Blog 3 - Affiliate Marketing

Firstly you need to ask yourself why are you interested in starting affiliate marketing, if it's because you want to get rich quick with only a little work then don't bother, but if you genuinely need a serious home based business it could be for you, maybe you are a housewife with young children who wants to work but you also want to be at home for your children, or perhaps you are in a dead end job with no future but you want to give your family a better life. Whatever your reasons are you have to ask yourself a few questions.

1.What are you prepared to put into your business
You need to be able to spend time building your business, you need at least a couple of hours a day to make affiliate marketing work.You also need to put some effort into this it is not as easy as some would have you believe. Do some research before starting, there are plenty of work at home forums that you can learn from and also check out some review sites.

2.Can you stay focused
Sometimes it can seem as if you are not getting anywhere, you need to stay focused on your goal and remember you can succeed, you will only fail if you give up at the first hurdle. Many affiliate marketers give up because they don't see instant results , the successful people are the ones who keep trying. You need patience and persistence.

3.Are you prepared to invest in yourself
This means you need to be teachable, are you prepared to spend a small amount on a good affiliate marketing training program to educate yourself on methods of marketing, there are many aspects to this you need to learn about article writing, keywords, blogging, copy writing and many other traffic generating strategies. Finally remember if you really want to make a success of affiliate marketing you can, the right mindset is very important, believe you will succeed.

I am a 39 year old housewife who after months of research found affiliate marketing to be the ideal home business for me. I find it fun, challenging and rewarding. If you want to learn more go to my blog at jan-workingathome.blogspot.com

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You've probably heard people saying that web content is gold but never really understood what they meant.

Actually that statement is absolutely true because there are at least two things you can do today with your existing web content that will put money in your pocket. And not a one off payment but valuable residual passive income that you will continue to earn for years to come.

You may be getting upset reading this because you've been struggling to make money online and have made nothing so far, but here I am telling you that you can turn your existing web site or blog site content into cash. Kindly hear me out, this is no hype.

Use A Ghost Writer To Turn Your Content Into Residual Passive Cash There are web sites on the net these days that sell content under license to other sites. What this means is that the same article can be licensed out several times and each time this happens, it puts money in your pocket. All you would need to do is get a ghost writer to go through your content and rewrite your articles for you. You can then post them yourself at the site, which will aggressively market them for you even as thousands of webmasters looking for instantly available content visit the site daily.

Use A Savy Ghost Writer To Turn Your Content Into Huge Daily Traffic The other way to put residual passive income into your pockets using your content is to hire a ghost writer who knows how to use articles effectively to generate traffic. They will re-write the content already on your site and then post it at just one high traffic articles directory frequented by hundreds of thousands of webmasters. The result is that your article will get re-posted all over the net complete with the links in the resource box pointing directly back to your site. Apart from the immediate traffic that this will give you, the SEO effect will be to dramatically improve your Page Rank and position for most popular searches which will bring you tons of additional traffic from popular search engines like Google. (continued)

Get more information now on how you can turn the content lying idly at your site in some low traffic page into gold from this ghostwriter site.

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Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways of earning money on the Internet. It offers a lot of advantages over other methods of sales, including the fact that you don’t actually have to stock any inventory to make sales. As an affiliate, you only need to advertise a product and direct the customer to the sales page for the product itself, which is usually run by the retailer or creator of that product. If the customer buys, you receive a portion of the sales price, even though you didn’t actually engage in a transaction or hand over product. What could be easier than that?

While the concept may be easy, most people are lured into affiliate marketing because of promises of making lots of money, rather than making money easily. You don’t have to search too long on the Internet to come across a page that tells you that you can earn thousands of dollars per day as an affiliate. While the mechanism is simple, it’s actually the promise of a huge volume of cash that tends to attract people to this type of business. Many people are blinded by the big numbers, however, and fail to realize how unusual it is to make huge money as an affiliate right off the bat.

You can certainly earn money as an affiliate, but those who earn the six figure incomes often have something going for them that most people do not – a huge mailing list. Having a large group of customers at the ready when a new product comes along is a large part of making a lot of money in marketing. Those who have spent years developing a large mailing list with ten thousand, twenty thousand or one hundred thousand names can often make thousands of dollars just by sending out a single e-mail advertisement. Such success is possible, but it comes as the result of years of hard work. Advertisements along the lines of “I made $30,000 in a week advertising product X” may technically be true, but they often hide the unspoken “by sending e-mail to the 250,000 people on my list!”

Building a mailing list takes time. It isn’t particularly hard, but it is a vital component of making money through affiliate marketing. With a large mailing list, you have a loyal, proven group of customers who are eager to buy from you. This is far better than randomly trying to get strangers to buy whatever it is you are promoting. Anyone who is interested in trying affiliate marketing needs to take the promises of huge, six figure incomes with a grain of salt and understand that such results are not typical. That doesn’t mean you can’t make money, it only means that you need to have realistic expectations of how much you can earn right away. As long as you understand that you can’t get rich overnight, you will be OK.

©Copyright 2007 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier is the owner of Retro-Marketing.com, a company specializing in making money online and a site about the Top Ten Affiliate Marketing Programs.

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Affiliate marketing is basically a way of making money by selling other people’s products in return for a cut of the sales price In a nutshell, you advertise the product and then send prospects to the merchant’s sales page. You then sit back and wait for the money.

Affiliate products can be of any type, and commissions vary from as low as 5% to as high as 75% of the sales price. The most popular products are those with no recurring costs, such as electronically deliverable ebooks and software. In such cases the usual commission is 50% of the sales price. This is good deal considering the advantages to the affiliate marketer.

First, you do not need to have a product of your own. You don’t need to spent time researching and writing an ebook, or developing a new piece of software. Secondly you have a massive range of products to sell. Clickbank specializes in electronically deliverable products, and you can take your pick from all of those in their database.

You also don’t even have to sell the product. You simply send prospects to the merchant’s sales page, although you will have best results if you carry out a degree of pre-selling, such as writing a review. Nor do you have to worry about collecting money or dealing with complaints. All of that is handled by the merchant. So what is the downside of affiliate marketing, and why is everybody not doing it.

There are, in fact, very few negatives since you can’t really lose. In order to run a successful affiliate marketing business, you will likely need a website. Most people who make a lot of money this way have their own website. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that you can more easily pre-sell the product from your own web page. You get much better sales figures if you write a review, or in some way tell the visitor how good the product is and how it helped you.

Most affiliate marketers purchase the product they are selling in order to sound genuine when they are writing about it. Another benefit of having a website is that you can use a different web page for each product you are selling, and also to advertise the product. Pay per click advertising is a good way to let people know about the product, and if you design the advert properly, with a good choice of keywords and provide a URL that sends the visitor directly to the relevant page on your website, you can get a fairly high conversion rate of visitors to sales.

This is because the visitor will be highly focused on your product, having clicked on your advert. Since you pay for every click made, you should test different wordings in your advert to find out the best. Google Adwords, the best known PPC program, allows you provide two or three different forms of your adverts, and they will display each in turn so that you can analyze the results.

There are several ways in which you can advertise, including ezine advertising, writing articles about the subject that the product covers and optimizing the page that your product is on so that you get some organic traffic from the search engines. Some affiliate programs provide you with a free website just for the product. While this could be useful to a newcomer to internet marketing, keep in mind that everybody using the program will probably have the same website, so you should check that you can customize it before entering into an agreement.

You should also make sure that you can easily contact your merchant. You have to be sure that the merchant is reputable, and is not going to pass complaints on to you. You are not responsible for problems that arise with the product. There are several online companies that offer affiliate products from merchants that are registered with them, and these tend to be the safest to use.

Examples are Clickbank and Commission Junction, both of which have a number of different products or merchants to offer. When you deal with such companies, your commission is paid by them rather than the merchant and you have some degree of security. However, you will find that it is very rare for a merchant to default on a payment, and everything normally runs smoothly.

Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to enter the exciting world of internet marketing, and allows you learn about the business without the need for your own product or a lot of start-up capital. You can theoretically start with nothing, but keep an eye on any PPC costs: these can build up quickly unless you keep on top of your advertising.

And as to why does everybody not do it: everybody does, at least most people involved in internet marketing have at some time or another. Some are more successful that others, and those that fail, are generally those without a website.

This article was brought to you by http://www.CapitalistLife.com, your best resource for earning, keeping and enjoying wealth. Visit us to learn more about Affiliate Marketing.

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There are many reasons why you need a website for affiliate marketing. A major one is advertising. Google Adwords is the most popular pay per click advertising program on the planet, but they only allow one advert to show per display URL. That means that if more than one affiliate is advertising a product that displays the merchants URL, only the highest bidder’s advert will be shown.

This means that if you want to advertise using Adwords, you will either have to bid high for keywords or have your own website, and show your own display URL. This is one compelling reason for having your own website, since Google Adwords is a very popular advertising medium for affiliate marketers.

Irrespective of whether you are using Adwords or not, if you send people who respond to your advert directly to the merchant’s sales page, you have lost them for ever. Whether they buy or not, you are highly unlikely ever to come across these individuals again. Every person you pass to another website is a lost opportunity.

However, with your own website you have several options of where to send them after they have clicked on the advert. The two main ones are a presales page and your squeeze page. The presales page is where you soften them up for the sale by writing a bit about the product advertised. This could be in the form of a review or a simple article on how the product is used and why you found it essential to your business.

The squeeze page, on the other hand, is designed with only one objective in mind, and that is to get the respondent’s email address and at least their first name. In this way you can keep in constant contact, providing information relevant to what people interested in that type of product would also be interested in, and making them occasional product offers.

Alternatively, the squeeze page and the review page can be combined into one page, where you provide a review of the product and offer some free information on how to use it better if they are intending to purchase it, and also some further information on the topic that they would find useful even if they did not make the purchase. For example, if you’re marketing a golf training aid you could offer a free exercise chart and other information that might help them to make better use of the aid, and also offer hints and tips in a free e-course on how to add 40 yards to their drive.

Naturally you need the email address to provide this information, and then you have them on your list! You cannot do any of this without your own website. There are other benefits, such as back-end products. The fact that you are selling somebody else’s product as an affiliate marketer does not mean that you cannot also sell your own, or even another merchant’s product that complements the original.

Once somebody has provided you with their email address, and you find that they have made a purchase from your affiliate statistics, email them with another relevant product. For example, if you have just sold a visitor an ebook on Search Engine Optimization, you can email them with a limited time special offer on a Keyword Finder, or article distribution software. The latter can be back-ended to many different type of product connected with internet marketing and search engine optimization.

Without a website you are restricted to the merchant’s sales page as your entire sales effort, and will consequently miss out on a lot of sales. With your own site you can make the reasons for buying a lot more compelling, and by the time the prospect clicks to be sent to the merchant’s own sales page very little work will be needed to convince them to buy. More people that you realize click onto sales pages just to find out what is available on the market with no real intention of buying.

If they find a good review of a product that might be useful to them, and you explain everything that it has done for you or your business, such as how your golf handicap has dropped dramatically since using this training aid, and then they might just think that perhaps it’s worth a further look at. On the other hand, if they only see a sales page with all the hype that goes with it, they might click away in the belief that sales pages are all hype.

A review is generally regarded by most people as being more believable, and if you could add 40 yards to your drive using this thing, then surely I can too!

However, all these other reasons beside, if you have to bid high and a pay lot of money for PPC adverts that will send visitors to another person’s website, then you must be nuts to do so. Send them to your own website and add them to your own list, not somebody else’s. To me, these are several very compelling reasons why you need a website for affiliate marketing, and why most involved in affiliate marketing agree.

This article was brought to you by http://www.CapitalistLife.com, your best resource for earning, keeping and enjoying wealth. Visit us to learn more about Affiliate Marketing.

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Although it’s possible to make tons of affiliate commissions without a website, having your own website really maximizes your earning potential. Not only can you brand yourself and your own business, you can build your own community where repeat visits mean more profits for you. Having no website of your own is like being handicapped in the game!

By studying many successful affiliate websites, you can start to gain a feel of why these websites pull in profits like crazy. They provide loads of unique content, and they regularly update their website. Many of these websites have forums, which is something that always encourages repeat visitors.

It is also important to watch what kind of content you put up on your site. Nowadays, search engines are clamping down pretty hard on content duplication, content that appears on many websites. This means you should try to keep your content unique as much possible. You can outsource the writing or do it yourself. However, doing all of it yourself may drive you crazy! A good balance is to outsource some of your content and write the rest when you have time.

Product reviews usually work well on affiliate websites. This is because you are pre-selling, rather than hard selling. You can recommend products by reviewing them if you have had experience with them. Even if you haven’t, you can read reviews on forums and other websites to see the general opinion about the product, then write your own. Remember not to plagiarize though!

Fabian Tan is the author of the free 51-Page Report:

"Murder Your Job: How To Build Cash Sucking Autopilot Businesses In 30 Days Or Less!"

Head over to http://www.MurderYourJob.com to get your free copy now before it’s gone!

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