Affiliate Marketing Explained

What you need to know about Affiliate Marketing…

Affiliate Marketing is a way of promoting online business through affiliate programmes and advertising that pay the affiliate (or publisher) a type of commission based on the amount of business their website brings the merchant company.

It’s a form of revenue sharing or commission based advertising. The term “affiliate marketing,” however, is often associated with network marketing or multi-level marketing and therefore many companies prefer to use the term “performance marketing”. Affiliate marketing is the most cost effective sort of marketing there is, and is actually incredibly efficient. For this reason, many companies (especially those that started in the early days of e-commerce) owe a tremendous amount to affiliate marketing (amazon.com is a good example) and it has now become normal for companies to include affiliate marketing in many of their plans.

There are three types of compensation methods that are associated with affiliated marketing.

1. Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Mil (CPM): Basically, the affiliate earns by how many clicks the advertising on his her site generates, or by just having the advert published on the website. But because of click fraud and many other questionable tactics, CPC is no longer the general form used for affiliate marketing.
2. Cost per Action (CPA): how much the advert generates interest by the clicker to actually buy or register at the advertised site.
3. Cost per Sale (CPS): based strictly on sales. In other words, an affiliate is paid if the clicker actually purchases something on the advertised site.

Google’s Adsense is also a very well known type of affiliated marketing, but is not really considered as true affiliate marketing as the adverts usually centers around the theme of the website they are displayed (known more as contextual advertising.) Google does not also directly sell a specific product, but generates money in other ways.

Affiliate marketing is not limited to only display-adverts on an affiliate site. When an affiliate joins in with an e-commerce merchant of some sort (be it a subscription service, a shopping site etc…) payment is received through referrals done from the affiliate’s website – done through the following methods:

1. Pay-per click systems: basically, the affiliate displays adverts on their site and is paid when a customer or internet user clicks on that website
2. RSS feeds on Blogs: even personal sites can sit under this category. Blogging is fast becoming a staple form of marketing and promotion, and affiliate marketing partners well with this form of online communication
3. Comparison sites and shopping directories: such as review sites or legit advertising sites
4. Loyalty sites: this is when a reward system is in place via a cash back or points back system (or charitable donations)
5. Coupon sites: focus strictly on marketing and promotions
6. Email lists: legit email lists to subscribers of the affiliate’s website etc – NOT spam
7. A registration path: when a person registers with a specific site, be it for a newsletter or subscription, offers from other companies are represented and advertised
8. Networks: there are many affiliate marketing networks. Some even function on a multi-tier or multi-level marketing sort of set up.

Affiliate Marketing can be the difference between make or break, it can drastically increase your brand awareness, your revenue and is without a doubt the most efficient and cost-effective form of sales and marketing.

NB: Stay tuned for a complete list of the best affiliate marketing sites available on the internet. Alternatively, please sign-up using the subscription email box at the top right of this page and have it automatically delivered to you.

Blogging Directories – Great Advertising Venues

If you want to have more people visit your blog, there are plenty of blog directories on the Internet that you can submit your blog to so that people will come and visit it. Most blog directories are listed by the topics that the blogs that are submitted to.

Blog Catalog is a free blog directory that offers categories such as careers, writing, Iraq, and many others. It has featured blogs and other things to offer those who submit their blogs there something extra.

Another great place to add your blog is blog-drectory.org. Not only do they have an an extensive list of categories with sub categories but you can get your blog reviewed. For the most popular blogs, it shows the amount of hits that blogs have and if they have any reviews.

As well as listing bycategory, the blogs are also listed by location.

There are of course many other blog directories on the Internet. Those were just a couple of them. But blog directories are a great place to advertise your blog and to make new friends. You never know what you will find when you browse through the directory, and you may just find out information that you never knew.

Some of the blog directories offer chat features as well, so that you can meet other people easily. As you can see, blog directories are a great place to get your blog noticed and bring people to read your blog and look at your pictures.

Advertising Your Blog In Your Email Signature

If you have a blog that you are particularly proud of, and that you want to share with other people, there are a lot of free ways that you can get your blog noticed.

One of those ways is something that you do everyday, and that you may not even consider as a way to share your blog. Put the link to your blog in your email signature. Chances are that you send out emails more times than you can count during the day. Each time you send out an email, you can advertise your blog by putting the address of your blog in your email’s signature.

It’s always a good idea to write something catchy like, “See what I am up to now”, or “Read my latest chapter of my fanfic here”, depending on what type of blog you have. The thing to remember about putting an adveritsement in your signature for your blog is to make it short,but eye-catching.

You want people to be interested enough to want to click on it, but you also don’t want to scare them off. Just like it is with any advertisement, you want to give them just enough to be interested and take a closer look at what it is that you are advertising.

Think about what it is that your blog is about. What is really going to interest people about it and make them want to visit. That is what you should include in your signature, and that is what is going to get people to go to your blog.

Blogger Forums – Adevertise your Blog!

It does not matter what type of blog you have, what you write about it or what your driving factor is for having a blog, one of the best way that you can advertise your blog is to join at least one blogger forum. After all, everyone who posts there has a blog and thats the main subject.

It’s a fantastic opportuntity to meet other bloggers and to advertise your blog for free.
There are quite a few blogger forums that you can signup for on the Internet. One is known as Bloggeries,where you can show off your blog, get your blog reviewed or review other blogs, and find lots of tools that you can use for your own blog.

Another good place to go is Forum4Bloggers. This, like Bloggeries, has spots for you to market and show off your blog,
Blogger forums are a great place to advertise because everyone in them are of the same mind and want to make certain that their blogs get noticed and read.

If you use your blog to advertise something that you are selling, or you want to get a lot of traffic to your blog in order to make money, you want to go some place where it can get exposure.

When you advertise on a blog forum, you know that you are placing your advertisement in a place where blogging is something that people enjoy.

Just remember when you are posting to a forum to read the rules and abide by them. That way you’ll get your blog noticed and you will know that you are doing the right thing.

The Social Network by David Fincher – REVIEW

So, I went to see ‘The Social Network‘ last night…

It was the first time I had been to the cinema in years. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the whole experience. I have gotten so used to watching films on the internet (for free!!! Sorry!) that it almost felt alien to me driving half an hour to pay 8 Euros for a ticket and 8.65 Euros for some Tacos and a 1 litre fizzy heart-attack. Nonetheless, when I walked in the foyer, it all came rushing back to me why I liked it so much.

An irrelevant name-dropping point: Waiting behind me in the queue for some popcorn was none other than Torsten Frings – the Werder Bremen footballer and ex-Germany international.

Anyway. Watched the film and was glued to my seat as it was truly a story that I wanted to hear about, as I am sure that most of the modern world population also feel the same way. Learning how a nerdy Harvard programmer became the world’s youngest billionaire from a product that I use daily, somehow makes watching the film more interesting to me. It is strange though. There are many things I use on a regular basis that do not interest me in the slightest. For example: If Steven Spielberg announced that he was going to do the life story of James Dyson… It would not be a film that I would rush to go and see. Now, I don’t mind hoovering / vacuuming. However, that’s where my emotions end on the subject of carpet cleaning!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Facebook, no matter how many people slag it off, is a very cool product, and if any one of us had the brains, know-how and balls that he had, we too would have loved to create it. Money aside ( and I know that’s a hard thing to forget when you take into account that he’s worth $25 Billion)… However, it was probably one of the defining inventions of our era. I doubt that we in our lifetimes will ever witness such an immense revolution again.

Love it or hate it, Facebook is here to stay.

What was interesting about the movie was that it was completely different to the story I had read in The Times newspaper years ago, detailing how and why Mark Zuckerberg had created ‘The Facebook’ as it was called at the time. Yes, he dropped the word ‘The’ on the advice of Sean Parker (creator of Napster) played by Justin Timberlake. NB: JT was very good, purely because he was playing an a$%hole…. a role which I believe he probably plays every day of his normal life!

So, I had read that he really needed money and wanted to go on a round-the-world trip with his friends one summer. So he created a small programme which he hoped would generate some cash. This was obviously complete BS! Shame on you Times newspaper! I will stick to The Sun from now on! Lol

On with the story… Without detailing it so as not to ruin it for you… It was the same old story of friendship and betrayal etc… and envy and greed. What I did find amusing was the starting point: a break-up with his girlfriend. He immediately started blogging about it, pointing out her downsides  and from that point on things spiralled out of control until he actually developed a type of Hot Chick Comparison programme for all the girls on his campus. He got into trouble but was so smart that his arrogance and intellect were a match for anything and anybody.

The rivalry between him and the Winklevoss brothers was great. If you search them on wiki it tells you the whole story but just imagine a pair of identical twins who just embody everything that is wrong about America and times it by a thousand. They were annoyingly good fun to watch. Reminded me of a couple of twins we had at my school. In the end it all came down to money and lawsuits and although there was a settlement of around $65 million …the lawsuit is still going on today as the two greedy cretins say that the settlement had been diluted due to a lower stock valuation. They are now looking to get over $400 million… The case continues…

Its a sad and poignant story mixed with admiration for this unrivalled genius. A real motivation to get your laptop out and start creating something online…right?

Well…. whatever you do… go and watch it. I give it 8 out of 10.

What is…a landing page?

So you don’t know what a landing page is!!!!?

Well then, before you begin the attempt to build a successful list or create a powerful sales page, you will want to start with a rigorous introduction to landing pages. In stark contrast to undifferentiated, unfocused home pages, landing pages focus specifically on capturing leads for a newsletter or making sales for a specific product – and make no attempt to give visitors a different option.

Another common word that is often used to describe landing page, is “squeeze page” (or “lead capture page” in some circles). A squeeze page is a page designed to get names and email addresses. Usually, however, a squeeze page is usually a smaller type of landing page, which usually has an opt-in form in sight when the page loads.

So what is important to learn in an introduction to landing pages? First, it is important to recognize that all successful marketers use these. If you plan to sell a product over the Internet, you will want to use one, too, rather than relying on sidebar opt-in forms and unfocused pages that do not convey a single point and a single call to action.

Another important thing you will want to take away from this introduction to landing pages is that every landing page contains the same parts and is focused on a SINGLE goal – getting the visitor to become a subscriber or buyer.

These parts are as follows:

1. an opt-in form (or sales prompt)
2. a brief or lengthy introduction
3. a picture of the list/product owner
4. the signature of the list owner
5. a call to action (or multiple calls to action).

Determining which model will work best for you can simply only be done through testing. While many boast a conversion and attribute it to the shortness of their introduction (many will be one short paragraph), otherwise will boast a high conversion rate because they use lengthy, thorough, and compelling copy. If there is anything you absolutely must take away from an introduction to landing pages, it is that you cannot create a landing page or squeeze page that isn’t focused.

 

The Complete Power Blogger’s Guide (Part 7)

The “Punch Line” of your blog!

 

This last chapter will introduce you to even more ways to monetise your blog successfully, ways that have been proven to work and perform really well on any blog out there.

One day, I was thinking if there was any other way to monetise my blog without having to put lots of ads, banners and links on my blog, just to keep it clean and easy to read. What I found out weeks later after a friend referred me to this programme, was that I was able to make $20-$50 per month with each 4 months old blog that I had, and that was without having to add any banners to my site.

That service is called Text Link Ads, and it’s been online for some time, performing really really well. It brings about $3000 -$5000 per month to some people, and that’s not hard to achieve if you have 10-15 successful blogs already up and running. What Text Link Ads does, is to sell links on your blog, depending on the main factor which is “page rank”. The page rank is that small thing which helps Google to rank your site in their search results pages. If you have a higher page rank, you get more traffic. So, by adding just a small piece of code to your blog’s template, you’ll be able to generate an extra $20-$50 per month, and this is pure income payable to your PayPal account or by cheque.

The other thing I want you to be aware of is the PayPerPost.com service, where internet marketing business people are paying bloggers to create content that talks about their company’s services or products. This is a great way to make extra cash and it’s like getting paid to write content on your blog. Your income depends on how many people choose you to write for them and no matter if you are a blogger or not, you can still earn cash from their affiliate programme. This is where you sign-up and you’ll get all the info you need – http://payperpost.com/affiliate_signup.html

Now, a different approach to getting paid to write about someone else’s business is to directly approach these people, or make an announcement/proposal/offer to people directly interested in your niche. The way to do this is to simply approach these people on forums where you know they might be. That’s where they get most of their customers, by replying in a friendly manner to questions raised by the forum’s members. Discovering what your readers want exactly, will also help you achieve more traffic and create a win-win relationship with your visitors.

Now, all you have to do is to get your blog started right now, as you finish reading this report, and you’ll be ready to go in no time. These step by step instructions will allow you to get going in no time at all, and all you have to do is to setup your blog, and track your traffic and sales.

Good luck and here’s to your success!

The Complete Power Blogger’s Guide (Part 6)

Vital blog marketing!

I’m not sure how much you know about marketing, but the thing is, marketing has a lot of influence on the internet. That’s why you need to be its friend.

One of the most important things is to know where you’re at, in order to decide where you want to go to. The best way to find this out is to actually track the traffic through statistics about your blog visitors. When you track your traffic, you will know what kind of people visit your blog (depending on the keywords they enter in search engines to get on your site), and you will also be able to find out how many of them are there.

A traffic statistics software will always tell you how many visitors you get in a specific day, month or year. This helps when you want to decide which topic attracts more visitors. So, let’s say that 300 people came on your blog last month after searching for “quit smoking program”. What you need to do next, is to write even more about this particular subject. Any hosting back-office should have a statistics software embedded, so there’s no need to use a 3rd party service. I usually prefer AWStats or Webalizer, but you can go with Google’s statistics service which is pretty good and has advanced reporting.

Also, to make sure the earnings of your blog are greater, try promoting a “quit smoking” program a little bit more intensely on the pages of your blog. You’ll soon realise that your sales as an affiliate are growing, and it’ s more likely to give you the right motivation to add more content to your blog.

The next thing you need is the “Subscribe” email subscription plugin that allows you to email the visitors of your blog each time you have something to say. This is often called “email marketing” and it’s the easiest way to drive targeted traffic to your website in no time and it is free! So, whenever you have got something good for your readers, send an email to your leads list telling them about what you have. If you’re not good at creating a great email copy,what you need to do is to get the “Instant Sales Letters” programme.

The last thing you need is to create a buzz, and Iwill tell you exactly how to do it. Creating a buzz, a viral effect, for some people is something really hard to achieve. However, that’s because they aren’t aware of the most important factor online, which is the video service called Youtube.

That’s it, you don’t need any other stuff. You just need to stick with this service and the buzz word is sent. In order to get the buzz to everyone’s ears, you need to come up with a great video on the topic that your blog is promoting, and then upload it on there. The cool thing about getting traffic to your video is the fact that you can embed it inside your blog pages and promote it from there. Once it gets more views, it will also get more attention.

Something that I use to do to get more traffic to my videos, is to post them as a reply to a popular, related video that gets a lot of traffic. Usually, the owner of the video who gets my response will accept it, and the traffic stream starts coming. You won’t believe I got 110.000 views from a 30 seconds video that was posted as a reply to a video with over 1.5 million views. That is a success and it can be done fairly easily.

Another great resource to get traffic to your blog for free is BlogsRater.com. The site lets you review and rate other blogs and in return you can get your blog seen more often. Do as many reviews as possible and you’ll see results. I have some inside information that this site is getting more and more traffic and it keeps offering huge benefits to members. You will want to join now and be ready for a great stream of traffic.

So the blog’s online, the content is coming, the spiders are eating your blog posts all day long, you have the buzz, and all you need now is to go to the bank and cash your money. Let’s close this report in a great manner by adding some more little extra tips to your power bogger programme.

Join me in the final part (7) of The Complete Power Blogger’s Guide

The Complete Power Blogger’s Guide (Part 5)

Creating a traffic jam!

One of the many reasons why a blog is a marketer’s favourite tool, is because blogs can achieve traffic fairly easy, and that’s because the open source community is more active than ever, helping the bloggers get the best from the blogging applications they are using.  The automatic RSS feed creation available in WordPress is a great example. This is a huge help because it seems that search engines love RSS feeds and they index them like crazy. Ok, let’s see what you can do to put your blog’s traffic into overdrive.

As already mentioned in the plug-ins chapter, I was saying something about the Ultimate Tag Warrior tags plugin. What you will need to make sure first, is that this plugin is available. Technorati loves blogs organised by tags, and they also encourage this kind of practice. Now that you know you have got RSS feeds generated automatically by WordPress, and the tags system is implemented by the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, we’re ready to improve the traffic a little bit more by “pinging” your blog. Here’s the trick that will help you to ping your blog on autopilot. If you login inside your WordPress admin panel, click “Options”, then “Writing”, at the bottom of that page, there is a box titled “Update Services”.

Inside that box, you need to enter just the following URL’s and that’s it:

• http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
• http://ping.myblog.jp22
• http://ping.bitacoras.com
• http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
• http://bblog.com/ping.php

You will notice that WordPress has a huge list of services available for pinging at http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services. However,my suggestion is to use only the above ones statedto avoid double pinging the same service and having your blog being treated as splog (SPAM blog). Once you enter those URL’s inside the writing options area, everytime you create a post, these services will be notified, and the spiders of those services will get on your blog and start indexing your new post. This is a great way to get traffic, and let everyone know that you have fresh content. A quick mention here, the Pingomatic service, will automatically send pings to other services, that’s why I insist to use only the links I specified in this list. This way, you’ll be protected from any SPAM complaints. Using these updating services, you’re sure to get your blog all the backlinks it deserves and that’s on autopilot.

The next thing you need to do is to transform your blog’s URL’s into search engine friendly links. This can be done by clicking “Options”, then “Permalinks” inside your admin panel. Then after choosing the “Custom” option, you need to enter inside the”Custom structure” field, the following text: /%postname%

That’s it! All your posts will now look like this: http://www.example.com/this_is_my_post_title_for_today_post, intead of looking like this http://www.example.com/?p=2.

Search engines will now be able to index your blog in a friendlier way, and your ranking can go a lot higher compared to using the default permalinks structure. A quick note here, you must make sure the htaccess file is writable while you update the permalinks structure, otherwise things won’t work as they should. To keep it short, this is all the info you need in order to generate traffic on your blog and adding those plugins to your back-office will surely amaze you.

Now,you have to focus on one more little thing, so keep reading the next chapter.

Join me for Part 6 of The Complete Power Blogger’s Guide

The Complete Power Blogger’s Guide (Part 4)

Small details make a big difference!

First of all, once you have decided that wordpress is the right route for you, I strongly suggest getting a wordpress.com account, which will allow you to get your WordPress key in order to activate Askimet. Don’t worry you’ll learn what this is in few seconds.

In the beginning, when I started blogging, there was something I always had problems with: SPAM comments. Just like the email SPAM, the ones on your blog will make your life a big pain, and instead of doing constructive stuff, like creating content for your blog,you’ll have to spend hours and hours deleting “viagra” and “cialis” pills related ads, posted by naughty little spiders created by programmers for one single purpose: posting SPAM ads under each and every one of your blog posts.

So, I said something about Askimet and a wordpress key. This makes up one of the 3 crucial plugins I recommend:

1. Askimet is a small plugin already installed on your blog when you launch the admin back-office for the first time, which requires a WordPress key. Once you get this key from http://www.Wordpress.com, you’ll be able to activate Askimet (click Plugins inside your WordPressadmin panel, and then “Activate” right near Askimet). This small plugin will filter all the SPAM comments in there, and leave your blog clean and fresh, and keep the legit comments where they should be. Actually, I remember having this plugin all the time there, but I never saw its power until I really activated it…I would always find excuses, “Maybe it will delete genuine comments”, “I want to review each comment myself”, but the truth is, if you want to make money instead of spending time, you need Askimet.
2. The 2nd plugin I highly recommend is Sociable. Once you setup this plugin, your visitors will be able to save your post’s link into their favourite social bookmarking sites. If you don’t know what these social bookmarking sites are, I’ll tell you quickly. These Web2.0 specific sites are nothing more than the old “web directories” that we’re used to, which organise the information on specific categories, and in many cases, they receive great traffic, which means your site has lots of chances of getting traffic also, especially if you get links bookmarked by their users. This is why the “Sociable” plugin is a must for your wordpress blog!
3. Number three is called Darren’s Related Posts plugin, and it helps you organise the content very well inside your blog. This is part of branding your blog and keeping your visitors longer on your site, so that you can expose more of the ads that you’ve setup inside yourblog. This little plugin allows you to define which posts are related to a specific post, and when someone will read one of your blog posts, after finishing his lecture, some links are available to point this person to a different yet related post. This plugin isn’t very popular among WordPress users and I think its value is totally disregarded. Actually, I find myself clicking on “relatedposts” links after reading a wordpress entry on someone’s blog many times. You probably know Youtube right? You’ve seen the way it works…. once you watch a video, you’re encouraged to watch more “related media” and it’s unlikely you won’t click to see those also. This is pretty smart, and luckily, now it works with WordPress. Definitely a must!
4. The fourth plugin that you should get as fast aspossible is called Link A Dink (yeah… I know). Link A Dink is a sneaky way to incorporate links inside your posts that, once you start using it properly, can direct people to ClickBank specific products. The plugin will replace exactly the keywords you want to use for affiliate marketing. How does it work exactly? Let’s say you write an article about “internet marketing”. What you can do at this moment is to select which keywords you want to associate with a particular affiliate link, and once you click the “Savepost” button of your wordpress blog, you’ll be ready to make money by having blog post keywords, automatically replaced with affiliate links.
5. The last important plugin you need is called Ultimate Tag Warrior. This will help you setup tags for each and every one of your blog posts. If you’re wondering what tags are, all I can say is that a tag is more like a keyword, which helps blog search engines (like Technorati) to organise their search results. This plugin is also extremely important and it will help you organise the content on tags. Not only will you give another reason to your visitors to keep browsing yourblog, but it will also help you achieve better traffic through RSS/Blogging search engines which is vital!!

Use these five plugins only! I strongly believe you shouldn’t install other add-ons to your wordpress blog. I know some of these plugins are cool, have nice effects, but in the end, the result is just too much time spent on installing plugins, and no real results being achieved. Now, you know exactly what you need to use in order to optimise the blogging process close to perfection.

Let us move on to the next chapter where we’ll be talking about traffic, one of the most important aspects when it comes to building blogs.

Join me in Part 5 of The Complete Power Blogger’s Guide