In this post I’m going to focus on SMART Targets, but I will also include a couple of my personal tips to help improve productivity; I used to spend 5 hours a day “working” and very strangely only ended up with what I could have done in 30 minutes.

S.M.A.R.T. Targets

SMART Targeting is a systematic and logical way of planning out all of your targets, Whenever I finally decide what I actually want to do during a project I make SMART Targets. SMART targets are the most effective way of planning out what you are going to do, the targets will allow you to know exactly what you are going to do, allow you to review how well you are doing at the target and I personally think if something goes wrong  it’s easier to back-track and find out what happened.

Your targets must be Specific, this quite simply means, you write exactly what it is you want to achieve.

Targets must be Measurable, make it a numerical. For example; I want to increase website traffic by 25%

It must be Achievable, don’t make it ridiculous like overtaking Microsoft for computer sales.

They need to be Rewarding, what will you get if you complete this target?

Lastly your target must be Timed or time-based, This combined with being measurable will allow you to know how close you need to get to your goal.

Here is my example of a perfect SMART Target; I want to increase the traffic going onto my sales page by 25% I want to complete this by January next year,  This will allow me to increase the probability of getting a higher revenue.

Now go forth and increase your productivity, turbocharge your business. oh and share this article…

I also advise you subscribe via email to get my latest posts in my Free Business Training Series.

The two most important things to note in the above description is that CPA commissions are typically a lot more generous than most other types of affiliate marketing, and that once they perform the desired action on your site you have earned your commission. In other words you are not sending visitors off to some vendors site where you hope and pray that they will buy something. And regular affiliate marketing you have no control over the sales page meaning that you have little or no control over the rate of conversions.

With CPA Marketing you have much more control of your own destiny than with affiliate marketing. You have control of everything you need to optimize the conversion process. With other types of affiliate marketing, you are at the mercy of the seller’s conversion rate. This means that regardless of how carefully you qualify the traffic to your landing page, if the sales page that you link to does a poor job of converting visitors into buyers, your income is going to suffer. This is why affiliate marketers consider CPA as the most profitable.

To get started you need to sign up with a CPA network. You will find that CPA Networks are much more selective about which publishers they accept into their network. Because their customers, the advertisers, are paying generously, the CPA Network needs to provide their advertisers with the highest quality and well qualified publishers.

This means that you as a publisher you want to get accepted at the best CPA network possible. Therefore you need to give serious consideration to finding the best CPA network. One of the very best CPA networks is the PeerFly CPA Network.

The PeerFly CPA Network has risen quickly to be one of the very best CPA network. They have over 1500 advertisers in their network with the highest number of the lucrative email submits. With overall conversion rates for the network at 8-15%, they have the highest conversion rate. Because the number of well known Brands being advertised on their network and the trust those Brands convey, PeerFly CPA Network boasts high EPC.

The PeerFly CPA Network can put money in your pocket quickly, because they have some of the most flexible payout options available. CPA Network marketing is great for anyone who wants to take charge of their affiliate marketing business and PeerFly is the best CPA network to make this happen.

Everyone who signs up through PeerFly can contact me and I will give you one-on-one CPA help (Mind you will need traffic to your site already, you may want to read some of my posts on getting visitors to your site.)

This was a guest post by Mark M, and a great one at that!

The series will teach how to successfully do the following below. (Oh and teach correct business terminology along the way)

• Finding a  niche (If you don’t have a passion for a specific niche already)
• How to do keyword research and find profitable keywords with lots of visitors and low competition
• Researching your market (Field research & Desk research)
• SWOT Analysis
• Creating your Business Model
• S.M.A.R.T. Targets
• Unique Selling Points
• Designing and developing your site
• Optimizing for high conversions and other metrics
• Flooding your site with customers
• SEO
• PPC
• CPA
• Promotional Techniques
• Building a relationship with the customer
• Monetizing your site

In every section of the training series I will include a service or a tool to either outsource the work or get it done to a higher standard or speed.

I strongly advise you subscribe via email and you will have the article emailed to you (as well as available on the site) courtesy of feedburner.

Receive The Latest Posts Directly To Your Email – It’s Free:

And follow me on twitter for useful tweets (If you will find any of the above useful, my twitter will be)

I don’t know anyone who would say no to that question, but let’s get down to the details..

When people don’t renew their domain name some lucky person can then go and buy the domain and get all their traffic, backlinks and PageRank forwarded to their site.  You can have all their customers and if your into blackhat activities you can use the domain as a buffer site and send thousands of backlinks without harming your main (money) site.

So what’s the negatives? Just spending a measly £/$ 5-20

If you ask me it’s one of the cheapest methods of high quality targeted traffic for the long term.

I have been given a tool that I’m been allowed to give out to you,  Here is some information on it:

What Will This Tool Do?

Description: Search either a webpage or in google and begin crawling for expired domains, it can also check url lists if you provide it with them. If a link is non-live a whois check is performed along with a pagerank check and multiple SEOmoz statistics (you need to provide to the software an SEOmoz api username and password to unlock this feature).

• Multi Threading
• Advanced scraping options for Google such as Google local and language support
• Cooling down between searches to avoid IP bans on Google
• Proxy support
• SEOmoz API support

Download Link Below

To get the tool you have to pay for it with a Tweet linking to this page or a facebook like, The tool will help you, and this will help me (To provide more free information, tools and tutorials that will help you, so really your helping yourself.)

Bottopia

Google has said that their algorithm does include site speed they have also stated that “fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed”¹
So unless your site is dead slow you won’t need to worry about the affect it may have on your rank in the SERPs.

But here is some shocking information! Did you know that loading time is one of the main contributing factors to page abandonment? And that for every 1 second delay in page response results in a total of a 7% reduction in conversions?

To put this into perspective a site making $500 a day will loose out on $12,500 a year.

How Can We Improve Our Site Speed?

Firstly I would just like to say it has taken me a long time to gather all the information for this post, if it helps you I would greatly appreciate it if you share this article, or follow me on twitter, I only let real people follow me on twitter to keep my unique content exclusive and free, so give me a follow request and I will accept.

To start with  your going to want to see how your site currently ranks, I personally like GTmetrix but you may prefer to go with Google’s page speed checker

Here are the results of WebmastersHelpGuide.com

As you can see I’ve pretty much halved the page size, requests and loading time, these are great results, and here is how you can apply it to your site:

You can cut out a load of unnecessary requests to your server by caching your site, this turns all your dynamic pages into static pages and your visitors will load the static page. (This only works for sites using PHP scripts such as WordPress or Joomla, pure HTML sites are already static.) If your are using WordPress then I strongly recommend W3 Total Cache. If you are using anything other than WordPress you can use PHPSpeedy which will automatically compress your PHP files.

Ironically I just told you to use some plugins but you seriously need to ask yourself this for every plugin you have; Do I really need this plugin? Will this plugin benefit me more than I can benefit from having a faster site? Although I would like to break the taboo that every plugin will slow down your site, some won’t and some will. The amount of resources a plugin needs varies from plugin to plugin. Here is some information on WordPress plugins²

Minimize HTTP Requests

Your pages will load much faster if they don’t need to wait for a load of HTTP requests. This means reducing the amount of items that need to be loaded, this could be PHP or JavaScript scripts, style sheets or images.

Make sure to do this in your header.php file as this will be used in pretty much every page, your server has to collect some of this information every time the page loads, you can easily speed this up, just go onto your website and right click then press “View Page Source” This will show you the whole coding of the page, select the bits in between <head> and </head> your server has already collected the information it needed so now go to your header.php file and paste it in between the <head> and </head>.

While you are in your header.php file you should put all your CSS data into a single .css file and link to that in the header rather than have it load in the HTML of every file, this should be done with JavaScript also, this allows them both to be cached.

Optimize Images

This is one of the best things you can do to reduce your pages loading time, this can be done in Photoshop or almost any other image editing software, instead of saving, go to file then “save for web” I prefer to use .png’s or .gif’s because the file size is reduced dramatically yet the quality stays quite high. I recommend doing this for every image in your theme, as well as every image you put on your site. GTmetrix will show you images you can compress and will give you a link to a compressed version of it and you can just upload that on your server instead of the image your using.

Compress your site with Gzip

Gzip will compress your page and will reduce the size, whenever a visitor comes to your site your server will send the compressed page and the visitors browser will decompress the page, result? Fast loading times and less bandwidth used. This alone can speed up the load time of your website by 70%. The only down site to Gzip compression is old browsers can’t decompress it and therefore use your site.  There is a great article on how to use Gzip compression here.

Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

A CDN will allow you to put content on another server, this way when a visitor comes onto your site it will download the content from two servers, this reduces the stress on your server aswell as improve speeds to the user. Most CDN’s have servers worldwide, when someone comes onto your site they will connect to the closest CDN to them, reducing the connection time. You need to pay to use most CDN’s however I use a  free one called CloudFlare. It’s quite good, but also free! If you have a budget this site is great, It’s rated as the fasted CDN and only $35 per 1 terabyte used! Woah! There is also a free trial of 5gb.

 Resources

1. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

2. http://www.webmastershelpguide.com/goto/link/40/9

Comment with your new page loading speed!

Before traffic exchange hit the web it was a costly affair getting traffic to your site, especially for new sites. Getting a good rank on search engines like Google and Bing was vital to ensure survival of a new site. It would involve a lot of time spent analyzing and choosing key words. The problem was a lot worse in highly competitive niches like fitness and personal health where key words could go for large sums of money. This leads to the need for alternative methods of generating traffic. Read on to understand just what traffic exchanges can do for you and your website.

How does a traffic/social network exchange work?

In a nutshell the concept of traffic exchange works like this; It can take various forms of exchanging traffic online including banner exchanges, link exchanges, and photo exchanges among many others. The basic idea is you send a visitor to another site in exchange for credits, these credits can be spent on sending a visitor to you, for facebook likes, twitter followers or whatever social/bookmarking site it be.

Exchanges can be a good source of targeted traffic, especially for new sites where you don’t have a chance in competing with authority sites on google. Every visitor who follows you on twitter or likes your facebook page can see some content before they get any credits, if you can lure them into your content then you may have a loyal customer, you should checkout  YouLikeHits  as most of the visitors you get sent are interested in what you have to offer, this site works best for me.

With the success of social networks like facebook and twitter, today there are literally hundreds of millions of potential visitors out there waiting to be tapped into, this brought about the idea of traffic exchanges on social networks. On many of these sites like ReLoader you don’t have to leave the site to get credits just click all the like or follow buttons.

As you can see, the benefits that an established or a startup website stands to gain from traffic exchanges are enormous, although an exchange site will not be enough to get your site popular, I recommend to include it in your marketing strategy along with; Article Marketing, Guest-posts, contextual back linking, blog commenting and web 2.0′s

How else can a social exchange site benefit me?

Traffic:

• As time progresses you should have a continuous stream of traffic coming in if you build up your twitter/facebook followers, you will notice a snowball effect where more people will follow you even after you stop the social exchange.

Bonuses:

• As you surf sites, join blogs and subscribe to newsletters you will quite often get free eBooks and offers which you may find quite useful, It’s great to build a relationship with the webmaster, they can always help you with things as well as push you in the right direction on certain topics.

Experience:

• As you view various sites, you pick up on things that you can use to better your site, if you can use the best bits of every site you visit as inspiration for your website you would have a lot of readers / customers.