Showing posts with label Affiliate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Affiliate. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Affiliate Programs Worthless for 80% of Affiliate Market

Affiliate Revenue Information

Affiliate Programs Worthless for 80% of Affiliate Market
by: Mike Banks Valentine
No doubt you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule – which states that
20 percent of affiliates generate 80% of affiliate income, and
conversely, remaining 80 percent of affiliates generate only
20 percent of all income for most affiliate programs.

There are ten basics that will put your affiliate marketing
in the top 20 percent of affiliate earnings. Ten suggestions
that will transform your affiliate income from a trickling
creek that barely covers your hosting fees, to a roaring river
of extra disposable income.

TOP AFFILIATE MARKETERS DO MOST OF THESE TEN ITEMS

1.Top affiliate marketers cloak web site links

Cloaking affiliate links should not be necessary, but is. Oddly
many site visitors refuse to visit your links if they see an
affiliate code appended to the URL when they hover their mouse
over a link on your web page. Sometimes they will type the
affiliate domain directly to the browser address bar while
removing your affiliate ID from the URL. To short circuit this
odd behavior, simply cloak the URL. How? Visit this Link Tool:
http://WebpositionAdvisor.com/tools/link_cloaker.php

2.Top affiliate marketers write & distribute articles

Writing articles about your market niche is essential to gain
reputation as an expert in your field. But the biggest benefit
comes not just from writing those articles, but from having
those articles published by other web site owners and ezine
publishers. Your article gains you both reputation and links
from other web sites from the resource box appended to the
end of each article. Here are major article distribution sites.
http://yahoogroups.com/group/free-content/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com

3.Top affiliate marketers focus on a market niche

Filling a web site with content reflecting a narrowly focused
product or service niche is a well known method of gaining web
traffic in your area of specialty. An excellent resource that
can help you determine relevant and focused areas to fill your
site with is called NicheBot. They offer innovative tools to
research and pinpoint market niches for your web site based on
the WordTracker Database and Google.
http://www.nichebot.com

4.Top affiliate marketers use autoresponder series

Autoresponders are incredibly valuable tools that allow you to
send a timed series of email messages to those that sign up for
them. Most often those autoresponders are sent through a third
party provider. Some of the top providers are Sendfree.com and
aweber.com, for a tutorial covering autoresponder basics, visit:
http://website101.com/email_e-mail/email_autoresponder_basics.html

5.Top affiliate marketers create web pages to pre-sell

Creating either testimonial pages or review pages that discuss
and pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with is
the best method of getting increased orders for your chosen
affiliate programs. Many programs actually provide either an
article or recommended text to sell their products for you and
allow reproduction of those articles with your links embedded.

6.Top affiliate marketers gather email addresses

The best affiliates collect email addresses on their web site
by offering free reports via the above mentioned autoresponders
or by giving away ebooks or through newsletter signup forms.
The best use all of these methods or more to build their list
of email addresses. This also allows you to contact potential
customers that would otherwise never see your site again after
clicking away to the affiliate program web site.

7.Top affiliate marketers advertise SOMEWHERE

Depending on your market niche you should advertise using PPC
and/or ezine advertising. Some categories of Pay-per-click can
be prohibitively expensive, but advertising somewhere is all
but mandatory to gain substantial additional traffic to your
site. There are some great bargains in ezine advertising and
some less popular PPC engines other than Yahoo’s Overture and
Google’s Adwords. Try 7search, Kanoodle and FindWhat for lower
Bids than the big boys of PPC.

8.Top affiliate marketers optimize for search engines

Search engine optimization is becoming more complex as more
and more webmasters participate, but the basics applied to
your site can increase visibility dramatically over time. The
most critical of the many SEO techniques is to use title tags
that reflect individual PAGE content. Many webmasters write a
master title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worst
thing you could do for search engine ranking. Learn more SEO:
http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/

9.Top affiliate marketers give away ebooks or freebies

Everyone knows by now that giving something away is a great
traffic generator and allows you to gather email addresses
to allow contact of potential customers at a later date. This
strategy is employed by EVERY successful web-based company at
one time or another. Think of all the free things YOU have
collected online over time. Screensavers, software, ebooks,
discount codes, toolbars, white papers. They work!

10. Top Affiliate marketers have their own mailing lists

The best of affiliate marketers have their own newsletter or
ezine and gather email addresses on their site to build their
list of subscribers. Having this list allows regular contact
with potential customers interested in your site, your product
and your market niche. If you don’t write your own material or
think you can’t produce weekly content, there are hundreds of
authors out there that will gladly product articles for you.
The article distribution lists provide free content and ghost
Writers provide high quality content for a fee.

If you implement ALL the above techniques, you are guaranteed
to become one of the top affiliate marketers on the web. Then
you can create your own product telling everyone how YOU did
it, create your own affiliate program and have hundreds of us
selling for you.

About the Author

------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Banks Valentine operates WebSite101 where you can learn
more through an extensive Affiliate Marketing Tutorial
http://WebSite101.com/Affiliate-Marketing/
Want more details on how to become a top affiliate marketer?
http://WebSite101.com/pam.html their sales letter is cheesy
their product is so good I wrote them a testimonial! Buy it!
------------------------------------------------------------

 



©2014 - All Rights Reserved

Affiliate Programs to Avoid

Affiliate Revenue Information
Affiliate Programs to Avoid
by: Rosalind Gardner
Affiliate Programs to Avoid

Copyright 2003 (c) Rosalind Gardner, All Rights Reserved.

As an affiliate marketer of Internet dating services, I'm always on
the lookout for good quality dating sites and products to offer my
single visitors. Merchants help me out when they let me know
about their new products and affiliate programs.

I was therefore thrilled when one of my friendly affiliate competitors
got in touch to tell me that he'd started his own Internet dating
service and affiliate program.

Having launched a community membership site myself last year,
I could fully appreciate the huge amount of time and money my
friend had invested to develop this new site. He was justifiably
proud of his accomplishment and I was excited by the prospect
of having a product to promote that would benefit everyone -
my customers, my friend and myself.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.

The first stumbling block was the low commission he offered. His
top rate was 30%, with no commissions on recurring sales.

This puzzled me. As an affiliate marketer of dating programs, he
should have been aware that new sites offer at least 50% on
new and recurring sales to entice good affiliates to sign up. If
commissions on recurring sales are not offered, then the rates on
new sales should be increased to between 70 and 100 percent.

In most cases, his affiliate program would have struck out for me
at that point. However, as this was my friend's site, it occurred to
me that perhaps his product was so unique that the potential for
high volume sales might offset the lower commission. Hoping for
the best, I continued my review.

When I got to the site, the first thing I noticed was '6 registered
members' prominently displayed at the top of the homepage.
That normally wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that my
customers are looking for friends and soul mates. If I send them
to a site where there are only six people to meet, they'll likely be
disappointed. Worse, by wasting their time, they lose trust in my
judgement and then I will lose them as customers.

That's not good. My customers are literally my bread and butter.
Giving them what they want and expect is how I stay in business.
Paying for traffic that I send to a merchant site where there is
nothing to buy, will put me out of business.

(This is how a membership site should be structured. When
starting a dating service, the merchant pays for advertising to
bring people to their site. To entice visitors to sign up as members,
he will initially offer his services for fr*ee. When the database is
large enough to attract paying customers, the affiliate program
manager then invites potential affiliates to join their program.)

Although my friend's program had already struck out for my customers
and me, I was still curious, so I kept on looking.

Next I clicked on a link labeled 'Dating Resources'. Expecting to find
Internet dating tips and advice, I found links and banners pointing
to Lavalife, FriendFinder and other affiliated dating sites instead.
When I asked him about placing affiliate programs on his site, my
friend said he simply wanted to supplement his income until the
dating service got *rolling*. I can understand his motivation. However,
what he doesn't understand is the concept of customer 'hijacking'.

As an affiliate, you pay good money to get visitors to your site. You
presell your merchants' products and expect the merchant to honor
their end of the bargain by making the sale and sending your
commission check. You don't pay for the merchant to send YOUR
customers to THEIR affiliated merchants.

I didn't need to look any further. I told my friend that I would hold
off on signing up and why. Fortunately, he understood and has already
alleviated some of the problems I mentioned.

Knowing when NOT to sign up for an affiliate program can sometimes
be a tough call. However, you can simplify the process considerably.
Put yourself inside your customer's head. If the product won't work
for them, the program strikes out. Simple as that.

 



©2014 - All Rights Reserved

Sunday, January 12, 2014

$27,817 Monthly With Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Revenue Information
$27,817 Monthly With Affiliate Programs
by: John McLaren

I still remember thinking that promoting Affiliate Programs was a waste of time. Until I started making a small fortune.

At the end of 2004, I started some time exploring the concept of promoting affiliate programs through pay-per-click search engines. I knew of some Internet Marketing gurus who were claiming you could make thousands of dollars every month. But I was skeptical. I remember thinking, “I know what these guys are about. They just want to sell more books.”

But I decided that at least it was worth a look. The concept is quite simple. Choose a product – and one that has an affiliate program, of course. Set up an advertising campaign at a PPC search engine like Google and choose how much you want to pay per click. Write a three line advertisement and add your affiliate link. Whenever anyone clicks through your ad and buys the product, you earn a commission.

So I looked. And thought about it. And looked some more. I was still very uncertain about the whole concept, but I finally decided to test for myself whether it could really work. And since I knew I’d be spending quite a bit of money on advertising clicks, I felt it was well worth investing in a book so I could learn from more experienced marketers how to maximize the profitability of my campaigns.

As my business grew over several weeks I purchased and read several ebooks. By far the best I read was Chris Carpenter’s Google Cash ( http://tinyurl.com/6gdaq ). His approach is genuine, down-to-earth, and he explains very clearly how to build your own affiliate marketing business. And importantly, he makes a fortune doing what he explains in the book.

I started by testing 20-30 campaigns on various products. Most of them were unsuccessful, but I expected that from what I had been reading. I would test a product, and if it didn’t work, I would drop it quickly. The key with this business is identifying the affiliate products and campaigns that are successful. Once you find one that works, the money starts rolling in.

By February of 2010 I had identified several campaigns that were turning a profit. With one of these I was spending $0.08 per click to promote an affiliate product that pays me $18 commission on each sale. Approximately 1 visitor in 100 buys the product, so I make around $10 profit for every 100 visitors that I send.

What a formula! For every 1,000 visitors, that’s $180 in commissions. That might not seem like all that much, but remember once you have a successful campaign it keeps going all day, every day. If you send just 1,000 visitors to a program like this every day, then by the end of the month you will have earned $5,400 in commissions, of which $3,000 is profit.

Does it seem too simple? Well, if it was so easy everyone from your Aunt Mabel to the mailman would be doing it. In fact, while the concept is simple, getting your campaigns to run profitably does take some work. Since I can't possibly teach you all you need to know in one article, I'll give you a few tips here and recommend Google Cash for a detailed explanation:

  1. Choose Your Product Wisely. The program should pay a commission of $15 or more, otherwise it won’t be worth paying for your clicks. And if the commission is very high, be careful. Some products like web hosting and satellite dish installations may pay commissions of $100, but you face intense competition from other affiliates, so the price you need to pay to get ad exposure and clicks will probably also be very high. Sometimes it is better to identify a niche product with less competition from other affiliates.

  2. Track Your Campaigns Carefully. If you’re paying around 7 or 8 cents per click for a program that pays close to $20 commission, you need to make at least one sale for every 250 visitors. If you send 300 to 400 visitors with no sale, consider dropping it.

  3. Days Of The Week Do Matter. When testing campaigns keep in mind the day of the week and even the time of day. Some products sell better on Mondays through Fridays, during business hours. Others, like entertainment products, sell better in the evenings and on weekends.

Getting back to my own experience, after identifying several campaigns that ‘worked’, I spent some time fine-tuning them using techniques I read about in Google Cash. By the end of February I had earned $27,817 in commissions for the month, all on products I had never even heard of at the end of 2004. My profit was a neat $10,795.

It’s incredible really. I made this money without a web site. From home. Working an average of just an hour or two a day.

I’m finally making the amount of money online that I dreamed about.

How about you? Would you also like to build an affiliate marketing business? Could you use some additional income? I encourage you to proceed, but be smart about it. There are risks involved and you should be aware of them. You should read Chris Carpenter’s book. That way you’ll be on a fast track to more profitable campaigns. And his book will save you hundreds of dollars, easily, as you avoid some common mistakes and pitfalls.

Good Marketing!

About The Author

John McLaren has worked for many years selling IT consulting services. Now he works from home, just a few hours each day, building his highly successful affiliate marketing business. For more professional advice, he recommends the book, Google Cash, available at: http://tinyurl.com/6gdaq.

 



©2014 - All Rights Reserved