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…)

Twitter Marketing Or Spamming?

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. (more…)

Should You Use Adsense Next To Your Affiliate Offers?

Google Adsense is an easy way to make a few bucks here or there. If you happen to have the right strategy going with your affiliate portal, you may actually be able to make a decent amount of money per month and make a living off of Google. At first, publishers and bloggers were the ones using Google Adsense to monetize their work. But recently affiliate marketers and product makers have also added Adsense to their landing pages. After all, if you are not going to get a conversion from your visitors, you may as well get paid for them to leave, right?

The issue of Adsense on affiliate landing pages is very controversial. As an affiliate, your goal is to drive traffic to your landing pages and optimize them in a way that helps your bottom line. If you are driving paid traffic to your website, the last thing you want is give your visitors an easy way to get out of your website. Google Adsense ads are a big exit sign. There is return mechanism to get back the visitors who have clicked on your ads. So you are at their mercy. In most cases, these people don’t come back to your website.

Many super affiliates who are using their own sales-letters to make money online are using their Google Adsense units at the very end of their newsletters. That is an interesting practice, as you give your visitors enough chance to take advantage of your offer. But in case they have read the whole newsletter and still are not ready to take you upon your offer, you may as well make a buck or two when they leave. The more controversial practice is using sidebar Adsense units and putting ads in a prominent position on your website. Can that possibly work?

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3 Killer Affiliate Keyword Research Tools You Must Try

If you have been involved in the affiliate marketing industry for a while, you know the importance of choosing the right keywords to target your prospects. Not all keyword phrases are created equal. Some are capable of making you a lot of money, while there are others that could cause you a big headache and baffle you on their performance. What sets apart top affiliates from rest is not only just the strategies used but also the affiliate tools and how they are used to develop more optimized campaigns. A lot of newbie affiliates use those free tools on the market to set up their affiliate campaigns. That may work for a while, but if you intend to build a real business around your affiliate efforts, you are going to spend money to earn money.

There are plenty of tools that you can choose from to get your keyword research done properly. Affiliates have been using WordTracker, Keyword Discover, and Wordze in the past to develop their affiliate campaigns. These tools are nice on the surface, but they don’t provide you with affiliate specific information. There are keyword tools out there that not only help you build up your affiliate lists, but they also help you find out what other affiliates are doing and whether you should go after a specific keyword. If that is what you are looking for, here are 3 killer affiliate tools you should try:

Keyword Spy: my favorite affiliate keyword research tool. It’s one of the best tools on the market for pay per click affiliate marketers. The tool shows you how much competition you are going to face per each keyword and how much you may have to pay to achieve results with your pay per click marketing campaigns.

Keyword Country: this tool is the prime example of a keyword research tool that has something for everyone. Whether you are an Adsense marketer or just want to start a profitable affiliate marketing campaign on Google Adwords, Keyword Country has something for you. Great tool for bloggers as well.

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Data vs. Information Affiliate Sites: Which way to go

There are a lot of ways to make online from affiliate marketing. You can always try CPA offers and play the PPC game. You can play the social media game and build killer apps for Facebook and Twitter and push affiliate products in the process. Or you can just focus on building portals and make money online that way. Portal building is one of the oldest ways to make money online. The whole portal development field has been around for years but a few years ago, people started realize the power of building a huge portal and optimizing for every keyword under the sun.

I remember watching a review from a conference in 2003 about how you can make money online with portal development. The person who was doing the presentation claimed at the time that he was making enough money from his website that he could quit his events and still have a comfortable life. That strategy may not be as novel as it used to  be, and it may take a lot of work, but it can still be done. With the explosion of the social media and search engines changing their indexes to provide more relevant results to their visitors, the opportunity is there for portal developers to make a killing online. (more…)

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.

Affiliate Theme Review

One of the biggest challenges that new affiliate marketers face is building their landing pages. I have heard from a lot of experts that you can make a lot of money from Google cash (direct linking). That may be true, but if you go in that route, you will be competing with top guns who have automated bid management systems that can overwhelm your bids and leave you with no real profit to show for. It’s never smart to get in a bidding war with super-affiliates. So, if you really want to make money in this business, you’ve got to create your landing pages, and you’ve got to be create a lot of them to test out and increase your conversion rate.

Building landing pages can prove too difficult for a lot of affiliate marketers. A lot of folks are scared of touching anything technical. A few others have no confidence in their web development abilities and often overestimate the obstacles in this area. Whichever group you belong you, you won’t have to worry about developing your own landing pages from scratch with Affiliate Theme. It’s a new theme that’s been released the help affiliate marketers build and test multiple affiliate landing pages fast.

Wordpress is an affiliate marketer’s best friend. With Wordpress you can set up your affiliate website in less than 5 minutes. But till now, you would have to program your landing page yourself, or use one of those dull themes that are available for free online. Affiliate Theme is a premium Wordpress theme that is designed specifically for marketers who want to test things out to improve their conversion rates. The theme comes with 6 different layouts, perfect for testing and figuring out what works for your niche.

You also get a color picker feature that allows you to change the look and feel of your website fast (in accordance to your niche). Let’s say you have a website about X-box. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could change the look and feel of your website to make it more attractive to your target audience, X-Box fans?

But what I like about Affiliate Theme is the fact that it’s highly optimized for PPC and SEO. Let’s say you want to start a new pay per click campaign on a cool new affiliate product. Wouldn’t it be nice if your landing page was optimized to give you the highest quality score possible? How about getting free traffic from search engines? Affiliate Theme comes with a clean HTML/CSS code, and the developers have used proper tagging to give you the best chance to get those high quality scores you need to run profitable PPC campaigns.

Affiliate Theme is highly customizable. Not only you get 6 layouts to work with, you can easily change the code to completely redesign your landing pages. The code is simple to understand and very easy to change. If you know any coding, you are going to find it very easy to create your very own layouts. You also have unlimited support, which means you can always ask if you are stuck.

Overall, Affiliate Theme is a great tool for affiliate marketers who want to spend less time coding and more time optimizing. By using Affiliate Theme, you can easily set up thousands of affiliate landing pages fast. And you can test them all too by changing the colors, fonts, and everything else in between. Talk about saving a lot of time and effort!

Download your copy here.

Catch Them While They Are Hot

Super-affiliates keep telling you how you need to work hard and keep banging your heard against the wall to succeed. In truth, a lot of super-affiliates are not what they seem to be. In fact, they make most of their money from membership sites and courses that they sell folks who are desperate to succeed in online marketing. In truth, a lot of top super-affiliates are successful due to their organization. These guys can launch campaigns, find hot products, and form partnerships fast, and that is the main reason behind their success. These guys look at their affiliate business as a real business and not some hobby you do from your bedroom.

You may not have their organization, but you can make a lot of money by catching the hot products fast. You hear from a lot of folks that you’ve got to wait to see a certain gravity number to start promoting a product. That’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. If you are not a super-affiliate and you don’t have their resources, you should start with new products as early as possible. Top affiliates afford to throw money around like crazy. If you get into that game with them, you are certainly going to lose. Speed does kill power, early on. In other words, as long as you are fast about going about your business, you can make money before the super affiliates come in.

Most gurus and super-affiliates have huge organizations. They hire employees and outsource things. That means they are going to be slower on a micro level. If you don’t have the resources they have, you can always use your speed of implementation to make money before getting into a head to head encounter with these guys. It may be a hit and miss approach, but it’s way better than burning cash on Adwords trying to outbid those super-affiliates.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is Recession Proof

Affiliate marketing is one of those fields that will always be recession proof regardless of what industry’s hit badly by an economic Tsunami. In fact, as times get tougher, one should expect companies to lay off their staff and take on more affiliates. Affiliate marketers act as a marketing extension for merchants. And while they do require commission to get their jobs done, they won’t cost as much as employees. Here is why:

• No sales, no cash: affiliate marketers don’t get salaries. If they don’t produce, they get no money.
• No limits: there are no limits to how many affiliates you can hire. There will be paperwork, but as long as they produce for you, you won’t mind.
• Competition: the competition among affiliates can not only push them to higher levels but can bring you lots of sales. That level of competition is not possible if you have employees.
• No health insurance: affiliates don’t get any benefits from the merchants they work with.
• Motivation: you can easily motivate your affiliates by giving out prizes or commission increase. And it will be all tied to their performance. No more dealing with folks who want a raise but don’t perform.
• No office space: you don’t even have to have an office to recruit affiliates. You won’t have to provide your affiliates with computers, printers, or anything in particular. The start-up costs are extremely low here.

Affiliates do pose their own challenges. Your top performing affiliates will ask you for commission increase, and they won’t be so loyal to you if you don’t compensate them for their troubles. But as folks are losing their jobs, you can expect commissions to decrease but affiliate marketing won’t go away unless the government makes the business unprofitable for merchants (e.g. NY Amazon tax).

Are You a Scared Affiliate?

A lot of folks look at super-affiliates who are making thousands of dollars every day and just doubt them. After all, how can someone make $10,000 a day when you make only $100 a month from affiliate marketing? It’s just impossible to believe. But a lot of super-affiliates do pull those kinds of profits. But here is the key: they spend a lot of money as well.

That’s really what it comes down to. Affiliate marketing is a game of numbers. You can’t expect to make a millions of dollars in this business without having enough traffic. You can get lucky and get ranked high for a highly competitive term on Google, or you can buy advertising. Either way, you have to spend time or money.

Newbie affiliates don’t like to spend money. They just can’t take losing money, and that is why a lot of them quit after a few tries. Once you understand that you should spend money to earn money in this business, you can unlock your true potential in this business.