Affiliate Programs Worthless for 80% of Affiliate Market
by: Mike Banks Valentine
No doubt you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule – which states that 20 percent of affiliates generate 80% of affiliate income, and conversely, remaining 80 percent of affiliates generate only 20 percent of all income for most affiliate programs.
There are ten basics that will put your affiliate marketing in the top 20 percent of affiliate earnings. Ten suggestions that will transform your affiliate income from a trickling creek that barely covers your hosting fees, to a roaring river of extra disposable income.
TOP AFFILIATE MARKETERS DO MOST OF THESE TEN ITEMS
1.Top affiliate marketers cloak web site links
Cloaking affiliate links should not be necessary, but is. Oddly many site visitors refuse to visit your links if they see an affiliate code appended to the URL when they hover their mouse over a link on your web page. Sometimes they will type the affiliate domain directly to the browser address bar while removing your affiliate ID from the URL. To short circuit this odd behavior, simply cloak the URL. How? Visit this Link Tool: http://WebpositionAdvisor.com/tools/link_cloaker.php
2.Top affiliate marketers write & distribute articles
Writing articles about your market niche is essential to gain
reputation as an expert in your field. But the biggest benefit comes not just from writing those articles, but from having those articles published by other web site owners and ezine publishers. Your article gains you both reputation and links from other web sites from the resource box appended to the end of each article. Here are major article distribution sites.
http://yahoogroups.com/group/free-content/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
3.Top affiliate marketers focus on a market niche
Filling a web site with content reflecting a narrowly focused product or service niche is a well known method of gaining web traffic in your area of specialty. An excellent resource that can help you determine relevant and focused areas to fill your site with is called NicheBot. They offer innovative tools to research and pinpoint market niches for your web site based on the WordTracker Database and Google.
http://www.nichebot.com
4.Top affiliate marketers use autoresponder series
Autoresponders are incredibly valuable tools that allow you to send a timed series of email messages to those that sign up for them. Most often those autoresponders are sent through a third party provider. Some of the top providers are Sendfree.com and aweber.com, for a tutorial covering autoresponder basics, visit:
http://website101.com/email_e-mail/email_autoresponder_basics.html
5.Top affiliate marketers create web pages to pre-sell
Creating either testimonial pages or review pages that discuss and pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with is the best method of getting increased orders for your chosen affiliate programs. Many programs actually provide either an article or recommended text to sell their products for you and allow reproduction of those articles with your links embedded.
6.Top affiliate marketers gather email addresses
The best affiliates collect email addresses on their web site by offering free reports via the above mentioned autoresponders or by giving away ebooks or through newsletter signup forms. The best use all of these methods or more to build their list of email addresses. This also allows you to contact potential customers that would otherwise never see your site again after clicking away to the affiliate program web site.
7.Top affiliate marketers advertise SOMEWHERE
Depending on your market niche you should advertise using PPC
and/or ezine advertising. Some categories of Pay-per-click can be prohibitively expensive, but advertising somewhere is all but mandatory to gain substantial additional traffic to your site. There are some great bargains in ezine advertising and some less popular PPC engines other than Yahoo’s Overture and Google’s Adwords. Try 7search, Kanoodle and FindWhat for lower Bids than the big boys of PPC.
8.Top affiliate marketers optimize for search engines
Search engine optimization is becoming more complex as more and more webmasters participate, but the basics applied to your site can increase visibility dramatically over time. The most critical of the many SEO techniques is to use title tags that reflect individual PAGE content. Many webmasters write a master title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worst thing you could do for search engine ranking. Learn more SEO:
http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/
9.Top affiliate marketers give away ebooks or freebies
Everyone knows by now that giving something away is a great traffic generator and allows you to gather email addresses to allow contact of potential customers at a later date. This strategy is employed by EVERY successful web-based company at one time or another. Think of all the free things YOU have collected online over time. Screensavers, software, ebooks, discount codes, toolbars, white papers. They work!
10. Top Affiliate marketers have their own mailing lists
The best of affiliate marketers have their own newsletter or ezine and gather email addresses on their site to build their list of subscribers. Having this list allows regular contact with potential customers interested in your site, your product and your market niche. If you don’t write your own material or think you can’t produce weekly content, there are hundreds of authors out there that will gladly product articles for you.
The article distribution lists provide free content and ghost Writers provide high quality content for a fee.
If you implement ALL the above techniques, you are guaranteed to become one of the top affiliate marketers on the web. Then you can create your own product telling everyone how YOU did it, create your own affiliate program and have hundreds of us selling for you.
About the Author
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Mike Banks Valentine operates WebSite101 where you can learn
more through an extensive Affiliate Marketing Tutorial
http://WebSite101.com/Affiliate-Marketing/
Want more details on how to become a top affiliate marketer?
http://WebSite101.com/pam.html their sales letter is cheesy
their product is so good I wrote them a testimonial! Buy it!
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5 Mistakes To Avoid When Choosing An Affiliate Program
by: Michael Turner
When people decide to join an affiliate program to make extra money, or to have a full time job, they often do so with illusions and no idea of how the affiliate program actually works. Read the following top 5 mistakes people make when it comes to choosing an affiliate program and avoid these mistakes at all costs. Then, you will be able to be more effective and make more money for your time, so it is definitely worthwhile to read these warnings and avoid them.
#1 Don’t Compete, Support
Too many affiliate programs compete against their competitors which wastes money and puts affiliates out of business. However, if you are part of an affiliate program the more affiliates the better for getting more information and more money. One of the worst things to do is choose an affiliate program that believes in competing against other affiliates. Instead, choose an affiliate program that agrees with supporting and growing other affiliates to have a larger network and access to more affiliates.
#2 Little Reward
Another mistake people frequently make when choosing affiliate programs is choosing a program that offers little reward for the individual’s hard work. Too many affiliate programs pay too little and as a result affiliates find it difficult to make the money they should be making. Look for an affiliate program that has a good pay rate for your work.
#3 Old Statistics, if Any
You want an affiliate program that offers good, solid, real time statistics, not old statistics or ones that are no longer valid. There are not many affiliate programs out there that provide the kind of statistics an affiliate manager needs, but do your best to find an affiliate program that offers the most.
#4 No Support
Too often affiliates find themselves waiting days for an answer to an e-mail and an important question for their business. You want an affiliate program that guarantees you support round the clock if possible or at least within 24 hours. If not, keep looking for an affiliate program that wants to help you help yourself.
#5 Fresh Ideas, Creatives
Many affiliate programs provide few ideas or creatives to their affiliates and so thousands of web pages end up with the same advertising. However, affiliate programs would have a better success rate if many different ads were made available so affiliates could alternate ads and place different ads on different sites, depending on the products sold.
Commit these five mistakes to memory so you know exactly what you are looking for in an affiliate program, as well as what to avoid. You will be much more successful and happier as well if you do not get caught in these traps!
About the Author: Michael Turner reveals step-by-step how you can increase search engine traffic in his free 7 part mini-series. Grab it now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/
Source: www.isnare.com
Top Three Internet Marketing Two-Tier Affiliate Programs
by: Gerardas Norkus
If you run an Internet marketing web site and sell your own products or services, you probably follow up with your current customers using autoresponders and upsell them with
products and services from related affiliate programs?
Note that if you don't do this, you are leaving money on the table.
What Internet marketing affiliate programs should you join and endorse to your list in order to increase your online business profit?
The answer is - two-tier affiliate programs.
When you promote a 2-tier affiliate program, you earn commissions not only on your direct sales as in a regular affiliate program, but you also earn commissions on sales generated by people that you refer to the program.
Here is a list of proven, free-to-join Internet marketing two-tier affiliate programs:
http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com/marketingtips
http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com/nitro
http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com/implix
The above 2-tier affiliate programs offer excellent products and services, generous commission and are designed to SELL. These are the most important factors when you are looking for good two-tier affiliate programs to join.
Some of the above affiliate programs can even earn you lifetime commissions. It means that you don't just earn a commission on one sale, you can earn a commission on every subsequent purchase by your referrals.
About the author:
Gerardas Norkus has been marketing online since 1997. Take advantage of his battle tested Internet marketing strategies that could quietly make you huge profits every single month. Take 7-part e-mail course at:
http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com