AssociateTactics.com

I like Google Adsense. It contributes a nice little chunk of change to my income each and every month.That said, I don’t and won’t follow the lead of those whose sites earn only through Google Adsense.

What happens when their Adsense accounts are shut down by Google? It does happen, and they’re left scrambling to replace lost income!

Don’t believe me?

Try clicking on your own site’s Google Adsense links once or twice and see how fast Google shuts down your Adsense account. (No, don’t really do that!)

Does it make sense to build an entire site around financial products to make a few bucks on Adsense clicks, when you can earn up to $40 for a completed credit card application?

Not to me, it doesn’t.

I use Google Adsense to supplement my affiliate income, not replace it.

Basically, it comes down to value. Value for you, and value for your visitors.

Sites that monetize only with Adsense aren’t getting real value from their site’s real estate.

Too, it’s important to me that my visitors find information of value to them on my sites, and I do that by offering balanced product reviews and articles on the related topic.

If after reading my material, they’re not interested in the product offerings, then perhaps they’ll see an Adwords ad that captures their interest.

Placing Google Adsense on your site is a strategy that will put money in your pockets even if your visitors don’t buy.

However, in the same way you need to be smart about choosing lucrative affiliate programs, you also want to do your homework when monetizing topics with Adsense.

For example, I was recently re-reading some information about under-represented niche topics with huge markets.

One of the topics suggested as a winner was ’snakes’.

I found that hard to believe, so I did my own research.

The term ’snakes’ had 152,857 searches at Overture and its partners in January, so yes, that’s a pretty sizeable interest in ’snakes’.

OK, but who’s your market? Kids looking for snake pictures for a school project? People who want to buy snakes? Someone who wants to visit Snake River?

What are you going to sell? Snakes? The game, ‘Snake’? A $10 book on which you make a 15% commission? A $60 poster from allposters.com on which you earn a 30% commission seemed to be the best bet, but how many people want to pay $60 for snake posters?

To me, that’s not enough interest or commission potential to build a site around ’snakes’.

So, what about incorporating Adsense to boost potential profitability?

Well, search Google for ’snakes’. See what comes up in the Google Adwords column?

NOTHING!

If you want to monetize with Adsense, you have to pick topics whose Adwords advertisers spend mega-bucks per click.

How do you figure out what those topics are?

Easy!

If you haven’t already done so, open up a Google Adwords account and create a new campaign. Add a list of keywords (one niche topic at a time), then click on ‘estimate traffic’. The resulting page will show you the average cost per click for each keyword.

Make note of the most expensive words in that list and optimize your pages for those phrases.

THAT’s how you’ll really profit with Google Adsense.

Warning! Warning! Warning!

Once you find a lucrative topic that is projected to cost you $36,987.57 per day, don’t forget to pause that campaign, or delete it altogether!

Article by Rosalind Gardner

posted by Deron Dohanich \\ tags: Rosalind Gardner

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: affiliate commissions

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: affiliate profits

I’d be willing to bet that right now, right this second, you are wasting precious online real estate.

In other words, you are not taking advantage of every “place” in your online marketing that you could be using to make you money.

The biggest one many people (including myself) often overlook:

The “Thank You” page.

Do you realize the “Thank You” page (the page you display after someone submits an opt-in form or even an order form) is some of the most RESPONSIVE real estate on your site?

You should be using your “Thank You” pages to promote some of your other products, other opt-in lists, or affiliate products.

One of the easiest ways to INSTANTLY make more money is to use an opt-in “Thank You” page to simply say:

“Thank you for subscribing. You will receive your first issue very soon.”

Then under that text you can say, “We Highly Recommend This Product…”

Then you can list information about an affiliate product that is related to your market. This is an easy way to send traffic to an affiliate link so you can earn some additional income that you didn’t already have. I.e. FREE MONEY.

You can do the same thing for your ORDER FORM “Thank You” pages. Thank the customer for their order and recommend they check out a related product. In fact, this real estate on your site will be the most responsive of all for other offers.

After all, that web site visitor just became the most qualified prospect of all — A PAYING CUSTOMER.

You know, most marketers are AFRAID to send additional offers to their customers. But why?

Well, the thinking is simple…

“I don’t want to piss them off by trying to ‘pitch’ them other products.”

We have all thought this way. *I* am guilty of this myself. But you know what? We all need to GET OVER IT.

Everyone needs to realize something — people buy MULTIPLE PRODUCTS when they are interested in something. So why shouldn’t *YOU* get paid when they do?

When is the last time you went to the bookstore to buy a book or magazine on an interest that you had and you left the store with only ONE COPY of something?

That’s right, you probably bought more than one on almost every occasion you can think of. Customers are the same way. So don’t be afraid to send offers to your customers.

This is a FACT: the more offers you send to your customers, the more money you will make.

Start displaying related offers on your order form “Thank You” pages and you’ll instantly boost your income.

I did this recently on ONE of my sites and it added an additional $3,500/month in net income. I simply took an order form “Thank You” page that had only said, “Thank you for your order.” (and some other minor stuff) and added a promotion for a “Recommended” product. This was an affiliate product that I earned a commission on when my customers visited the link and then made a purchase.

Here’s something else for you to understand…

When people are ordering from you, their TRUST and RESPECT for you is at an all-time high. If you “recommend” another product for them to buy at this time (right after they placed an order with you), not only will they trust your recommendation (by the way, make sure it’s a solid product you are recommending) but they are also still in the “buying mood” and will be more likely to buy something else at that moment.

After making this minor modification to one of my own “Thank You” pages, I am now making this additional income day after day. All I did was make use of some precious online real estate that I was overlooking — i.e. WASTING.

So take a closer look at your web site and marketing process and find places that you are not effectively using to promote your other products or affiliate products.

I’d be willing to bet that there’s some “unused” online real estate you can go take advantage of right now that would allow you to INSTANTLY make more money from the same traffic you are already receiving.

So what are you waiting for? Stop reading this email and go put up an offer on that unused space. Yes, NOW.

John Reese is an Internet Marketing pioneer that has been actively marketing online since 1990. John has sold millions of dollars worth of products and services online and his network of Web Sites have received over 1.4 BILLION Web Site visitors since their inception. You can learn more about John, his home study courses, and subscribe to his free ezine by visiting:

http://www.marketingsecrets.com

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Reese

posted by Deron Dohanich \\ tags: Online Real Estate