One of the big things I’ve been learning about over the last few months, is how important it is to use tools to automate processes related to affiliate marketing or internet marketing. There are two concepts I wanted to address.

“Think bigger” and “Takes money to make money”

When I say “thinking bigger” I’m not talking about your marketing hopes and dreams, but rather, expanding your technique on how earn commissions or earnings, and how to reach out to people. Many of us have the mindset of creating a site, put some content in it, put some ads on it and wait for money to start falling from the site into your pocket. Next, when reality hits that you’re not going to get rich you either quit or you figure out what’s wrong. Usually the problem is traffic, so you start tuning the site and begin promoting it, either via SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising or both. Traffic increases, but you’re still not seeing your income rise.

To think big is to think about your process larger. Increase your sites, increase your backlinks, increase your promotion and the ability to contact more and more people to encourage them to your site. To do this manually can be extremely tedious and time consuming. Time is money, and it’s important to focus your time on things that will benefit you the most. Submitting sites to directories is a poor use of time, but spending your time creating new sites or content is time well spent. Why? Because one can be automated and the other can not (unless subcontracted).

I wanted to describe some of the things are that I would consider vital to my operation.

I’ve been creating Twitter accounts for my support hub blogs. These hub blogs are ways I can promote sales/products, talk about news or information about niche, while connecting to some of my store fronts. My store fronts are good and produce, but it’s hard to create the sense of community to attract repeat visitors. That’s the primary reason why I wanted to create a hub blog within a primary category. To me the best way to attract new visitors and to keep existing visitors engaged is to use Twitter. Having a Twitter account is one thing, but gaining followers is a whole other ball of wax. This is where one of my favorite tools come in, which is Bird Feeder. With Bird Feeder, I can search based on niche related keyword and follow a set amount of users. I can also set unfollows based on time and protect my mutual followers (don’t unfollow if they’re following me). Every morning while I make my pot of coffee, Bird Feeder is doing it’s thing following many people and unfollowing many people. Eventually your counts will rise and rise depending on your Tweet quality. The amount of Twitter traffic I get to my hub blogs illustrates the importance of these Twitter accounts, and not manually following or unfollowing people saves a ton of time!

Research is a time sucker in itself, and it sucked so much time in the past, that I ended up doing very little, which is bad. Research is the key in finding quality niches, and understanding the competition. I’ve been pushing hard with SEO trying to gain more organic, yet targeted traffic to my web sites on top of my PPC efforts. A tool that I’m absolutely loving for this is SEO Elite. Here is a tool that can do many things for you while you work on building sites, etc. It does an excellent job finding backlinks, showing where you’re ranking, finding backlinks of competition, etc. To do this by hand via Google is painful, speaking from experience. It’s very nice to create a query, and let it run while I do other things. When it’s done I review the results and store the information and formulate plans based off of the data. To me, SEO Elite is the best SEO research tool out there and I wish I purchased it years ago.

With SEO, one of the critical pieces is creating backlinks to your sites with proper anchor link/titles along with relating content. I use two tools to help with this. The first is Blog Comment Demon. This is a blog discovery tool. It’ll search for blogs based off of keyword supplied. It will return a listing of sites, their PR, number of comments, number of outbound links, etc. It’ll also let you know what type of blog it is (WordPress, TypePad, etc). Clicking on the URL it will open a browser window inside the software where you can contribute a useful post. It records when you submitted a comment. The other nice thing is the ability to create ‘projects’, which helps organize your backlinking efforts.

The other tool I like to use, made by the same developer (EdWin Soft) is Book Marking Demon. Basically this will help submit sites to various book mark directories on the web, but in a way that is automated. You create a account that Book Marking Demon creates accounts at those directories and submits your sites as that user into those directories.

This is where I go back to the next ‘concept’ mentioned above – “Takes money to make money”. These tools are not free, but the amount of time it frees up is amazing, and are worth their weight in gold. You need to think bigger, figuring out how to reach more and more people, and I don’t think it’s possible, or extremely difficult without the use of tools and services.

Related posts:

1. Working the backlinks
2. SEO Elite Review
3. Blog Comment Demon Review

Some of you following along with the blog are aware that I’ve been on a buying spree lately for internet marketing tools. I’m a strong believer of “it takes money to make money”, and I’ve been trying to find ways to maximize my time and efforts, and tools are vital to this. Lately, I’ve been on a big SEO (Search Engine Optimization) kick, and finding ways to drive organic, targeted traffic to my sites.

I recently purchased Blog Comment Demon which is fantastic and Bird Feeder for Twitter followers, but I also needed a tool to help gauge and provide as much information about how my sites ranks with various keywords. This is where SEO Elite comes in. After several recommendations from friends/associates as well as reading some posts on Digital Point, I figured this was the next tool in my tool box I needed.

I’m currently using SEO Elite for two large purposes, while I discover and maximize other features. I’m primarily using SEO Elite to determine how my site ranks with the keywords I have chosen with Google’s keyword tool. The second area I use is to view other sites that compete with me and see how they rank on similar keywords. By doing so, I can potentially find where they’re backlinked.

SEO Elite also has some great tools similar to Blog Comment Demon for finding blogs and other potential linking sites.

Another key feature, but I haven’t worked on this yet, is to be able to submit articles to article directories with a centralized tool. Part of streamlining things is staying organized, and that’s my goal for July is to establish a ‘process’ and work a ‘plan’ for SEO to my sites. By using tools to help organize, centralize and optimize I feel this will help in the big picture of my internet marketing ventures.

I would highly recommend purchasing SEO Elite. It’s a quality product with tons of video and audio tutorials. I’m just scratching the surface and I’m thoroughly impressed with this piece of software by Brad Callen. If you purchase this, and have any questions, I’ll be more than happy to try to help you out.

Related posts:

1. Blog Comment Demon Review
2. Take advantage of automating your daily tasks with tools
3. SEO Book Training Program!