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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Classified Ad Sites

Sites that allow you to post free classified ads online offer another way to market affiliate sites. There are a few classified sites that can be used to make some commissions. I recommend usfreeads and craigslist. Most classified ad sites offer free ads as well as paid upgrades to help get your ad more exposure. To be successfull using classified sites for affiliate marketing the way the actual ad is written is critical. Your ad has to be both attention grabbing and compelling enough to clickthrough.

Your own email list

Most top marketers will tell you the best way to make affiliate marketing commissions is to have your own list. Email lists are very effective at getting sales because you can follow up on people who are interested but not ready to buy yet.

It can be very profitable to own your own list but it is also requires a lot of know how and hard work. If you want to create an ezine that you publish regularly that can especially take a lot of time and work. You have to first find a good autoresponder.

Next you have to actually build your list through various advertising or coregistration. Then you have to put together a newsletter and decide on what products to promote in these newsletters. This all has to be done on a regular basis because email marketing success depends on keeping in touch with your customers on a regular basis.

If you want to build your own list a couple of popular autoresponder services are aweber and getresponse.If you have the time to develop your own list I definitely recommend doing that.

For affiliates who don't have the time it takes to building and maintaining a list there are a couple of turnkey options. If you are a clickbank affiliate cbmall has a built in autoresponder that follows up with your affiliate id in a years worth of emails.

Another good option if you want to have an ezine of your own but don't want all the work is a place called e-zine-factory.com that will do everything from content to delivery for you

Newspaper Advertising

This is an oftentimes overlooked affiliate marketing method. There are some affiliates who make a lot of commissions from just placing classified ads that have their affiliate site in them. Here are some tips for being profitable with newspaper advertising.

1. Write powerfull ads that will stand out and compell readers to visit your url.

2. Test different newspapers. Response rates will vary dramatically with each paper.

3. Response generally increases by advertising more than once in a paper. Try to advertise for at least 4 consecutive issues in the same paper.

4. Make sure you advertise in the correct section of the classifieds. If your affiliate site is business related then that is the section of the classifieds that your ad should be in.

5. If you put a long affiliate url in your ad people are likely to chop off your affiliate id when typing it in their browser. I recommend using a service called tinyurl to make your affiliate url smaller.

If you want to learn more about making affiliate commissions by advertising in newspapers I recommend reading The Ultimate Mail Order Guide.

Contextual Advertising

These are small classified type ads that show up on others websites. Google has the largest contextual ad network. It is widely known by webmasters as adsense. Advertisers generally pay per click using content ad networks. One can use content ads to drive traffic to their affiliate pages. I advise caution when paying for content ads. The conversion rates from content ad traffic is very low. If you do use google or any other paid content ads I recommend bidding the minimum amount per click. Other major content networks include yahoo and adbrite.If you have a website and are a clickbank affiliate there is a free alternative to paying for content clicks. There are several services that allow you to place clickbank text ads on your site. A major player in offering these clickbank ads is cbclicks. The way most of these work is that whoever refers you to the ad network along with the network itself gets a percentage of the clicks with their ids in them along with your own. In turn if you refer others their websites will have some ads that have your affiliate id on them. To make good commissions using this method one must build a large referral base to get a lot of traffic to their clickbank id's.

Google AdWords

If you want to start earning affiliate marketing commissions fast Google adwords is the best way to do it. When you advertise on google adwords your advertisement shows up in their search results for the keywords that you bid on. Google ranks where your ad shows up in the results by a combination of clickthrough rate and the quality score of your ad and website. You can advertise direct affiliate urls on adwords if you want but since they tend to have a low quality score the minimum bid prices tend to be high. I recommend using either a landing page or blog with links to your affiliate site in your ad instead of directly linking to affiliate site. This will improve your quality score and lower minimum bids and at the same time gives you a chance to presell visitors before they go to the affiliate site. Here are some other tips for getting the most out of adwords.1. Use keywords in your title and make your ad stand out from others to increase your clickthrough rate and lower your cost per click (cpc).2. Try to bid on as many four word keyword phrases as possible because there is generally less competition and lower cpc with those phrases.3. Build your keyword lists as deep as possible and bid the minimum 5 cents. As an affiliate you don't want to get into a bidding war. Since you will probably only get a sale for every 100 to 200 clicks using adwords minimum cpc is necessary to make a profit.4. Only promote products on adwords that pay at least a $30 commission.5. Put the cost of the product you are promoting in your ad to keep freebie seekers from clicking your ads costing you money.6. To increase your conversion rates you can break up your ads in different groups with simaler keywords. Then make a different ad for each group.7. I don't recommend putting adsense ads on pages you promote with adwords. It will lower your pages quality score and increase cpc.8. Try to track your ads if possible to see which keywords are converting. You can then weed out the keywords that aren't making any commissions and add new ones.9. It's important with adwords to test new ads and get rid of ads that have low clickthrough rates. I recommend removing ads that aren't getting over 1% clickthrough rate. This will lower your cpc.10. Adwords success is all about testing. Campaigns should always be adjusted with new keywords and ads to lower your costs and improve conversions.

Why you need a website?

If you want to be a serious affiliate marketer you are going to need your own website to promote your affiliate programs with. A blog, squidoo lens or any kind of webpage will also suffice. Any affiliate who tries to send traffic to a direct affiliate link is doomed to fail in my opinion.

Here are the main reasons why having a website is very important to affiliate marketing success.

1. Your own webpage helps establish your online presence and makes you look more professional than just sending traffic to direct hoplinks.

2. With the recent "google slap" having a landing page other than an affilate hoplink is needed to have a profitable adwords campaign. For those who have not heard of the google slap here's the deal. Around a year ago google changed it's algorithm for adwords. Any affiliate urls were penalized with the algorithm change and minimum bids skyrocketed for advertisers who used direct hoplinks.

3. A website can be used to pre-sell visitors before clicking through to the merchant that you are promoting. This increases conversions.

4. With a website or blog you can get free traffic from search engine optimization. There is no way to optimize an affiliate url for the search engines

Traffic Exchanges

One free way you can generate visitors to your affiliate programs is to use traffic exchanges. They can be a very usefull tool if used the right way. Any site that is trying to directly sell products to visitors is not likely to do well on a traffic exchange. They are best used as a lead capture tool. Traffic exchanges are great for building email lists that you can earn affiliate commissions on the backend. They also work good for mlm programs. Exchanges can also work for any free signup programs. Most all traffic exchanges use a credit system where you earn credits from surfing other members sites and referring others. The biggest traffic exchange online is Trafficswarm. So if I were to give a secret formula for making money as an affilate using traffic exchanges here is how I recommend doing it.1. Sign up for several traffic exchanges.2. Use each exchange you sign up for to build referrals to the other ones.3. Surf on each one periodically to increase your credits.4. Once you have built up enough referrals and credits start sending traffic to a squeeze page with an signup form for your email list.