Google Analytics is probably the most popular web analytics product. It’s a really good service, and best of all it’s free.

However, not everyone wants to install Google Analytics on their site. Mainly, because they don’t want Google to have access to more data on them then necessary.

So what are some good Google Analytics alternatives?

Clicky

Clicky is great. It offers real-time tracking of your traffic. It has a simple, but easy to use interface. It’s easily accessible via your mobile phone, so you can track your stats wherever you are. The Clicky Pro plans starts at $9.99 a month.

Woopra

People really love Woopra’s nice looking interface. It has a web app or desktop client. Plus it has some very powerful segmentation features. I found Woopra a little bit clunky though in my experience.

Piwik

Piwik is a completely free, open source Google Analytics alternative. It provides semi real-time tracking. I saw semi, because when you start getting more traffic, it slows the system down and you have to use their archive feature.

Mint

Probably the best looking web analytics software. Mint is very simple, yet extensible by adding plugins called Peppers. The downside to Mint is that you have to pay $30 for a single site Mint license.

This is just a small sample of the available Google Analytics alternatives out there. Some others you may have heard of like AWStats, I don’t really recommend since their stats are widely inaccurate.

There are quite a few others as well that I haven’t tested yet too. Reinvigorate and Open Web Analytics come to mind. If you’ve used any of these other web analytics products, please let me know in the comments.

So what are the best ways to get your site indexed? Well, if you don’t want to invest any money, you can always do it manually. One easy thing to try is to submit your site’s RSS feeds to various RSS aggregator sites. Or write an article with a backlink back to your site and submit it to a Web 2.0 property like Squidoo or Hubpages. Or the easiest way of all, is to add a backlink from one of your own sites that is already indexed in Google.

If you are willing to invest some money into tools, then there are some products that were specifically built to get your site indexed. Two of the most popular ones are Backlink Energizer and Backlink Index Express. Both of these let you submit many links at a time, and they will automatically post content to other Web 2.0 properties with a link back to your site. It’s a mostly hands-free process, and can be very effective.

Sometimes, people are interested in seeing if multiple sites are indexed in Google. Checking this manually can be very time consuming. Instead, why not use one of the few index checker tools that let you check multiple urls at a time. It’s a super effective way to check that your backlink efforts are actually working well or not.

As you can see, checking if your site is indexed is a very simple process. And to get your site indexed quicker, the key as always, is to get more backlinks.

Godaddy is certainly one of the biggest domain/hosting companies on the net, and probably one of the best known brands. You see their ads in the Super Bowl, and on plenty of other sites as well. They really know how to advertise, and it shows. One thing that Godaddy does well is by offering Godaddy coupons to various bloggers. With these coupon codes, you can get great discounts off of many of the services that Godaddy offers.

One of the best Godaddy coupons is their one for $7.49 domain names. That’s 35% off the normal price of buying a .com domain. As you probably know, the .com TLD is the most recognizable TLD out there so this is a really awesome code if you can get it. Search for available .com domain names using the Godaddy search box, and then save tons of money using this coupon.

Another common Godaddy coupon you can find, is their 10% off any order coupon. This means you can get discounts on all Godaddy services including domain names, web hosting, and more. This is especially useful for more expensive items like their dedicated hosting packages. The more it is the more you save. Although actually, there is a better Godaddy coupon if you just want hosting. Search very carefully, and you can find 20% off Godaddy coupons that are specific to their web hosting packages.

There are just some of the Godaddy coupons you can find around the net. Search around on Google and other deal sites to find more coupon codes that you can use for Godaddy products. It’s well worth taking the time to do this, because you can really save some big bucks. Especially when you’re in the market for some web hosting, or renewing a ton of domain names. So take advantage of this list of Godaddy coupon codes while you can.

FAN3 – 35% off .COM $7.49 domain names – WORKS
FED2499 – $24.99 .CO domain which is usually $30
FAN749 – 50% off .ORG domain names ($7.49 each)
YES749 – $7.49 .NET domain names
GAM749 – $7.49 .BIZ domain names
RUSH20 – 20% off a 1yr or greater hosting plan
MIN1 – 10% off a month to month plan

Leadbolt is another company, based out of Australia using content locking technologies to provide ad publishers with a unique way of making money from their website traffic. Like other popular incentive networks like CPA Lead, Leadbolt has its own incentive widget (or content gateway) that they offer their ad publishers.

For those not familiar, this is a script webmasters can install on pages on their website. When a visitor visits one of these pages, they can’t access the content unless they fill out some sort of incentive offer. When a visitor does complete the offer, the webmaster gets paid. It’s an excellent way to money, with specific types of traffic.

How does Leadbolt compare to CPA Lead and other CPA Lead alternatives? Well, in our experience, results are a mixed bag. Unfortunately, their content gateway widget does not allow you to control which specific offers show up on your gateway. Compare this to BlamAd’s version which has manual offer selection which gives you more control.

One thing we do like is that their content gateway does offer some targeting features. You can specify what type of content you’re installing the gateway on, and the offers that are displayed reflect your choice. So if you have adult content, you can have adult type offers showing in your gateway. Movie and TV traffic would show a different set of offers.

The Leadbolt Content Gateway wizard is pretty easy to use. It just takes a couple of minutes to setup all the options and copy and paste the code onto your site.

As an ad publisher, I’ve had no problems being paid with Leadbolt. They offer both Paypal and wire transfer as payment options and I’ve always been paid on-time. For most publishers you get paid Net-30 which is pretty typical. Leadbolt has a sub-standard referral policy of 2.5% for the first six months.

All in all, if you are looking for an incentive network to join Leadbolt should be one of the options you look at. It’s not as well known as CPA Lead or Blam Ads, but it’s still decent. Try to sign up if you can.

http://www.leadbolt.com

One of the great things about internet marketing is that you can build a niche website about anything. Many marketers make a great living building these niche websites, since there are really unlimited numbers of topics and keywords you can target for your sites.

In this niche building guide, I’ll show you how to make a profitable niche website in just a few days. Use this guide as a blueprint to building your first niche website, and once you learn this process, start using it to build tons more. In that way, you will start your own niche website empire.

When thinking up a topic for your niche site, you don’t want to start too broad. So lets say your topic is web hosting. Think of all the subniches of web hosting. Web Hosting > VPS Hosting > Best VPS Hosting. Make sense? VPS hosting covers just a subset of web hosting. And digging down some more, you can see that best VPS hosting is even more specific.

While you wouldn’t get as much traffic ‘best vps hosting’ as you would ‘web hosting’ or ‘vps hosting’, the traffic you do get is very targeted. This is a keyword that’s very focused, and buyer oriented. This is good for us, because it means we can make money off of it.

Once you’ve chosen your specific niche, you need to find some specific affiliate programs so you can make some money. In my case, I’d look around at all the VPS hosting companies out there. There are so many of them, and many of them have very lucrative affiliate programs. Just do a Google search or look on a niche specific forum like Web Hosting Talk (in my case).

If you can’t find any affiliate programs in your niche, then you can always use Google Adsense on your site. Depending on payout on your keywords, you may or may not be able to make good money with it. In the web hosting niche, I probably could since the market is very competitive. In general though, affiliate programs are more lucrative and are better adsense alternatives in general.

When building your site, I would generally go with WordPress. It’s just super easy to setup, once you learn how to use it. Most web hosting companies support it out of the box, so anybody can pretty much install it. Depending on your design skills, I would also choose a nice WordPress theme. I’d recommend Thesis Theme or Headway Themes for the best customization options.

Once you have your site built, you still need to get traffic to it. I’ll save that process for a future article.

One of the big things I see in the affiliate marketing space are the use of Content Gateways. I’ve heard stories from friends and other marketers that there are people making $10,000 or more a day with content gateways.

If you are not familiar with what a content gateway is, or other content locking technology, it’s basically a popup that appears over the content of your website and it displays a variety of incentive offers. Only after a user completes the offer, does the content gateway go away, and the user can actually access the content beneath it. Of course, you get paid as well!

Payouts for these types of offers vary. I’ve seen them as low as $0.50 to as high as $3.00. Definitely not as high as regular CPA offers, but since you are essentially “incentivising” the completion of these offers, the conversion rates are quite good.

Content gateways have actually been around for a long time. I joined CPA Lead a long time ago, and people were making bank with them even back then. The technology is definitely improving though as we move along. Blam Ads is about to introduce their Content Gateway 3.0 Excedo very soon.

The key to making money with content gateway’s is finding the right traffic and incentive. You probably don’t want to put them on your regular websites with legitimate traffic. Many incentive offers are pretty spammy, and you don’t want to annoy any loyal users you may have.

You’ll often see content gateway’s stuck on TV or movie sites. I’m pretty sure it’s not legal to have your gateways on copyright content, but people do it, and probably make a lot of money doing so. Probably downloads and adult content would be the best best to use a content gateway with. Just make sure the incentive network you choose is ok with this. Some are more strict than others.

If you are looking for networks that offer content gateways, the major ones are CPA Lead, Blam Ads, Adscend Media and Leadbolt. Sign up as an ad publisher with them, and see what they offer.

Paid advertising is one of the best ways to make money online. Sure you have probably heard of Pay per click (PPC), but have you heard of PPV? PPV stands for Pay per view marketing. You might also hear it called CPV or cost per view marketing. Basically this involves buying traffic on popup-traffic. You know, when you visit a website and you see pop-ups appear on top of your page? That’s PPV marketing in a nutshell.

There are many different PPV networks to choose from. TrafficVance being probably the best. Their traffic comes from people who have willingly installed adware on their computer. For TrafficVance, these are people who have installed their game software called GameVance. By installing this software for free to play games, the users are agreeing to see a few popup’s each day.

As an advertisers, you get to show your ads in these popups. When a person searches for targets (urls or keywords), they will see your ad if you have bid the highest for that target. Depending on the network bids can range from a penny to a few dollars depending on the competition. Watch out for your budget though. Views can come in fast and furious, and if you aren’t careful, you could spend a lot of money advertising on certain targets.

What’s nice about PPV compared with PPC is that you don’t have to worry about Google. There’s no quality score to worry about at all, although you do have to follow the rules of your PPV network. Still, it’s much easier to get campaigns approved, and make money faster.

To learn more about PPV marketing, you should probably join a dedicated forum. The most well known is probably PPV Playbook. It’s run by PPV expert David Ford, and it is one of the most active forums out there. You’ll find some great tutorials, and good case studies which makes it perfect for the beginning PPV marketer.

As far as tools go, most people use Prosper202 or CPV Lab for tracking. Once you have made some money, I would probably go with CPV Lab. It’s built specifically for PPV and it has tons of awesome features that make optimizing your PPV campaigns much easier. It does cost money, unlike Prosper202, so keep that in mind.

PPV marketing can be an extremely lucrative business once you get good at it. So if you are into paid advertising, check it out for yourself and see if you can’t succeed with it.

SEO Link Robot is the latest automated link building tool on the market. While there are many others, with SENuke being the most popular, the thing that makes SEO Link Robot stand out is the one-time fee. Yeah, you heard that right. No huge monthly fees to pay each month. That’s all find and dandy, but how well does SEO Link Robot actually work.

First, lets see take a look at the modules that are a part of SEO Link Robot.

Account Creator – This allows you to setup a profile and create accounts on supported social bookmarking sites, and RSS aggregator sites. SEO Link Robot will randomly generate profile data for you which makes filling out the form simpler. You do have to enter in your email details as well so the software can handle the email verification of the accounts it creates.

Web 2.0 Sites – Here, you can create accounts on Web 2.0 sites and submit your spinnable articles to these sites. SEO Link Robot supports nested spinnable articles and a preview function to show what your articles look like. After submitting your article, you will get back a list of urls on the web 2.0 sites that the software was able to post to.

Web 2.0 Linker – Here you can link your web 2.0 properties together to create your own mini network of sites. SEO Link Robot can grab content from Unique Article Wizard or Ezine Articles and then it will randomly link up to 5 web 2.0 sites together.

Social Bookmarking and RSS – These pretty much do what you think you do. They allow you to submit your links to social bookmarking and RSS aggregator sites. For social bookmarking, you can have it bookmark your url to all available social bookmarking sites, or randomly select a number of sites to submit to.

Article Spinner – SEO Link Robot includes a basic article spinner to create spin articles. If you don’t own a software like The Best Spinner, then this integrated one works fine.

Site Pinger – This allows you to ping your urls at a variety of popular ping services.

Email Verifier – This simple module tells SEO Link Robot to go out and click on all the verification links in your specified email.

Meta Indexer – This module is supposed to get all your paged indexed by submitting them to so called meta index sites. There’s over 3000 such sites included with SEO Link Robot.

Link Viewer – Here is where SEO Link Robot puts all the links you’ve created in the software. This allows you to use them with other software to increase their strength or just try to get them indexed.

All in all, SEO Link Robot is a decent product. The UI is a little plain, and I’ve noticed some hiccups here and there. I’m able to get about 60% of the sites in the software to work (creating accounts and posting), which seems normal.

However, for a $197 one time fee, it’s really hard to go wrong. As a cheap SENuke alternative for those who can’t afford the real thing, it’s not bad. Check it out for yourself if you need to get some good automated backlinking done for your sites.

As an internet marketer, you want to make money from your website right? Probably the easiest way to do so is to put some ads on your website. What type of ads? Well, there are several possibilities here.

The simplest way is to apply to the Google Adsense program and stick some Adsense ads on your website. With Adsense, the google adsense bot will crawl your website and determine the best ads to show. Adsense allows you to choose text based ads, image ads, or both.

In my experience, text based ads convert the best and will earn you the most money. Image ads just don’t seem to pay very much…probably because there is less competition for them. There are many different sizes of Google Adsense ads, so make sure to choose the best size that fits your particular blog layout.

With enough traffic, you might be able to squeak out a decent income with Google Adsense ads. Not enough to retire, mind you, but some nice pocket change.

There are also several other in-context advertising Adsense alternatives as well. Sites like AdBrite, Chitika, and Kontera all offer similar ad formats to Adsense. However, results are a mix bag in my experience. You really have to test with your own traffic to see if the payouts are worth it to you.

Other Adsense alternatives include promoting CPA offers on your blog. These offers give you higher payouts, although visitors have to complete some action for you to get paid. With the right targeted traffic, many webmasters are making a killing with these offers.

Another alternative is using some sort of content gateway script to monetize your traffic. If you have a lot of junk traffic, you can make some money this way. You can’t use traditional CPA offers with a content gateway though. Instead, you have to use incentive offers. Only a few CPA ad networks like Blam Ads, CPA Lead, and Leadbolt offer these types of offers.

As you can see, there are many ways to make money just by adding ads to your website. The most important thing to do, is to test each monetization option and see what works best for your traffic. For some people, Google Adsense will work best. For others, one of the adsense alternatives mentioned might do better. But whatever, you do, try one!

Every internet marketer knows that they should build a list if they really want to see success. If you’re marketing online but not building your list then you’re not building an asset. One of the main reasons why new internet marketers don’t work on building lists is because they expect it to take a lot of work. But the fact is, if you’re using an autoresponder service to automate your email marketing needs then it’s not at all difficult. It’s important to be smart about your efforts, not do more work. In the following article we shall be discussing a few powerful ways to use your autoresponder to get the most out of it.

1) Publish high quality newsletters that go out automatically by using your autoresponder. You could use many autoresponder services like Aweber or GetResponse that can help you follow up with your target audience with your newsletter that you’ve already created in advance. Sending out a newsletter that targets the people you’re trying to target will help to establish you as an authority figure over your niche. You may not believe it, but it’s actually quite easy to send out a newsletter monthly or bimonthly. Even better, with the automation features of the autoresponder, you can even publish it weekly.

2) Another good way is to share resources with the people on your list that they find useful. When somebody joins your email list, they are looking for help. That’s a fact. You are giving your prospects this value by inputting regularly scheduled emails that provide resources they can use. For instance, if your email list targets programmers and web developers, you can share useful tools and resources that you come across by adding them to your autoresponder. Pretty soon, you will have an entire group of resources that can be sent to the new subscribers of your list at predetermined intervals, and old subscribers will receive them also.

3) You can go about creating quizzes on your website that are related to the subject matter you work within, as that is a great way to get people to give up their email addresses to find out the answers. You can then deliver those answers via autoresponder, and that’s how you can grab their email addresses. Finally, you should now see how important creativity is when it comes to autoresponders. Many internet marketers don’t find autoresponders so easy, and that’s mostly because they’re not thinking creatively. The best way to stay ahead of your competitors is to use an autoresponder for your email marketing campaign.

No matter how small or big the task looks, see if you can employ your autoresponder to automate it and make it easier. Remember, when you save time, you have the potential to earn much more money.

If you are looking for a good autoresponder to use, I would highly recommend GetResponse. It has tons of cool options and is very reliable.