Month: April 2019

When you want to generate multiple streams of Internet income, you want to consider making money with Affiliate Marketing.

Earning money as an Affiliate Marketer is different than the revenue streams most think of when they think of Internet Marketing; most think of Internet Marketing as a way to perform Multi Level Marketing, Network Marketing, or the selling of info products.

When you make money from the ads on your web site, you are driving leads to your site, to pick up free knowledge. By placing smartly targeted ads, provided by Google (using Adsense) or Chitika, for example, in all the right places, you will earn money as users click through to other sites offering the product; you earn money online by simply providing the lead.

The tools and techniques you use to present your knowledge, and influence leads to take the action you want them to take, include a Landing Page, an Optin form, an email auto-responder, a shopping cart, and promotion methods (such as banner ads, Pay Per Click ads, and or exposure with massive amounts of content).

When you promote an item from an Affiliate, the quality of information is important; however you do not get a chance to change it. All you can do is decide which item you want to promote.

The amount you will earn as an Affiliate will not depend on the quality of your knowledge but on the quality of the knowledge of the seller and their item that is for sale.

What you as an Affiliate Marketer bring to the transaction, is trust.

Your website will give you an audience. As your leads are browsing your website, you let them know about a product. Most of the time they may never have heard of it and they did not know they even needed the product. If they buy the item, it is because you introduced them to the item and suggested they should buy it. They simply click the link you suggest, press the shopping cart button, make a purchase, and you as the Affiliate Marketer have money in your pocket.

Again, what you as an Affiliate Marketer bring to the party, is trust.

Using this overview of the Affiliate Marketing process as a foundation, I will provide in future blog posts, a description of exactly what it means to be an Affiliate Marketer, how to find merchants and products you can promote, how to sign up for programs offered by Affiliate Networks, and several success strategies that can be implemented.

As I conclude this post, I trust you are getting excited about the opportunities in Affiliate Marketing. And so far, what I have introduced has just been the tip of the iceberg. Let me explain.

Last year (circa 2009), a recent study reported that there are over 225M websites; 30 years ago, a similar study highlighted there were 30,000 websites. With this explosive growth has come the money. In 2008, advertising distributed by the four top online ad agencies – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL – was worth approx $33B. Britain reports that more advertising money is now spent on the Web than on television.

Overall, the $33B is just the money spent on influencing people to buy something. The estimated value of the items purchased, as a result of being influenced by online research, is $200B.

This highlights that making money online is a fantastic opportunity and a gigantic gold mine that everyone has access to undertake. You don’t need a giant company nor do you need advanced college degrees; all you need to know is how the system works and have the patience and drive to succeed.

This blog, and related posts, will continue to provide a blueprint for making money online with Affiliate Marketing. You will find step-by-step road maps for various parts of the Affiliate Marketing business. You will find tools, education, training, and support. And you will find a community of like minded entrepreneurs that are using the Internet to get out of debt, build wealth, and secure their financial future forever.

Finally, a good book to read would be -KaChing- by Joel Comm. This book describes How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays and was the source of some of the material provided in this article.

I Hope You Enjoyed the Article and I Trust You Found It Insightful! Let me Know What You Think.

Happy Reading and Here’s to Your Success! Mike Farrell, founder, owner, and operator of the aspenIbiz group of online businesses.

Affiliate marketing is the most popular way of making money online. You can earn affiliate commissions, regardless of your experience in internet marketing. Choose a specific niche for which you want to promote affiliate programs. It is not advisable to sign up for a wide range of programs. Make your affiliate marketing targeted, and promote products that appeal to that market. Research and select the best affiliate programs for your niche. You must choose the most rewarding, reliable and affiliate programs. The merchant must also supply you with some marketing tools you can use to promote the products. The affiliate program or products should be of high quality and well-priced. This will make is easy for you to sell the products or programs. Build a web site focused on your niche, and have high quality and unique content that is rich with your key words. Have a budget for promoting your website.

Drive traffic to your website. Your website will need traffic for you to earn affiliate commissions. Write articles, submit online press releases related to your niche and submit your website to search engines. You can also exchange links with high ranking websites related to your niche.

Review your affiliate programs on a blog, and include your affiliate links.Get started in affiliate marketing now. Click Here Build an email list and offer free e-courses, articles or e-books. When you have a list, you can keep in contact with your prospects and recommend your affiliate products to them

Be available to answer any questions from your prospects and customers. Customer relationship management is very important in online business. Make sure that you provide your real name and an email address on your website so that potential customers can contact you with questions, and know that they are dealing with a real person. This is most important for your credibility. Build your own network of sub-affiliates. Keep in touch with your sub-affiliates and motivate them to succeed because their success is your success also. Work hard consistently in promoting your website and have patience. Start Now Click Here

Blog owners can also help to maximize the profit from their affiliate marketing opportunities by doing self promotion to drive additional website to the blog. This will likely be beneficial because higher website traffic will generally translate to greater profit from affiliate marketing. Additionally, the blog owner may want to occasionally mention companies for which they are an affiliate to generate interest in the advertisements on the website.

Understanding Affiliate Marketing Requirements

Finally, blog owners should pay careful attention to the affiliate marketing agreements they enter. This is important because some companies may place restrictions on the usage of a link to their website. This may include restrictions such as avoiding objectionable content, not including links or advertisements for direct competitors or restrictions on the appearance of the affiliate links. Failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in the blog losing affiliate privileges and the blog owner being denied compensation.

From a website owner’s point of view, affiliate marketing programs can add to your income as well as improve your credibility among your visitors. Signing up for affiliate programs should involve as much thought as the types of information you offer on your site, whether you sell products or services or simply have a blog site.

For example, if you have a person blog concerning dogs or cats and you place affiliate links for a pet products company on your blog, you are more likely to earn sales commissions than of your blog site promotes vitamin sales. The products offered by affiliate companies should be related to the primary focus of your site.

With the number of affiliate marketing programs available, there is no doubt you can find an appropriate site with which to be affiliated. You will want to know ahead of time the commission structure and when payments can be expected to avoid disappointment in the future. Most companies will also keep you informed of any program changes, which would include changes to commission structure or other payment options that may affect your continued affiliation with them.

When you are working with companies as an affiliate, simply placing their link on your page does not end your involvement. Many offer seasonal merchandise or services and keeping your links up to date can make your website more credible to your visitors. If someone visits your site in March or April and you are still promoting free Christmas delivery, many will believe your site is outdated and may ignore your other links.

Many times companies will have sales offering coupons you can place on your site as links, but you need to constantly monitor the coupons for going out of date or for offering products or services that maybe you do not want to promote on your site. For example, if the focus of your site is for children’s education, you may not want to promote an adult oriented site or a gambling site. This can happen when some of the smaller sites lose their domain name and another company picks it up and promotes products other than what you were used to seeing.

It has happened where a company will go out of business and their name is bought by a gambling or a dating site and all links to that name now are pointed at the new site. If you are not keeping track of your affiliated sites you could unknowingly be promoting a site that goes against your primary business focus.

If you are going through an affiliate marketing corporation that manages the programs for many companies and one goes out of business, the links on your page will typically disappear. However, if you are affiliated with a company and their own program that goes out of business, the link may remain but will give your visitors an error message. Another indication that your site may be out of date.

Years before the NASDAQ tanked and banner advertising died, e-commerce pioneers like Amazon.com and CDNow began partnering with topic-centric websites to drive revenues, paying a commission for each sale referred. The practice spread quickly and became known as “affiliate marketing.” By early 1999, Forrester Research proclaimed “affiliate programs” as the Web”s most effective traffic-driving technique “” almost twice as effective as banner advertising.

Consider that by September 1999, more than three years after Amazon launched, there were over 1,000 merchants offering affiliate programs. And by 2000, Amazon”s Associates Program had grown to over 500,000 affiliates. What Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos started as a polite conversation had grown into an entirely new industry, bringing with it affiliate networks, directories, newsletters and a variety of consultants. Other innovations followed and affiliate marketing is now an integral part of the Web”s composition. It”s also now widely heralded as the Web”s most cost-effective marketing vehicle.

Still, as affiliate marketing evolved, issues with the model have been exposed. The affiliate community needs to remember that affiliate marketing is not about generating cheap advertising, but developing profitable strategic relationships.

But now there is a way for merchants to now offer a win-win where both merchants and affiliates have a vested interest. Improving technologies now make it possible for the formerly CPS, CPA, CPL performance programs and the CPM, CPC, and flat advertising models to unify creating a new hybrid that I call the CPP (Cost-Plus-Performance) model.

The CPP combines a paid campaign with a performance campaign and offers the best of both worlds. I see this as the future of affiliate marketing, a wide-open world of performance and payment where the CPP takes inventory lost to Google”s AdSense and advertisers back. The result is a whole New World of opportunities for merchants, affiliate managers and affiliates.

The hybrid CPP is converting former CPM, CPC advocates into affiliate marketing believers. For many top websites, affiliate marketing now represents a chance to loosen the grip of pay-per-click search engines and costly advertising. The most difficult obstacle in affiliate marketing is finding good affiliates with traffic. If a site sells traffic then they must have it, and if you negotiate a Cost-Plus-Performance payout valuable opportunities begin to open up.

Merchants are also realizing that affiliates need better tools as well. Technologies such as data-feeds, site and shopping cart abandonment (exit traffic) promise to allow merchants, who are also affiliates, to increase EPC and EPM numbers without compromising the visitors experience, thereby improving monetization. By simply offering additional products and/or service offers at or after the point of sale, merchants can add revenue without diluting the sales process.

It”s becoming clear to merchants, affiliate managers and affiliates that the line between performance and traditional advertising has been breached.

It started with Google”s entry into the market. Google”s AdSense captured valuable affiliate program inventory, which caused the flexible affiliate marketers to evolve again. The industry”s response was to tangle with the paid advertising side of the market. Google”s method is to pay out for ad space “” the same ad space that was used by affiliate marketers. That limits available inventory and changes the Web publisher”s expectations.

Some affiliate marketers using AdSense end up to cannibalizing their own market. Why? To get guaranteed income from traffic. If you pay for traffic, you”re guaranteed to get it. The merchants get guaranteed traffic and the affiliates get guaranteed revenue from traffic. However, this presents a problem. Traditional advertising places the risk on the merchants, while performance places the risk on the affiliate. In either case only one has a vested interest in the campaign.

It”s clear from a handful of recent studies and reports that marketers are frustrated with the current process.

In a survey of 135 senior-level marketers a recent study found that while 60 percent of respondents said that defining, measuring and taking action on ROI is important, only 20 percent are satisfied with their ability to do so. In addition, 73 percent reported a lack of confidence in their ability to understand the sales impact of a campaign.

The study, conducted by Marketing Management Analytics (MMA), the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and Forrester Research in April 2005, was presented in July at ANA”s 2005 Marketing Accountability Forum.

Also this summer, a MediaLife”s media buyer survey quantified what most already suspected: media buyers think that about only half of media reps know what the heck they”re doing (via MediaBuyerPlanner.com). A significant minority of the buyers “” about one in six “” have such a low opinion of representatives that they said only 10 or 20 percent are useful.

Complaints centered, unsurprisingly, on time wasting, both in the form of over-contacting and proving ill prepared when conversations do take place. Another big complaint proved to be overly hard selling, with some reps seeming to believe that repetition or browbeating may succeed in getting a property on the buy where the numbers won”t.

Half of the buyers said they agree with the statement that the rep problem was “no big deal. Sure, they”re annoying sometimes, but I”m sure they find me equally so. It”s how the industry is set up.” About 45 percent agreed instead that they are “a necessary evil. Most are okay, but there are a few really obnoxious ones I hate doing business with.”

Even with all the issues, the good news is that the affiliate community is still evolving. Organic search is becoming more competitive. CPM rates are going up. Paid search is becoming cost prohibitive and the need for cost effective online inventory is becoming stronger, causing the affiliate space to grow at ever increasing rates. As merchants, affiliate managers and affiliates become even more interwoven, the friction decreases and new forms of integration and aggregation are made possible.

I see it this way “” the race is on! In the last year the number of merchants offering affiliate programs has more than quadrupled. Literally, millions of websites now participate as affiliates “” from personal homepages at Geocities and Homestead to Fortune 500 companies. And now, more often then not, merchants with affiliate programs are also affiliates.

Whether termed affiliate marketing, collaborative commerce, revenue sharing or syndicated selling, the affiliate space leads the way in the ever changing landscape of online marketing and has become the Web”s fastest, simplest and most cost effective marketing vehicle.

As both merchants and affiliates continue to recognize the power of change, affiliate marketing”s best days are yet to come. In a few short years, affiliate-marketing looks to become the tail that wags the dog “” controlling the majority of the adverting and marketing dollars. Despite the less then impressive advancements in the advertising world and hype, affiliate marketing stays true to its origins as a better way of connecting buyers and sellers and rewarding those that facilitate those relationships.