Is it reliable ???

A lot of confusion people are saying u can earn bucks with affiliates but in my opinion its not that easy to earn the bucks from affiliate …

Friends – it all depends on the effort that you are willing to put into affiliate marketing, or for that matter ANY type of business opportunity you decide to undertake.  This could be an online business, or offline business – regardless of the type of business you need people to drive your business forward (or should I say customers).

Consider an offline business that’s in the service industry.  You spend $100,000.00 to set-up shop.  That includes the cost of leasing a space, purchasing equipment and supplies, purchasing the raw material (food) to prepare your products.  BUT you forget about placing ads in the newspaper, and local community papers about your upcoming grand opening.  You neglect to contact community centers, or even media outlets about your new business – in fact you don’t even tell your friends or family!!!  Instead you stick up a few “grand opening” flyers on windows, toss in some balloons and hope for the best.

As a result, your first day is a total flop.  Sure you sell some products – but only to passers by; even then hundreds of people didn’t even notice your new shop because you failed to… ADVERTISE.  You never even thought of putting up a board to direct people into the shop.

Affiliate marketing is not easy.  You need to stay with it.  But how can you attract visitors to your site in some highly competetive areas?  I can think of a few ways:

Be DIFFERENT.  Yes, it’s hard to be different but you should look at the offline world and look at what the big companies are doing and put your own twist onto the promotion and try it online.

For example, suppose you are setting up a website for coffee or tea affiliate programs (trust me, they are BIG business).  You need visitors, and need visitors that will come back often.  You want to do all the right things first:

• Set-up an RSS feed through FeedBurner or another RSS aggregator.  This will capture the more advanced visitors/readers who know all about RSS and how it works.
• Set-up an e-mail alerts system.  This will capture less advanced visitors/readers, that don’t understand RSS and prefer to get e-mail alerts and then visit your site (this is a GOOD thing).

Next you need to drive visitors to your site.  How will you do that?

• Advertising. Think Google, Yahoo all the BIG search engines advertising programs.  But don’t stop there!  Look at like minded sites and see if you can strike up advertising with them.  It could be as simple as swapping ads in e-zines or swapping button/banners on each others site.  Why like minded?  Why would you advertise for tea or coffee on a site selling plants or BBQ’s?  Doesn’t make a lot of sense – right?
• Article marketing.  Friends – THIS WORKS!  But you need to be consistent.  Draw up a list of topics that would be of interest to coffee or tea drinkers (trust me, there are A LOT of topics) and write about them.  Write each article in such a way that it could be a blog post (or two, or three – you get the idea).  Post to your blog first, then a few days later post to the major article repositories on the web (I will provide these in an upcoming post).

Once you have visitors, you want them to “stick”.  How will you do that?

• Contests.  Everyone loves a contest, and if you can get coffee/tea suppliers (equipment, specialty products) to sponsor your contest you could give away some grand prizes!
• Freebies.  This works very well, though could cost you a lot of money but consider how much advertising would cost you.  It could work something like this.  For the first 100 sign-ups to your e-mail alerts or RSS feed (you need them to send you their mailing address) you send them a small bag of coffee or some speciality teas.  Why would you want to do this?  Well, for one you’ve captured their e-mail address AND their mailing address.  Think DIRECT MARKETING.  It still works, especially if it is targetted!

People LOVE free stuff.

Think about all the types of things you can give away, that people would appreciate.  Several years ago, I helped someone run a promotion for free pedometers on their site (it worked so good, I did the same thing).  I found a supplier willing to sell me around 1,000 pedometers for about $1.00 each, the condition was that we had to leave his company label on the pedometer – it was like one of those “made in China” stickers.  The trade off was great. 

Then he ran a promotion on his site to get people to sign up to his e-mail alerts.  The condition of course was that they had to provide a valid e-mail address, and provide a mailing address so that he could send the pedometer to them.

Now you may be thinking that that was expensive, if I remember correctly it ended up costing him about $3,000 to get 1,000 visitors.  I never dug past that, so don’t know what type of attrition rate he had – but consider that some keywords in health and fitness can sell for WELL OVER $3.00 each he ended up getting highly targetted visitors legitimate e-mail address AND mailing address for only $3,000.00 – you can’t get that anywhere.

He used the mailing address to send out other freebies randomly.  Sometimes he’d pick 5 or 10 people and send out a $20.00 book.  One time he got a good deal on those big pilates balls and sent out three.  As a result of these random gifts, he didn’t loose many readers because they never knew what they’d get.  In fact he found that he got more sign-ups over time as the initial bunch told friends which expected that they may get something as well.

The money he was making from affiliate sales was helping drive these types of promotions.  And did he make money – treadmills pay up to $200.00 per sale, he could sell (through his affiliate promotions) 5 to 10 per month.  But he also knew the peak times to be “pushing” these types of products (think early-mid new year; after everyone has had their feasts over Christmas and New Years).

Definately earning money as an affiliate is a numbers game – the more visitors you have, the greater the chance that they purchase through your affiliate link.  The more sites you have the greater the chance of each site earning some money.  When you decide to concentrate on a specific area, whether that be sports (such as golf, hockey, soccer, baseball, basketball), health and fitness, lifestyle or any other area you quickly move away from “affiliate” sales and moving into more of a business.

Now don’t think that this is the end of things – in fact, you can still move into other area to make even more money.  Think about creating your own product or products:

• E-books
• Online courses
• Video courses
• MP3
  • You can get these transcribed
• Teleseminars
  • Which can be turned into MP3s

You only need to look at the offline world, plus what other sites are doing to get more ideas on how you can take a hobby or interest and turn it into a business making you anything from a few hundred dollars per month to thousands of dollars per month!

Do you have other ideas that you would like to share that perhaps I’ve not covered?  Why not participate and leave us your comment!

Take care!

Technorati Tags: affiliate links, affiliate marketing, affiliate sales, affiliate site

So Lets Kick It! off with Affiliate Programs.

I am going to break down this post into two individual posts, the first part will focus on what exactly affiliate programs are, and how they work.  The second part will present you with a blueprint that you can use to start making money with affiliate programs.

In order to truly understand how affiliate programs work, and how you can make money with affiliate programs lets get you some of the basic information about affiliate programs, how they work and how they can make you money.

Think back to retail sales – I’m sure everyone has done some retail in their time.  I’ve worked several retail jobs – most positions were hourly wage + commission, while some were hourly wage only (those really sucked sometimes).

The sales positions that were hourly wage + commission were great – the more I sold, the more I made and each item carried a different commission rate.  The commissions were anywhere from 5% of a product to as much as 25% of the product, but you should also remember that many of the products had HUGE markups.  For example a computer cable (any type) were purchased for around $0.50 each and sold for well over $9.95 to as much as $19.95.

Sales + Commission jobs were usually a win-win situation.  If the sales person is good at what they do, they make great commissions, otherwise they just get an hourly wage — but most companies do expect their sales people to meet some quotas, so you can’t really sit on your backside expecting a job for long.

Affiliate programs are sort-of like your sales job but you get only a commission, no hourly wage.

Like the sales job, you are only as good as the products you try to “sell”, and how well you promote your products.  The more competetive the product, guaranteed the more competetive the keywords would be to sell that product – that’s why you see so many people resort to spamming (think about all those viagra and discount pharmacy e-mails you get).  If someone could send out 50,000,000 e-mails for viagra and they happen to get a 1% hit who happen to buy – they’ve just made a few dollars.

Affiliate programs allow you to sell hundreds of different products without knowing a thing about the products.  You could set-up one or a hundred websites selling everything from fruit baskets, to meat and wine, to construction equipment or consumer goods.  Some products will need more finesse, and in some cases you could even create your own affiliate program (we’ll talk about this later) even if a company doesn’t have such a program.

Affiliate programs are nothing more than revenue sharing opportunities.

Here is an example of how an affiliate program works.

Suppose I enjoy golf.  I’m a golf fanatic.  I live and breathe golf, so naturally I’d like to make some money off of my addiction… er, hobby.

So I set-up a golfing website or blog and I post regularly.  I’ve amassed quite a readership, but I’m not monetizing the visitors nor am I doing anything to monetize my regulars.

So I sign-up to a few of the top affiliate networks out there and sign-up for several of the best rated golfing programs.

Initially I just slap on the advertisments on the blog, and though I make some money it’s nowhere what I could be doing.  So rather than just post advertisements, I make the advertisements part of the posts.  I include ads at the start and end of the posts, but I also try other things.

For example, I decide to do a series of posts on how to improve your swing and in the course of the posts I also have someone video tape some lessons – perhaps teasers, perhaps freebies (you do know what I’m getting at, don’t you?  I won’t go into it here – but will save this discussion for another post).  But as I post the series, I ensure each set of posts is keyword rich for specific keywords.

Each of the keywords that I am targetting is then linked to a specific affiliate program – because the keywords are phrases that are searched on there is a very high probability that they pages will get picked-up by the search engines and if I’ve done my job right then I may get into the top 3, 5 or 10 listings.

Each time someone clicks on the link they are redirected through my affiliate link (which includes my special tracking ID) and if they purchase an item – I get a commission on it.

Now I may only make $5 or $100 per item (or even more) but if I can direct 10,000 people to my site daily and out of that I manage to interest 10% of the people to click on the links (so that’s 1,000 people) and out of that 1,000 people 3% buy something (so that’s 30 people) then I get a commission on their purchase.  It could be a few dollars to as much as $300 or more (for example, treadmill sales regularly result in commissions in excess of $100 — redirect and sell 10 of those per month and you’re making some good money).

Affiliate sales are a numbers game – you need to drive visitors to your site and your content needs to be good enough to have them return and click on the links.

Something else you want to do with any affiliate site you run (especially if it’s something you enjoy) is to further monetize it:

• Set-up e-mail subscriptions/lists
• Create personalized or general training guide or videos
• Create and develop physical products

That’s only the tip of the iceberg – there is so much more that you can do with an affiliate site.

I will expand on this article to go into more detail on how you would pull all this information together to create a tight, well developed website that is guaranteed to make you money (well, I can’t really guarantee you anything).

As always I welcome your feedback and questions!

Take care!

Technorati Tags: affiliate links, affiliate marketing, affiliate sales, affiliate site, how to make money on the internet with affiliate progra

Hi,

I remember running affiliate sites, I used to generate some pretty good income from affiliate sales even if I was not building my own business. 

In the good old days most of the people who clicked on your affiliate links used to purchase without a second thought… but, now as times are getting tougher, and visitors getting more cynical, you’ll be amazed at the number of people who won’t.  For whatever reason, if a visitor can “smell” an affiliate link — they will do what they can to bypass it.

It’s pretty easy to spot an affiliate link.  Most affiliate links are some form or the other of

• http://www.thesite.com/?YOURID
• http://www.thesite.com/?aid=xyz&prod=1455&uid=1231

Pretty easy to spot, right?

Where your affiliate id is passed as a parameter. A thief has to simply change the “YOURID” part to “THEIR ID” to put your money into their pocket – of even simpler, just cut off everything after the .com – in either scenario, you loose.

Why do people do this?  Simply that they can’t stand the thought of you “making money off them” so they bypass you by simply chopping off the end of your affiliate link that contains your ID or just heading to the website and searching for the product themselves.

Affiliate marketers and retailers are smart to this and may run special promotions using your ID as part of the “coupon” code — but more often than not this is an added headache that not all retailers or affiliate programs will get into.  Besides if they can keep an extra $200 in commission — why not?

But there has always been one aspect of affiliate marketing which plagues most affiliate marketers – that’s affiliate ID theft.

It works two ways:

1. Your affiliate ID gets hijacked, by those that know how to manipulate the system.
2. Your affiliage ID get chopped off, by those that know how to manipulate the system.

In either of these cases, there are no sure fire ways to protect your commission but there are deterrants.  One such deterrant is Jack Keifers’ AmazingCloaker 4.

Click on the link to look at Jacks’ application – although the technology behind his application has been around for quite some time he packages everything into a great slick application that will keep most users honest.  If you’re trying to stop a dedicated thief, then unfortunately there isn’t anything out there that will really stop them.

Check out Jacks’ program – if you will be running affiliate programs on your site then this is a tool that you do want to keep on your desktop and readily accessible.

Regards,

Mohamed

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate sales, affiliate theft, Internet Business, internet marketing