How To Use Lists To Promote Affiliate Products

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that lists are in demand. People seem to eat up lists, no matter what they are about. If you have visited popular websites such as Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, you have probably seen lists make it to the top of their front-pages. Of course, not all lists are created equal. You can always slap a list together and hope for the best. The better way to do it is by adding as much value as you can with your list.

(more…)

Don’t Be Cheap with Affiliate Hosting

There are a lot of affiliates who assume that you can get everything they need to build a huge business without spending too much money to get it done. Many affiliates start their journey in the affiliate marketing world with free or cheap web hosts. There is nothing wrong with paying $5 a month for a shared hosting plans, but if you are running a business that people care about, you want to make sure your website is up all the time.

There are many shared hosting web hosting plans that promise you unlimited everything for only a few dollars a month. That would work fine if you only have a couple of sites and don’t drive too many people to your website. But shared hosting doesn’t work out too well if you are getting a decent amount of traffic. Imagine investing a lot of time and effort into your online business to drive people to your website through paid and organic search. Wouldn’t it be devastating if your site is somehow down when your visitors get to your website? (more…)

How To Use Google Products To Find Affiliate Partners

A lot of affiliates just assume that in order to make money, you have to partner with Amazon, eBay, and other big stores. There is no question that as long as you play your cards right, you can earn a decent amount of cash from Amazon and other top websites. But you should not forget about small retailers who might be offering better prices on some items than even what Amazon has to offer. One of the best ways to build credibility with your audience is by helping it save money. If you keep sending people to Amazon and eBay without checking prices, you could lose credibility and your traffic in the process. That’s where Google Products (formerly known as Froogle) comes in. It’s a very helpful service by Google that lets you compare prices and find retailers that have the lowest prices for the item you are planning to promote on your website.

Google Products not only helps you provide the best prices to your customers, it also enables you to find products that people are searching for. On the front-page, you can find products that people have recently searched for. So you can easily get an idea what’s hot on any given day. What’s more impressive about Google Product Search is the fact that you can identify those smaller retailers and partner up with them to earn more money with your website.

(more…)

Affiliate Software Change: Frustration for Affiliates

Affiliate managers are going to use the software that gives them the best options possible. So it’s not too unreasonable for them to make software changes from time to time. If you happen to be partnering with CJ or LinkShare affiliates, chances are you won’t have to worry too much about affiliate software changes. But affiliate programs do jump from one network to another from time to time. That all means that affiliates will have to be alert about the links that they are using on their websites and have a way to keep track of them. Affiliate programs do tend to give affiliates enough time to change their links, but that’s not always a given.

I have seen so many affiliates that are all over the place with their approach to adding links to their websites. It’s so easy to just use a service such as bit.ly to add affiliate links to your website. Sure, the tracking is nice. But if there is a change in your affiliate URLs, you are going to have to do a lot of URL updating. Spending time updating URLs all over your campaigns is not the best way to use your time, which is why you should never use a third party service to handle your affiliate links.

(more…)

Affiliate Marketing and Success: How to Define it?

Whether you are a part time affiliate marketer or a seasoned full time affiliate, you need to have a set of success metrics in place to make sure you stay on track with your business. If you are a part time affiliate, I assume your first goal is to make enough money to quit your day job and focus all your efforts on affiliate marketing. Experienced affiliate marketers probably have more lofty goals. There is so much money you can earn being a one man operation. That’s why no matter how much success you are having with affiliate marketing, you need to invest in the future of your business.

Many new affiliates assume that making millions of dollars a month is possible. That’s why they fall for those get rich quick courses that promises a lot and fail to deliver even a little. Let’s be honest. There are not too many courses around these days that provide you with a specific plan or method to making thousands of dollars from your affiliate business. I have seen courses that promise to teach you how to make a $1 or $1000 a month. That’s actually a more realistic approach. But those who tell you they are making thousands with Amazon and Clickbank show you their revenue source but don’t teach you the exact way you can get it done. In most cases, these guys have years of advantage over you, so even if you copy their operations, they are going to come out on top. (more…)

5 Must Read Books For Affiliate Marketers

The affiliate marketing business is changing all the time. Whether you are new to the game or just want to keep up with the latest developments in the affiliate marketing world, you are going to have to find resources that you can trust to learn new information from. There is always blogs and forums that could help, but I personally recommend adding a few books to the mix just to give your information diet the right balance. There are plenty of books that promise to teach you how to make millions, but we are going to focus on affiliate books that actually teach you something useful. With that in mind, here are 5 books (courses) that could help you become a better affiliate:

Mastering Niche Marketing: niche marketing is one of the best ways to make money online these days. If you know how the game is played, there is no reason you can’t make a living online.

Google AdWords For Dummies: one of the best Adwords books around. If you want to promote affiliate products through pay per click marketing, this book is a must read.

Web Analytics 2.0: a refreshing look at how you can use your analytics software to optimize your pages and get more out of your affiliate campaigns. It teaches you enough to be very dangerous.

Landing Page Optimization For Dummies: if you have not done landing page optimization before, here is your chance to learn enough information to get started. After all, what’s the point of knowing everything there is to know about analytics if you don’t know how to optimize your pages. (more…)

It’s Not All About Your Commission Rate

Everybody likes to earn more money. Whether you are a teacher, a cop, or even a CEO, you wouldn’t mind it if someone offered you more money to get your job done. The same concept applies to affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers do not have the luxury of a stable income. So if you don’t perform as an affiliate, you are not going to get paid, and you might end up going out of business. Expert affiliate marketers understand how to get the best out of each affiliate program. They don’t necessarily go after the items with the highest commission rates. They focus on products that convert at a high rate. But that can’t be said about newbie affiliate marketers.

A lot of affiliate programs go about recruiting new affiliates by printing up these brochures that talk about how much money you are going to earn per click. The concept of EPC has been around for a while now, and a lot of people assume that an item that comes with a high average EPC is a winner. In truth, many affiliate programs do not remove outliers from their numbers, so you end up with an EPC that is bloated. EPC also doesn’t count the amount of money that you will have to spend to generate a valid lead. Many newbie affiliate marketers don’t take into account their overall CPA, and that could lead to your fast downfall.

I remember when I started with affiliate marketing. I didn’t know exactly what I needed to do, but I knew I wanted to make a lot of money. So I started going after products/services that gave me the largest amount of money per sale without figuring out whether I had a chance in making a profit with my campaigns. It’s true that mortgage companies are willing to pay you crazy amounts per each approved lead, but you are going to have to do a lot work to set up your campaigns in a profitable manner, and you will still be at the mercy of Google Adwords and other pay per click services. Besides, let’s not forget that those high-commission products are usually in mature markets, so you are going against people who have been in business for a while and are ahead of you on the curve. (more…)

Clickbank Code Review

Clickbank is one of my favorite affiliate networks. It’s probably one of the best networks to get started with affiliate marketing and make some quick cash fast. In fact, a lot of super marketers still use top Clickbank products to make some money. Clickbank is a great network to be involved in as it provides you with a lot of information about the products available on the market. You can easily do your market research and find out what products are worth promoting. And let’s not forget that you get 50 to 75% commission checks, which is more than anything you get from CJ, LinkShare, or other traditional networks.

Clickbank Code is one of the most popular Clickbank training courses ever made (next to Affiliate Project X). Clickbank is a great marketplace to be involved in, but you’ve got to take time to know your way around and learn the tricks to make the most money from Clickbank. There are a whole lot of newbie affiliates who are leaving money on the table by promoting Clickbank products the wrong way. Clickbank Code is designed to helped newbies and advanced marketers get the most out of Clickbank.

Clickbank Code comes with a set of videos and tutorials to help you get started with your Clickbank market research and product discovery. You are going to learn how to:

• Choose the right products: going for high gravity Clickbank products is not exactly the best way to go. You are going to play your cards right to maximize your revenue with each product that you promote. You want to catch the right product at the right time.
• Drive free traffic: you can have the best landing page in the business, but if you are not driving traffic to it, you are going to struggle to make any real kind of money. Clickbank Code is going to show you some of those modern tactics that you can use to drive free traffic and bring down your CPA.
• Manage your paid advertising campaigns: Google cash still works, and so does Google Adwords marketing. You just have to set up your campaigns right and advertise in the right places. It’s more complicated than that, which is why Clickbank Code is a good course to consider.
• Set up highly converting landing pages fast: time is money in the affiliate marketing business. When a good product is released, you may only have a short time to take advantage and start accumulating big commissions. Once other top affiliates enter the market, you are all going to earn less. That’s why you need to be able to put up your landing pages as fast as possible. Clickbank Code shows you all the tools you need to set up your offer pages fast.
• Manage your business like a pro: you’ve got to treat your affiliate business as a business! It’s not a hobby but at the same time you shouldn’t slave yourself for 18 hours a day to make a decent living online. The more your work towards becoming more productive, the better you can use your time to make money online from affiliate marketing. And you can always outsource and hire people to do your job for you. Thankfully, it’s all covered here.

I was impressed with the coverage of SEO and Adwords in this course. You are going to learn a whole lot of small little tactics that can save you lots of money on Adwords and bring you a lot of free leads. I was also impressed with the resources discussed in ClickBank Code. It’s one thing to know what to do. It’s another thing to see someone do it in front of you. And knowing what tools to use always help too! Best of all, Clickbank Code is designed for Clickbank affiliates, so you don’t just get general affiliate marketing tips.  All in all, if you are looking for a comprehensive course on  Clickbank marketing, Clickbank Code is a must review product.

How To Promote An Affiliate Product – Part I

A lot of people often ask me, “how do you go about promoting an affiliate product?” We have all these affiliate training courses on the market that claim to teach people how to make millions online. But almost all these courses assume things and take shortcuts. That’s why the success rate of these courses hasn’t been as well as what people hoped they’d be. I am not talking about one or two affiliate courses. Almost all affiliate training packages give you a part of the whole picture. If you are a beginner to affiliate marketing, you want to take the proper time to get yourself familiar with all aspects of the game. You certainly don’t want to focus on only one network, one product, or one method to promote your products. It’s nice to be able to build a list or get a good PPC campaign going, but being well versed in various methods to promote affiliate products pays in the long run.

If you are a beginner affiliate marketer, you want to make sure you spend the proper amount of time finding the right market and product. Once there, you want to focus on a multi-channel promotion strategy to maximize your earnings. Here are a few channels you should concentrate on:

• Search Engine Optimization: I know a lot of top affiliates tell you that you should start with PPC first. PPC is definitely a faster way to promote products. But search engine optimization takes a bit of time and the sooner you lay the foundations, the better off you will be in the long run. You simply can’t replace getting free leads from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (Must read: SEOBook).
• SEA: search engine advertising is the fastest way to drive traffic to a website. But you don’t want to focus only on the search network (on Google). You want to focus on banner advertising, the content network, blog networks and more (Resource: CopyNProfit).
• Social Networking: building a large following on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed can give you an additional channel to push your affiliate products. But do yourself a favor and avoid spamming others. You’ve got to work on building relationships.
• Blog Marketing: building a blog and reviewing affiliate products from time to time helps as well. Just make sure you focus on providing content and value to your readers. A blog full of affiliate reviews is not exactly going to be a hit with your readers (Resource: Wordpress). You can also join hands with other bloggers to join partnerships or promote your products on blog networks.
• Article Marketing: article marketing is another cheap way to promote affiliate products. It also helps with your SEO efforts as well. EzineArticles.com is a great place to start (this one too).
• Ezines: advertising on newsletters is another great way to drive targeted traffic to your website. It won’t be too costly and definitely worth a try.
• Email: creating an email list is another way to have a channel to push your products to through. You’ll need good content to get your e-mail list going. You can also use your e-mail signature to promote your products.
• Partnerships: if you have a product of your own, you can always use it to your advantage to promote other products that may be helpful to your customers.
• Offline Marketing: there are plenty of ways to promote a product offline. You can do it with your business cards, brochures, and … It’s definitely worth testing (here is a good course on this topic).

Affiliate marketing may not be rocket science but innovation certainly pays when it comes to finding ways to promote products. As long as you are testing all aspects of your affiliate business, there is no reason you can’t make a living online with affiliate marketing.

Stay tuned for the second part of this series which contains more advanced methods to promote affiliate products online.

Opportunity.com Review

John Reese’s Opportunity.com is an affiliate training course for newbie to advanced affiliates who are looking to take their affiliate game to the next level.

Opportunity.com contains many modules that walk you through how to set up affiliate campaigns and create auto-pilot money making systems. List building is still one of the best ways to gain targeted followers that you can market affiliate products to. But not everyone knows how to set up a newsletter properly. You don’t want to go all in with your content, and you don’t want to spam your followers by constantly forwarding them affiliate products. Getting the right balance could take a lot of time, unless you go through training courses available on training sites such as Opportunity.com.

Another big factor in having success in this industry is your ability to follow trends and find profitable niches before everybody else. That’s exactly what you will learn in Opportunity.com. Finding profitable products are not that simple, which is why you should be testing and analyze your campaigns to optimize your conversion rates. Opportunity.com covers everything you need to set up profitable campaign and extract more money from them.

Here is what’s covered in Opportunity.com:

• Market Research: selecting the right affiliate market to enter to is a big part of the whole equation. You certainly don’t want to enter a market that doesn’t provide you with enough revenue or is not broad enough to let you take your business to the next level. The easiest way to fail in affiliate marketing is by choosing the wrong market to be a part of. Opportunity.com teaches you how to:
  • select a profitable market.
  • use multiple channels to push your affiliate promotions and make money online.
  • cross-promote products and make more money online.
• Trend Analysis: knowing where your market is heading to is the best way to develop new campaigns and even find new products to promote. You can’t expect to promote the same products and keep making money. Each product goes through a cycle. You want to make sure you catch products in their introduction or growth phases. By watching out for the trends, you can save yourself a lot of headaches and keep on the top of your industry.
• Niche Discovery: knowing what market to enter is only one part of the equation. You then need to define your own niche. You want to make sure your niche is not too broad, but at the same not too narrow to leave you struggling to make decent money. Believe it or not, there is a lot of money to be earned in micro-niches. But you’ve got to find the right ones.
• Campaign Management: knowing marketing well is one thing. Being able to manage your campaigns and business effectively is a whole other thing. Not many affiliates know what they are getting themselves into when they start an affiliate business. Running a business is not that easy, and you need to plan to avoid any major surprise. Thankfully, Opportunity.com has you covered. It comes with various models that teach you how to run every aspect of your business. Opportunity.com shows you how to:
  • track your affiliate campaigns and maximize your results.
  • build an e-mail list to push your affiliate products.
  • automate many aspects of your business.
  • drive lots of cheap but targeted traffic to your websites.
  • outsource and grow your business more effectively.
  • scale your business to handle growth.
  • learn from your competitors and use their knowledge to grow your business.

Opportunity.com is a modern affiliate marketing training course that is designed to help affiliates from all walks of life increase their commission checks and grow their business. If you are looking to master the art of market research and niche discovery and drive more traffic to your affiliate offers for less, you should give Opportunity.com a try. The course comes with a 30-day money back guarantee.