New Affiliate Guide - Free Ebook

Any affiliates who are new to affiliate marketing and who are not very clear about affiliate marketing concepts - or indeed how an affiliate can make money online - may find the Successful Affiliates Guide free 'factsheets' ebook particularly useful.

It is non-copyright, so it can be distributed freely to others.

It covers the following:

What is an affiliate?
How do you become an affiliate?
What is affiliate marketing?
What do successful affiliates do well?
What is a niche market?
How important is marketing?
How do you encourage people to buy?
How does pay per click advertising work?
How do you combine Google Adwords and Clickbank?
What is an affiliate network?
What's a conversion?
What are keywords?
What's a keyword campaign?
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
How do I design my own website?
Do I need to know HTML?
What is website optimization?
What should I put in my page titles?
What are meta tags?
What is a landing page?
What is RSS?
What is a robots text file?
What is the Google dance?
What are white hat and black hat?
Is website page count important?
What performance statistics do I need?
How should I monitor affiliate program performance?
How do you make money online?

Download it from the Successful Affiliates Guide 'sitemap' page (scroll to the bottom for the download link)

It does promote their full-length guide, but it is full of useful free information for the new affiliate.

Free SEO tools

Here's a list of free search engine optimization (SEO) related tools that every website owner should at least be aware of and quite probably use regularly:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool (use to select keywords)
E3 KWD Check (use to check your website's keyword density)
SitemapDoc (create and edit sitemaps)
Google toolbar (to check Google PageRanks)
Google Webmaster Central (essential site-maintenace tools for webmasters)
Google Analytics (site statistics to monitor hits and keyword campaigns)
Meta tag analyzer (includes keyword checking with suggestions)
Webpage analyser (provides a webpage review from an SEO perspective)
SearchStatus ( a plug-in for Firefox to alert you to 'no follow' links)
'do follow' blogs (useful list for potential backlinks)
Keyword position tool (check how your webpages are ranking for specific keywords)
Backlink watch (tells you which websites are linking to yours)
Link popularity checker (tells you how many backlinks are recognised by the leading search engines for your site)
Free Webhosting (lists free webhosts for additional free websites)
SEO Elite (clever keywords link analyzing software to gain a high SEO, but not free!)

This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully some of it will prove useful for search engine optimization strategies.

How to apply a full range of SEO strategies is presented in the Successful Affiliates Guide, which you can buy for half-price if you sign up with Clickbank first! (Use the 'webmasters' link at the bottom of their homepage to see how to do it).

Good luck with your SEO.

Specifiying Sitemap URL in the Robots text file

In order for all search engines to be directed to your sitemap.xml file in your website's route directory, you can add a line to your robots.txt file that specifies the URL of your sitemap.

The robots.txt file would then look something like this:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /landingpages/
Disallow: /campaigns/ppc.html

Examples of a folder (landingpages) and a file (ppc.html, in the 'campaigns' folder) that search engines are being instructed not to spider / include in their index are also included.

The * tells all search engines to obey the robots text file rules.

Note that if you have a website that you do not wish indexed by any search engine, you would include one 'Disallow' line:

Disallow: /

You can add as many 'Disallow' lines as necessary.

If you have not yet created a sitemap file for your website, it is wise to do so. You should submit it to Google via their Webmaster Central service.