Let’s face it. Not every affiliate has the technical & marketing knowledge to develop highly sophisticated affiliate campaigns. Some of the tactics used by newbie affiliates is sound and can serve as a stepping stone to build a highly sophisticated affiliate business in future. Spamming blogs is not one of those tactics. Blog spamming has been around for quite some time. Many aggressive marketers used it a few years ago to gain yes-follow links from other sites and push the products they were promoting on other sites. These days, the practice has become silly.

You don’t have to have a super popular blog to start getting those spam messages. Some of them are actually very sophisticated while others are easy to figure out. When someone uses the term “Poker Affiliate” as user-name to comment on a site, it’s clearly obvious what they are doing. Sometimes, spammers go beyond that and make it a bit more difficult to realize what they are doing. Comments that don’t read like an automated message are harder to figure out.

Does comment spamming work? I have seen many sophisticated bloggers actually let these comments through. The fact is, many top bloggers don’t have the time to go through each comment to figure out whether people are trying to spam their websites. If one can get enough clicks to their links on those popular sites, they may pull off a sale or two. But this is not the way to build a long-term business. It’s short-term at best. There are plenty of legit ways to make money online. It’s too sad some people prefer trying sneaky things instead of building their business.

Many new affiliate marketers assume that the only way to make some money online is by pushing ClickBank products or starting a blog about the product they intend to sell. Those tactics can work. But there are better ways to make money online from affiliate product. One cool way to do it is by giving away a very useful tool and ask people to support you for your work through your affiliate links.

These days, if you know coding or know someone who can bring your ideas to life, the sky’s the limit. Take WordPress for instance. There are millions of people who are using it as their main platform. Creating a killer free plugin for WordPress can put your work in front of a lot of WordPress users. If your plugin is good enough, people will have no trouble supporting your work.

The best way to approach this is by identifying a need that is not being satisfied by all the plugins that are available for WordPress. Or you can just focus on a very new services that do not have any plugins written for them. In order to succeed with this strategy, you are going to create a high quality plugin, so don’t even think about cutting corners.

Once you have developed your plugin, you can add your affiliate information to your plugin page. Since that’s the page that most people will visit every once in a while, you have a good chance of getting some action from that page. Keep in mind that this is not the only tactic you should use to make money online. But if your plugin is a hit, you are going to get some good action on your affiliate links.

If you have been around the Internet marketing world for a while, you have probably seen all these “gurus” who claim they are making this much or that much money from Google only. Some of these guys claim they are making 6 or 7 figure incomes from Google alone. As someone who has made 6 figure income from Google, I can tell you that it’s certainly possible to pull that off. But it’s not easy and may not last for too long.

It was just a couple of years ago that I cleared over $60K in earnings in one month just from Google. Our team had the right strategy and implemented it at the right time. We are talking about organic search here only. If you can get your affiliate website to rank high for those general and specific keywords, there is no reason you can’t make a decent chuck of cash. But here is the caveat. There are multiple ways Google can screw with you and your business. For starters, the company is constantly making tweaks to its algorithm. So while you may show up on the top of the rankings one day, don’t be surprised to get moved all the way down the rankings the next day.

Is it possible to make lots of money just from Google without spending a lot of money on advertising? It’s actually possible. But it’s going to take a whole lot of time to achieve that. So the less money you spend on advertising, the more time and effort you will need to spend on guerrilla marketing and organic strategies to build your affiliate business. Unlike advertising, you are not going to be in absolute control of how Google and other search engines treat your web pages. So even if you get to the top of the SERPs, you are still going to be susceptible to changes and Google slaps.

I am not suggesting that you should not spend time on SEO and the organic search channel. At the same time, you should not put all your eggs in one basket. Even if you make a 6 figure income for a month or two, you can never relax. That’s what’s fun about internet marketing. You never know when Google has a surprise for you.

Internet tax is coming whether you like it or not. We hear all these stories about states that have defeated the legislation in the past. Affiliates in those states seem to feel too confident about the prospects of doing business in those states. Let’s face it. As an affiliate, myself, I do want the industry to grow and internet regulation to stay at a minimum. But many states are struggling with their budgets, and it’s only a matter of time before the government starts going after the Internet. Internet regulation has been delayed but not avoided. Take Philadelphia for instance. We have had budget crisis for a while now. Every few years we hear about the local government’s plans to add a “trash collection” fee to our tabs. Every few years we defeat it or delay it. But it keeps coming up again and again.

Shareasale, CJ, and other top affiliate networks have done a wonderful job informing their affiliates and help protect them against these internet taxes. But if a state wants to pass the tax, it is going to do it. What an easier way to balance the budget than putting tax on internet sales. And the way our states are struggling to make their ends meet, we may not be too far away from a comprehensive internet legislation that will drive many affiliates out of business.

We have already seen what could happen when states decide to tax internet sales. Amazon has already dropped affiliates in a few of those states. Colorado was one of those states. Of course, some affiliate networks stand by their affiliates (e.g. ClickBank), but when the next tax legislation comes into play, you can expect affiliate networks to reduce your commissions or drop your altogether. It won’t be anything personal but more of a business decision. Affiliate companies are not going to incur a loss just because you have been a somewhat productive affiliate.

As an affiliate you don’t have time to be scared or even worry about such tax. Your goal should be to be prepared for when things get worse. That’s why you should work towards a bigger goal than just making affiliate checks each and every month. Most top affiliates have their own products. That should be your goal if you plan to stay in this business for long. Having your own product not only gives you the ability to have more control over how much money you make, it also allows you to participate with joint ventures with other top product makers. You can always offer your product as a bonus to those who use your affiliate link to purchase products.

It’s too easy to get stressed out about all these laws and affiliate marketing issues. At the end of the day, you need to plan for the worst and be prepared just in case your world is turned upside down. The internet tax is coming so you may as well get ready for it.

Just like anything in marketing, there are multiple ways to look at Twitter and how one can take advantage of it to make more money online. Twitter marketing is nothing new. People have been taking advantage of Twitter to generate leads and make money from affiliate products for months now. Of course, just like anything else, you don’t hear about top Twitter marketing tactics until they are old. That’s really how marketing training courses have worked in the past, and this continues to be the case.

I would also blame fake Internet marketers that make a living on teaching people who to spam Twitter and make money that way. Don’t get me wrong. It IS possible to spam Twitter and make money for a short period of time. But sooner rather than later, you are going to get caught and all your efforts go to waste.

The tactics that fake Internet marketers are teaching these days involve opening up multiple Twitter accounts, setting up robots, and spamming the heck out of Twitter. That’s not marketing. That’s spamming and harassing others on Twitter. Of course, black hat marketers don’t mind teaching others how to spam on these sites. The funny thing is, they don’t teach you how they make money online. But these people take your money and throw you to wolves. So newbies end up spamming and getting caught for their trouble.

Real Twitter marketing is all about connecting with your leads, providing them with value, and building trust with them. It will take time to achieve all that, but if you are looking to build a long term business, there are no short-cuts. And anybody that tell you it is has some other agenda.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, there are two ways to go about making money online. One way is to just follow what you have read in every book and go about promoting offers without looking at trends, seasons, and so on. You find a Clickbank product and promote it using Google Adwords and other top advertising services online. You could even build your own landing pages and optimize your conversions over time. The better way is to take advantage of the latest trends all around you to start and develop laser targeted campaigns for your prospects.

By watching the latest trends and analyzing the information you can get from Google Trends and Google Insights, you can do a better job finding products to promote and optimizing your campaigns. Think about it. Let’s say you are planning to start selling Amazon or eBay products. People are more likely to buy a heater during fall and winter thn a cooler or a lawn mower. These are simple concepts, but there are affiliates that don’t pay attention to them. If you have build a portal based on products from Amazon and eBay, you are better off putting the emphasis on promoting winter products during fall and winter than other seasons. That’s why top affiliates do make small changes to their portals to optimize for different periods of the year.

Black Friday and other holiday sales events are going to be upon us soon. Smart affiliates have already set their plans into motion to have a very successful sales season this year. Many have created and optimized their Black Friday communities. While others are focusing more on niche deals. Whatever the case, it’s good to know about the trends, seasons, and special occasions and plan your affiliate campaigns accordingly. This is not rocket science. It’s just marketing 101.  And with tools such as Google Insights, you won’t have to jump through the hoops to get your hands on the information you need to optimize your campaigns.

You don’t have to be a genius to realize that there is just too much value in the social media for affiliates not be involved in it. Web services such as Twitter and Facebook have enabled many marketers to come up with more innovative campaigns to make money online from affiliate products. But there is a right way and wrong way about making money online. There are plenty of Black Hat affiliates who use software automation to force their offers on Twitter and Facebook users. Let’s say you want to talk about web hosting on Twitter. You are likely to get a whole lot of messages pitching you web hosting services. Now that wouldn’t be an issue if a person was behind those messages. But in most cases, it’s a computer that is doing it. You can tell as these messages are always identical to each other.

If you have been on Twitter or Facebook for a while, there is a good chance you have gotten the above message. There are plenty of web hosting affiliates who are doing the same exact thing process using scripts that are available online. That’s not exactly how you should go about building your business with the social media.

It’s nice to have lots of friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. But unless you have their trust, you are not going to get the value you are looking for out of them. There are a lot of people who follow you so you follow them. That doesn’t mean they actually pay attention to what you have to say. Many of these people use Twitter friend adder solutions such as TweetAdder. There is nothing wrong with adding friends to your account. Just make sure you take time to build credibility with them.

Facebook and Twitter require you to have different strategies to succeed. There are plenty of tools that you can use to build your followers up and communicate with them more effectively. But spamming Twitter and Facebook users is the easiest way to get de-friended, blocked, or banned. And besides, if you know anything about marketing, you know you can’t build a real business by playing roulette with your social media accounts. People may fall for your Black Hat tactics once in a while, but sooner or later you’ll get exposed for your tactics. Once you have lost your credibility, it’ll be very difficult to get it back.

If you are an experienced affiliate or just have been around for a while to test your own campaigns and optimize your own landing pages, you are familiar with how the game works. A lot of people assume that super affiliates keep making thousands of dollars each day. In reality, there are days that you can throw hundreds of dollars at your campaign without getting any real results. Depending on your niche, you may have some days that you have too much success and some other days that are losing money on your campaigns. Seasonality and cycles are a part of affiliate marketing business. Those who are new to the game are more likely to give up on their business after losing a few bucks. But those who have been around and experienced things will stick around and supplement their income with other streams of income.

Just because you are good at affiliate marketing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore other avenues to make money online. Many affiliate superstars have made a lot of money from blogging, and you can too. Let’s say your affiliate business is about anti-spam software. You have created a landing page comparing anti-spam software packages, and you are driving traffic to it from the social media, Google Adwords, your articles, and so on. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a blog about anti-spam software and dedicating a post per anti-spam software package?

Top affiliate marketers often create a blog about their experiences and share with others their own experiences with Google Adwords, Twitter, and … ShoeMoney is one of the folks who has made a ton of money from his blogs and other online real estate. I am sure he has made a fortune from affiliate marketing as well, but you can’t just rely on affiliate marketing to make money online, especially if you want to be a big shot in this business. Getting started with blogging may be a bit difficult for people who haven’t done it before. You need to be knowledgeable about what you talk about on your blog. You’ll also need to keep things simple and know your audience if you want to connect with them. And let’s not forget that your blog shouldn’t be full of call to action to sell things to people. You want to provide real value on your blog to gain your visitors trust and make them want to take you up on your recommendations and purchase on your landing pages.

At the end of the day, you should put all your eggs in one basket. By blogging for 30 minutes a day, you can not only provide more value to your leads, you can gain their trust and increase your conversion rates. Besides, you can always monetize your traffic with Google Adsense and Chitika ads. If you put a real effort into making your blog a success, you’d be surprised with how much money you can earn just from blogging. And it won’t depend too much on your Google ads either. A great way to diversify.

Affiliate marketers live and die by traffic. It’s really that simple. You can have the best site around and promote the best products on the market, but if you are not driving enough traffic to your landing pages, you are not going to earn enough commissions to stay in business. You can always use advanced pay per click marketing techniques to drive lots of traffic to your website, but that’s going to cost you money. You can always hedge your bets by focusing on a multi-channel strategy to drive traffic to your website and manage your cost per actions and EPC in the process. That’s where article marketing comes in. It’s one of the oldest methods to drive traffic to any website.

Article marketing is especially popular among affiliate marketers as it allows them to not only get targeted traffic from article networks, but it also helps them gain backlinks and get more free traffic from Google and other search engines. Article marketing has changed a lot in the past few years. With the introduction of blogs and blog networks, your articles can show up on more websites, and you can get more from each and every article (as long as they are high quality and contain valuable information). MyArticleNetwork is a cool article marketing service that lets you share your content on their blog network, without you having to wait for webmasters to pick up your articles. See the difference? Unlike EzineArticles, where you submit your articles and have to wait for others to pick your articles up, with MyArticleNetwork, all you have to do is submit your articles and wait for the network to distribute them.

Submitting an article to MyArticleNetwork is very easy. All you have to do is pick a category and the time that you want it to go live. You can then copy/past your articles and you are set. Keep in mind that you can include links inside the body of your articles. So you are going to get the full benefit of your links as they are posted on other blogs.

You’ve got to appreciate the useful tools that are included with this service as well. You can use the article spinner service provided to make your articles unique and avoid duplicate content issues. You can also track the progress of your articles overtime and find out how many times they have been posted and how many backlinks you have gotten from each article. Essentially, MyArticleNetwork is EzineArticles on steroids. You get to distribute your articles on other blogs but you don’t have the restrictions that you do with EzineArticles.

MyArticleNetwork is a premium service and will cost you a bit. But you do save a lot of time and effort in the process. Think of it as outsourcing your article distribution and promotion processes. If you are looking to incorporate article marketing into your affiliate plans, MyArticleNetwork is a good place to start.

A lot of affiliates are good at copying what others are doing to make money online. Affiliate marketing is a tough business, and what a better way than following the leaders and piggybacking on what they have done. There is nothing wrong with that. A lot of top online marketers you do that, and even they do it in their own business. But what you don’t want to be in the affiliate marketing world is a pure follower. There is a right way and wrong way to piggyback. If you are just borrowing other people’s strategy and just cloning their business strategies, you may see some short-term results, but you are not going to succeed on a long term basis. The person who’s concocted the strategy that you are borrowing is always going to have an edge over you as they know exactly where to take their business whereas you are just following.

Top affiliate marketers usually analyze other folks’ strategy and try to absorb the strengths and get rid of the weaknesses. Then they add their own innovations to make even more money online. You can be a follower, and there is nothing wrong with that. But you don’t have to follow someone all the way to the bank. You can always take a short-cut along the way or find better ways to proceed. Top marketers do a little bit of both. They have the luxury of knowing other top marketers. These folks are super networkers, so when they borrow strategies from others, they do so from the cream of the crop. Even then, a lot of these folks take time to analyze what they are borrowing and how they can improve upon it.

Top affiliate marketers also understand that there is more money in developing their own products than actually promoting what other people have made. When you are promoting other people’s products, you are only settling for a small percentage of the revenue. You can always promote ClickBank, and there is a lot of money to be earned there, but I personally prefer working on a real business strategy than looking for new ClickBank products to promote each and every week. ClickBank and other info products could be a part of your overall strategy but shouldn’t be the only thing you focus on. You can always try to sell your own info product to find out what it takes to develop and launch a product.

At the end of the day, you want to think outside the box and come up with your very own strategies to promote products and take your business to the next level. Affiliate marketing is not the be all end all when it comes to making money online. I’d like to think it as a training ground for folks who want to own their own products and grow their companies on a consistent basis. The commission checks can be great, but it’s much tougher to make it as a millionaire as a pure affiliate marketer than it is by having your own products and services. If you don’t like risking too much, you can’t expect high rewards, now can you?