Affiliate marketing is advertising for someone else in exchange for a cut of the sales you generate. You’re sharing your traffic for a price. It’s a great way to capitalize on the traffic your website’s already producing.

So let us find out what people mean when they say “Affiliate marketing.”

It is high time Wikipedia entered the game:

“Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.”

Being an Affiliate

What does it require being an Affiliate?

If you possess a small home-based Internet business you can become an affiliate partner of other merchants and get money for sharing your traffic with other online sellers. You need to find a site that deals in the goods which are complementary to yours without overlapping

Before you join this or that affiliate program there are things you should consider:

1. Find out if the site has an affiliate earnings history
2. Get to know if they have an affiliate manager you can contact in case you have problems
3. Is the affiliate marketing program of the site well-established?

You role in any Affiliate Marketing program is to make your clients to want to buy the products from your partner’s site. Simply placing a link to this site is obviously not enough. You have to promote and advertise the products by proving that they are somehow better than those of the competitors.

Jonathan Miller, Team-Affiliate.com, says:

“The sites that do better are the ones that select one or two offers, tell people why they recommend these particular offers, and then provide them with a link.”

Making use of affiliate partners

You yourself can use affiliates to increase your traffic. But you should be very choosy about whom to trust in the issue. Keep in mind that you are attaching your brand to their businesses. You have to find the sellers the collaboration with whom will make you benefit. Moreover, you affiliates must be relevant to your target market in order to get the right kind of traffic.

There are software programs that track visitors when they leave an affiliate’s website and click through to the merchant’s site. If they convert to a sale, the affiliate that referred them gets paid a commission. You can track your visitors in two different ways, and each has its own advantages:

There are apps that help Affiliate marketing partners track the traffic. This software tracks a user that clicks on a link at an affiliate’s site. If the user buys something from the final site, the affiliate get a commission. This monitoring can be done in two different ways:

1. You buy a stand alone tracking app and integrate it into your web-page. In this case you yourself establish the commission.
2. You can join an affiliate network (for instance, LinkShare or Kolimbo). The network establishes the commission but it also gives you access to their pool of affiliates.

Affiliate Marketing: Increasing your Traffic – Increase your Sales is a post from: We talk on making money on the Internet

- freebies
- dating
- finance
- education
- ringtones

PPC remains the major focus in my case – though it is fast way (the fastest, in fact) nowadays to get traffic and monetize it one needs to know many aspects of PPC engines (and they evolve all the time) in general and niches you are about to promote. So PPC promotion is not so easy as many gurus state. With no knowledge and experience in dating industry I am not likely to succeed despite my knowledge of PPC promotion in detail.

How to properly launch new PPC campaign, what are the signs of a healthy PPC campaign and, most important, how to optimize a promising PPC campaign:

Launching an Affiliate Offer: From Zero to Profitability, Part I
Launching an Affiliate Offer: From Zero to Profitability, Part II

Importance of eCPC (estimated cost-per-click) can’t be overestimated: it allows you to benchmark your campaigns to your competitor’s ones and make sure you buy traffic at proper price – otherwise it is time to make changes to your PPC promotion:

Why eCPC is King

One of the most efficient ways to lower the click cost and improve you Quality Score in Google AsdWords is to properly arrange you adgroups:

Un-Clutter & Optimize Your Account with Better Organization

With so many articles on keyword research you are likely to find some new tips to extend and properly research for high targeted keyword lists:

Keyword Research Secrets to Explode Your Affiliate Business

A recent discussion about links and content compared (Content is King, or Links are King: What’s Your Money On) shows that a great portion of webmasters focuses their efforts on link building (not on content).

If you believe those who say that build a great website, generate unique and quality website – and you will get the links naturally – think over your strategy again. Natural links are next to impossible to get if you want to promote some affiliate program focused project. So, one should buy links, search for links exchanges (3-way and similar).

A few recent gems on improving your link popularity:

How to Check if a Site Passes Link Popularity
Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Link Builders
Link Page Report Card

Affiliate marketing using some established domains to get traffic to your offers – a widely used approach. But i did not have a chance to try that. Back in August I have set up accounts on WordPress, Squidoo, Hubpages and MySpace. The services have deleted all accounts within 7-10 days for the violation of their TOS.

So, I have decided to have a deeper look into what it takes to promote offers on these websites. No duplicate content from your other websites, no affiliate links on new accounts – just a few tips. More (though the articles cover Squidoo promotion aspects, I m sure it works for other mentioned authority domains):

Affiliate Marketing on Squidoo
3 Squidoo Mistakes That Will Hurt Your Rankings
My Squidoo Experiment – 2 sales + Top Ranking at Google

Black Hat SEO, Grey Hat SEO – probably the terms have some negative color, but many webmasters do it along with their White Hat SEO sites – do not miss one of the best of the recent articles in the industry:

SEO Empire

[tags]ppc, motivation, inspirations, tips, tricks, seo, affiliate marketing, internet marketing[/tags]

Industry tips and tricks weekly is a post from: We talk on making money on the Internet

3 Huge Adwords Editor Timesaving Tips
How to Lower Your AdWords Minimum Bid
Optimization of Ads & Landing Pages by Keyword Match Type
AdWords Quality Score Survey Results Are In

I think every person needs to be motivated and inspired – especially at times when the results are not what we expect them to be, so I do not miss this sort of posts. They help to see that there is money in the Internet and also to take a peek in what most successful online entrepreneurs do to get where they are:

Productivity Tips for Bloggers
Answers For Questions 9/3/2007
Even Super Affiliates Need A Kick in the Butt!
John Chow dot Com Income Report – August 2007

If you need to get an idea about what new type of website to start consider starting a niche business directory:

Easy way to make 100k/year

It was always a mystery to me how people make money promoting e-mail/ zip submit offers with top PPC engines:

SeoDave’s Guide to Generating High Converting Zip/Email Submits

When your focus shifts to PPC promotion you realize the importance of affiliate network relations and your affiliate manager:

Ask anything about Affiliate Marketing and i will try to answer (Copeac Owner)

[tags]ppc, motivation, inspirations, tips, tricks, seo, affiliate marketing, internet marketing [/tags]

Affiliate marketing tips and tricks weekly is a post from: We talk on making money on the Internet

Which ones to choose? Those that have plenty of adv money in them.

Just a simple example. Let’s have a look at those Internet entrepreneurs that you are likely to know. To be exact, I suggest that you have a look at their website portfolio focus:

Jeremy aka Shoemoney – focus on mobile industry, particularly ringtones
Darren aka Problogger – gadgets (digital cameras, cell phones, etc)
John,  popular wickedfire forum owner – finance
Capitalist Pig – finance, mobile
Xboxundone – mobile, adult
Kieron – shopping, finance, poker

I think you do not need much analysis to see that these guys focus on those industries that have good income potential. I do not want to say that their website portfolios are limited by the mentioned niches – they run many websites, each of them, but the most profitable, I would say pillar niches are those that are mentioned above.

You can run quite successful websites that get good amount of traffic, but you are likely to turn those visitors into a few dollars due to the low payouts of CPA or CPC advertisers in those industries.

Summary: My intention and advice are to start a few ‘boring’ websites in those niches where one can earn really good income. It will take time to grow those websites, years in fact. But it is the current state of Internet marketing business that we should accept. If you are lucky or smart you will make this period shorter.

I like the progress of a few websites from my portfolio when it comes to traffic stats, but when I analyze  their CPC income I feel really upset to see that they get tons of .05-07 clicks (AdSense), the same applies to Kontera network ads. And potential of CPA income is very limited as well.

Yes, I do realize that it is much harder to succeed (= get good rankings with organic SEO or low bids for PPC promotion) with that type of websites, that the competition is super tough in those niches, but I am sure it is worth it. You can enjoy your other (‘hobby’) websites when you have free time or at the weekends. Added to that you can drive traffic from your popular low income websites, but you need a few boring websites in the money niches. Otherwise you are destined to do a big amount of work for a few dollars.

[tags]website niches, seo, affiliate marketing, internet marketing [/tags]

Niche selection: importance of industries is a post from: We talk on making money on the Internet

- I am in the process of implementing my first PPC arbitrage experiment using 2nd tier PPC engines
- I also properly learn PPC engines for my plans to learn CPA marketing properly (I do tests with AdWords)

For these purposes I recommend you to read a few PPC blogs and blogs of the independent and quite successful PPC marketers:

- cpa-affiliates
- capitalistpig
- shoemoney

Though the guys do not publish their recipes one can collect the ideas one by one into a solid picture and start your own tests. I am sure that even if they have published their step by step guide it would not work for most other webmasters – you need your own experience back up to get a feeling of any online marketing technique. It is my belief. As a sample I publish a recipe from one more CPA marketer, but I strongly doubt that you will earn thousand (or even hundreds) tomorrow based on these guidelines:

Here is how I did it (and will probably continue, tweaking along the way of course):

1. Look over the offers your affiliate companies have. Find ONE that interests you. When evaluating your offer, think about how you would respond to it. What would get you to click and buy or give out your email, or whatever.
2. Do some research on that niche. Go to Google, MSN and Yahoo! and type in the primary keyword for your niche. Look at the paid ads’ landing pages very closely, particularly the top 10.
3. Build a landing page that mimics the main points you noted were used in the top ten. So, in other words, if every landing page in the top ten has flashing graphics, guess what you need? Flashing graphics.
4. Now, NOT using any sort of software or web based program, come up with as many keywords as you can for that niche.
5. Using those keywords, pick out the keywords that are super specific. In other words, if you are promoting Hoodia diet pills, then “hoodia diet pills” would be super specific.
6. Now, add action to those keywords, like “buy”, “purchase”, “get”, etc.
7. Take that specific list, and the action list, and try to expand on it. Remember to keep your keywords tightly focused. Loose keywords will get you more clicks, but less sales. Tight keywords will get less clicks, but more sales.
8. Time to set up your ad. Go back to those top ten ads in the major search engines and get a feel for the language. Don’t just copy one, but get creative with the ones you like best.
9. Set your budget. Be careful with this, don’t try and chase 1st place. That will cost you money (most likely). If #3 is cheap enough, try for that. In Google and MSN, 1 – 3 all show up at the top of the page. Really, don’t worry too much about placement, worry about your budget.

From this point, its just a matter of watching and evaluating your campaign. You’ll need some sort of tracking software to help you. If you’re using Adwords, they’ll give you Google Analytics. If you’re not on Google, try StatCounter Free invisible Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats

Summary: I have changed my tactics (and strategy?) recently. Now my online activity reminds me what guys from marketing experiments do: I would like to test as many ways and techniques to earn my living online as possible, by trial and error, to find those that are most profitable and appealing personally to me and focus on them.

[tags]cpa marketing, ppc marketing, ppc arbitrage, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, make money online, home based job, earn your living online[/tags]

CPA marketing, PPC marketing and other tests is a post from: We talk on making money on the Internet