Affiliate Commissions: Leveraging the Power of the Internet!

An Affiliate is a person who recommends your products and services online to people who need them, and if a deal is struck the Affiliate is paid a commission in return.Commissions do vary from merchant to merchant. Sometimes a percentage is fixed as the commission rate.

Many people term an Affiliate as an online vendor, which is practically incorrect. A vendor is termed as someone who exchanges goods or services for money. One that sells or vends: a street vendor; a vendor of software products on the Web. Simply put, this is the seller of any number of goods of any possible type.

From topsoil to cars, new homes to pets, the person doing the selling is the vendor. Traditionally, he/she is selling goods that they may or may not have produced or manufactured themselves.Where as an Affiliate are people having an agreement with a seller (vendor) to represent (sell) his or her product within the terms that the seller has dictated in exchange for remuneration (payment) of some type, normally a percentage of the sale.”

An Affiliate program’s prospects solely depends on quality affiliates. If your Affiliates are witty enough to convince your clients your products and services sale like hot pancakes. Where as a poor Affiliate will never get you a client no matter how good your product or service may be.

It is generally advisable for any newbie who would want to start of as an Affiliate to join a small time program.Never mind the pay,gather the experience initially. As with any occupation, you must study hard and learn constantly. The initial learning curve is tough.

Start with some of the other SEO related occupations and try covering them over the next week or so. Work in web design and development while you start to learn as they are critical skills to SEO. Consulting and making decisions from working theories is generally a good next step. Experiment and read often.

Find some good merchants, and build around what you know to start.Study other affiliate programs. Datafeeds, page creators, hosting, specials generators, and more can all be useful to affiliates. Get your name out there, and let folks know about you and your program, this is a good way to start off.If you have an existing program, join another that offers a little higher percentage that passes link popularity.

Once you become well acquainted with the trade you could move along smoothly. There are contemporaries you might come across who calim to be “SUPER AFFILIATES”. Initially when they started off, these super affiliates were guys who never posted on forums, never sold any ebooks or products, never really spoke to anyone outside of their inner circles, never had a blog, never let anyone know who they were either. They had an aura about themselves and never interacted with the common struggler.

Suddenly, in the last year or less, there are like a million of them popping out and coming out of the woodwork claiming to be a super affiliate, and are willing to sell their ideas of how to become one in exchange of a hefty amount. They either do it by releasing e-books or by trading with acclaimed webmasters.

So a year ago, there were a very few bunch of people that were called super affiliates. But now there are tons of them. The old standard was if you make at least $25k a month in affiliate revenues, then you’re considered a super affiliate. I don’t think that’s true at all anymore. Because in an internet industry, things change and move pretty damn fast, and so should the minimum requirements or earning platforms for affiliates.

They may all do well in their own right, not bashing most of them, but they are by no means super affiliates.All I’m saying and pointing out is that their monthly and annual income levels are nowhere near what super affiliates are doing, not to mention very few of them actually do any real affiliate marketing.

Occasionally would you find news concerning Affiliates being robbed or denied their commissions missing.It happens every now and then.Affiliates keep crying and lamenting about being deprived of their share. And this sort of denial to pay comes from the biggest programs.

Hence I pointed out that it would be better you joined a small time program as long as you were paid so that you didn’t get disheartened right from the word go.In the world of Affiliate Marketing you would have to battle it out to get your pay. Once you carve a niche out of your self as a promising Affiliate (not a super affiliate)things get relatively easier and the end results are extremely rewarding.

The problem doesn’t lie only with the merchants solely,even the payment processors are there to blame.Recently an acclaimed payment processing unit had come under heavy scrutiny and crticism alike for failing to provide the required payments.

Following are some suggestible methods for affiliates as to how they could boost their commissions:

1. Learn how to PRE-sell your visitors instead of hard-selling them. Using this technique will put your visitors in the right frame of mind to visit the merchant’s website and have a look at the product offerings.

2. Focus on one or two products and put all of your your effort into promoting them. Your visitors are looking for a website that has great information on their area of interest.

3. Purchase the products you are promoting. This will enable you to know first-hand if the product is of high-enough quality to deserve your efforts, and will give you the ability to provide an honest recommendation based on your own experience with the product.

4. Create an email course and include your affiliate link in each email with a recommendation on how that product will help your visitors. Setup an auto responder to put this idea on autopilot

5. Write articles and submit them to newsletter authors and article directories. You can either include a recommendation for the product within the article, or at the end in your author’s resource box.

6. Add a few lines promoting an affiliate product in your signature that goes out in all of your emails. Every email you send will have your advertisement with your affiliate link in it.

7. Purchase a domain name strictly for the purpose of promoting your favorite affiliate program. Use a forwarding service to redirect the domain name to your favorite affiliate program.

8. Create a mini site that focuses on only one affiliate program. Spend your time promoting this site through search engine positioning, pay-per-click search engines, ezine ads, etc.

9. Create an ebook with useful information on your chosen topic and give it away. In your ebook you will have links to different affiliate products and if any sales are made through them you will get the commissions.Make sure you let other webmasters know they are free to give away your ebook as well so you can get as many copies as possible out there.

10. And last but not least is to create your OWN product! Satisfied customers will gladly purchase from you again in the future. If you don’t have other products to sell them, make recommendations of products that you can earn a commission from through affiliate programs. Last part of the step is to create VOLUME.

I firmly believe that when you do something correct, and it makes you money, then you should keep plugging away and doing it over and over and over. Use the notes from this post to create your own little network. SEO your sites correctly, and you’ll build up longterm streams of traffic. Alright, enough writing. Go do it’s high time to start making money for the future.

Source: http://www.marketingscoop.com/

Affiliate Marketing: How to Succeed!

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. It is a known fact that joining an affiliate program is a great way to start earning money on the internet without much hassles. All one has to do is to reffer someone else’s product or service and be paid a refferal fee.

Affiliate marketing is initially tough but finally rewarding. Many people who open up new affiliate programs goes through the hard aspects of the program initially and in many cases they are compelled to terminate the program. It takes time and experience to learn what works and what doesn’t, in terms of both (1) selecting affiliate partners and (2) integrating them into the site. The truth is, joining affiliate programs can be extremely profitable. if you know what you’re doing, that is!

Affiliate marketing is strikingly similar to a modern version retail sales. Affiliate marketers are paid a percentage based on many criteria. As is with retail sales, location is everything..with affiliate marketing the location is at the top of the serps rather than mainstreet. The more traffic to a site (or foot traffic to a retail outlet) the more likely the customers are to pay a higher price. The more people the better the chance of converting enough folks to make a profit.

In my mind, the best affiliate marketers are the pros of the SEO industry. They are the people willing to get “down and dirty” and just sell. There is no school for affiliate marketing – learn online and run with it. It takes a true entreprenuerial mentality. An affiliate marketer must understand all aspects of how the web works, user psychology, web development, search engine optimization, etc.

Affiliate marketers “control their own destiny”, and seem to see opportunity in every crisis. They are soldiers of fortune that create Christmas sites in July (or July of two years previous now.)

Affiliate marketers are often the “blackhats” that give the industry a bad name as well. This works both ways, as they also do the “dirty work” that corporations want no part of to keep their reputation from being tarnished. They will be happy to garner the traffic that goes with cutting edge borderline techniques, they just would rather have the affiliates do them to keep a safe distance from liability.

How it might change: The techniques will of course change. Competitive industries will become more cutthroat with things like Googlebowling as people realize the potentials spoils.

Focus on NICHE. Keep searching for high demand/ low competition areas to target. As algorithms get better the methodology will of course have to evolve with it. Some things that have changed over the last couple years are the rate at which sites grow and get links. The types of links will certainly become more of an issue with links pages, reciprocal links, off-topic links, and other such techniques being devalued as time progresses.

Choose one of two routes – 1, 500 sites that make $1 per day. 2. One site that makes $500 per day. Depending on your route you will use different techniques. Learning them all and coming up with a hybrid approach is probably safest and best. Good affiliates are like chameleons. They blend into their environment, and stay well under the radar in failure and success.

How to become an affiliate marketer: As with any occupation, you must study hard and learn constantly. The initial learning curve is tough. Start with some of the other SEO related occupations and trycovering them over the next week or so. Work in web design and development while you start to learn as they are critical skills to SEO. Consulting and making decisions from working theories is generally a good next step. Experiment and read often. Find some good merchants, and build around what you know to start.

Affiliate marketing is tough. Anyone who tells you different is most likely very very smart, or very very stupid. Smart affiliates use button pusher marketing to crank out large sites quite often. Usually these sites certainly help with the size of the SE’s index, though many of them don’t contribute to the quality of their indexes.

The best affiliate marketing folks are generally very technically savvy as well as marketing savvy. I really respect the opinions of those who have been successful at affiliate marketing, because I know it takes a lot of work, ambition, and dedication. I’ve never been what I would consider successful with affiliate marketing, but I have dabbled a bit, and listened a lot. There is definitely some gold available for those up to the challenge.

To discover how you can reach the top of the search engines and make your affiliate commissions sore, visit http://www.google-exposed.com

Source: http://www.marketingscoop.com/

How to Use Article Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Website

If you want to increase traffic to your website, article marketing is the key.

Are you trying to get more traffic to your website? Article marketing is a powerful way to generate significant traffic to your website. In this article, I’ll provide some details on how to use article marketing in a very specific way to generate a steady stream of qualified prospects to your site.

The first step is to develop an article that is clearly written, provides value, and builds credibility. A clearly written article ensures that readers do more than skim your article. It also provides an “easy read” resulting in a high level of engagement.

To keep your reader’s attention, your article must provide something of value. This is a basic principle of article marketing. An example might be an SEO related article that shows readers how to write an effective “Title” tag for their webpage. A valuable article would first explain the concept then follow with examples – giving readers something tangible to represent each concept.

A result of a clearly written article that provides valuable information is that of credibility. The concept of credibility can be subtle but is very important if you wish to drive the most traffic to your site or affiliate products. Some suggestions for building credibility through article marketing include: injecting your experience into each article, providing references to findings from recent studies, offering facts, providing quotes from industry experts, and so on.

Once you’ve written a compelling article, you can weave a mention of your sites products and services into the text. However, be sure to do it in modest way if you want your article marketing to take hold. Some examples are:

• “I’ve used a number of products that weren’t any good… but I did have some success with the [insert product name here].”

• “I’ve used [product 1], [product 2], and [product 3], but found [insert product name here] to be the cheapest and the best.”

• “Personally I use [insert product name here], but any [product descriptor] will do.”

• “I’m not an expert on [product descriptor] but know that [insert product name here] is quite popular.”

Too often I see individuals using article marketing with a hard sell. This doesn’t work. People don’t like to be told what to do, what products they must use, or rely on the opinions of those they do not trust. So your best bet is to begin with a clearly written article, provide something of value, and use your newfound credibility to generate referrals/sales.

Now that you’ve written your article, here are some tips for “on-page” optimization. This will ensure that once your article is posted, it can be seen by the major search engines and is easily crawled.
Tip #1 Place your keywords in the title of the article. For example, if you’re promoting email software, let’s call it, “Email Management Software” then work it into your title. Here’s and example…

How to Use Email Management Software to Improve Results.

And try to limit your title to about 7 main words. This is how you optimize your article marketing efforts for a given article or page. Now we’ll talk about some other ways to increase your on-page optimization factors.

Tip #2 Use your key word term or phrase in most of your paragraphs. You certainly don’t have to use the phrase in every paragraph of your article, but it helps to use it frequently. Many engines count the number of times the keyword or keyword phrase is used. However, you do not want to over do it. This will turn off many of your readers and negatively affect your credibility. Find a good balance between using your keyword phrase and an appropriate amount of content.

Tip #3 Bold your keyword phrase at least once within the article. It doesn’t matter where you bold your keyword phrase when using article marketing, just be sure to bold it at some point in your article and/or when you post your article online. This provides emphasis and shows the search engines that it’s important to the content on the page.

Tip #4 Italicize your keyword or keyword phrase once in the body of your article. Again, providing a treatment to the text signals its importance and value to the rest of the content on your page.

Tip #5 Use your keyword phrase in the first 25 words of the page and last 25 words of the page. This is essential for on-page optimization and again signals the search engines that your phrase is relevant to all of the content on a given page.

Now that you’ve written your article, what are you going to do with it? When considering the options available for article marketing, consider distribution of your article through online article directories. I personally use those directories that have a high Google PR. If the article directories are favored by other popular sites, they will most often have a good deal of traffic. Article Directories with the highest Google PR (that are any good) include:

Article Central – PR7
About.com – PR6
EasyArticles – PR6
Go Articles – PR6
EzineArticles.com – PR6
ArticleAlley – PR5

A number of these directories are also favored by major search engines like Yahoo! Some allow affiliate links and others do not. Be sure to read the submission policies carefully before submitting your article.

For some directories, you may have to include your website or affiliate link in the “About the Author” section. This is one of the most important aspects of article marketing. Be sure to write your bio very carefully. The added benefit of inserting a link to your product or site in this section is that other webmasters, who repurpose articles from article directories, will include these links – giving you the benefit of viral marketing.

Article marketing is a great way to promote your website or products. By writing an article that delivers value and offers a subtle mention of your website or product, you’re well on your way to getting the proper exposure you’re looking for. Add the on-page optimization factors we talked about, and you’re sure to get noticed. Give article marketing a try and you’ll be glad you did!

Source: http://www.marketingscoop.com/

What are Affiliate Programs?

Are you looking for a simple explanation of affiliate programs? If so, this article will tell you everything you need to know about affiliate programs and making money on the web. Simply put, affiliate programs allow individuals promoting specific products or services to receive a commission each time they are successful in selling someone elses product.

Affiliate programs give you an opportunity to promote someone else’s products or services using Google Adwords, your own website, email, or other forms of electronic communication. When prospects turn into customers (i.e. someone purchases the product you’ve promoted) you receive a commission – usually as a percentage of the selling price or a fixed sum. For website owners affiliate programs are one of the fastest ways they can generate revenue.

For example, let’s take a popular affiliate program called Affiliate Cash Vault. This very popular online product uses hundreds of individuals to promote it through online advertising. When these “advertisers” drive traffic to the product’s website or registration page, the referring URL is recorded. When those browsers turn into customers, the individual that drove the traffic to the website (that converted) receives a commission.

Legitimate affiliate programs benefit everyone. The customer receives a good product at a fair price. The product developer/website owner sells his product or service, and the individual who drove the lead receives a sales commission. This is why affiliate programs have grown in popularity over the last few years. New tools have made the implementation of affiliate programs even easier.

A number of websites bring those with products to sell and others who want to promote products together to facilitate the development of online affiliate programs. ClickBank and Commission Junction are the largest and have been around for a number of years.

If you’re looking for products to promote, or are publishers looking to sell a product or service on the web, I suggest looking into these programs. If you’re new to affiliate programs, I suggest using ClickBank. I’ve used both websites and ClickBank does a much better job of explaining each step and getting you up and running easily. Select products to promote that are most closely aligned with your web site content!

Once you’ve registered with an online affiliate network and selected the products you wish to promote, you need to focus on traffic generation strategies. You want the traffic that sees your product listing and promotion to be targeted. There are a variety of techniques you can use to find the right traffic interested in purchasing your affiliate’s products. Here are just a few:

1. Google Adsense. I know what you’re thinking. it’s just too expensive. Well, that doesn’t have to be the case. With pay-per-click advertising, you can set you spending limits and get the most targeted traffic available. Learn about Google Adsense if you wish to become a successful affiliate marketer. There are also a variety of tools you can find on the Internet to help you find the best keywords for promoting a given product or service at a reasonable price.

2. Article Marketing. If the product you’re promoting is about a given subject or area of expertise, than write an article about it. Be sure that you offer some information of value versus simply promoting a single product. You want others to read your article and see your advice as credible. This can create an additional platform for marketing your affiliate products.

3. Link Exchanges. Are there websites that attract the type of users who would potentially buy the product you’re promoting? Email these sites and let them know that you’re interested in exchanging links with them. Often times these sites would like to increase their traffic as well. When a site receives more links, it ranks higher in search results.

Once you begin learning more about affiliate programs, you’ll discover new and innovative ways to generate traffic to your website or affiliate’s product site. Don’t be afraid to try new things and experiment with different types of products and services. You may find a niche that you’re particularly good at promoting.

About the Author
Michael Fleischner is an Internet marketing expert and the president of MarketingScoop.com, the Internet’s biggest source of marketing information and free marketing resources. He has more than 12 years of marketing experience and has appeared on The TODAY Show, Bloomberg Radio, and other major media. Looking to become an affiliate and generate some serious cash? Open the Affiliate Cash Vault by Clicking Here. Affiliate programs are your ticket to making money on the web.

Source: http://www.marketingscoop.com/