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Archive for the ‘Affiliate Marketing’ Category

When we set out to search for online business, we receive so many messages telling us that not having a website is not a problem as the opportunity itself will give you a duplicate page of your own that you can promote.

This is great news if you want to market only one business on the internet. But look at all the people who are marketing successfully on the net. There isn’t a single person who is actually marketing one single product or service. You would find them Partnering in this or that venture, selling three or four e-books, being affiliates of numerous opportunities…etc.

Now let us say that you have opted to work with one single online business affiliate program that offers you a web page that you can promote. How will you promote it?

Let us look at the things you will NOT be able to do:

1- Exchange Links: Since you do not own the site, therefore, you cannot make any changes on it; accordingly you will not be able to add links to your site. If you cannot put links on your site then you cannot exchange links.

2- Forums: One of the Forums that I am involved in, and believe me it is one of the best forums around, recently announced that you can add to your signature either a product or a website that you yourself own and nothing duplicate or you do not own.

3- Adding your link to directories: I guess I will be safe to say that at least 90% of directories do not accept links with an extension. Meaning, your duplicate site would be something like that http://www.website.com/affliate . The directories would only accept http://www.website.com. Although I must say that some companies are overcoming this issue by adding your affiliate username at the beginning rather than as an extension. It would look like this http://username.website.com . In this case your chances to be accepted are better, still not very good though. As directory owners usually do not accept duplicate sites when they review it for approval.

What you will be able to do is the following:

1- Writing Articles: In your author resource box you will be able to put a link to an affiliate page.

2- Traffic Exchange sites: These also accept affiliates

3- Paid advertising whether online or offline.

You will realize from the above that out of the five free options listed above you will only be able to do two of them. While if you have your own website you will be able to build a full marketing effort without having to pay for any kind of advertising.

Remember this is with the limitation of having only one stream of income coming in. If you decided to get involved in more than one business then you will have to duplicate your work for each affiliate program when you are dealing with paid advertising.

The advantages of having your own website are numerous, but we will list a few here:

1- The flexibility of having all your online business opportunities in one place.

2- The flexibility of changing your content for search engine optimization and enhancing visitors’ experience.

3- The flexibility of automating your link exchange activity.

4- The Flexibility of automating your content management so as to have always new content on your website.

5- Of course we should not forget that all the things that we listed above that you cannot do with an online business affiliate duplicate page, now you can do them with your own home based business website.

6- Adding a newsletter subscription which will build you a list that no home business/online marketer can do without.

Does this mean that each person who wants to venture into online business must go into the trouble of building a website, designing it, and setting it up? Not really, there are opportunities out there which have the option of building your own website as part of the package. Yet you must make sure that you own the domain name.

Affiliate marketing is one of the hottest home business opportunities around.  With some basic training, you can easily set up an affiliate business and get started in a couple of weeks.

Affiliate programs are the best way for you to sell someone else’s products or service and get paid for it.  Selling through an affiliate program is a great way to sell on the Internet without getting knee-deep in product.

You market the product or service online (that includes websites, emails, forums, blogs as well as paid advertising). The company then is responsible for the product; they process the payments, ship the merchandise, and handle any complaints.  You provide the marketing and get the commission. Brilliant!

Say you own a website giving people information about Jazz Music. You could place links to products related to Jazz Music, CD’s, download sites, etc. on your website. When your visitors click on your links they will go to the website you are promoting. If they buy, you will be paid a commission. Not bad for providing information huh?

You can find affiliate programs just about everywhere these days.  A good way to find programs you’d like to join is by doing a search on your chosen topic.  See what your competition is doing for a place to start. The affiliate networks such as ClickBank and Commission Junction are great places to look as well.

Look everywhere you shop online. Check the web sites for the words affiliate or partners. You’ll soon see there are almost no merchants online today who don’t have some sort of affiliate program.  If you’re going to have a website or blog, you should definitely have affiliate links.

When you register for your chosen affiliate program you will receive your own personal ID number. When you place your link to the website you’re promoting on your website, you will use a link address which includes your unique ID. Anyone who makes a purchase via your personal link racks up commissions for you. These commissions are paid based on the pay schedule of that particular program.

There are a number of products which show you the ins and outs of starting your affiliate business. Check the resource box of this article to get the two best and most economical products on the market today. Each of these products is guaranteed by the product owner and each has its strong points. The most important one being, you get the information you need without spending a fortune.

Easy as pie?  Right? The truth is, you will probably need one of the resource products to get things set up; but I wouldn’t spend a lot of money on them. Check out the recommended products to get you started. Above all, get started. You won’t earn until you learn. Good luck.

Affiliate marketing suits stay-at-home moms because it provides intellectual stimulation and the catalyst for building social networks online. At the same time affiliate marketing can be a lucrative source of income to offset the loss of income and additional expenses of child rearing.

Affiliate Marketing provides four key sources of intellectual stimulation that can contribute to the psychological, social and physical well-being of stay-at-home moms:

1. The challenge of mastering the affiliate marketing process

Affiliate marketing is a life-long learning pursuit. It takes of lot of skill and experimentation to find an appropriate niche and an effective marketing strategy. However, there are very few barriers to entry and there are many free sources available for creating and marketing an online affiliate business. One of the secrets is to focus to accelerate your learning and then utilise your affiliate income in the early stages to fund further learning and marketing.

2. The opportunity to share your expertise

The wisest course in affiliate marketing is to start with products and services related to your field of expertise and interest. Stay-at-home moms can gain a real sense of satisfaction and enjoyment from sharing their expertise and passions through affiliate marketing activities. Social marketing sites such as Squidoo are designed explicitly to enable anyone to share their knowledge and interest on any topic. These no-cost platforms provide a very wide range of tools for this purpose. By sharing your expertise you also attract people who have similar interests.

3. The connections and stimulation from online social networks

Affiliate marketing today thrives on Web 2.0 technology and related social networking activity. Stay-at-home moms can build their Internet profile and social networks through any of the many social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Squidoo. Blogging too can provide a means of building and connecting a personal following. The emergence of podcasting and video marketing adds further potential for personalizing your marketing. Again, focus is important in the first instance, but the opportunities to grow a social and business network are numerous.

4. The catalyst for creative activity

Affiliate marketing is a great catalyst for creative endeavor. One of the more satisfying activities is to create your own products (no matter how small). This develops a sense of achievement, a steady cash flow and the potential to fund further product development and marketing. Many of the social networking sites, such as Squidoo, facilitate creativity by enabling multi-media presentations with a point-and-click technology. It has never been easier to create something that is new, fascinating and attractive to others. You can now even turn your photos into animated musical videos with a simple web-based technology.

One of the best foils for the isolation and depression experienced by many stay-at-home mums is focused activity. Affiliate marketing provides a catalyst for undertaking such activity as it brings rewards in terms of intellectual stimulation, personal satisfaction, social connection and increased income. It’s important, at the outset, however, to choose a sound affiliate marketing plan to avoid frustration and unnecessary loss of income.

Discover a marketing plan that works for stay-at-home mums: Marketing Plan Example

Ron Passfield is a Top 100 Squidoo Lensmaster and Giant Squid: Squidoo marketing

Don’t look now, but Christmas is only a few weeks away once again. It’s a time for families to get together, kids to open their presents, office workers to do lots of embarassing things at the office party…

Ok, we all know Christmas is a time of festivities and fun!

But for those of us trying to make a buck (or several) online, what does it mean for your home business? Well, it’s a pretty good time to roll out the seasonal affiliate sites, dust them off and put them to work for you. Don’t have anything suitable? Well, believe it or not there is still time to make new ones if you’re quick. But you have to act fast.

First of all you have to be able to put up a half decent site quickly, get enough original content on there with a liberal sprinkling of your keyword to satisfy the search engines that its legit, then be able to link to it fast and furiously. Then rinse and repeat with more sites.

Why more than one site?

You need to build in some redundancy as well as create an interlinking system. By building in redundancy, I mean you’ll need a few sites that all target exactly the same keyword because you’re probably going to have a fight on your hands with a certain search engine that is currently indexing and de-indexing new sites seemingly at random. Some will feature in the SERPs and some won’t. And you need search engine traffic for this to work.

Here’s how.

Say you want to target a fairly competitive seasonal keyword, such as Christmas tree decorations, Christmas gifts, artificial Christmas trees or something similar. You’ll need three or four blogs with that exact keyword in the url, the site title and the page headers as far as on-site SEO goes. Don’t waste time looking for domains, you probably won’t find any .com’s suitable. Use some of the many free blogging hosts available, but just make sure they allow you to put up affiliate ads before you start building.

Build your blogs with a simple template and write an intro post, then social bookmark them to as many places as you can. Meanwhile, find a good affiliate company that has Christmas tree decorations (or whatever your keywords are) vendors that you can sign up with. ShareASale is one pretty good one, but there are others too like CJ etc and don’t forget eBay. There is a killing to be made so spread your net as wide as possible.

Now you’ll also need some supporting sites that you control that cover topics broadly similar to your keywords, such as special occasions, gifts, or anything similar.

What, you don’t have any?

Sheesh! You want an online business but haven’t been building backup sites? What about Squidoo, Hub Pages, Blinkweb, Blogger, WordPress… the list is long and available so there is no excuse for not having the resources. They are there in abundance and if you’re not using them then don’t quit your day job just yet!

Ok, for those of you with plenty of sites, edit them all and add a link to each of your main Christmas keyword targeting sites with the keywords in your anchor text. I take it you know how to do that…

These links may or may not get counted in time, but do it anyway. The theory here is that if you throw enough mud, some of it will stick. Write some articles (also with your keyword anchored link) and submit them to a few top ezines (ezine articles etc). Get into some of the forums you are a member of and put a link in your sig to your sites and post something worthwhile. You are a member of some forums, aren’t you? Good!

The whole idea is to get your sites indexed fast and into the SERPs in the short term.

The next phase is to start writing as fast as you can. You want to hammer as many articles into your main blogs as you can. Don’t worry about them being perfect, just readable (the writer in me hates to say that, but needs must). Post as often as you can (daily or even twice a day) because the more you do it, the more often the Google bot will come visit your sites and give them the short term authority in the index that you need. Also, link the blogs to each other from within those posts. Normally this is not a good idea, but in this case in the short term you only care about creating authority fast.

In the meantime, you should have been accepted into some of the affiliate programs, so start creating pages in your blogs and fill them up with the products you want to sell.

Keep going like a mad person and some of the mud will stick. One or more of your blogs will appear in the SERPs for long enough to attract sufficient traffic to make some sales over the next few weeks. After that, Google will most likely sandbox your sites anyway, but who cares? You will have wrung out of them as much as you could while the going was good, which is all you wanted to do!

Of course, the sites will emerge from the sandbox in 6 months or so ready for an assault on next year’s festive season with the added bonus that they will have acquired more authority and will therefore do better next year!

That’s one way to make use of Christmas with your home business!

Terry Didcott
Internet Marketer, Writer and promulgator of how to make money online

With the crappy economy, things were looking pretty lousy for the month of October, which still has a week to go as of this article. Sales were down and I was down. It had been a long time since I had run into a spell like this. But I wasn’t going to let it defeat me. I was determined to figure out how I could salvage this month.

So I sat down and thought. What does my target market want? I mean, what do they REALLY want? Well, they want to make money. That’s the bottom line. But they don’t want to kill themselves to do it. They want to come as close to pushing a button as they can and have the money appear.

Okay, as unrealistic as that is, I thought about it a lot. Was there anything that I did that was even close to pushing that button…something that anybody could do? Well, I went through my arsenal of stuff and found something that I did that was pretty fast and easy income. I was fairly certain that anybody could do this.

The next step was to go through the process and see if I could explain it in simple to understand English. More importantly, could I explain it so that it was in step by step format that anybody could follow? I realized that I could do this so I actually walked through the entire process, writing everything down as I went.

After I had the whole process written, I then made videos of it. This was to add value to the package.

I then created my sales page and priced this at a price that would make it impossible to turn down. See, offering a great product is one thing, but when you do that in combination with an amazing offer, that’s when you have a winner on your hands.

I then put together my payment processing and uploaded everything to my server. I then ran my offer.

Inside of 6 hours I had made over 2K. Not bad for a $15 product.

The point is, I understood my market. I knew what it was that they wanted and I gave it to them. The response to this offer has been amazing and still is.

If you want to know what it is that has everybody talking, check my signature below.

Understand what your market wants. Once you do that, you’ll start making sales on a regular basis.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Make Money TODAY…You Heard Me…TODAY!