Thursday, July 16, 2009

Introduction To Different Types Of Affiliates

Introduction To Different Types Of Affiliates

Today, affiliate marketing programs is seen as one of the most important methods by online companies and merchants to market their products and services because implementing an affiliate program doesn't cost much money and it helps generate a consistent stream of online profit.

On the other hand, the affiliates see affiliate marketing as a feasible and low cost method to make online online by promoting other people products using a website or without a website (using Google AdWords PPC advertising program).

There are many affiliate programs on the Internet and not all of them are similar. The most basic affiliate programs fall into 3 categories:
  • Pay Per Performance
  • Pay Per click
  • Residual Income Affiliate Marketing Programs
Pay Per Performance
Pay per performance (PPP) affiliate programs are what most companies and online merchants likes to use. The companies only need to pay when an affiliate referral translates into an action. The action can be a purchase or a lead. The affiliates will spend their own money to promote the affiliated company's products, This save a lot of money for the company. PPP affiliate programs can be futher classified into 2 sub-categories:
  • Pay Per Sale (PPS) The title says it all. The company only pays the affiliate when a visitor referred by the affiliate make a purchase.
  • Pay Per Lead (PPL) PPL is a little different to PPS. PPL affiliate programs usually used by finance and insurance companies. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate will be paid a fixed commission whenever a visitor referred by him/her to the merchant's website requested a quote or filled up an online application form.
Pay Per Click (PPC) Affiliate Programs
PPC affiliate programs are most popular. You should have heard them a lot. PPC programs are probably the easiest way for web publishers to make money from their websites and blogs. The affiliate gets paid a certain amount ($0.05 to $0.50 usually) whenever a visitor click a banner or text ad displaying on the affiliate's website. PPC typically used by contextual advertising companies like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Networks and much more.

Residual Income Affiliate Marketing Programs
In this type of programs, the affiliate not only compensated for every customer referred to the merchant's website, the affiliate is also paid whenever the referred customer returns to the site and buy another product.

The different types of affiliate marketing programs would deffinitely work differently for merchants and affiliates, and each would have their own advantages and drawbacks. To find out which types of programs work best for you, you'll have to know which one of them suit your need and characteristic most. And then start testing them.




Getting started guide:


Affiliates make money by referring customers to their merchants. There are many companies and webmasters offer affiliate programs to promote their online sales. When you sign up for an affiliate program, you will be given an affiliate link with an unique affiliate ID which will be used to market the product. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you make money (earn affiliate commission). Below are the steps to starting an affiliate marketing business:

Step 1 - Join an Affiliate Program
Clickbank.com is one of the best places to find an affiliate program that interests you as there are a ton of sellers looking for people to promote their e-books and info products. Before you join any affiliate programs, do a little research. Find out which products are most popular, the conversion rate of the products and visit the sellers’ websites to see whether their sales letters are convinced enough to generate sales. A conversion rate of 5% is reasonably good. This means that for every 100 visitors to the website, 5 visitors will buy.

Step 2 – Promote an affiliate program through a website
You need to have a website to promote your affiliate programs. Creating a website isn’t difficult nowadays. You can use an easy website builder to create a website with little or no technical knowledge. To learn more about how to set up a site with website builder, you can go to Google and enter the search term 'website builder' to find a site builder that is right for you.

Step 3 – Decide the Content on Your Website
As you are promoting e-books, you can write a review on each e-book with an affiliate link to the sales website of each e-book. If you do not wish to write reviews, you can create a product recommendation list on your website (e.g., ‘Top 5 SEO e-books,’ ‘Top 3 MP3 music download,’ etc.).

Step 4 – Drive Targeted traffic/visitors to Your Website
To earn affiliate commission you need to drive targeted traffic to your website. The more traffic your website gets, the more likely you’ll generate more sales. There are several ways to drive targeted traffic to your site in short period of time (2 to 5 days). Here’s how……

Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
You can get a lot of targeted traffic using PPC advertising. The two most popular and effective PPC advertising programs are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. So how PPC advertising program works? PPC advertising programs allow you to bid for top rankings on the keywords of your choice. When someone enters a search term matches your keyword in the PPC search engine and press the search button, your contextual ad will appear on the sidebar of the search result page. If the visitor clicks through your ad to your website, you’ll be charged base on your bid amount. To learn more about PPC advertising, please click here.

Article Marketing
Writing an article related to your affiliate products with a link to your website in the article’s resource box and submitting it to many article directories can bring some free targeted traffic to your site. To get more and continuous targeted traffic, you need to write more articles. Try to publish a new article every week. Doing this for a year can drive truckload of free traffic to your website.

Post Messages on Forums
Another way to get free traffic is by posting messages on community forums with a link to your site on the signature of each message posted by you. Here’s a technique I learned from an affiliate marketer.

1) Run a search on Google to find out forums and message boards that are related to your affiliate products and try to join as many forums as you can.

2) Make sure that each one of your forums profile is edited to include your website link within the signature option.

3) Spend a few hours navigating the pages of the forums. You can ask questions and post informative and helpful replies to other peoples’ questions or messages to build your status. The more people trust you, the more likely they will click your link.




Tips for Selecting a good affiliate:

Your success in affiliate marketing part depend on the kinds of affiliate programs your are marketing.To make your affiliate marketing campaign works, you obviously need to participate in an affiliate program that offers worthy and quality products. Below are some tips that can help you choose an affiliate program that is good for you:

1. Affiliate programs that are associated with many experts in that particular niche usually are in certain level of standard and quality. Joining one of these programs will assure you that the products of the program you will be promoting are in good standard.

2. The program that is catering to a growing target market. This will ensure you that there will be more and continuous demands for your referrals. Ask question. There are forums and discussions you can participate in to get good and reliable feedbacks.

3. A program with a compensation plan that pays out a residual income and a payout of 30% or more would be a great choice. There are some programs offering this kind of compensation. Look closely for one. Do not waste your time with programs that do not reward substantially for your efforts.

4. Be aware of the minimum quotas that you must fulfill or sales target that is too hard to achieve. Some affiliate programs imposes pre-requisites before you get your commissions. Just be sure that you are capable of attaining their requirements.

5. Ask for program recommendations in the community forum of your niche. The experienced marketers who see your question may recommend you the reliable programs they have success with. Other things you can ask about are like is the program offers a real and viable product? Does the program provide a lot of free tools and resources helpful to affiliate? and any other questions you think are essential.




10 Affiliate mistakes:

Although anyone can start an affiliate marketing business but not everyone can achieve success in affiliate marketing. What is the reason?Well, there are 10 of them, actually.There are 10 affiliate mistakes that deter people from succeeding in affiliate marketing business.To avoid all these mistakes, you first need to study them and understand them thoroughly. 1. Believing that visitors would only click on their affiliate links.Although the task of an affiliate is only restricted to pre-selling, pre-selling isn’t just limited to displaying the affiliate links.It also entails enticing visitors to click on them by listing out the benefits of the affiliate products, giving positive recommendations by writing reviews to encourage readers to check out the products.

2. Promoting too many affiliate programs at the same time. If an affiliate markets 8 affiliate programs at the same time, he or she will have 8 affiliate marketing campaigns to handle. Most probably, the affiliate will find difficult to manage all his campaigns and unable to concentrate on each one of his or her affiliate programs in this situation and ends up losing money.


You should begin with one affiliate program; choose a program that you are passionate about. Then put your best effort to market the product. Test different marketing strategies to see which one works best. Once you are making a steady commission with the product, then maybe you can look for second affiliate product to sell.

3. Believing that using a single method of marketing technique is sufficient. There are people actually think that submitting a few articles to article websites will generate the amount of traffic they expected. But this is wrong. Focusing only one marketing technique will limit the number of potential buyers you can send to your affiliate merchant’s website

4. Failing to improve the performance of your marketing campaign. Many affiliates tend to concern on checking their daily commission only and have no interest on studying and analyzing their marketing campaigns performance. When their campaigns don’t work as expected or don’t generate sales, they will fail to make corresponding adjustments because they don’t know which aspects of their campaigns need to be improved.It is essential to learn every aspect of our marketing strategies.Which marketing techniques are attracted most visitors?How many unique and returning visitors generated?How long do they stay in our website?Where they come from? These are the questions that could help us enhance the performance of our affiliate marketing business.

5. Promoting affiliate products that are lacking of demand. Some affiliate programs offer extremely high sale commission to their affiliate. But the products aren’t sellable and thus earning nothing.

6. Failing to find an affiliate program with a proven record of consumer satisfaction.The trustworthiness of a company relies on how people view it.If the affiliate program has established good relationships with their customers, then it has established a brand which is recognizable for its excellent service.You will find easier to pre-selling such an affiliate product.

7. Failing to keep abreast with the latest developments in the industry.There will come a time when the marketing knowledge we know would become obsolete, more so in the field of internet marketing where everything transpires at a rapid pace.You have to constantly update yourself with the newest trends, techniques and news in this field to always keep your competitive edge.

8. Failing to invest on knowledge.Knowledge likewise evolves and you have to evolve with it.Buy noteworthy eBooks, special reports and the likes… those which would teach you the latest tactics to help you conquer your field.

9. Resting on your laurels once a semblance of success is achieved.Success is not eternal.You have to sustain it.If you leave your business alone once it shows the promise of success, you’re just setting it up for failure.

10. Though that affiliate program can help you become rich fast. No, affiliate program isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme.You have to put in a lot of effort and time, and some capital before you can make money in affiliate marketing.





10 Power full ways to turn ur visitors into Buyers:

Whether you are making money online by promoting affiliate programs or running an e-commerce website that loaded with products for sales, you want your targeted prospects who visit your site purchase from you. The higher the percentage of your targeted prospects buy from you, the more profit you'll make. Here are 10 benefits and power words that can motivate your targeted prospects to take an action (make a purchase) on your website:

1. TIME: Most people makes time their most valuable commodity. When they search on Internet to shop, they are looking for products or services that can help save their time. Power words: FAST, INSTANT, QUICK, i.e., fast shipping, fast ordering or quick results.

2. SECURITY: People want to feel safe when buying online. The want to make sure that they are accepting a real offer. Power words: MONEY BACK GUARANTEED, Risk free, i.e., 30 day money back guarantee, zero risk guaranteed, no obligation.

3. EXCLUSIVITY: When there is only a limited version of an product or a limited amount of an item, it makes people feel that the product is more valuable. The more valuable your product or service appears to be the more people will appreciate what you have to offer. Power words: RARE, LIMITED, SPECIAL, EXCLUSIVE, i.e., limited for the first 300 buyers, special offer, limited edition.

4. SIMPLICITY: People appreciate clarity and ease. Show them how your product or service will reduce their stress. Power words: EASY, SIMPLE, CONVENIENT, STRESS FREE, i.e., stress-free ordering, simple instructions, convenient to use, easy payments, etc.

5. PROOF: Online buyers like to know what other people think about your product or service. Power words: TESTIMONIAL, REVIEW, CRITIQUE, COMPARISON, i.e. buyers’ testimonial, consumer review, customer satisfaction.

6. SPECIAL OFFERS: People want to find bargains in the form of rebates, one time sales or percentage offers. Power words: SALE, DISCOUNT, REBATE, ONE-TIME, LIMITED TIME, i.e., one week sale, special discount, instant rebate, one time offer, festival discount.

7. INCENTIVES: Giving free gifts will delight your potential buyers and making them more likely to do business with you. Power words: GIVEAWAY, BONUS, GIFT, REWARD, i.e., your complimentary subscription, order bonus, special e-book giveaway, a gift for you.

8. RECOGNITION: People want to know that you understand their concerns. Power words: YOU, YOURS, i.e. the benefits you want, the solution to your problem.

9. STATUS: People want to know how something will affect their life. Power words: ALERT, IMPORTANT, ATTENTION, i.e., important notice, attention please, special alert.

10. POPULARITY: People are always looking for new products or services that will improve their lives. Power words: NEW, FRESH, UPDATED, i.e., brand new, fresh off the press, updated report.





7 Ways to Improve UR Affiliates Commission:

Affiliate program promotion is a most rewarding and easy way of earning money online. You don’t have to be very knowledgeable or experienced, to be successful at affiliate marketing. This is a great way of earning residual income.

Many people don’t make the sort of commissions that can be made with affiliate marketing. It would help to understand the different routes one can take to earn huge affiliate commissions.

Article writing and distribution
With article writing, you can promote your affiliate programs very effectively and earn money. High quality and informative articles should be submitted to all the good article directories, like Ezine articles, which has a high PR. These articles will appear on search engines like Google, when people search for information related to your article. Writing articles and having a link to your website in the signature box helps drive huge amounts of traffic to your website, as long as you ensure your articles are attention-grabbing and your bio has a strong call to action. Just make doubly sure not to link directly to the affiliate product, as many top directories don’t allow this. It’s best to have your own website. Since you are going to be advertising your affiliate link on the website, there will be a huge increase in the number of sales and the end result is an increase in your affiliate commissions.

Multiple keywords in articles
Having multiple keywords related to your affiliate program in the articles, helps you rank higher in the search engines like Google for those keywords. If your affiliate program is related to making money online, you can have keywords like “make money from home”, “make money working online”, “make money working from home”, “earn money online” etc. When people who are looking to make money online, type any of the related key phrases, your article will show up at the top of the search engine. If you rank high for at least 3 key phrases related to your business instead of just one key phrase, your traffic will increase tremendously and so will your affiliate commissions. This is a very powerful technique that will certainly increase your affiliate commission.

Ad campaign personalization
To earn more commissions from affiliate programs, it would help to offer your visitors something more than just the affiliate program. Do not ever rely solely on your affiliate program website as a good way of promotion. Personal touch matters and will help get you more affiliate commissions in the long run. You can make a list of the particular market products and see what people are looking for. Do not refer them directly to the merchant’s website. It would do good to give something like a ‘quick start guide’ to gain the visitor’s attention. Many people may not know much about the affiliate program being promoted by you, so your guide, which will explain things will be helpful. This gives a feeling that you care. This will sky rocket the affiliate sales.


Creating a blog
How does a blog help? Having a blog on your website means fresh content on the website. Fresh content drives traffic to the website. Have reviews of the affiliate products on the blog and also your affiliate links. People will read these reviews and click on the links, thus increasing affiliate commissions through an increase in affiliate sales. You can also aim at having a separate blog, where you have fresh content and redirect visitors to your website.

Targeting the right market
You should aim at advertising your affiliate products to the right market. Advertising your acne affiliate product to an IM niche will not yield good results. The most cost effective way of getting the right people to your affiliate product is finding forums related to your affiliate product or social networking sites targeted at the correct niche. These are the places where your market is usually found. This will bring targeted traffic to your affiliate product, which will result in more sales.

Creating a list and ezine
Creating a mailing list is very crucial to being a successful affiliate. Once you have a mailing list, an ezine becomes a powerful way of promoting your affiliate program to your subscribers. Bring out an ezine that is related to the affiliate program you are promoting. You can have an ezine sent out weekly, where you will be promoting affiliate product related to the content of the ezine. Over a period of time, since these people are used to getting some good info from you, they will begin trusting you, and in turn look at products being promoted by you. This is a great way of increasing affiliate commissions.

Cloaking affiliate links
This may not be a direct way of increasing affiliate sales, but a way of ensuring that you don’t lose any sales. Yes, losing sales is common in the affiliate business. It is also considered to be very unprofessional displaying affiliate IDs. By cloaking, I mean that you do not display the affiliate ID that is used to get you commissions. If you have a website, you don’t have to worry about this, but if you don’t, then there are several ways of cloaking your affiliate IDs.

One way is to buy a domain name related to the product that you are promoting and then using domain forwarding to mask the affiliate links. Alternatively, you will find software that masks the affiliate links for you. You will find plenty of such softwares if you search on Google. There are also several free cloaking sites that help you cloak your links for free.

By following the above steps for promoting your affiliate programs, you will see your commissions increase and you will start making money through affiliate programs immediately.





Increase UR Affiliate Commission Using Camtasia:

Since there are tons of people already involved in affiliate marketing, it is no wonder that the competition of affiliate industry is getting fierce. To survive and make a consistent income from affiliate marketing, you have to try and outdo other affiliates and think of ways to be able to attain this.

These affiliates have learned so many techniques and tips in order to best plan their marketing strategies for their program to work effectively so that more affiliate commission will be earned.

What better way to wow your prospects and customers than to record and publish top notch, full motion and streaming screen-captured videos. Nothing like feeling your hard work getting paid by having your customers jumping up excitedly in great anticipation to buy your product right there and then.

Camtasia videos
This is Camtasia in action. It is a proven fact; giving your customers something they can actually see can boost your online sales instantly.
Anyone can create stunning videos, from multimedia tutorials and step-by-step presentations available online. The process is like having your customers seated next to you and looking at your desktop, as you show them the things they need to see and hear. All this done step by step.

How does Camtasia works actually?
1. It can record your desktop activity in a single click. No need to have to save and compile all your files because it is recorded right there and then.

2. Can easily convert your videos into web pages. Once converted you can have your customers visiting that certain page. Videos are easier to understand and take in unlike reading texts which oftentimes is a trying thing to do.

3. Upload your pages. Publish them through blogs, RSS feed and podcasts. You may want your Camtasis videos to get around and reach out to other people that may be potential customers in the future. Nothing like being visible in many sites and pages to advertise yourself and get your message through.

Other things you can do with your affiliate program using Camtasia
  • You can create stunning multimedia presentations that are proven to increase sales because all the senses are engaged. This also has the tendency to reduce skepticism among hard-to-please customers.
  • Reduce refunds and other customer issues by demonstrating visually how to use your product and how to do it properly. Complaints will also be minimized because all the facts and the presentation are there for the customers to just see and hear about.
  • Promote affiliate products and services using visual presentations. This is an effective way of redirecting your viewers straight to your affiliate website after they are finished with the video. Make the most of the presentation by putting your site location in the end and make them go there directly if they want more information.
  • Minimize miscommunication with your customers. Instantly showing them what you want they wanted in the first place is making them understand clearly the essence of your affiliate program. The good thing about multimedia is, nothing much can go wrong. It is there already.
These are just some of the things you can do with Camtasia that can be very helpful in your chosen affiliate program.

Note that the main purpose of using Camtasia is to boost the income that is generated from your affiliate program. Although it can be used for entertainment and enjoyment purposes.

Try to focus on the goal that you have set upon yourself to and achieve that with the use of the things that may be quite a lot of help in increasing your earnings.

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