Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Where to start?
Where To Start The first thing you need to do if you want to be an affiliate marketer is to find a affiliate program that you want to promote. There are many individual merchants that offer affiliate programs. Unless the program is a well established site such as amazon I recommend instead signing up with an affiliate network. The largest two networks are commission junction and clickbank. I like promoting clickbank products myself but that is just a preference. Clickbank only has affiliate merchants that sell products that can be delivered digitally such as ebooks. They have over 10,000 merchants to choose from to promote. The other big network commission junction has a wide variety of merchants. Some very well known and prominent merchants are a part of commission junctions network. There are many other affiliate networks such as linkshare, affiliate fuel, commissionexchange and too many others to mention.
How to find right programme to promote?
In order to be successfull in affilate marketing choosing the right merchants to promote is very important. You can do everything else right from creating effective ads and advertising in the right places and still not make money if you don't promote the right merchant. The first thing I recommend looking at is the amount of commission that is offered. This isn't the only thing you should consider but to make money the commission should be generous. I would say in most cases a good program will payout at least 50 percent commission. Commissions earned for each sale in most cases should be around 25 or 30 dollars. This can change due to other considerations such as conversion rates and popularity of the product or service. If what you are promoting is a hot popular item you can expect the conversion rates to be higher and an easier sale which might justify promoting a merchant with lower commissions per sale. I also look at how many others are promoting a merchant. If there is a large number of affiliates that means you will have a lot of competition promoting that merchants product. If there are few affiliates promoting a merchant that tells me that maybe the merchants site isn't converting sales or some other reason affiliates haven't been happy with that merchant. It can sometimes be complicated finding the right merchant to promote so I hope some of my general ideas might be of help in choosing. If you want to get input from other affiliates about a particular merchant before you promote them I recommend going to affiliate marketing forums such as Ewealth and asking others in the forum for their opinion. Many times affiliates in those forums will be happy to give you their honest opinion if they have dealt with the merchant before. Other than that sometimes just test promoting a merchant with a small amount of advertising can be a good way to find out if they will be profitable for you.in the right places and still not make money if you don't promote the right merchant. The first thing I recommend looking at is the amount of commission that is offered. This isn't the only thing you should consider but to make money the commission should be generous. I would say in most cases a good program will payout at least 50 percent commission. Commissions earned for each sale in most cases should be around 25 or 30 dollars. This can change due to other considerations such as conversion rates and popularity of the product or service. If what you are promoting is a hot popular item you can expect the conversion rates to be higher and an easier sale which might justify promoting a merchant with lower commissions per sale. I also look at how many others are promoting a merchant. If there is a large number of affiliates that means you will have a lot of competition promoting that merchants product. If there are few affiliates promoting a merchant that tells me that maybe the merchants site isn't converting sales or some other reason affiliates haven't been happy with that merchant. It can sometimes be complicated finding the right merchant to promote so I hope some of my general ideas might be of help in choosing. If you want to get input from other affiliates about a particular merchant before you promote them I recommend going to affiliate marketing forums such as Ewealth and asking others in the forum for their opinion. Many times affiliates in those forums will be happy to give you their honest opinion if they have dealt with the merchant before. Other than that sometimes just test promoting a merchant with a small amount of advertising can be a good way to find out if they will be profitable for you.
How Commisions are Tracked?
In order for an affiliate to get credit for their commissions there must be some tracking system in place. Affiliates are given special links to send traffic to that looks different from a regular url. These are sometimes called hoplinks. Hoplinks usually go through an affilate network so activity can be tracked. A normal website address looks like this: www.yoursite.com. An affiliate url looks something like this: www.yoursite.com/?affiliate=abc123. This allows for tracking but has some disadvantages such as in search engine marketing that I will get to later.
Some affiliates worry about theft of their commissions that they work hard to earn. There are two ways affiliates lose their commissions. First of all other affiliates can replace their own ids when making purchases. Secondly some people will see an affilate link and decide to chop off the affiliate id in their browser. To combat this to make sure they get the commission many affiliates are using link cloacking software. This hides the affiliate link and helps protect their commissions from being stolen.
Some affiliates worry about theft of their commissions that they work hard to earn. There are two ways affiliates lose their commissions. First of all other affiliates can replace their own ids when making purchases. Secondly some people will see an affilate link and decide to chop off the affiliate id in their browser. To combat this to make sure they get the commission many affiliates are using link cloacking software. This hides the affiliate link and helps protect their commissions from being stolen.
How Affiliates Earning Commisions?
Affiliate marketers are faced with multiple choices on how to promote their favorite affiliate site. I will go into more detail later on on each marketing technique but here is a list of the most common ways that affiliates use to make commissions.
1. Blogging. My favorite method. There are many individuals who make a very good living from putting affiliate links in their blogs. Well written blogs with either good information or honest and well written reviews of affiliate products have high conversions. Tip: putting an afiliate link in the main text of a blog produces the highest conversion rates.
2. Squidoo lenses. Good way to make money online with affiliate links.
3. Advertising in Google adwords. Affiliates put small google ads in the search results and pay for every click trying to make more money from the commissions than the cost of the adwords. This is very competitive and often times low profit margins. Despite the challenges there are still many affiliate marketers who do well with adwords.
4. Articles. This is becoming very popular. An affiliate writes articles and submits them to article directories. The articles contain a link to an affiliate landing page of some kind in the bio box. Affiliates can do very well with this if they are able to crank out hundreds of well written articles. The traffic quality and conversion rates from well written articles is very good.
5. Forums. Posting in several high traffic forums is a great way to establish yourself as an expert and earn commissions.
6. Ezine advertising. Many affiliates do well with this. Even though conversions generally are not as good as having your own list the cost of advertising in most ezines is very low and your ad can easily be seen by tens of thousands of readers.
7. Building your own list or ezine. This is how most superaffiliates make a large percentage of their commissions.
8. Banner advertising. Not very effective overall in generating commissions. I don't recommend paying for banners on other sites. If you have a high traffic site and have the room for a banner it might be worth doing. Another option is to use free banner exchanges.
9. Contextual advertising. This involves placing small classified type ads on other websites. These are also known as content ads.
10. Newspaper advertising. This involves placing classified ads in newspapers. The response to ads will vary greatly depending on what paper you advertise in.
1. Blogging. My favorite method. There are many individuals who make a very good living from putting affiliate links in their blogs. Well written blogs with either good information or honest and well written reviews of affiliate products have high conversions. Tip: putting an afiliate link in the main text of a blog produces the highest conversion rates.
2. Squidoo lenses. Good way to make money online with affiliate links.
3. Advertising in Google adwords. Affiliates put small google ads in the search results and pay for every click trying to make more money from the commissions than the cost of the adwords. This is very competitive and often times low profit margins. Despite the challenges there are still many affiliate marketers who do well with adwords.
4. Articles. This is becoming very popular. An affiliate writes articles and submits them to article directories. The articles contain a link to an affiliate landing page of some kind in the bio box. Affiliates can do very well with this if they are able to crank out hundreds of well written articles. The traffic quality and conversion rates from well written articles is very good.
5. Forums. Posting in several high traffic forums is a great way to establish yourself as an expert and earn commissions.
6. Ezine advertising. Many affiliates do well with this. Even though conversions generally are not as good as having your own list the cost of advertising in most ezines is very low and your ad can easily be seen by tens of thousands of readers.
7. Building your own list or ezine. This is how most superaffiliates make a large percentage of their commissions.
8. Banner advertising. Not very effective overall in generating commissions. I don't recommend paying for banners on other sites. If you have a high traffic site and have the room for a banner it might be worth doing. Another option is to use free banner exchanges.
9. Contextual advertising. This involves placing small classified type ads on other websites. These are also known as content ads.
10. Newspaper advertising. This involves placing classified ads in newspapers. The response to ads will vary greatly depending on what paper you advertise in.
Article Marketing
Well written articles are one of the most powerfull affiliate marketing methods. The conversion rates from good articles is phenomenal much higher than adwords, banners or many other paid advertising. Writting articles and publishing them online has the additional benefit of establishing yourself as an authority in the topic you are writing about. The way you start getting traffic to your articles is by submitting them to many article directories such as ezinearticles and goarticles.
You can put a link back to your website in the bio box of an article. Since most article directories don't allow affiliate links in the bio box one must make either a blog or some other webpage promoting the affiliate site to link to instead. Your article then gets reprinted on hundreds of other websites creating links and traffic back to the affiliate site you are promoting.
Usually one article won't be enough to create enough traffic to get a large volume of sales. It usually takes over 50 articles to start seeing significant results. Here are some tips to start making money online with articles.
1. Keep your articles between 500 and 750 words.
2. Write your bio box in a way that compells the reader to click through.
3. Make your article about a common problem and offer a solution. Sales pitches don't make good articles and are a turnoff to readers.
4. Try to write as many articles as possible and submit them to as many directories as possible.
5. Keep in mind that article marketing is not a get rich quick deal. It takes time and many articles to start making money. It is a good way to build long term income though.
6. Other affiliate marketing methods should be used in addition to articles. Don't rely on article marketing alone. Top earning superaffiliates use multiple methods to earn commissions and you should too.
7. Many article marketers write multi part articles to keep readers coming back. This is the blogging equivalent of daily posting.
8. Pick a niche for your article that is low competition. This will make it easy for your article to rank high in the search engine results. The best keywords to target have less than a million search results.
9. Article titles are very important. For a couple of reasons. The old saying people judge a book by its cover is true. Secondly your title should have keywords that you want to rank high for.
You can put a link back to your website in the bio box of an article. Since most article directories don't allow affiliate links in the bio box one must make either a blog or some other webpage promoting the affiliate site to link to instead. Your article then gets reprinted on hundreds of other websites creating links and traffic back to the affiliate site you are promoting.
Usually one article won't be enough to create enough traffic to get a large volume of sales. It usually takes over 50 articles to start seeing significant results. Here are some tips to start making money online with articles.
1. Keep your articles between 500 and 750 words.
2. Write your bio box in a way that compells the reader to click through.
3. Make your article about a common problem and offer a solution. Sales pitches don't make good articles and are a turnoff to readers.
4. Try to write as many articles as possible and submit them to as many directories as possible.
5. Keep in mind that article marketing is not a get rich quick deal. It takes time and many articles to start making money. It is a good way to build long term income though.
6. Other affiliate marketing methods should be used in addition to articles. Don't rely on article marketing alone. Top earning superaffiliates use multiple methods to earn commissions and you should too.
7. Many article marketers write multi part articles to keep readers coming back. This is the blogging equivalent of daily posting.
8. Pick a niche for your article that is low competition. This will make it easy for your article to rank high in the search engine results. The best keywords to target have less than a million search results.
9. Article titles are very important. For a couple of reasons. The old saying people judge a book by its cover is true. Secondly your title should have keywords that you want to rank high for.
Marketing With Blogs
There has been an explosion of the number of blogs online in the last few years. A large percentage of those are affiliate blogs. Blogs are a perfect tool for affilate marketing for a couple of reasons. First of all they are search engine friendly and highly optimized. Blogs in general are heavily favored in the first pages of search engine results. This is especially so for Blogger blogs and squidoo lenses. Yes thats right this lens you are reading is very highly optimized for the search engines. Squidoo lenses have dominated the first page resluts for countless keywords. Blogger blogs also do well in google because well they are owned by google. Here are some important tips for using blogs to get commissions from a blog.1. Put links to your affiliate site in the body of your blog. Ideally the links should be in important keywords.2. Write helpfull and usefull information for the reader.3. Some bloggers write product review blogs and do well with them. I recommend if you do this to actually buy the product you are promoting first and either use it or read it to be able to offer an honest review.In order to earn commissions from blogging you need traffic. Here are some tips to get people to your blogs.1. Write multiple blogs and link them togther to drive traffic to each blog and help with SEO.2. Post frequently to keep the search engine spiders coming back.3. Use blogger blogs or squidoo lenses. They tend to do well in search engines.4. Choose your blogs topic carefully and make sure it isn't a highly competitive market. Shoot for a keyword that is searched for at least 2000 times a month and has less than 5 million sites listed in the search engine results.5. Get as many links as possible to your blog by submitting to online directories, forum and blog comment posting(must be something usefull added to the discussion, not blatant advertising which is spam) and writing articles and submitting them to article directories. The more links you have to your blog the more direct traffic and SEO benefits it will get.6. Claim your blog on technorati and use keyword tags for each post.7. Ping your blog after every post. I recommend pingomatic.com for this.
Recommended: Blogging Cash Machine , Squidoo Traffic Power
Recommended: Blogging Cash Machine , Squidoo Traffic Power
Forum Marketing
A great way to drive free targeted traffic to your affiliate site and make commissions is to participate in forums. Forums are a great place to both learn new ideas and information and also market at the same time by helping others. In most forums you can put a link in your signature and many forums allow multiple links so you can promote more than one site. In forums you basically have discussion threads where people ask questions and others answer them. To build up your reputation it is important to answer questions in a thoughtfull and respectfull way. Most forums will show your track record for posting and that is how you build up a reputation and get more visitors and earn commissions.
The best strategy to follow is to first find two or three high traffic forums about the topic of your affiliate site. To find out if a forum has high traffic go to alexa.com for the traffic data. Any forum with an alexa rank of less than 5,000 is worth joining. Next you just start posting as much as possible. Over time your traffic should start building as you accumulate posts and build your reputation. When you participate in forums it is very important not to spam. Only putting an advertisement in forums and not contributing anything of value will just get one banned. Another thing to help build a good reputation is to be respectfull of others in the forum and be postitive.
A couple of forums that I participate in and recommend is the Warrior Forum and Digital Point Forum. Both are very high traffic sites. I especially recommend the warrior forum because some of the biggest names in affiliate marketing hang out there and the forums focus is affiliate marketing. Digital point is also a great place to get traffic from. They have an alexa rank of 180 and just get an enormous amount of traffic.
All you have to do to tap this traffic is post frequently. Another nice thing about digitalpoint is that they share adsense revenue providing another income stream.Forum marketing is not likely to make anyone rich quick but if one posts to them regularly over many months one can build up an income from it.
The best strategy to follow is to first find two or three high traffic forums about the topic of your affiliate site. To find out if a forum has high traffic go to alexa.com for the traffic data. Any forum with an alexa rank of less than 5,000 is worth joining. Next you just start posting as much as possible. Over time your traffic should start building as you accumulate posts and build your reputation. When you participate in forums it is very important not to spam. Only putting an advertisement in forums and not contributing anything of value will just get one banned. Another thing to help build a good reputation is to be respectfull of others in the forum and be postitive.
A couple of forums that I participate in and recommend is the Warrior Forum and Digital Point Forum. Both are very high traffic sites. I especially recommend the warrior forum because some of the biggest names in affiliate marketing hang out there and the forums focus is affiliate marketing. Digital point is also a great place to get traffic from. They have an alexa rank of 180 and just get an enormous amount of traffic.
All you have to do to tap this traffic is post frequently. Another nice thing about digitalpoint is that they share adsense revenue providing another income stream.Forum marketing is not likely to make anyone rich quick but if one posts to them regularly over many months one can build up an income from it.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
