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.

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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.

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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.

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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…)

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.

Make Money with EzineArticles

Many newbie affiliates ask me about the foolproof way that you can make money online from affiliate marketing. In reality, there is no foolproof way to make money online. You have to work hard to earn a decent living in the affiliate marketing. I know a lot of us want to believe that you can just work an hour a day and make a million dollars a year online. But you’ve got to plan, find products, do market research, conduct segmentation and demographics analysis, create landing pages, optimize, and promote. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like hard work to me.

A lot of affiliates go through all the work only to fall to the ground when it comes to driving traffic to their affiliate pages. There may be no foolproof way to make money online, but there is certainly a foolproof way to drive traffic to your affiliate pages — article marketing. EzineArticles can drive you hundreds or even thousands of visitors if you play your cards right. Writing articles for EzineArticles is more than just providing valuable content to your readers. The devil is really in the details here. You need to use the tools available on EzineArticles to do your keyword research, tagging, and even choose the right titles for your articles. And knowing what makes people click on your links helps you get the biggest bang from each of your articles.

EzineArticles Manifesto is a course that shows you how to write traffic-building articles effectively. And we are talking about hundreds or thousands of views per each article. I still remember when I got started with EzineArticles. I didn’t know you could promote affiliate links in the footer. After all, if you read their guidelines, you get the assumption that affiliate links are not allowed at all in your article. But they have a loophole for those who are willing to use a top level domain for each new offer. After writing 30 or so articles, I realized my mistake and started using affiliate links the right way in my articles. EzineArticles Manifesto is full of tips and hidden facts that you can use to dominate EzineArticles and make a lot of money online.

Here is what’s covered in this course:

• Complete hands on video tips to help you get the best out of EzineArticles.
• SEO tactics that you can use to get your articles to the first page of Google.
• How to write magnetic titles and resource boxes that get you those precious clicks.
• How to start generating leads like a pro from your articles.
• Find niches and markets and write articles on topics that people can’t get enough.
• A set of well-researched niches that you can start writing articles about right away.
• How to get more profile views and leads than those who have written thousands of articles.

A lot of folks are skeptical about article marketing , but no matter which camp you belong to, you should know that EzineArticles has worked well in the past and still works great for affiliate offers. If you don’t believe me, just check the front-page and click on the articles to find out about products that people are promoting. Do you believe people would be using EzineArticles if it wasn’t working? Nobody likes to waste time, and as long as you play your cards right on EzineArticles, you won’t be either. I would love to tell you that the more articles you write, the more traffic you get, but in reality you are going to get more traffic for less articles as long as you pay attention to the details. That’s what sets apart people who are making lots of money on EzineArticles than those who are slaving themselves for free.

What Should I Do: Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

I have talked in the past how important it is for new affiliate marketers to get the basics down. Affiliate marketing is a fun busines, but it can be hard breaking for a lot of us. If you your basics, you can always go back to them and come up with profitable campaigns. But if you have no idea what you are doing and are just throwing darts in the dark, there is a real good chance you are going to keep missing.

New affiliate marketers have a lot to deal with. It’s not just about finding the right niche or creating a keyword list. You are going to have to make tough business decisions. How are you going to handle your hosting? How are you going to raise funds? What’s your plan B? What’s your plan A? These are just a few questions that you should consider beforing dreaming about ways to spend your millions.

Here are what I call the basics of affiliate marketing:

• Know the nature of this business: don’t expect to make hundreds of dollars on a daily basis from the same day you get started. You may achieve it but the odds are not too high.
• Treat your affiliate business as as business: a lot of affiliate marketers are guilty of treating their affiliate business as hobby. Don’t fall into that trap. Hobbies don’t often put money on the table.
• Have a plan and stick to it!: every business needs a business plan. It doesn’t need to be 400 pages with all those forecast numbers. But you’ve got to have something to go back to.
• Be a student of the game: don’t be an I-know-it-all person. Nobody knows everything. I don’t care how good you are. You’ve got to keep learning and evolving.
• Know your priorities: there is a time to play games and there is time to do business. Don’t forget what puts money on the table.
• Be rational: don’t make rash decisions just when something goes wrong. Quitters don’t win.
• Be irrational: don’t give up too easily. Don’t do exactly what others are doing. Be innovative. Think out-side-the-box.
• Make sound investments: affiliates are often guilty of buying too many e-books and training courses. Find a couple of good ones and try them out. Don’t spend thousands of dollars on pricey conferences.
• Have focus: don’t take on too many products. Think linear. I am not suggesting you should put all your eggs in one basket but at the same time don’t focus on too many products.
• Take time off: it’s not healthy to spend 15 hours in front of a computer everyday. Take time off. Reward yourself. Take breaks. Eat and exercise well.
• Network: who you know can be the difference between your succeeding or failing in this business. Take time to network with fellow marketers. What do you have to lose?

These are what I like to call the basics of affiliate marketing. There are a few other things you need to keep in mind but in essence as long as you know what you are dealing with, you are not setting yourself up for a nasty surprise. Affiliate marketing is a tough business. But freedom to do what you love is well worth it.

Not All Affiliate Niches are the Same

Niche marketing is a big part of affiliate marketing business these days. Unless you are able to find a hot super niche that you can sell too, you are going to have to be content with going against 800 pound guerrillas in more general niches, and that is not something I recommend. It’s true that the barriers of entry are much lower in the affiliate marketing world, but they are still there, and the early movers still have a significant edge over the rest of us. So, choosing the right super niche can go along way of achieving your affiliate dreams.

But not all niches are created equal. You have to do your due diligence before entering any market. There is such a thing as “what the heck did I just get myself into” in the affiliate business. I remember when I started a credit card site a while back. I was positive that I was going to make lots of money with my site. But what I did not take into account was the pain of dealing with credit card companies. These guys want you to display a certain copy, and the offers change so many times a year that running a big credit card portal can be a hassle. In the end, I decided the hassle was not worth the money.

Believe me when I say there are hundreds of similar niches out there. Not all of them are going to pose the sme challenge, but it is important to understand the challenges that you will face in a market you are trying to enter. When I was in business school, folks talked about some nonsense called SWAT and Porter’s 5 forces analysis. Well, it turned out that stuff wasn’t nonsense after all. Understanding a niche requires similar analyses. You should always try to break down the challenges and opportunities in each niche you are going for and try to figure out if it’s all worth it. Sometimes, the costs associated with entering a market outweigh the opportunities available by a long margin. If that is the case, you should probably pass on that market. But unless you do your research, you wouldn’t know that, now would you?

Have you had an encounter with a niche from hell? What was the primary challenge associated with running a business in that niche?

The Concept of Fool’s Gold In Affiliate Marketing World

You may heard this too: “The Instant road to affiliate millions” or “how to make $1000 in on hour.” Anyone who has been in this business has probably had the pleasure of seeing or even buying these training courses. For folks who are not familiar with the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, this business looks like the dream come true for the lazy folks. Con artists keep talking about how you can make millions of dollars by reading an ebook. That’s how they sell stuff. That’s how they con folks.

Any reasonable person realizes that you can’t make a million by reading an ebook and slapping a website on the Web, hoping to make $100,000+ a month. But think about it. How many Amazon products do you have to sell to make that kind of money? Even if you own your product (selling it for $40 a pop), you are going to have to sell 25,000 copies to get to that $1m mark. Now that’s actually easier to do, but can’t be done in 2 seconds. Let me rephrase that. It can be done (folks like John Reese do it all the time), but you can’t get into this business and start making a million.

Do you believe John Reese started making millions by reading ebooks? Guys like that have been in this business for as long as some of us have been alive, and they have found the success blueprint and have mastered it. That kind of know-how is a distinct capability that can’t be duplicated in seconds.

At the end of the day, you should know what to expect before getting into this business. Affiliate marketing folks is not a lazy man’s job. There will be tough days. There will be days that you’ll be bored to death by your daily tasks. There will be days that you won’t make any money, and you still have to go at it full force. What affiliate marketing is not is a smooth ride to the millionaire country. If you set your expectations right level, you will be better prepared to deal with the surprises and headaches of this business. Is making a million with affiliate marketing possible? Yes. Can anyone do it? Absolutely not. Not everyone’s going to get there, but for those who have, life can’t be sweeter.

The Truth About Info Affiliate Products

I am often asked about the effectiveness and value of some of the info products that folks can find on ClickBank or over the net. If you read the sales letter of some of these products, you may come to believe that you are going to learn how to make a million dollars by paying $29, $49, or $79 for an digital affiliate training product. But here is my advice to you. Try it but don’t hope for the skies.

Don’t put too much hope in learning much from affiliate training product out there as no one is going to teach you the exact way they are making money. These guys are all great marketers. They give you hope and they use your aspirations and ambitions to sell you their products. But at the end of the day, no super affiliate will teach you the exacty methods he/she uses to make a killing.

Besides, reading books is not going to make you a millionaire. Being practical actually pays here. You are actually better of by using KeywordSpy of Affilite Elite to figure out who is marketing what and how. You can also find out a lot about other affiliates in your niche by using Google search. If someone is advertising on Google, either they are making lots of money or they are burning lots of money. Either way, it helps to see what they are doing.

So here is the deal. Instead of spending your hard-earned money on digital products, invest them to acquire tools that can give you competitive advantage over your rivals. If you have an $80 extra to spend, use it to get a subscription to WordTracker, SpyFu, or Wordze. You get more value from these tools than you ever will from digital “make a million in 20 minutes with affiliate marketing” books.