Let’s face it. We have all used photos that we have not taken on our blogs and affiliate portals in the past. There is nothing wrong with using photos that are licensed to be used freely. But the majority of photos you find online are not. If you use a photo you don’t have the right to on your affiliate portal, you could be taking on serious amount of risk for your business. Here are 4 tips you should pay attention to when using photos on your website:

• do your research: before adding a photo to your website, you should do your research and find out about its license. Don’t just assume that a photo you can find on Google is available to be used freely on your site. Some photographers require you to link back to them for the right to use their photos. So you need to pay attention.
• give credit: always give credit when using someone else’s photo. Even if you make mistake, it always looks better when you have given credit back. Besides, it is only fair to let the word know who is responsible for the photos and images you are showing on your website.
• ask permission if in doubt: not sure whether you are allowed to use a photo? Instead of assuming what you can do with an image, you should try asking permission from the photographers whose work you are interested in using.
• rely on your own photos: know how to take your own photos? Maybe you can hire someone to do the job for you. If you can afford it, there is no reason not to go in that route .

Photographers are pretty sensitive about people using their works without permission. You can save yourself a whole lot of trouble by following some of the above tips.

In the post Panda world, all bets are off. There was a time that sites could achieve high rankings by getting listed in online directories. Online directories have not been decisive factors for search engine rankings for a while now. But even the little effect that they had was pretty useful for new sites that wanted to get the best start in the SERPs. Google’s Panda update has changed many things. But it has not totally killed off directories.

Affiliates who want to improve their site’s rankings need to do even more research on the directories they submit their sites too. Google has been clear about what it looks for in sites after its Panda update. Sites that look spammy are a no no. Google values sites that people would not mind sharing their credit card information with. Before adding your site to all kinds of paid directories, you want to do your research and find out about their reputation. You also do not want to gain too many links in a short period of time as it could raise a flag.

Link building is still very important in the post-Panda world. You just want to get the links from the right places.

Affiliate marketing is just like any other business. In order to build your small business into something special, you are going to need to work on it on a consistent basis. Newbie affiliates do make the mistake of relaxing as soon as they achieve some level of success. That could come back to haunt them and their business over the long run. Here are 5 ways to avoid those scenarios:

• Build content: no matter how many articles you have written for your affiliate projects, there is no way you should have enough articles to stop. There are always new products to talk about and new angles to tackle. Don’t forget that social media and search engines both reward fresh content. A lot of affiliates create a lot of content up front and then cruise for a few months. The better approach would be to continue adding new content to your site on a consistent basis to stay ahead.
• Try new channels: YouTube, social media sites, and local networks can all provide you with new ways to get the most out of your affiliate campaigns. Getting started with video or local sites may sound difficult on paper. In a matter of few years, everybody will be doing it though.
• Don’t forget SEO: many assume that SEO will be dead in 2011. That can’t be further from the truth. The game of SEO will change. Search engines may add new factors to their algorithm. But they are not going to get rid of their systems altogether. Keeping up with top SEO blogs should give you more ideas to keep your website optimized for the search engines.
• Test new products: even if you are promoting the most successful product in the world, there will be a time when your earnings will start to drop. If you do not have a backup plan, you could end up losing your business over the long run. Trying new products on a consistent basis can help you stay afloat when your top products are underperforming.
• Get rid of dead weight: many affiliates get too attached to their once successful products. While it is OK to give a product that has been successful in the past a chance, you don’t want to burn everything you have on it. By testing products against each other, you can figure out which ones are worth your time going forward. Don’t spend all your time and effort to get a product that is slowing down in sales to perform for your business. There are better ways to get the most out of your time.

As you can see, running a viable affiliate business is more than just sitting on the beach and enjoying the sun. Those who stay on it and push themselves have a better chance to make it big time.

Clickbank is one of the best affiliate networks around. The majority of products in this network are informational products. The commission for such products are much higher. Most newbie affiliates promote these products through pay per click and reviews on their websites. Those tactics can pay off but it never hurts to pit Clickbank ads against Adsense (or other types of ads) to see how they perform. You want your Clickbank ads to be as relevant to your website’s theme as possible. That’s what WP ClickBank Ad Display WordPress plugin offers.

ClickBank Ad Display is an easy to use plugin that lets you enter your Clickbank information and keywords you want to target on your website. You are also in control of the size of your ads.Of course, Clickbank is a tad bit different from Adsense considering that you get paid only when someone makes a purchase.

You will have to figure out your effective EPC and put it against your Adsense earnings to see which type of ad is performing the best on your site. But thanks to this plugin, you will save time doing it. More customization options would be nice though.

The best way to get started as an affiliate marketer is by studying what others have done and try to learn from them. Many newbies make the mistake of exactly cloning everything others are doing. That may work in the short term, but that is not how to build a business in the long term. Spying on other affiliates can help you identify new products, find out about new potential partners, and figure out tools that can help you take your business to the next level.

Here are just 5 things you can learn by spying on other affiliates:

• what are their affiliate promotions: new affiliates sometimes struggle to find new products to promote on their websites. By looking at what others are doing on their sites, newbies can figure out how they can expand their business and who they can work with to make more money online.
• what ads are converting for them: top affiliates do not leave ads on their website that do not perform. If an ad is showing up on their site for a few months, there has to be a good reason for that. You want to make sure your distinguish between affiliate, sponsor, and direct ads. That way, you can get a better sense of what is working for your competitors.
• find out their tools: the tools used by your affiliate competitors may not work for you. But it never hurts to be aware of them. Sites such as BuiltWith.com can tell you a lot about a website and the technologies used on it. You should also lookout for plugins, social tools, and analytics software packages use by your competitors.
• identify good website designers: see an affiliate portal that you like? Many affiliate marketers link back to their site’s designer. That’s your chance to identify top designers you can work with to create your killer affiliate portal. Some of these designers won’t be cheap, but it’s always good to have a list of them handy.
• analyze your competitor’s affiliate campaigns: by spying on your competitors, you can figure out some of the things they are doing to make money online. Don’t forget to search Google for their affiliate ID to see how they are promoting their affiliate offers. As long as you are willing to put some time in researching, the sky’s the limit.

Spying on others is fair game in the affiliate marketing business. Almost all top affiliates pay attention to what their competitors are doing. There is no reason you should sit in the sidelines.

We have all been there before. You pick up a product that is very popular and is performing very well according affiliate networks but fails to generate good enough results for your business. Sometimes, you can blame that on inaccurate information provided to you by your affiliate partner. But that is not always the case. In most cases, there are things you can do to improve your affiliate campaigns before dropping them. Here are 5 ways how:

• Reach out to affiliate manager: starting an affiliate business is not about putting yourself in a room and just building websites (or promoting offers). There is a lot of value to reaching out to your affiliate manager to find out about ways you can improve your campaigns. How much value you get out of your conversation with your affiliate manager depends on how much are you willing to listen and whether there is someone decent on the other side. In most cases, affiliate managers want to help you become more successful. There is no reason not too. You’ll never know if you don’t reach out.
• Ask for latest creative: relying on creative and banners offered through affiliate networks can slow down your testing process. Not all affiliate programs have the time to upload their new banners to their networks as they come up with them. Never hesitate to ask for specific banners if you want to test your partner’s offers more effectively.
• Spy on other players: you want to learn how others are making money from the same product you intend to sell? See what they are doing on Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Tools such as SpyFu can give you a wealth off information on how to promote certain products.
• Test different offers: don’t just put a bunch of banners on your website and hope for the best. Test different offers. Let’s say you are working with a cell phone company. Don’t just promote their most popular phone. Test different things out and make decisions accordingly.
• Pounce on opportunities: merchants often send limited time coupons and promotions to their affiliates. Just get those offers out before it’s too late. Experienced affiliates have mastered this art. At first, you may make some mistakes pushing offers you get right-away. But once you do this enough times, you’ll learn how you can take advantage of these offers before it is too late.

Starting and building a successful affiliate business takes work. But make sure you use all the resources made available to you by your partners before dropping your under-performing campaigns.

We all hate spam e-mails, comments, and everything in between. Nobody likes dealing with nonsense and garbage when trying to do work. But website spammers can give you a few ideas about markets you can enter and try to dominate. Bloggers are well familiar with spam comments. Anyone who has a blog has gotten those automated comments. Many of us tend to discard those spam comments without even looking at them. But sometimes, it does help to see where these guys are linking to.

Here are just a few comments that I have received on this blog. Some of them may sound harmless but just take a look at the products some of these guys are pushing. HDMI Cables may not sound like a lucrative market to you, but those cables are very affordable, meaning that you can sell more of them and generate more hits for your merchants.

Plenty of affiliates push work from home products online. In these tough economic times, people would do anything to be able to make money from the comfort of their home. Language products could also be pretty popular (as you can see in the below picture).

Spammers may be the lowest of lows in the marketing world, but they can actually help you find new niches to target. I do not recommend using the same approach these folks are using. But if you are out of ideas about the new markets you want to enter, spammers could help you do just that.

Credit: stock.xchng

When you start an affiliate business, you may want to do everything yourself to save money and learn a few new things. There is nothing wrong about learning every aspect of the affiliate business. You just don’t want to do it in the long term. If you look at all the top affiliates who have made it, they rarely do the basic things themselves. They spend most of their time focusing on their core activities and developing strategies for their business. Doing everything yourself may save you a bit of money in the short-term, but it’ll come back to bite you in the long run.

Here are just 5 reasons why you should not do everything yourself:

• You won’t have the time: unfortunately, there are only 24 hours each day. Even if you work 24 hours each day, you won’t be able to get everything done yourself. Hiring virtual assistants and outsourcing parts of your business can help you pull off more everyday that you ever could all by yourself.
• You can’t be good at everything: there is a difference between knowing something and being very good at it. Lots of people know SEO. Not everyone can be considered very good at it. Trying to be perfect in everything is only going to take away from your business.
• Focus on core activities:  everything that is not core to your business needs to be outsourced. It’s as simple as that. As a business owner, you want to spend your time on more important activities of your business. Your virtual assistant or outsourcing partner can do the rest.
• Focus on growing your business: if you are spending time learning things that you shouldn’t be learning (things that can be outsourced), then you won’t have time to find ways to grow your business. You may have a great affiliate business now. If you don’t innovate, it will disappear on you quick.
• Spending money is not such a bad thing: many affiliates are terrified of spending money. They don’t want to spend money on a better web hosts or multiple domain names. In a perfect world, you’d be making money without spending money on anything. In the real world, that attitude holds you back.

Even if you find the time to do everything yourself, that is only going to kill your business in the long run. No successful affiliate does everything him/herself.

You don’t have to look hard to find people who are supposedly selling the secrets to a hidden fortune. A fortune that they have been tapping into while everyone else’s been just doing things the wrong way. It’s funny how not a lot of people pause for a minute to think about how these folks make money. They may not make all their revenue from selling these products, but these gurus would not be doing it if they were not making a decent amount of profit.

I would not say that these products are all useless. But if you keep going through them without taking any action, you are wasting your time. Affiliate marketing is not about how much more your know in comparison to others. It’s about taking action. Here are 5 reasons why I do not recommend most affiliate training products:

• Practice makes perfect: you can read thousands of books on affiliate marketing. That still does not make you a decent affiliate marketer. Unless you are practicing what you are learning, you are wasting your time. Not every issue is covered in those books, so getting your feet wet in this business can be pretty eye opening.
• No need to go through rehashed content: a lot of these gurus have made a living out of rehashing their old content and repackaging them to sell them for more profit. That means you won’t be getting a good bang for your buck if you keep buying these courses.
• Most courses are a waste of money: the majority of courses on the market are a waste of time and money. They do not teach you anything more than you can learn from a book and cost a whole bunch more. These gurus are great marketers, but that does not mean they have the greatest products.
• Beware of misleading tactics: I remember purchasing a course on how to master Google Adwords a few years ago. It was full of hacks and tricks that could get you banned on Google and kill your business. I was an experienced affiliate at the time, so I was familiar with some of those tactics. But some who weren’t probably got in trouble for using those tactics (e.g. cookie stuffing, …)
• You got to start somewhere: indecisiveness can kill your business. You are not going to get anything done if you are constantly reading or tweeting each day. You got to have a goal and stick with it. It’s as simple as that.

There are a few good training courses out there. With that said, you don’t want to keep picking training courses up and not take action in the process. To be successful in affiliate marketing, you need practice not theory.

Affiliate marketing can be very lucrative, but from time to time you may find yourself struggling to grab the money you have earned from your affiliate partner. If you happen to deal with networks such as CJ and LinkShare, you have more leverage to put pressure on your partner. Unfortunately, that is not the case if you are a part of one of those smaller networks. A lot of times, those smaller networks only cover software issues and give your affiliate partner the final say on payments. That can be dangerous if your partner turns out to be a greedy business that’s willing to rob its affiliates out of their commissions.

Trying to get your commission from your affiliate partner can be difficult if you don’t have too much leverage. Once a company decides to go rogue and steal from its affiliates, then all rules are out of the window. That is actually very rare. Most companies that I have personally had issues with have not been rogue. Sometimes there are misunderstandings. It is essential for all affiliates to try their best to reach out their merchants before doing something drastic.

Here are 5 ways I would try to get my commission from my merchants:

• Contact and ask for explanation: mistakes happen. Assuming the worst is not going to help anyone. Affiliates should never do anything drastic without trying to contact their partner. Most ethical merchants will try to work with you and provide you with an explanation why your commission check has been held. Of course, from time to time, you may end up with a non-responsive partner.
• Do not sound desperate: acting desperate and begging for your commission check is not going to help. Staying professional is the way to go with dealing with a rogue partner. If they don’t respond to you, contact them again. Just don’t write graphic e-mails as that won’t solve anything.
• Search the Web for other forms of communication: affiliate partners that ignore their affiliates’ emails are very problematic. Sometimes, your e-mail could be filtered by your partners’ filters. So try to figure out if there is any other way you can communicate with your partner. Don’t assume the worst without trying other ways to reach out to your partner.
• Don’t burn your bridges unless you have to: don’t burn bridges with a partner if you disagree on one or two payments. I have had issues with many major affiliate programs in the past. Minor problems I can live with. As long as your partner is willing to communicate with you and try to work with you, there is no reason to burn your bridges with them.
• Use your channels to your advantage: if all has failed, you can use your social media presence and forums to put pressure on a non-paying affiliate partner. This is not an ideal solution, but if your partner does not respond to your e-mails, then you’ve got no choice (especially if we are talking about a significant amount of commission). Try to reach out to your partners on Twitter or Facebook if they are there. If they still don’t respond, it may be time to make your episode public. Not the best solution out there, but there is no harm in letting other affiliates know about your rogue merchant (staying professional here is a must).

There is no right way to deal with rogue affiliate programs. Every situation is different. What you don’t want to do as an affiliate is getting into a name calling contest with someone. Thankfully, there are not too many of these affiliate programs around. Doing your research before partnering up with someone can reduce the chances of you having to deal with this issue.