To make money with articles that you place on websites, you will also need a variety of good affiliate links that will help to generate revenue.

It is important that you know where to find affiliates and that you choose the best affiliates for you and your niche site.

When you pick an affiliate, it is important that you determine which companies you will profit best from based on the frequency that the product is likely to sell.

There are several types of affiliates and some will offer you more money from a sale than others will.

Before you get hazy-eyed by dollar signs, however, remember some products are bound to sell more than others.

If you sell on product four times a year from a little known company that gives you $100 per sale or sell a well known product 3 times a week at the rate of $10 per sale, then you will make much more money with the $10 per sale product.

Often times large well known companies will offer a very small profit per sale because they are established and know that their product is likely to sell well.

Small, unknown companies, on the other hand, need all of the promotion they can get.

Also, because they are unknown, their products are likely to sell less frequently.

The most important rule when picking affiliates to promote on your site is to pick products that would be of interest to those who would likely visit your niche site.

Otherwise you will be promoting a product to a group of people who do not even want nor need it.

If your niche site targets parents of young children, then promote baby products.

If you niche site targets gardeners, then promote gardening products.

If you promote baby products to gardeners, you are almost guaranteed to not make a profit no matter how much money the affiliate company offers for a sale.

Lastly, there are two main ways to find an affiliate company for your niche website.

You can sign up with a company that manages the accounts of hundreds of companies, big and small, and apply for the products within these accounts or you can do a web search for companies that would match well with your niche, visit their websites, and see if they advertise an affiliate program.

Using the Yahoo Search Marketing Tools to Retrieve Free Keywords

When making money with articles, you need to find the perfect keywords to make your niche sites a success. However, many times it is expensive to utilize paid keyword search tools.

For this reason, some new marketers may prefer to try and find their keywords for free.

One of the best ways to do this is to use the free Yahoo Search Marketing tools that you can find on their website.

First, go to the Yahoo website and choose Search Marketing under Yahoo Advertising Solutions. Scroll down to and click on Sponsored Search.

You will see a section that says “How many searches can your business get?” where you will type in the main keyword of your decided niche.

This will bring up a list a of words that have your niche subject in them and tell you how many people searched for that particular word the previous month.

To get an idea of what the competition is like, take each word that had a substantial amount of searches and input it into the Yahoo search engine using parenthesis.

This will give you a good idea of how many people search for a particular keyword and how many sites you will be in competition with for the top spots on the first two pages.

This will of course take a lot more time than a paid software program and it may not give you all of the great ideas that a program might.

On the other hand, it will be free and give you extra funds for other parts of your website.

If you can do this for free on your own, search engine optimize your site on your own, and write your own content, then the only thing you will have to spend money on is a website URL and web hosting.

This is a great idea for those who have little to no start up cash, a lot of time on their hands, are quick learners, and can wait for the profits to start coming in (which will pretty much be pure profit).

However, if you prefer to go the easy route and utilize a keyword generating software program, you can find many online.

Some are more popular than others and have been a proven way for people to dig up valuable keywords for their niche sites.

 

The Importance of Keyword

Keyword density and placement are important parts of optimizing your articles for search engines.

Search engine spiders scan a page in a way that makes it important to place your keywords where they will be detected and recognized as a keyword, so that your article will come up when someone searches for that keyword.

What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a word that is going to be placed in your article several times, not just once as that would make every word a keyword.

When a spider sees that you have a word placed several times in an article, it will determine that your page may be useful to users that search for such a keyword.

Over Optimizing Your Articles

It is important to note that there is also such a thing as over optimizing your articles for particular words, this is known as “keyword stuffing”.

When you stuff keywords in an article a spider will detect that you are trying to trick it into placing your article high in the search engine results for that word, and will instead penalize your site and your page for doing such.

This may even affect the rankings of your other pages or get your site blacklisted from a particular search engine if you are found keyword stuffing too many times.

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is how many times your keyword is placed in your article. Most use a percentage to determine how many times they will put a keyword in an article.

For instance, if you have a 500 word article and want to achieve a keyword density of 5%, then you will need to have the keyword in your article exactly 25 times.

You can find hundreds of resources and guides recommending one keyword density over another and the reasons behind the logic, however, in the end you will have to determine which density is more profitable for your articles.

Each webmaster as their own density that they like to achieve based on past results. As long as you don’t over optimize and you are making sufficient profit from your rankings, then you can choose whatever keyword density you like.

The Right Density

No matter what exact density you choose, it is important to place keywords so that there are more at the beginning and end to produce an hour glass effect. Having the right keyword density in your article makes it more likely that you will make money off of that article because it will rise in the search engine results and be seen by more people.

 

Banner Advertisements

When you are trying to make money off of the articles on your website, it is important to effectively promote your site so that you will attract customers and they can see just what a good, quality site you have.

There are several ways so market and promote your website, one of them being though banner advertisements.

What Banner Ads Can Do For You

Banner ads can help bring visitors from others sites to your own.

Although monthly fees can be expensive to advertise on high traffic sites, in the end it may be cheaper and/or a faster way to start seeing significant revenue from your website efforts, rather than waiting for SEO techniques to bring your own site to the top of search engine results.

Aside from paying to advertise on someone else’s site, there are also free banner exchanges to choose from.

We will look at the pros and cons of each banner advertising method below.

Free Banner Exchanges

Free banner exchanges are when you and other sites exchange each others banners.

Their banner will go on your site and your banner will go one their site.

Although this option is free, there are two main problems with it.

First, if you want your banner on a significant number of sites, it will mean cluttering your own site up with these banners.

This could even shot you in the foot if you run an affiliate website because, instead of clicking on your affiliate links, your visitors may be clicking on your banner exchange links.

Secondly, you have to be really careful about the types of sites that you exchange banners with. Some sites like to gather a lot of banners so that they can be a directory or portal site and not have to have any real content. These “banner farms” or “link farms” will do nothing positive for your site and, in the meantime, you will be bringing them potential traffic.

Paid Banner Ads

As we saw above, paid banner ads cost money, but they will eventually pay off if you choose the right ones.

You need to ensure that the site produces the amount of traffic that they say and that they have your ad placed in a way that invites visitors to click without being too pushy. You also want to choose a site that does not house too many other banners on the same page as yours or that there are no competitor links on the same page.

All in all, banner ads can end up being profitable for you site if you go about it the right way.

If you do decide to check out banner advertisement as a marketing avenue, be sure to keep the above tips in mind.

Placing Banner Advertisements On Your Website 

Placing  advertisements on your website can increase your monthly revenue greatly.

This option is better than being an affiliate for several companies because you will get one monthly fee no matter how many of your visitors go to the website or make a purchase.

The main thing is for you to create an informative website filled with useful articles, so that you can generate a high amount of returning visitors.

As your site rises on search engine rankings, the blank space on your site will begin to look more and more appealing to advertisers.

Anyone can be an affiliate, but to have a banner placed in a good spot on a high-ranking website will bring in the most revenue for a company.

Once you have established yourself as a site that can be profitable for them, you can rent out different spaces on your site for advertisers to place banner ads.

Each month you will be paid the same fee, no matter how much they do or do not make off of you.

 

Optimal Article Length

When choosing an article for your website, make sure that it is a length that is optimal for search engine optimization efforts.

Articles that are as short as 200 words or as long as 500 words should fit into this category.

Even if search engine optimization is not your goal, it is still a good idea to keep your articles at this length for your reader’s sake.

They are likely to not finish your page if it is any longer.

This could leave them Kith only half of the information you wanted them to have or leave them with the impression that your site is too “wordy”.

Most Internet readers do not read a website page as they would a book, so the shorter the better.

Even if this means splitting one long idea into 4 or 5 pages.

Be sure to label them so that the reader can pick and choose which part they want to read or so they know what is coming up next to help them determine if they want to continue reading.

Learn to Use Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Learn to use search engine optimization techniques when writing your articles.

If hiring a writer to write articles for you, you can choose one who already knows about SEO or you can supply them with a list of keywords and let them know where they should be placed and how many times they should be repeated throughout the article.

Optimizing your articles for search engines will help them rank higher when someone searches for a keyword relating to your subject, which means that you will receive more visitors because more people will actually see your URL.

It is a fact that most visitors don’t look past the first search engine result page and by the third search engine results page there is practically no audience left for you to promote to.

What this means for those on the third or high page is no traffic.

This is why it is very important for you to make sure that your articles are prepared in a way that will eventually get them to that first or second search engine results page.