Archive | Affiliate Marketing

5 Tips For Starting An Affiliate Marketing Business

Written by Simon Dodd | Posted in Affiliate Marketing

Simon Dodd here and I am going to show you why affiliate marketing is often touted as being the easiest way to get into online marketing and why there are a few key things that you need to do if you are going to have any success with it.

#1 Find a Good Niche

The most successful marketers find a good niche with people spending money. It may seem obvious but if people aren’t spending money in your niche then you aren’t going to get any money out of it. Create regular new content for this niche and you will see your traffic constantly increasing, try to stay on top of the latest developments in your niche to help you with content. You can use current trends if you are looking for a short term niche with the Google hot trends service or you can find longer term niches using keyword research and by putting yourself in the position of a buyer.

#2 Don’t Overdo It

Don’t cram your website with loads of affiliate offers and flashing banner ads, this only distracts your readers from your content. Stick to relevant ads and links and try not to have more than one pop up. Try to steer clear of too many flashing ads as this can distract your readers unless they are at the top or bottom of your posts. You want them to learn from you before they click the ads so they are more likely to return to you.

#3 Work Hard

Affiliate marketing requires hard work, results don’t come overnight, you have to put time and effort into creating your site and then promoting it to generate traffic. You can’t expect to just sign up to an affiliate program and expect $1 million overnight. You need to treat it as a business not a hobby, set aside time every day to work on your business and then work on they key tasks to get you moving forward. Prioritize your work so you get projects finished on time.

#4 Buy and Review the Products You Promote

You must buy the products you are promoting and use them. It is no good just grabbing what looks to be making money for people, if the product doesn’t work you will get a lot of refunds. If you provide a review for your affiliate links make sure you don’t sugar coat it. If there are issues and you point them out your customers will be a lot happier than if there is a problem that you don’t tell them about.

#5 Build a List

You may have heard “The Money Is In The List” and it is so true, while you can make money from direct affiliate links on your site it is far better to get your readers to subscribe to your mailing list. You can then build a relationship with them and they are more likely to buy from your affiliate links in the future. A great way to start building your list is to create a free product incentive for people who sign up to your list. Once you have built a relationship with your list you will be able to send them affiliate links in an email and have a much higher click through rate.

Conclusion

To sum up, it is hard work to get started but if you have a definite plan from the start and are prepared to take advice and continually work on your business then you can have a profitable affiliate marketing business.

If you want more help with your business, I have some great free advice on my blog so feel free to ask me questions over there http://www.simon-dodd.com

Making money isn’t as hard as a lot of people make it. You just need to know the fundamentals first.

I currently have 3 FREE reports titled ‘Automatic Money Machines’, ‘Free Traffic Secrets’ and ‘Affiliate Organizer’ that will all help you to get started fast.

You can get these FREE reports at SimonDoddMarketing.com

Google Instant Previews: The New Rules of SEO

Written by Wayne Lambert | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Traffic

As part of my ongoing commitment to bring you the most valuable up-to-date information about changes in traffic generation, I’d like to let you know about a new feature Google are introducing to their search engine called Google Instant Previews.

Google Instant Previews provides you with a thumbnail view of the website before the user even clicks the link. This gives the user an idea of whether they actually want to click the link before they actually do.

This is nothing new to some experienced Firefox users who will know that there has been a few add-ons in Firefox such as SearchPreview that have already provided that sort of functionality for users for some time, however the number of users were in the minority. If the Google Instant Previews feature becomes mainstream and part of Google’s standard search features, then considerations and changes may need to be made to ensure that your listings are still competitive in Google. After all, ranking is only the first part of SEO, the second, and often overlooked part, is clickthroughs.

Here is a question for you to consider:

Do the thumbnails reflect your website accurately and favourably?

Is the perceived value of your website good or could it be improved?

If you want clickthroughs, or to keep getting clickthroughs from Google visitors, you must give this some serious consideration.

Caption: Keyword “Wayne Lambert” with Google Instant previewing thumbnail of TheProfitShare.com

Could Google Instant Previews Destroy Your Search Traffic?

If you’re not monitoring the trends of search behaviour and ensuring that your pages have a high perceived value, you could end up looking at your Google Analytics account in a few months time shocked at the dip in your free search traffic.

Of course, everyone is likely to be in the same boat as Google Instant Previews is rolled out further with its enhancements and becomes a part of ordinary everyday search. If you’re willing to make your pages attractive and relevant, you can reap extra Google traffic as other less willing competitors will just put up simple pages which have less perceived value for searchers.

Video Demonstration of Google Instant Previews in Action

In this video, Google Instant Previews is explored in more detail and how the changes to search will affect the way you market your online business. Keeping up to date with these changes is an absolute must for any Internet Marketer. If you’re not making these shifts in your thinking and approach to SEO advertising, then your competitors certainly will be and you’ll be out of the game.

I hope you found the video insightful and come away with some thoughts of how you can alter your search strategy to account for the changes that Google Instant Previews has brought to search behaviour and your ability to get clickthroughs and Google traffic from your SEO adverts.

To Your Online Success,

The Profit Share

The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)

Why You Should Be Using Clickbank

Written by Wayne Lambert | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Product Creation

If you’re in the Internet Marketing space and haven’t heard of Clickbank, where have you been?

Clickbank is the world’s largest online digital marketplace which enables you to pick as many products from over 12,000 products to promote.

Clickbank makes it extremely easy for you to promote a product as an affiliate, although there are certain practices and etiquette you should observe, although these are not necessarily commonly observed.

Using Clickbank as an Affiliate

You can simply sign up as an affiliate, look for a suitable product to promote to your lists, create a hoplink and use the hoplink to promote the products to others.

Sure, actually making sales is tougher. In the modern times of affiliate marketing, you need to add value to the original product by offering an incentive to purchase through your affiliate link. The days of disguising an affiliate link with an HTML or PHP redirect are gone – at least in the Internet Marketing niche where people have become almost immune to this strategy.

As well as this, some people have hang ups about buying products through someone else’s affiliate link. They would rather go direct to the product owner, or even purchase through their own affiliate link to effectively give themself a discount. Clickbank doesn’t allow this but people can usually work around it by buying things from other people’s links in an exchange scenario.

The question you need to have in your mind is, “how can I add more value to the purchase than the affiliate commission paid out?” If you can add more value, people will buy through your affiliate link. Offering additional bonuses for your customers to purchase their products through your affiliate link also helps the product owner keep their refund rates down.

You can approach a product owner and ask them, “Can I help you sell more of your stuff and reduce your refund rate at the same time?” Most product owners are only going to be too happy to accommodate you when you approach them from this angle.

Using Clickbank as a Merchant

Clickbank makes it easy for you to host your own information products by providing you with a merchant account which you only need to pay for each time you sell one of your information products. Clickbank also gives you the opportunity to place your product in the Clickbank marketplace where over 100,000 affiliates are hanging out looking for products to promote and to make money with.

If you’ve ever wanted to expand your traffic reach and pay salespeople on a commission only basis, then listing your product on the Clickbank marketplace is the solution for you.

The first merchant account you register with Clickbank will cost you $50 and every account thereafter will cost you $30. You can have multiple products on one account, although many people choose to host one product on each account.

Clickbank’s Popularity

Clickbank’s popularity is rising rapidly right now which is reflected by its popularity. Look at the graph below which is an excerpt from Alexa.com taken on 26th October, 2010 which shows its daily traffic rank over the last six months.

Whether you decide to locate or create Clickbank products in whatever market you choose to get involved with, there are products to promote and people to promote your products. Get involved, take action and make things happen!

To Your Online Success,

The Profit Share

The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)

The Changing Landscape of Affiliate Marketing

Written by Wayne Lambert | Posted in Affiliate Marketing

You may have noticed a shift in how affiliate marketing is being done. There are people that are hanging on to the old way and people who have changed their strategy and moved onto the new way.

What Are The Affiliate Marketing Changes?

The old methods of affiliate marketing is to set up an affiliate link cloaked behind another URL which contains a redirect command. This means that an affiliate link is disguised behind a more appealing URL which disguises the destination of the link and makes it more likely that the link will be clicked on.

In the past, people were tricked into being sent to a product to buy and the owner of the referring link was paid a commission because they sent the traffic to the product vendor.

The rules have changed!

FTC The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) came out with some new guidelines in an attempt to protect the consumer from being misled. One of the laws that came out now means that Internet Marketers must make an open disclosure for their affiliate links.

In reality, there are still many people that are not doing this. They are still choosing to disguise the hyperlink using cloaking and URL shortening software or utilities.

These changes have driven a change in the approach of affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing used to be about matching highly targeted traffic to a high converting offer.

Now affiliate marketing is about matching highly qualified traffic to a high converting offer AND adding value to the original offer in the eyes of the prospect by adding some complimentary bonuses which help them get even more results.

The question now becomes:

What is the best complimentary bonus that I can offer to the original product that will help the prospect get even greater results from their purchase?

The bad news for you is you could now really struggle promoting the big launches because the big guns have an arsenal of products on their servers and in their warehouses already at their disposal. The big guns can simply look through their stockpile and determine which of their existing products would suit the offer they’re promoting best and offer that to the prospect should they decide to make a buying decision through their affiliate link. However all is not lost!

How Can You Compete Against The Big Guns?

Well, you could create a product that perfectly compliments the product on offer and massively adds value to the original proposition. In effect, this increases the value of the purchase in the eyes of the customer and makes it even more likely that they’ll make the purchase and even less likely that they they’ll seek a refund for the product.

You could always offer consultancy time through Skype which would help the customer to use the product. This is especially useful if you ave expertise in using the product and there is a degree of knowledge required to effectively use the product being sold. This is the case with products such as Optimize Press, Easy Video Player 2, Profits Theme, Market Samurai and Wishlist Member.

Think about this for a second… In The old days, customers would only get the product that they paid for, so they had to perceive that the value of the product to them was in excess of the money they were going to part with. Now, with your additions to the product, they’ll be more likely to buy the product because there is even more value for the price they are going to pay.

However, you should also be aware that consumers are being conditioned to go bonus shopping once they’ve made a buying decision about a product.

This is actually putting the customer in a greater position of power and accelerates their learning curve, results and ability to leverage. The macro effect of this is an expansion in the Internet Marketing marketplace which creates even more opportunities for more people to deliver real value.

This now means that you really need to be a product creator just to be an affiliate marketer. This is so you can add products to your asset base which you can use to offer as bonuses for other products when you promote them. Saying that, there has been an alarming trend in the industry where marketers are giving away products that they once charged $1,000 for. This must be extremely annoying for the buyers that purchased that $1,000 product.

Savvy buyers might even consider that they will have an opportunity to get a product for free if they are patient for a few months and await for that marketer to offer their own product as a complimentary bonus for buying another product they’re promoting as an affiliate through their link.

There are plenty of people out there who are hanging on to the old way of doing things and making some great money from it. Eventually though, other governments will catch up and implement similar restrictions insisting that affiliate marketers make open disclosures about their affiliation.

This means you need to think in advance of how these changes will affect you when the inevitable day has come when these enforcements make you change the way you do affiliate marketing. Doing so now will put you ahead of the curve and give your business an opportunity to stand out from the crowd.

To Your Online Success,

The Profit Share

The mutt's nuts or the dog's drivel? I double dare you to leave a comment! :-)

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