Tag: affiliate marketing

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Online Business – Leverage Affiliate Products

Do you want to work online? Do you want to build your own business? Do you have a dream of working for yourself, from home, where you could work as many or as few hours as you like and still make a good living?

A lot of people have that dream too, but what’s the best way to make it come true?

Chances are when you start on this journey, you’ll end up joining some get-rich-quick schemes and multi-level marketing programs; but you’ll soon realize that only a select few make money this way, and unfortunately the odds are against you.

However, there are in fact many multi-millionaires being made online.

Most of them are selling their own products they’ve developed; but nearly all of them are also selling products as affiliates.

What does that mean? Selling as an affiliate means working as a commissioned salesperson, or making money selling other people’s stuff!

While the product owner takes care of billing, customer service, refund requests, tech support and so forth, the affiliate just recommends the product to others, and gets a hefty sales commission for doing so… which can often be as high as 50-75%, and sometimes even 100%, for digital downloadable products.

Why would a product owner offer such high commissions? They do it because 25-50% of your sales, and every other affiliate’s sales, add up to a lot more than 100% of their own sales. In other words, they wouldn’t be selling those products at all without you.

Why would anyone offer 100% commissions? Because they want to give you a good reason to promote their product (usually at a fairly low price point so they don’t mind giving up the sales money) in exchange for building their list of opt-in subscribers. Everyone who pays you the 100% commission for the product also ends up signing up with the product owner to download it, so it’s a win-win scenario.

Now here’s the biggest question: how do you get people to buy products through your affiliate link when it seems everybody online is promoting the same thing?

There are numerous ways to get the attention of a customer, which leads them to buy through you.

1. Pay per Click Direct-to-Merchant

Many people are making great money online by purchasing clicks from Google AdWords or other pay per click search engines, and sending that traffic directly to the product owner’s sales page through their affiliate link. This can be very profitable if done right. The main drawback is that only a couple of people can use the same domain name when promoting through AdWords, so rather than using your affiliate link as it is, you should create a redirect link. The other drawback is that the traffic you have purchased may be interested in other products you’re promoting, but you don’t have contact with those people once they’ve clicked through to the sales page, so that’s a lost sales opportunity.

2. Pay per Click to a Landing Page

This method uses the same type of pay per click advertising, but sends people to your own landing page first. You can offer a review of the product or some other type of unique content, before offering the visitor your affiliate link to click on if they like your review. Again, once the people click through to the sales page, you won’t be able to contact them anymore.

3. Combination of Pay per Click and List-Building

This method is very similar to #2, sending people to your own landing page first. However, the idea is to have them opt in to your newsletter list before they get to see your review or the sales page. Once someone is on your list, you’ll be able to send him or her related offers down the road. But be careful that your landing page is not just a “squeeze page” with an opt-in form and no content, which goes against Google’s AdWords regulations.

4. Combination of SEO and List-Building

If you don’t want to pay for traffic or worry about operating within Google’s pay per click terms, you can go the natural search way and build traffic through SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. This takes a different resource – your time — in order to properly optimize your page. You will also want to research how to do it the most effectively. However, many super affiliates are to the point where all their traffic comes naturally from the search engines, and they get thousands of visitors a day.

To combine SEO with list building, you would once again offer an opt-in form to the visitor so that you can keep contact with them. Otherwise you’re letting them leave as easily as they came, which is a waste of your SEO efforts.

As you can see, there are numerous ways to get traffic to your sites and build your affiliate marketing business. If you choose an option that involves opt-in list building, then you’ll also have a growing list of subscribers who know, like and trust you, and will buy much of what you recommend.

Another way to stand out is to offer a bonus or rebate that nobody else offers. You’ll make less on each transaction if it’s a cash rebate, but not everyone will cash in on your offer, and you’ll also have more sales overall.

With a little ingenuity and effort, you can be a super affiliate in no time.

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How to Start Your Affiliate Marketing Business the Right Way

Affiliate marketing generates 45% of worldwide eCommerce revenue. But only a handful of affiliates, estimated to be 1-2%, really makes it to the top to generate a full time income from their affiliate business. What separates a successful affiliate marketer from the one who is struggling to make a few hundred bucks?

Though affiliate marketing is touted to be the easiest make money online business, it may not be as easy as it sounds. Yes, you can start an affiliate marketing business without spending any money and effort but are you going to be a super affiliate who generates a full time income from her online business?

A successful affiliate marketer creates a business plan, executes it, track every aspect of the business, and tweak it to make it the most effective money generating machine. If your plan is to get Clickbank hop links for free and spam every forum, blog comments, and classified site, you will never be a successful affiliate marketer. To layout a your business on a solid footing, follow the step described below.

Create Your Own Website: Your own web site is the greatest important and indispensable tool in starting an affiliate marketing campaign. The number one step in any thriving affiliate marketing business is creating a good, believable and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first create an -easy-to-use website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the goods and services you are promoting and hopefully create a purchase.

Consequently, you must first focus your efforts in building a site that can cater to what your prospects need and desire. The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to search for information, not automatically to go and buy something.

Above all else, make your website full of original, pertinent and practical content. People love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is always the key and top quality content will not just raise your credibility, it can also help you fulfill a higher-level search engine ranking.

By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible authority in the field, displaying you a trustworthy endorser of the product or service you support. Establishing a good reputation is a good move in building up a loyal consumer base.

Provide Incentives: Competition is extremely fierce in the internet world. You should always be one-step in advance of your rivals to ensure that you capture a critical share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every conceivable means to inspire people not only to visit your website but also to click and go to the merchants’ websites that you are promoting.

Creating an opt-in email list is one of the ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to inspire them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can offer free software, access to unique services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.

Increase Your Site’s URL Popularity: The value of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. Attracting people to your site has to be the first action you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a top search engine ranking.

Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to establish search engine rankings. So, to elevate your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive link building campaign.

One of the ways to do this, at no cost at all, is by submitting articles, with your site’s web address in the resource box, to e-zines and free article directories. You may not only earn exposure, you may also have the opportunity to advertise for no cost, just include a link pointing to your site.

The more sites you send your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Ensure your articles are unique, pertinent and practical so that other websites may pick it up and post it.

Once you start mastering the three most important steps outlined above, you will discover hundreds of other free techniques to drive traffic to your website and other ways to monetize your web site.

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A Few Basics of Online Money Opportunity

Is it still possible to make a good income with Google Adsense? After all, there was a report circulating this past fall that said Adsense was dead.

Adsense took a beating a short time ago when Google made some changes. But it is still possible to make some extra money with a Web site or two. It is even possible to make a good living with it.

What You Need

You need a domain name, a hosting account, and a niche topic. Preferably the niche is one that you know something about. That makes it easier to fill it with content.

If you want to make a good income with one or two Web sites then good content is a must. Your goal is to create a site that attracts people and keeps them coming back.

There are sites on the Internet, created by people just like you, that are getting thousands of visitors a day. The content is written by the site owner who cares about the subject. They are passionate about the topic and write from their heart.

These sites have grown in popularity simply by word-of-mouth and maybe some simple search engine optimization tactics. Good content will get noticed, although optimizing for the search engines helps.

Getting Traffic to Your New Site

Before your site can become popular through word-of-mouth you need to get the first visitors to your site. How do you let people know about your site?

Free tactics include posting in forums or blogs and putting your URL in the signature, posting on Yahoo’s Answers and again putting your URL in the signature, and writing articles and submitting them to article directories. These are all free, and they work very well.

Here’s a hint: Write an article each week for each site. Do that consistently and you can’t help but get traffic. It’s a great way to get backlinks, too, which are very important in getting ranked high in the search engines.

For further education (and for examples) visit sites like StevePavlina and JackHumphrey. These are two sites that get thousands of visitors a day. They are using the blogging software put out by WordPress, which is free.

Blogs are a simple way to build a Web site. Anyone can start one, and then tweak it as they become more experienced. Jack’s site didn’t start out looking that cool. He’s done some major changes to it in the last year.

Steve’s site looks very plain, but that doesn’t bother the millions of people who regularly visit his site. They are coming for the content.

A simple-looking site can generate several thousand dollars a month in Adsense, affiliate products, and donations. Yes, people actually donate to sites that offer them good content for free. Steve uses a WordPress plugin for collecting donations from visitors who want to give him money as a way of saying “thank you.”

A free forum that can provide a great education on the topic of Internet marketing for any newbie is available at DigitalPoint’s forum site. Be prepared to spend hours there searching through all the posts that give good tips on how to make money online. You can also sign up for free and post questions.

The basics of how to make money online have been described here, along with some examples to study and a forum to learn from. Now it is up to you to get started.

Whatever you do, don’t put it off. You can’t earn money online by just reading about it. You have to take action.

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Affiliate Income Using Online Free Tools

Article marketing is nothing new. But applied to affiliate marketing it is the easiest way to make money online. And best of all, you can do it without spending a dime using only free tools available online.

This is all you will need :

– A free keyword research tool,
– A free text editor,
– A free Clickbank account,
– A free Blogger account.

Do a quick search on your favorite search engine and you will find these free tools very easily.

Quick cash blue print :

1 – Keyword research :

Using your keyword research tool, search for low competition keywords. Those are keywords that have at least 300 searches a month and that have less than 5000 competing pages in Google (when entered between quotation marks like this “keyword”). Try to find 5 to 10 good keywords related to the same topic.

The idea is to focus on keywords for which you can get a first page ranking in Google, Msn and Yahoo.

Hint : If you have no idea of which market to target, start by checking popular phrases like : how to, purchase, get rid of, help, cure, tips, etc.

2 – Find a digital product to promote

Go to Clickbank.com and find a product related to your topic. Choose one that pays at least $15 to $20. Generate your affiliate link and write it down or save it in a text file on your computer.

3 – Article writing :

Write an informative article (approximately 400 words) focused on each of your keywords. Put your keyword in the title and in the first and last paragraph of your article. Also sprinkle it throughout your copy. You can also throw in a few other keywords related to your topic. This will help you rank well.

Most important, write a great bio box that will make people want to learn more and click on the link to your blog. Put your keyword in your bio box as an anchor text link to your blog.

4 – Set up your blog.

More and more article directories will not let you put your affiliate link in your bio box. So your blog is going to be your landing page. The idea here is to put up a simple blog that will presell (not sell) your product and make people click on your Clickbank affiliate link to go to the sales page.

Hint : set up a blog for every product you promote and give it a keyword focused name.

5 – Submit your articles to article directories.

You will need to find article directories with a PR of 5 or more. These are the ones Google likes and it will help you get a first page ranking in the search engines and drive tons of free traffic to your blog.

Post one article a day on each article directory and do not post the exact same article to more than one directory.

Hint : Your best choice is Ezinearticles.com. You will need good quality articles, but it is the most powerful directory online. Alternatively you can use Goarticles.com.

6 – Rinse and repeat !

Article marketing is a game of numbers. The more articles your submit, the more money you will earn. But every product is not going to be a winner. Some will do well, some will not. So test a new product every week putting up 5 to 10 focused articles each time.

That is all there is to it. This may seem to good to be true, but it really does work. Off course it will take a couple of weeks for money to start rolling in on a regular basis but the magic of this method is that once you write a money making article it will generate residual income for months and maybe even years — without ever costing you a single dime.

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AdSense and Affiliate Programs – Simple Ways to Make Money

One of the most frequently asked questions of all time is, “How do I make money on the Internet”?

If you have been trying to make money on the Internet for even a short while, you have undoubtedly heard quite a few names being thrown about. It seems as if everyone sees themselves as an expert and everyone who is anyone knows everyone else who is someone. It is like a marketing guru clique. And they make you think that if you do not know somebody, you will always be a nobody.

You have probably encountered product launches, audio and video streaming, teleseminars, and joint ventures, etc. The gurus that are selling these products and services are making money hand over fist. In all fairness, these products and services are genuine and valuable to the folks who buy them.

But what most of them will not tell you is that there are thousands of people on the Internet making thousands of dollars a month without spending a lot of money. They do not fly to every seminar in the country just to make contacts. They rarely do joint ventures, because frankly, no one knows who they are. They literally sit in front of their computers in their underwear, click a few links, and wait for the money to roll in.

How do they do it? Affiliate links, Google Adsense, and content.

Take Google Adsense, for instance. Search engines love good content, the more, the better.

When you create multiple content pages on your website, the search engine spiders crawl the site, then follow each link to more content, which helps raise your rankings.

How does this make you money? By placing Adsense ads on every page. As readers click through your pages, many will also click the Adsense links. Every time they do, you make a commission from Google. It can be anywhere from a few cents to several dollars.

They do not have to buy anything. Just clicking the link makes you money. The more people you drive to your site, the more people will click the links, and the more money you will make.

Now all you need is content. If you are a good writer, you can write your own. But most of us are not.

One option would be to use articles written by others. Go to any of the popular article directories and you will find thousands of articles. Most can used free of charge as long as you include the resource box with each article. Since you are not promoting your own product, this is a very viable option.

The major downside to using other peoples articles is that the reader will view them as the expert and likely click the link in the resource box instead of the Adsense links, and you lose money.

However, the best option is Private Label Rights articles. Just a little editing can turn these articles into your own creation. The reader will view you as the expert, since you are not competing with another writer.

You can also include your own resource box with a link to an affiliate program, so whether they click the Adsense links or your affiliate link, you have increased your chances of making money. And you have done it without a single product of your own.

Making money on the Internet is not as difficult as some would have you believe. As with any business, give the people what they want and they will keep coming back.

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Affiliate Marketing – a Surefire Web Business for You

If you really want to start a Web-based business, but really don’t know where to start, then listen up. If you have no product of your own, the best thing that you can do is investigate affiliate programs.

What is an affiliate program? It’s basically a commission-only sales arrangement. Someone with a product or service will offer to let you sell it for them in exchange for a cut of the selling price. Typically with a hard product you’ll be lucky to get 10% commission on sales. The good news is that downloadable products such as ebooks and software will often pay you 50% of the sales price as an affiliate – you can even find deals where you get 75%.

If you’re just starting out you are certainly advised to begin your affiliate selling career by selling downloadable products because they are the ideal in our ‘instant gratification’ society. Your customers don’t have to wait around after paying their money they can immediately download their purchase over the Internet. If you go to www.clickbank.com, you’ll find they have several thousand different downloadable products you can sell as an affiliate, and the majority offer you at least 50% commission. Signing up is a simple one-time process and you’ll then be able to use your Clickbank ID to sell any of the products in their online catalogue.

You can browse the Clickbank catalogue by subject area to find something that interests you. In any given subject area you will usually find that there are several related products that you could sell from a tightly-focused Website where you could set up pages to pre-sell the products you have selected and then place a link that your customers can click on which will take them to the affiliate site to place their order – and if they do that, you get your commission.

One of the best types of site you can build using the above ideas is a review site. Set up some simple pages on your Website comparing and contrasting the features of several related products that you’ve picked out to sell. All you really need to do is go along to the vendors Website which will basically be a sales page for their product. Here they’ll list the features and benefits of their product. You can adapt this information to highlight the similarities and differences between two or more of the products to help your customers to choose which product would be the most suitable for their own particular circumstances.

What is the easiest type of Website you can set up to achieve the above? You’ve probably heard the buzz by now surrounding blogs and blogging. One of the main reasons blogs are recommended for setting up tightly-focused niche topic Websites is that they are usually easier to get traffic to from a standing start than conventional Websites.

Another good reason for choosing a blog as your site-builder of choice is that they are comparatively easy to set up if you’re a Website building novice. Once you’ve carried out some pretty basic setting up, the software behind the blog handles most of the major house-keeping chores, like making sure all of your pages are properly linked together. All you have to do is to keep adding on-topic content regularly.

Two good choices if you want to experiment with blogs for your niche affiliate review sites following the above model are WordPress and Blogger. WordPress is free open source software that resides on your own Web server – so you’ll need some hosting of your own if you want to go this route. This is certainly the preferred way to go because if you’ve got your own domain name and hosting you’ll present a more professional image to your customers. You will also have more control over the look and feel of your site.

If you are a complete novice and you just want to test the waters to see if this niche marketing with affiliate sites thing is for you, then the cheapest (free) way to get involved is to go to www.blogger.com, sign up for a free account and make use of the free Blogspot hosting.

Whichever blogging route you choose, once you have your blog set up, just put your review articles on it comparing and contrasting the affiliate products you’ve chosen, as detailed above. To bulk out the content on your blog, just look around the Net for news items and information on the subject area you’ve chosen and write some articles based around these.

Once you have one blog set up with a decent amount of content on it, just rinse and repeat. Find some more subject areas that interest you and put more blogs together on these subjects, based around more good affiliate products that you can promote.

There are people out there right now who are making very good money using nothing more than these, and similar, ideas. How will you know whether you could join them if you don’t give it a try?

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12 Tips for Generating Bright Ideas For Writing

Are you running short of ideas for your blogs or articles? Is generating fresh ideas for writing becoming difficult? By following the techniques discussed in this article, you will be a writing power house.

1. Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds on various subjects you are most interested in. Scan through the feeds every morning or at night and select a few articles for thorough reading. After reading the articles, tag them using your own classification system.

Classifying articles in different categories helps locate them quickly. Use Google’s RSS reader for reading and tagging the RSS feeds. You will have access to your categorized articles from any computers connected to the Internet.

2. Subscribe to a few print magazines and read them regularly. After you finish reading an article, record the main points of the article in a Google note. You will have access to these notes anywhere in the World.

3. Use a PDA and carry it with you wherever you go. Better yet, get a PDA with a camera and cell phone. You will only carry one gadget for all your communication, organization, and content generation needs.

Take pictures of interesting places, events, and moments you come across in your daily life. Use the voice recorder of the PDA to record whenever an idea hits you. Every night, transfer the ideas from your PDA to Google notes and upload your pictures to flickr.

4. Scan through the comments posted by others on the online articles you read regularly. Record interesting ideas, pros and cons of an issue, and strong opinions posted by others in your Google notes. Leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

5. Have lunch with friends at least once a week. Bounce ideas off them on any topic. Mix ideas from divergent topics to create new ideas in you own subjects.

6. Use the time like driving, watching TV while exercising in a treadmill, etc. to think about your favorite topics and try to relate to things you observe on the road and on the TV. When you get an idea, record it in your PDA.

7. Go through all the ideas and articles you have recorded in Google notes and your RSS reader to create new ideas by giving new twists to the old ideas. Combine two or more ideas and change or improve an existing idea to come up with your own idea.

8. Use a variety of online tools like Technorati, Digg, Delicious, etc. for writing inspiration. Every hour, hundreds of new articles and news stories are posted in these sites. Check Yahoo’s buzz log to find out what people are talking about and searching for. Quickly scan them to hit a few gold nuggets that can serve as springboards for new ideas.

9. Using on-line tools discussed earlier, select an issue and jot down all the pros and cons. Search Google to enhance the idea by adding more pros and cons. Once you have collected a dozen diverse opinions, you will be able to write an article based on those facts in a pro-con format.

10. If you are good at using data for analysis and comfortable in the use of a spreadsheet, draw charts in the spreadsheet and look for patterns in the data. Provide you own interpretation to the data. Illustrate your articles with charts and graphs.

11. To generate topics for your article, use overture keyword selector. Select a single keyword and run it through the overture. You will see a dozen or more keywords based on the search popularity. Copy a few selected keywords to a notepad. Now, take each keyword and do a search in online sites like Digg, Technorati, etc. You will see a number of articles. Read them to generate ideas.

12. Ask yourself what if, what else, and why not questions on an issue and search the Internet to find answers from different sources. Create new ideas generated from existing materials, provide step-by-step guide for somebody to practice an obvious idea, or offer benefits of practicing an old idea.

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8 Steps to Affiliate Sales Using Classified Ads

Many websites advise not to use classified ads to promote affiliate programs. But they are wrong. If you know how to use classified ads effectively, you will be able to drive traffic to your affiliate sites without spending a dime.

1. Keep the ad simple. Don’t try to sell anything. You are trying to get clicks and drive traffic to websites. Your goal is to arouse curiosity in the readers’ mind and urge them to click on the link that takes to the landing page of the affiliate sites.

2. Create a compelling header. This is the first line a reader scans. It should grab her attention immediately. If it cannot attract her like a magnet, she will not read the rest of your ad description. Don’t write the type of headers that thousand other ads have in the classified site. Make it compelling and create a psychological trigger. To get the most clicks from your ad, use words like “cheap”, “free”, “proven” and “shocking”.

3. The next step in creating your ad is the first two sentences of the ad itself. According to many experts, the best way to make your ad appealing is to state a quantifiable benefit in these two lines. This benefit should make the reader recognize right away that they have come to the right place. A good way to do this is to tell the reader exactly what solution your product offers them.

4. The third sentence of your ad should be about a crucial feature of your product. This can be a unique selling point. The purpose is to draw the reader into clicking through now to find out the details and price of the offer. Just remember to keep the ad as simple as you can. The goal when advertising with classified ads is to use as few words as you can to achieve the greatest results.

5. Next you will need places to post your new ads to. The criteria here is to find places that will allow free classified ads that get large amounts of traffic themselves. Use Google and search using key words “free classifieds”, “free ads”, “free business ads”. Use the first two pages of Google listing and start visiting each site. Use sites that are simple and easy to use and keep a listing of those sites in you browser’s favorites.

6. Don’t forget to put a link in your ad. The link will take users to your affiliate site when they click it. Use classified sites that have an input box for URL. Put your link starting with http. If the site does not have an URL box in the ad submission page, just forget it unless you know the html syntax of a link.

7. Don’t spam the free classified sites by posting ads in irrelevant categories. You can post as many ads as you want but post only in a few relevant categories. If the site does not allow you to post multiple ads, there is no need to visit the site for the second time.

8. Use pictures or banners in your ad. If the classified site does not have a picture upload feature, you should give a second thought if you really want to use the site for your promotion. You can use it if the site gets lots of traffic.

By following these proven methods and a bit of perseverance, your success and profits will be greater. It will give more effective exposures to affiliate programs you are promoting. Just head to clickbank and pick up a few affiliate programs and start promoting using free classified ads.