New entrepreneurs quickly find that it is imperative to achieve high page rank or PR. Many people are under the mistaken belief that online business equals overnight success and profits. Unfortunately that is not the case and most online businesses fail due to lack of understanding and knowledge.

Search engine success involves a great deal of work and determination. Achieving high PR isn’t an easy task. Every online entrepreneur knows they need high PR and strive to be noticed more than their competitors.

Article Marketing to Raise PR

Articles are obviously the best choice to share information about your products and services. Well written articles make proper use of keywords and are very helpful and informative. Consumers need information, not sales pitches, when they’re planning a purchase.

Article marketing made it easy to share information about products and services. Links from the author resource box made it easy for entrepreneurs to create relevant backlinks to their website. Links are categorized in two ways, relevant and irrelevant.

Relevant backlinks are extremely important to search engine success. The more relevant links to a website, the better it is ranked by search engines. Irrelevant links are not ranked as highly as relevant links.

Relevancy of links is based on the content of the website versus the content of the linking page. Articles that are written based on the content on a website create relevant links. Any article written to promote a specific product that links to the page with that product creates a relevant link.

Many entrepreneurs jumped on the article marketing bandwagon. The end result was a bunch of sales pitches and spam-like articles strewn across the internet. Most didn’t seem to realize that their articles didn’t make sense and the grammar was horrible.

Search engines have to continually modify their algorithms to stay on top of things. Consumers use search engines on a daily basis to find information about products they plan to purchase. The primary goal of the search engine is to provide relevant information each and every time.

Author Resource Box

Backlinks are one of the most important parts of an article marketing campaign. Strategically place at least one link to your website within the author resource box. Use the link to create a link back to your website’s home page or even directly to the product or service you’re promoting.

Most distributors won’t allow the author to use links in the body of the article. The only link that’s allowed is from the author resource box or author biography. The only sales pitch displayed on your entire article should be in the author resource box.

Article Distribution

Distribution is a key factor in article marketing. The best article in the world won’t attract attention if it isn’t published. Distribution is the process of having an article published to several websites, ezines and blogs.

Distribute each article to as many publishers as possible. Thousands of publishers and ezines are waiting every day to receive quality content from entrepreneurs. Provide original, unique content three times per week and watch your PR skyrocket.

Submitting your articles to thousands of publishers takes a lot of time. If that isn’t an option, check out distribution services. Most distribution services charge a relatively small amount for the services they provide.

Look for publishers that allow syndication. Paid distribution services are often very inexpensive and offer an amazing return on investment. Some publishers allow other website owners to syndicate, or use each article as content on their own website. Proper syndication is not considered plagiarism and does not cause duplicate content penalties.

Rebecca Taylor is a coach for the Affiliate Program at Article Marketer. She assists and coaches Article Marketer affiliates. Learn about articles relationship with search engines here.

As an experienced affiliate marketer myself, I can relate to the challenges faced by all of you out there just starting out. So lets take a look at exactly what affiliate marketing is and how to maximize your efforts to centralize your focus.

Affiliate marketing defined

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is a way to sell products supplied by other people for a commission on each sale. This benefits the product owner as well as the affiliate. The owner gets their product seen and viewed by a great number of people. You, as an affiliate, promote that product and find prospects who are interested in that product. For this work, you receive a portion, normally between 30% and 75% of the sell price, as a commission.

The problem with promoting numerous affiliate products

Usually, the affiliate program will give you an affiliate link to the products sales letter or home page. That link points back at you so the owner knows who to pay for that sale. The problem with this is that the links are very long, complex and cannot possibly be remembered later. So if you are promoting a number of different products, you will have to keep track of all those links and campaigns separately. That can be a burden, to say the least.

The solution that works!

The best thing you can do is to start a central affiliate web site where you can promote ALL your affiliate products in one place. This gives you one place to go and see your progress at any given moment. It also gives you one, central place to send all your prospects. Once there, they will not only see the product that brought them there, but ALL the products you have available.

Having your own web site to market your affiliate items has several major benefits, including:

1. Traffic generation is easier. Send all your prospects to one place for all the products in your directory, whether it is 10 or 1000.

2. Makes you noticeable as an individual. By drawing people top tour own web site, you can build those relationships and work them to other products that they may find useful.

3. Total control over the way it all looks. Present the links to the products in any way you like. You will have complete control over the layout and presentation.

4. Total control over the content. You will also have complete autonomy over the text that is placed on the site. As long as it doesnt violate the terms of the affiliate agreement, you can use it. This includes the anchor text (words that are hyper-linked to the sales page for the product).

5. Reporting is key. The host company always makes certain reporting available to even free members. You can target the times of day that people navigated to your site, which pages they accessed most often and where they came from. All is very good info for you to have access to.

There are more than just these benefits, but you get the idea. Having your own web site to bring visitors to is the most powerful way you can work your affiliate products/services.

Judy Hay is the webmaster of make money at home online Visit her site to get your own money making affiliate website set up for free.