Are Your Affiliate Programs Eating Away Your Money And Time

So many times I have heard this. So many examples I do remember. People have left the internet business after being disappointed with their so called affiliate programs.

An affiliate program is an excellent way to earn money especially in the beginning. I said beginning because at that time one does not understand the market and is too naïve to bring his own product out in right way.

Affiliate programs fill that gap nicely. You have got a ready-made product and a ready-made webpage too (though you can develop your own and you should be doing that). There is only one aspect left to make that money.

Making sales.

But you need to choose your affiliate program carefully.

An affiliate program should be free to join. You should be cautious of the programs that will charge you upfront to be able to become their affiliates. Sometimes you buy a product and get affiliate status as bonus. That is acceptable. But a good affiliate program should not charge you a membership fee monthly or yearly whatever the case may be.

There are some programs which charge you a monthly fee for becoming a member and you are expected to recruit more for getting a commission. These are not affiliate programs but MLM programs.

Be cautious when you join such programs. They do not offer a good product to sell. The only thing that you have to sell is the membership. Such programs may eat up a lot of your money before you realize their worthlessness. In such programs you sell a membership and your recruit is expected to sell the same in return.

This kind of sale is not only hard to accomplish but also associated with high attrition. That means the rate of members dropping out is very high.

Also you should get a good commission. Check the percentage offered. Good programs offer 50-60% commissions. Though high priced products seem quite lucrative due to apparent volume of money in commission but selling a high priced product may not be that easy task too. It is because the market for those may not be that large. So you need to select your product carefully.

One very important factor that is often ignored is your aptitude for the particular product. Select a product that you can associate your interests with. For example if you like gardening then a product that caters the gardening needs will be easier to sell than a selling a real estate product.

Because in sales first of all you need to be convinced about the usability and benefits of the product before you attempt to sell it. If the product is around the area of your interest you can easily identify the beneficial aspects. Then you will find it easier to convince your potential customers.

Study the market and demand for that product.

If the demand is high the sales are easier. To study the demand go to Overture or Google and look for the search made around the keywords of your product. It will give you a fair idea about the demand.

Plan your market strategies beforehand.

It is better if you make your own website instead of promoting the copy of the original page laced with your link. Having your own website gives you a unique identification and professional look. The other advantage is that you can promote multiple products on the same page rather than promoting different pages separately.

Web hosting is quite cheap now a days and webpage can be easily built in front page.

Try and give your full efforts into promoting what you have got. Affiliate programs are good way to learn the market tactics. Learn and try them best to your abilities.

Stick with the product you have chosen instead of jumping to the new offer of some other product. New products are being released everyday but being new does not mean that it is better and easier to sell.

Analyze regularly. Test regularly and keep working.

Ten Ways Affiliates Sabotage Themselves

If affiliate marketing is so lucrative, then why do so few ever turn a profit? Read on, and I'll tell you why.

1. They don't consistently study the craft. By treating affiliate marketing like a hobby instead of a business, they squander time and money, spinning their wheels as other marketers pass them by.

2. They are a jack of all trades and a master of none. It is amazing what a little focus can do for someone trying to succeed online. By establishing a clearly defined set of goals, 20% of affiliates consistently continue to earn 80% of the commission.

3. They don't write special reports. Free special reports with giveaway rights can be powerful pre-sellers for products that offer generous commission. They're also easy to create with free PDF software available online, and can make the difference between a profitable and unprofitable marketing campaign.

4. They either rely too much, or too little on Google Adwords. By figuring out how to utilize Adwords to develop recurring revenue streams, a small percentage of affiliates are using Adwords to earn more and more income online month after month, year after year. How can you use Google Adwords creatively to move your business forward?

5. They don't capture e-mail addresses. Everyone says that the money is in your list. Then start building your list baby! It's much easier than you think. I'll cover this in greater detail in future articles.

6. They don't cloak their links. Up to 80%, or more, of affiliate commission is stolen, depending upon the product. Thus, quality link cloaking software is a must-have for anyone truly serious about succeeding with affiliate marketing.

7. They don't utilize viral marketing. Did you know that you can get a lot farther by leveraging 1% of the effort of 100 people than by expending 100% of your own efforts?

Managing a successful viral marketing campaign is as simple as filling a need that people have and giving Web surfers a huge incentive to share it with others. (If you don't get anything else out of this article, make sure you jot this point down).

8. They don't help other Internet marketers to succeed. What's that, you say? You only care about your own success? Then how will you develop loyalty among your website visitors? How will you keep them coming back?

People need a reason to choose your website over everyone else's. Do you your best to serve your visitors and you will generate customers for life.

9. They rely on the efforts of sub-affiliates to earn their commission. If you are recruiting sub-affiliates, take the time to give them the tools to make some sales. If you do, they'll appreciate your efforts and keep coming back to you again and again.

10. They don't think outside of the box. Some of the best Internet marketing breakthroughs haven't yet come into existence.

Become a visionary. Change the face of the Internet. Don't become one of the masses!

Your success in Internet marketing is completely up to you. Every day is a fresh start, and there's nothing you can't accomplish. How soon will you be earning a six-figure income online?

**Attn Ezine editors/Site owners** Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site so long as you leave all links in place, do not modify the content and include our resource box as listed below.

Feel free to substitute your referral link in place of mine in the resource box. Thanks!

Article Marketing 101 For Affiliate Program Managers

This article is for Affiliate Program Managers: Interested in increasing the amount of revenue that each of your affiliates creates for your business? Read on to learn about how to use your existing articles to grow your affiliate program strength.

From an affiliate perspective, there are only a few 'deal breaker' type things that I insist any affiliate program that I join must provide me:

Real-time reporting statistics

Real-time email alerts upon each sale

Payment on a consistent monthly basis

High price-point products

Package of articles that I can reprint on my websites and ezines

One strategy that many newbie affiliate program designers fail to offer is a package of articles that can be reprinted on my website along with my unique affiliate link. Of the tens of thousands of dollars I'll do this year as an affiliate, you would be shocked at how much of the revenue comes directly from reprinting articles of the affiliate programs I am involved in. This strategy works for me and it can work for you!

Here's what to do:

Designate 10, 25, 50, 75 or 100 articles that will be made available to your affiliates as a dump (meaning all at once and immediately).

Provide them with 3-10 articles per month thereafter that they can reprint along with their affiliate link.

Be certain to spell out the reprint rights of this type of affiliate article marketing so that your articles don't show up on bad websites you wouldn't want to associate with.

Here's what NOT to do:

Allow your articles to be private labeled. This is a poor strategy and will dilute your credibility. They should carry your name or the name of your primary author brand.

Don't give out all of your articles for your affiliates to use. Best to designate a specific "lot" of them that can be used by your affiliates and the rest are yours to keep exclusively for your direct sales audience.

Why this type of article marketing is important for affiliate program managers and affiliates:

Articles are like "sales agents" in that they keep selling for you, day after day, year after year. They also help expand your reach as each article gets indexed by the major search engines. Lastly, they give you another reason to send an email to your list members about the articles available.

This is a credibility builder for the affiliate program manager and it's a "Give" before the "Take" which begins the reciprocation cycle in a positive direction.

Note For Affiliates Who Use Articles To Promote Their Affiliate Programs:

Some sites (like ours at ) don't accept articles that promote affiliate programs, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't go find other sites that do accept articles that promote affiliate program links. I really meant this article to speak directly to affiliate program managers and not the needs of affiliate marketers.

To save you the trouble of sending me an email to ask why EzineArticles.com doesn't accept articles that promote affiliate programs, there are three reasons:

1) Because we don't accept articles that are available on a non-exclusive basis (meaning we only want to see original or exclusive licensed content) and...

2) Because affiliate marketers are not our ideal author profile type and...

3) Because most ezine publishers don't want to reprint articles that pitch an affiliate link. One of the primary purposes of our site is to be a resource for ezine publishers to find supplemental content for their next email newsletter.

With that said, there are plenty of competitor article sites that will allow you to submit your affiliate-link-laced articles, not to mention listing them on your own website.

Bottom line: If you offer an affiliate program to promote your products and services, consider immediately offering a package of articles that your affiliates can add to their website or send to their email newsletter lists to further promote your business.

8 Basic Rules for Choosing The Right Affiliate Program

Joining an Affiliate Program is a great way to start earning a sizeable income on the Internet without many of the hassles that come with running your own business.

But the problem is? there are so much affiliate programs out there for you. In this article I will guide you to choose the most suitable and profitable Affiliate Program for you. I recommend you to follow this rule before choosing an Affiliate Program.

1. Find a great quality product or service

Remember that any recommendation you make will reflect directly on you. If you recommend a great quality product, the people you recommended will always trusted you and be interested in future recommendations that you make. If you recommend a bad quality product, and I'll guarantee that they will likely hesitate to act on any offers you recommend.

Don't get greedy. Only recommend products that you truly believe in.

2. Look for a program that offers top commissions.

I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to expect to be paid 30% to 50% of the profits on each product sold. 5% to 10% is very low. You should look for companies who understand the "lifetime value" of new customers you refer and appreciate your efforts.

Only consider joining programs that show a similar level of respect for their affiliates.

3. Make sure they have a high sales conversion ratio

Make sure that the affiliate program is turning a reasonable number of visitors into sales. If not, then your efforts directing traffic to their website will be completely wasted. A 1% conversion ratio (1 out of every 100 visitors) is quite good, 2%+ is better.

4. Be sure you'll be credited for every sales you make

You should find out what kind of tracking software the Affiliate Program that you're interested in joining uses. You MUST look for a program that uses quality affiliate tracking software that is reliable and tracks ALL (online, by phone, fax, mail orders, etc), because there are many companies only track online orders, and this means that you will never get credit for anywhere from 5% - 10% of your affiliate sales!.

Make sure they have a high sales conversion ratio and a good tracking software.

5. They should allow you to access your sales statistics real time

What I mean is that the Affiliate Program you join should give you a special username and password that you can use to access your own personal affiliate sales information right on their website. Many affiliate programs have done this, you don't have to worry about that, but incase they don't, you should reconsider to join them.

6. Look for a program that teaches you to maximize your affiliate sales

A good affiliate program will provide you with everything you need to be successful. They'll provide you with traffic-generating banners, text-links, and recommendation letter templates. They'll tell you which techniques work well in which circumstances.

Find an affiliate program that is similarly dedicated to educating their affiliates.

7. Make sure they are reputable.

I still feel I should mention the importance of doing business with a reputable company. I know many people who have worked really hard, made a lot of sales for a company, but then they have never been paid or forced to wait months and months to get their money, I've been there too. If you have any concerns about a company that you are thinking of doing business with, ask for references and do some checks on them before you join them.

8. Be sure to read all contracts and agreements.

Before you join any affiliate program, just make sure that you read all contracts and agreements very carefully. Pay very close attention to exclusivity clauses in the agreement. Be careful that any affiliate agreement or contract you sign does not restrict you.

Why Top-earning Affiliates Have Their Own Domains And Websites

Many affiliate programs usually provide special web pages for their affiliates. This is one of the reasons why it may appear very strange, at first, that most top affiliates and the high earners from affiliate programs will most certainly always have their own websites, complete with their own domains specifically for promoting a certain affiliate program that they are involved in.

Why should these affiliates spend the extra money for a website, and even a domain name that both come with their own heavy demands when they already have so much visibility already through an affiliate program website? Actually there are a number of reasons.

Having your own website and domain will tend to attract more traffic than an affiliate site

A domain is bound to attract much more traffic than a long affiliate address. When surfers see what looks like a registered domain name, they will tend to take the site much more seriously than if they were to see the rather long affiliate website address. The affiliate can even ensure that they select a name that will be quickly picked up by search engines to give the site a high ranking.

It is possible to carefully monitor where the traffic is coming from

One of the major weaknesses of the vast majority of ordinary affiliate websites lies in the fact that it is not possible to analyze traffic and establish exactly where it is coming from. You would need to install some code and most affiliate sites do not give access to codes of the pages that they supply to their affiliates. The result is that folks are forced to operate blindly. Even as they instigate various advertising methods to get traffic to their sites, there is really no way they can track their visitors.

One of the most effective Internet marketing methods calls for the constant analysis of your traffic to establish where they have come from. The idea here is to find further ways and means of reaching that particular market niches. In this way you will find that your site traffic is constantly on the increase.

It becomes possible to harvest email addresses

With your very own affiliate website, it becomes a lot easier to collect names and email addresses from visitors to the affiliates independent website. It is usually not possible to do this from an affiliate website. When you do not do this, you fail to make efficient and maximum use of the leads you generate through your website and from all the marketing efforts you make to attract traffic. A person harvesting email addresses and building an opt-in email list is bound to make much more sales from lower traffic than a person with a much larger volume of traffic who does not build an opt-in email list.

It has been established that buyers usually need to be exposed to any product or service that you are advertising, several times before they can make a decision to buy. Emails are a great way to do this, and the only legal way to send out mass email is through permission marketing of using safe lists or your very own opt-in email list. This is a list of persons who have opted in to receive the latest updates and developments. This is naturally the more effective option.

There are various ways of harvesting email addresses from regular visitors to your affiliate website. You can offer an amazing free e-course or offer to send them some free fascinating software in return for their email address that you can then use to market to them again and again. It really is not surprising that top affiliates and top earners from affiliate programs insist on having their own websites and domains.

Affiliate Marketing Secrets that You Can Use

Affiliate marketing is a very hot topic on the web right now. Not surprising when you consider the fact that a vast majority of successful online entrepreneurs make their money from affiliate schemes and programs. Since the early days when Amazon was being set up and founder, Jeff Bezos was establishing affiliates as key marketing tools for any online enterprise, affiliates and affiliate marketing has come of age.

The amounts of income being made have clearly transformed affiliate marketing into a very serious business. There are more and more affiliates comfortably raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars every month.

The first important affiliate marketing secret to bear in mind is the reason why affiliate marketing remains the most effective way of marketing any online enterprise. It is all about the power of the referral. It is rather awkward when a website is trying to promote itself directly to prospects. Actually very different from the situation where somebody else refers the business to others, including people they do not know personally.

This works out superbly for several reasons. Firstly the affiliate as a consumer themselves is able to quickly identify the strong attractive points of the business that will best attract others like them.

The other little known affiliate marketing secret is that most of the top-earning affiliates have their own websites and blogs. Having their own websites gives these affiliates a tremendous edge over others. The sites are usually very closely related to the affiliate program that they are promoting. By having their own site, they are able to harvest the email addresses of the traffic to their sites.

Usually, most people you send to your affiliate site will not end up purchasing anything. However when you have their email addresses in your opt-in email list, you can continuously market to them and the affiliate will automatically end up with a much higher conversion rate from the traffic they generate as opposed to an affiliate without a website who just sends traffic to their affiliate website.

This is the affiliate marketing secret that makes a difference between affiliates struggling to pull in a good income and those comfortably making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Free Keyword Research Tools Are Not As Effective as Wordtracker

One of the most unanswered questions online today is, how to perform keyword research that gets free traffic from the search engines. Many SEO experts recommends using one keyword or keyword phrase per page, while others recommends using secondary keywords with your main keyword.

My philosophy is simple, you simply use both methods and check to see which method works best. You will also have to draw the line and recognize which is working best and continue with that method.

For me, I love to use one keyword phrase for review pages and for content pages I use secondary keywords with my main keyword, making the theme of that page much more search engine friendly. Our job is to please the spiders as well as our visitors.

My advice for newcomers is to build our first page using only a free tool such as GoodKeywords. I did the same with my first site, which ranked very highly for my choosen keyword phrases, due to the fact that the competition wasn't very high and I also didn't use the highly targeted keywords found in the search results.

Now, I must admit that I wanted to take my keyword research to higher heights and even discover a niche of my own with very little competition, and that is where free keyword research tools fails. They don't supply enough data for you to analyze if your keywords are actually worth while or highly competitive.

That is where, wordtracker and KRA comes into play. Wordtracker is the number one keyword research tool online, has been for many years and still is. Those who generate five figure monthly commission checks with affiliate programs knows the importance of wordtracker and just can't live without it.

KRA, is a tool by SEO expert Andy Williams that you can use to filter out secondary keywords and related phrases. If your into optimizing your pages for better search engines result, then I highly recommend you get yourself a copy.

You can reap the benefits of online keyword research by using these tools, and stop fiddling around with free tools. Free tools are for beginners who are testing the waters. It is now time for you to join the rank of professional marketers and stop hoping for success.

The best feeling you can get from your online marketing is when you make that first sale, and it doesn't matter how big it is. Stop targeting the wrong keywords and start building much more profitable content pages that only the smart marketers are targeting.

My final words: If a keyword research tool is so good, then why would you create a tool with an import possibility for wordtracker data?