Apr 04

Building an affiliate business is one of the easiest ways to start a business online. You don’t need your own products, you don’t have to provide customer service, and in fact, you don’t even need a website. If you want to earn real profits from an affiliate business though, then you need real strategies for getting traffic and earning profits.

Now, if you’re already a member of an affiliate program, the next thing you need to do is work on earning more commissions. If you really want to earn more commissions, here are three strategies that will help you begin to earn, or earn more from affiliate programs:

1. Know which affiliate programs are the best to promote. Selecting the right product or products to promote is crucial to your success.

To select the best products to promote, there are several factors you should consider. These include finding programs that have a generous commission structure. If you’re having to sell a lot of a product to generate small commissions, you’ll have to work a whole lot harder.

Make sure you know who your target market is and go where that target market is to promote. You also want to make sure that the programs you choose have a solid track record for paying affiliates, as well as having a solid track record for sales. Some sites, like Clickbank, can tell you how well different products are selling.

With thousands of affiliate programs available for you to sell, you can afford to be picky about what products you promote. Although as an affiliate, your reputation is less at stake than the merchant’s, you want to be careful about what programs you promote. If you’ve built a list, as well as a relationship with your readers, your reputation is still at stake, and you want to make sure that you offer your readers good products.

An easy way for you to promote affiliate programs is through free ebooks and reports. These can be reports offered by the merchant, or a short report you’ve written about the product you’re promoting. This can help you distinguish yourself from other affiliates, especially when you write the report yourself because you are giving the reader new information other affiliates are not offering.

Offer tips in the report about how to use the product. Give readers more information about the product. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. What questions can you answer in your report that may not be answered in the sales letter?

2. Give away your free report to those who subscribe to your list. This is really easy to do because all you need is a lead capture page and an autoresponder to do this. Once you set up the lead capture page and autoresponder, all you have to do is drive traffic to the page.

You can also offer follow up messages on the product to give readers more information. By offering followups to your initial contact, you are building a relationship with the subscriber, and you are more likely to convert the subscriber to a customer.

Once you get the subscriber to sign up for your list and download the report, then you can send the subscriber to the merchant’s website.

You can also publish an online newsletter or ezine for your list. Not only will you have a chance to promote your initial offering repeatedly, but you can also promote other offers. Let me caution you though, you want to make sure that you offer plenty of good information in your ezine.

An additional advantage of publishing an ezine is that you can also use this content for your website by creating an archive of your ezines. This also gives you an opportunity to promote to your new visitors.

3. If you want to get traffic fast, then try pay per click advertising. You can test your ads first by using some of the lesser known pay per click search engines that offer free credits. By testing your ads first, you’ll find out what works best for promoting your affiliate products.

Build your list, offer your potential customers more value than your fellow affiliates, and test your promotions, and you can easily increase your commissions.

By: Jinger Jarrett

posted by Deron Dohanich \\ tags:

Apr 04

According to a report from MarketSherpa, affiliate sales in 2006 amounted to 6.5 billion dollars. That’s Billion with a B. This is a phenomenal amount of money. Are you getting your share of affiliate profits?

The hottest sectors were adult, gambling, and retail. Areas that are expected to do well in the future are: cell phones, finance, travel, entertainment, and Internet related services. If you have not been able to make money using affiliate programs in the past, there may be an opportunity here for you.

You might start out by doing some research on affiliate programs in these hot areas. This works best if the product can be related to the content on your site or blog. Find two or three products in each area. Then look at each of the sales pages. Are they compelling? Do they make you want to buy the product? If you answer “no” to either of these questions, you should continue your search and look for other products.

Once you have found what you consider the best product in each category, develop at least two attractive ads for each product. Include a tracking string with each link so that you can determine which ad performs the best. Place these ads in various places through your site.

Keep records as to how each ad is doing. This is a key component to any ad campaign. Eliminate the worst performing ads and replace them with new ads. Again, make sure you include the tracking information. Continue this process until you can no longer see improvements in your ads.

Of course, this technique only works if you have traffic coming to your site. If you are just starting out and not getting much traffic, use a variety of traffic generation methods to bring in visitors. By using products in the strongest niches, you should begin to get your share of affiliate profits.

Do you want to learn how to make affiliate money? Get my new ebook and start making money online!

By: Jo Mark

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

posted by Deron Dohanich \\ tags:

Apr 04

You can make money with Adsense on any blog or web site. It doesn’t matter what you niche is - or what you’ve been told before…

I’m tired of people saying either you can’t make money with Adsense, or you can’t make money ‘in this niche’ (blogging help, making money online) with Adsense. Google Adsense can make you money on any web site or blog in any niche passively and easily. How much money depends on your niche and if you’ve setup your blog properly.

I started thinking about a post comment I received awhile ago. Hock, of Marketing Tools Review writes:

“I saw your message on Entrecard and decided to check out your blog. The AdSense blocks really detract from your actual content.  Most of the folks who are serious about setting up a blog in this space will generally not put AdSense on. Think about it, your target audience is someone who probably knows and uses AdSense and chances of them clicking on the ads are very low.

 I’m guessing that you would do better with other forms of monetization on this type of blog. Hock has a good criticism, because I think a lot of bloggers feel this way. I don’t feel this way though, and I’m ready to tell you why.

 First - I recently wrote about how to make (more) money with adsense and that article was for all the people that say they can’t make money with Adsense.  I keyed in on a point that I learned a few years back about leaving money on the table. This was a phrase I first heard from adsense guru Joel Comm a few years back (just google him). He’s an adsense expert that feels that he shouldn’t be leaving small amounts of money laying around if he can collect them - because it adds up! Day after day, week after week, month after month - it all adds up!

Think about this in perspective for a moment. What stage is your blog at? A hundred visitors a day (if that)? Five Hundred? A thousand? When do you think you should be making money? How much money will be you making? I am a firm believer in monetizing your blog from day one. I am also living proof that you can make money from day one on a blog that only gets 20-30 visits per day. I’ve had several blogs with that kind of traffic (they get more now) that made $1-2 per day from adsense alone. I think that Adsense and be profitable as well as an indicator.

Use Adsense so your bounce rate doesn’t hit you on the ass on the way out the door, but instead drops a few coins in your jar.

 Everyone has a “bounce rate”. Your bounce rate is the percentage of people that visit your site and rapidly leave. Because of the variety of ways people can visit your blog (and find you in search) everyone has a bounce rate. It’s a google analytic “to watch” because you surely don’t want nearly everyone that comes to your blog rapidly leaving. What good are 500 unique visitors a day if 90% of them quickly leave because you didn’t have the content they wanted? In that article I said (in my experience with many blogs and sites) that “I think (a bounce rate of) 90% and up is pretty bad, 60-90% is to be expected once you get 25+ quality posts, 40-60% is excellent, and under 40% is amazing!

Let me give you a game plan here…

You should be using google analytics and you should check your bounce rate at least once per week for an active blog.

  • Take steps to reduce your bounce rate:
    1. List recent and popular posts in your sidebar
    • Have a working prominent search box
    • Have both a contact form and an about page
    • Offer “related posts” on every page
    • Link similar and complementary posts and categories on every page

     Once you’ve done everything you can to keep them on your site monetize the bounce rate you can’t control,

    There always seems to be some purist or lone holdout who says to my argument - “that’s unprofessional”, or “it detracts from your content”, or “there’s better ways to monetize a site like this…” - you get the picture. I say to you - first of all I am not an A-List blogger (yet) so I’m not worried about it ruining my “image”. I can certainly make more money (at a time) by other means on this blog - but I’m not making any money now from bounced traffic anyway! In other words - Adsense is setup on this blog (and most of my other ones) to make money from visitors who WERE LEAVING ANYWAY!.

    What kind of person are you? Are you a saver or a spendthrift? Have you seen these commercials where they offer to “round up” your purchases on your VISA card and deposit the change from every transaction to a savings account in your name? I knew a woman once who did this (rounded up every purchase in her checkbook register) and in one year she saved $5,000! If you passed the same table every day and it had loose change that would be gone the next day - would you take it? Don’t leave money on the table - it could be your biggest blogging mistake..!
     
    About the Author

    John Pratt writes on his blog JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes, and he makes good money online using Wordpress as an eBay affiliate! Catch him texting on his latest used cell phone!

    posted by Deron Dohanich \\ tags: