Expanding Your Business With Affiliate Programs

Many people think that they can only get involved in e-commerce if they have a product or service of their own to sell -- or a lot of products and services to sell. But this simply isn't true. You can jump on the band wagons for many large companies who already have an amazing array of products available to the general public -- but are looking for ways to increase their exposure. And one of the easiest ways for them to do this is by offering an AFFILIATE program.

HOW AFFILIATE PROGRAMS WORK

Affiliate programs provide you with a text or graphic LINK that you place on your website, leading back to the original company's site. You are given a unique URL -- one that has some code in it identifying the link as belonging to your website. When a customer clicks through that link and is taken to the other company's website, their system keeps track of where that customer came from. And if that person buys something from the other website, it rewards you with a COMMISSION -- either a flat fee or a percentage of the sale.

WHY SEND TRAFFIC TO ANOTHER SITE

It might seem at first that affiliate links are antithetical to running a website -- that you are sending your traffic somewhere else. But what you are really doing is providing an additional RESOURCE for your clients -- a reason for them to come back again and again. The goal behind a website – even one that is designed to promote your company -- is to give your visitors VALUE. So by directing them toward the products or services they might need -- that you don't provide yourself – you are building credibility and customer loyalty. And, you are making a bit of profit along the way.

E-COMMERCE ON THE CHEAP

Setting up an e-commerce website can be very EXPENSIVE -- between the shopping cart program, the secure certificate for accepting credit cards, the merchant account fees, and site maintenance, you can go broke in a hurry if your site doesn't grow quickly. However, affiliate programs make e-commerce easy and affordable. You can offer your customers the opportunity to purchase the products that they need on the inteet, without having to set the system up yourself. They get the ease of shopping online with a credit card -- and the VALUE of not having to search on the web for the products they desire (because you've been kind enough to point them in the right direction!) -- and you get a satisfied customer base and a nice check from the businesses you support.

Best of all, the other company takes care of all of the sales-related RESPONSIBILITIES of running an e-commerce site -- processing orders, customer service, after sales support, etc. You don't have to stock inventory, deal with sales tax, handle complaints, or manage the bookkeeping. All you do is put up the link. It's as close to a WIN-WIN situation as you will find in business today.

OFFERING A QUALITY LINK

However, joining affiliate programs is just like being involved in any other marketing or business opportunities -- you need to be DISCRIMINATING. You don't want to link to a website that has questionable business practices, sells a shoddy product, or does not represent your company well. You put your REPUTATION on the line when you link to a site -- just as you would if you gave your customer a referral to another local business -- and you want to make sure that you are doing your customers a real service with every link you provide. Only link to those companies you believe in and would shop from yourself.

HOW TO CHOOSE A GOOD AFFILIATE PROGRAM

Start off by selecting an affiliate program that provides content that COMPLEMENTS your website. If you provide interior decorating services, appropriate web links might include home décor, professional organizing, Feng Shui, or even housecleaning. However, you probably wouldn't want to link to a pizza joint's website, as this really has nothing to do with your services.

Also look for a website that provides QUALITY services, products, and information. Your visitors will appreciate being sent to a site that provides both valuable content and useful products, rather than one that tries to hard-sell them from the very start. And the key to being a successful affiliate is VARIETY -- try to offer a lot of different options for visitors, either by linking to a comprehensive site that provides many different features, or by linking to several "niche" sites.

THE BENEFITS OF BEING AN AFFILIATE

Affiliate programs really are the AFFORDABLE way to build your business. When you think about it, launching a new line of products or services the traditional way requires a lot of time, energy, and money. But with an affiliate program, it simply involves cutting and pasting a link onto your site -- no capital outlay and no real RISK. If it doesn't end up generating the income you thought it would, you haven't lost anything.

Another nice aspect of being an affiliate is the time frame within which you can start eaing commissions. With most business expansion efforts, there will often be a substantial "wait" period between launch and that first check. But with affiliate programs, you can begin eaing money the very first day you put the link up.

HOW TO SUCCEED AT AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Most affiliate programs will provide you with graphics and text to include on your site -- but that is only the first step to really marketing your affiliate links. The first rule to remember is that the MORE links you have to a company, the more potential sales and affiliate commissions you will generate. And don't just put a link on some arbitrary page with no explanation of why it is there. Try to WEAVE it into a part of your site that makes some sense -- and describe to your visitor why the link is valuable to them.

For example, one affiliate of or website (www.onlineorganizing.com) includes little blurbs in her content and articles describing related companies and how they can be of benefit to her visitors. She has included our link in over 50 different places on her site -- always with a bit of text talking about a specific product or service we offer that is relevant to the topic at hand -- and she gets a tremendous number of sales as a result.

Also try to create PRODUCT-SPECIFIC or EVENT-RELATED links. At our site, we send out monthly notifications of sales, special events, organizing holidays, etc. And our most successful affiliates are the ones who include a new link each month describing the offers and activities going on at our site -- giving people a real reason to visit. We also have seen affiliates create entire product pages on their sites that essentially look like their own shopping carts. They include pictures and descriptions of products we offer, and set up the link to take the customer directly to the page on our site where they can buy the recommended item. With the right web design, this kind of link can really enhance your site -- making it appear as though your have a wide variety of products to offer yourself.

As you can see, joining affiliate programs can be a terrific way to create an entirely new income stream for your company – with very little investment or effort on your part. If you are interested in joining the OnlineOrganzing.com affiliate program, please visit http://www.onlineorganizing.com/Affiliate_Program.htm -- and if you would like to set up a creative organizing product page on your site and need some help, please contact me directly at ramona@onlineorganizing.com. Good luck!

Ramona Creel is a Professional Organizer and the founder of OnlineOrganizing.com -- a web-based one-stop shop offering everything that you need to get organized at home or at work. At OnlineOrganizing.com, you may get a referral to an organizer near you, shop for the latest organizing products, get tons of free tips, and even lea how to become a professional organizer or build your existing organizing business. And if you would like to read more articles about organizing your life or building your business, get a free subscription to the "Get Organized" and "Organized For A Living" newsletters. Please visit http://www.OnlineOrganizing.com or contact Ramona directly at ramona@onlineorganizing.com for more information.

How To Become A Data Feed Super Affiliate

I am not going to describe what a product feed (or a data-feed) is. There is a lot of information out there about how to use one to build sites. Instead, I want to talk about how you can actually make more sales with data-feed sites.

The program that I manage offers a product feed, and I get a chance to see a sad picture of many good affiliates wasting their potential.

Here is my advice from the affiliate manager's perspective.

Whenever you join (or think bout joining) a program, you need to look for two things:

- Temporary or permanent opportunities

- Flaws of a merchant

Here is an example of an opportunity that was created by an outside factor.

Recently, we got removed from the Yahoo index because of a penalty. I have no idea when (or if) we will get included back in, but I do know that it makes one decision much easier for our affiliates.

Judging by the numerous posts on various SEO-related message boards, it looks like Google and Yahoo use very different algorithms to rank pages. So for any given site, you have a choice to make. You can optimize for Yahoo, for Google, or for both.

Since Yahoo and Google use different algorithms, it is going to be hard to optimize the same set of pages for both of those engines at the same time, unless you employ heavy cloaking. And the way I see it, for an affiliate, it is better to appear high on one search engine than to appear low on both of them in an attempt to optimize for different algorithms at the same time.

Imagine that you are one of our affiliates. Given the information I just told you, shouldn't you concentrate on Yahoo for that data-feed site that is being used to promote our products?

Why spend (at least) half of your time and resources on optimizing for Google when you know that we are nowhere to be found in Yahoo?

You have to have an extremely well linked and optimized site to get ahead of the merchant for the exact product-name search terms. The merchant is your biggest obstacle when it comes to the search engine traffic. So if there is a route that lets you get around that obstacle - take it!

Most of our well-performing affiliates did just that. Either intentionally or unintentionally, they ended up making much more money by appearing high in Yahoo results, while not being ranked high in Google.

So on a practical side of things, here is what you should do.

For your existing merchants, check if they are removed from the index in any of the major search engines, and if they are, then start reading and implementing SEO tips for that particular engine.

And if you are thinking about joining a program and can't decide between several merchants, then check if any of them is not in the index of either Yahoo or Google. If you find a merchant like that - drop everything else you are doing and jump on that program.

As far as theory goes, this was just a simple, but specific example of what you should look for to make your efforts pay off. There are many different opportunities to get ahead in existing programs with data-feed sites; you just have to look for them.

Now, let's talk about flaws of merchants and how you can exploit them to make more money and help consumers at the same time.

I will give another specific example, but you should be able to apply this concept to many different programs.

Our site has one huge structural flaw: we only list products by product-oriented categories.

In other words, there is no way to navigate our site by a specific occasion or by the purchasing intent of a visitor.

You can follow a path like:

widgets -> wooden widgets -> red wooden widgets

This setup works fine for some type of shoppers, but is a complete tu-off for others.

And the problem is that most affiliates simply mirror the catalog structure of a merchant according to their feed.

But if you structured your site to list widgets as:

- widgets for birthdays

- widgets for girlfriends

- widgets for those who are over 50

- the Independence Day widgets etc.

then you would attract different type of shoppers. You would no longer compete with the merchant, but instead you would complement them.

A visitor who is looking for a gift for his 50-something friend and has no idea that a red wooden widget would be perfect, will not travel down the path laid out by our catalog. So if he gets to our home page, we simply lose a sale. And if your data-feed-based site follows the same structure - you lose as sale as well.

Also, since the visitor does not know that he really wants a red wooden widget, he we not use those keywords while searching for a present on the search engines.

But if you attracted that visitor to your site, presented him with ideas for older friends' birthday gifts and guided him to that specific widget's page - then we would make a sale, you would make a commission, and the visitor (tued customer) would get his present with much less searching around. Everyone wins.

Such approach takes more work than simply cloning the merchant's site with a feed, but affiliates who actually do something to complement merchant instead competing with them make a lot more money. After all, if you create a copy of a merchant's site - you are not only competing with the merchant, you are also competing with all of their affiliates that use the same feed in the same way.

Konstantin Goudkov manages an affiliate program with a merchant that carries 2500+ gifts. If you enjoy working with companies that treat affiliates like valued partners then be sure to check us out.

You can find more information about our program at: http://www.genericgifts.com/affiliate_program.jsp

How to Start an Online Internet Business for Less than 60 a Year

This report will show you how to find niche products to sell, create a niche website and sell to the selected market for under $60 a year. The cost includes product research, web hosting and design.

Step 1: Keyword Research

Keywords refer to single words and phrases that are related to the niche you will be marketing.

When people search on the inteet they enter words or phrases they are interested in. For example, if someone is looking for weight loss help, they may enter "lose weight" "how to lose weight" "help losing weight" weight loss pills" "exercise equipment" or any number of combinations containing the word weight.

When you are marketing to an Inteet audience these keywords are used in your webpage, PPC campaign, articles, etc. so that people will be directed to the webpage featuring these keywords.

The key to evaluating your keywords is to determine whether your choice will have too much competition for you to receive enough visitors or not enough interest to make it worth your effort to create a webpage around that keyword.

To start the research:

Download http://www.goodkeywords.com

Enter a general keyword relating to your niche, ie: dogs

What will be retued is a list of the keywords that contain the general keyword and number of searches for the keywords.

Next, put dogs in the Google search box. You will see 243,000,000 results (upper right coer) which means that there are that many other websites targeting the word "dogs". This is too much competition for a starting website.

Go back to GoodKeywords and look farther down the list to find other phrases that have less searches. Repeat the procedure of looking up the word phrase in Google until you find a phrase that has less than 100,000,000 sites but more than 200,000. Why more than 200,000? Because it will be difficult to find products for your site if there is limited interest in the keyword.

Step 2: Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs give you access to products and services that you can promote on your website.

A list of free programs at http://www.as-easy-as-abc.com/Free_Resources.html

Find products to sell in your niche by searching by subject in each affiliate program.

Google Adsense is different from other affiliate programs in that they feed the ads to your website based on the content of your pages. You put the code supplied by Google into your webpage where you want the ads to appear.

Also check well-know websites in your niche for affiliate programs. Email them and ask if they have an affiliate program for their products.

Step 3: Choose Domain Name

Choose a domain name and register it at www.GoDaddy.com Choose a name that reflects the keywords that you plan to target in your niche. While at GoDaddy sign up for the $3.99 a month web hosting package. Do not add any additional software that GoDaddy offers. Remember - we are keeping the cost of the website under $60 per year.

Step 4: Website Design

Choose a website design using free templates from:

www.rickystemplates.com

Step 5: Webpage Editor

Download a WYSIWYG editor if you do not know HTML programming. The editor will let you add content and ads to your webpages. Two editors I recommend are www.nvu.com and www.mozilla.org. The nvu program is a stand alone program but the mozilla is downloaded with the firefox browser.

Step 6: PayPal

If you are going to market your own niche products, sign up with PayPal so you can accept payments from credit and debit cards.

Step 7: Content

Your niche website needs content. Write your own or get free content from the article sites listed below.

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.articlecity.com/

http://ezinearticles.com/

http://e-syndicate.net/

http://www.aracontent.com/

Adding RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to your website is another way to incorporate content but it requires that you lea how to integrate the Javascript into your pages.

Step 8: Free Promotion

Promote your niche website free by:

Writing articles and reports about your niche and including a link back to your website. The list of article sites above will publish your articles at no charge.

Adding your website to www.dmoz.org or other directories targeting your niche. A good resource for finding directories is www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php

Contributing to niche forums, adding a link back to your website in your signature. (There is a block for your personal signature on forums). Find the forums by searching by your general niche name, ie: dogs forums on Google.

Add a newsletter and autoresponder to send out product announcements and articles to your subscribers.

Find more free information at http://www.as-easy-as-abc.com/Free_Resources.html

Lea more about building a website by subscribing to my newsletter at http://www.as-easy-as-abc.com Pat Schraier pat@as-easy-as-abc.com As-Easy-As-ABC makes it possible to start an online business in minutes for pennies. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Pat_Schraier

Design Web Site Around Affiliate Programs

When starting a Web business, most people choose a topic for their Web site and then look for products and affiliate programs related to that topic. In this article, I suggest searching for a group of related affiliate programs first, then designing your Web site around those programs.

There are many affiliate directories and affiliate network Web sites where you can search for the best programs. For this example, I use Commission Junction http://www.jc.com This affiliate network site provides a vast amount of searchable information on over 1200 affiliate programs.

On Commission Junction's front page, click on the link "Search all advertisers". This will take you to a page with a drop down list where you can select a category. In order to search the information on Commission Junction, you must be a member, but membership is free. After you login to Commission Junction, go to the bottom of the page to "Find Advertisers & links". Here you can get a list of all advertisers, search advertisers by keyword, or browse for advertisers.

Click on "Browse for advertisers". This takes to to a table where you can arrange the affiliate programs based upon "EPC" or "Network Eaings". EPC is the average eaings per 100 clicks. It reflects the affiliate programs ability to convert clicks into commissions. Network Eaings is a rank, on a scale of one to five, of an affiliate program based on the amount of commissions paid. In the head of the table, click on the name of the parameter you are interested in. This rearranges the entries based upon that parameter.

After you arrange the entries, you have to page past all the "New" programs. I guess Commission Junction puts the new programs at the top of the list to help promote them. As you analyze the data you will discover that the programs that pay the highest eaings per click do not necessarily provide the highest total eaings.

Some important points:

- Commission Junction is not the best affiliate network. Their fees to advertisers are too high. Search Google for other affiliate networks and affiliate programs.

- Join several good programs. You don't want to build your Web site around one program that may be discontinued.

- Don't join too many programs. It takes time and work to promote each program.

- Don't be in a rush to join affiliate programs. Take your time and select a profitable category and high quality programs.

Most people get an idea for a Web site, and then look for related affiliate products to sell. Why not research affiliate programs first? Then you can lea what categories of affiliate products and services are going you ea you the most money. You can then design the topic of your Web site around the most profitable product categories and affiliate programs.

Permission is granted for the above article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and the byline, copyright, and the resource box below is included.

About The Author

Copyright(C)2002 Bucaro TecHelp. To lea how to maintain your computer and use it more effectively to design a Web site and make money on the Web visit http://bucarotechelp.com. To subscribe to Bucaro TecHelp Newsletter Send a blank email to subscribe@bucarotechelp.com

Earn Extra Revenue With Online Sports Betting Affiliate Programs

The Inteet is not simply a place for big businesses to get bigger or for new ideas to be rewarded with huge bonuses. There are numerous ways in which the everyday person can get in on the act and make their own small business. One of the most tried and tested ideas on the net, in terms of creating your own business is that of affiliate marketing. Thousands around the world have or still are taking advantage of this hugely lucrative market. But do not be put off by the number of opposing sites, the market is not built like so many on creating a market share and then capitalising on it. Personal website owners can ea some extra revenue just by simply hosting affiliate-advertising banners. The more business orientated and larger affiliate sites can go much further creating an entire business from the industry. It may sound a little far fetched, but when you consider that thousands of people are eaing substantial amounts of cash from this simple program, it is actually a hugely effective a profitable business model.

New affiliates can choose almost any online industry to represent, most offer bonuses and free start-ups for their new partners. However few of these industries can rival the financial muscle and the astonishing growth of the sports betting business. With an industry that generates such a huge tuover each and every year, you know you are essentially representing one of the market giants. Similarly the sports betting industry is constantly growing with hundreds of people looking to join each day, which in tu means more potential custom for them and the affiliates. The sports betting affiliate program gives new affiliates the chance to experience some of the eaing power of the online bookmakers. Without having to risk a penny, affiliate marketers can ea up to 35% of a player's money generated for their entire lifetime on the site, just by recommending them.

Affiliate programs don't cost a penny to join so there is no financial risk to be considered. The sports betting sites will provide their new affiliates with all the banners and links that they need to direct people to their site. This means that even the advertising is sewn up, leaving the affiliate the relatively easy task of choosing the content and advertising of their site. The affiliates are essentially self employed and working wholly for themselves, they have no bosses and no one to produce results for except themselves. Therefore they are free to experiment with site content as much as they wish, producing anything that they really want. Similarly the way in which an affiliate markets their own site is completely up to them. The Inteet is swarming with excellent marketing tools, but depending on an affiliates budget some may be easier than others. The main problem an affiliate faces, as it is for every site, is the initial challenge of bringing people into their own site. The affiliate faces a secondary problem, which is persuading their visitors to follow links to a secondary site and join up. There is no easy solution for either of these problems, but there are plenty of options available to overcome them.

Discover the secrets of top online poker affiliates and discover how to find the best poker affiliate programs at http://www.epokeraffiliate.com.

Affiliate Program Marketing Become an Online Marketing Success

Advertising and marketing has become one of the largest and most profitable careers around. Successful advertising gurus can command huge wages by working in the creative industry. Few people would choose to argue with eaing money by the bucketful doing something as simple and enjoyable as creating advertising campaigns.

The invention of the Inteet has blown apart the traditions and boundaries of many of the industries and business sectors, which have become established in the real world. One of these is that of advertising, the online market is vastly different to that of the standard tried and tested methods. In itself the advertising industry has been revolutionised and brought into the technological age. One of the products of this marketing revolution is the affiliate program.

The affiliate-marketing program runs along the same fundamental principles as that of the standard media marketing. However it does have some vastly different attributes to make it almost completely unique from the traditional associations of marketing. Apart from the obvious difference that it is an online campaign, affiliate marketing is a system based around commission and diversity.

The first major difference is the way in which advertisers are paid. Rather than forking out for a huge advertising campaign from the outset, the host website only pays an affiliate as and when they produce a new customer for them. This not only provides the website with a cost free outlay but also gives the affiliate the necessary incentive to go out and find new customers for the site. Without customers the affiliate doesn't get paid, so it stands to reason that most are going to be working hard to secure valuable custom.

The second main difference is the way in which the advertising campaign is mounted. Rather than running campaigns through an advertising agency and standard media such as television, billboard and event sponsorship, it is done through a network of websites. These subsidiary websites agree to host the banners and other advertising materials, in exchange for their commission. This form of free advertising means that a company can easily spread it's advertising to an unlimited number of people from countries all over the world, through it's sheer variety and breadth of websites.

Most successful industries utilise affiliate marketing, often in line with traditional forms of advertising. Competitive markets such as that of online sports betting have used the affiliate marketing program to generate exceptional growth in businesses throughout the sector. Offering their clients a percentage of the money generated by a player throughout their lifetime on the site gives the affiliate a huge potential to ea significant money in the sports betting industry. Not only has the sports betting industry taken off as a result of it's affiliate program, but so has that of it's subsidiary marketing partner. The sports betting affiliate industry is one of the most popular and profitable for affiliates everywhere. The growth in the advertising sector has helped, both the sports betting and affiliate industries develop into successful bi-products of each other.

Lea how Party Poker affiliates are generating massive incomes with this amazing poker affiliate program at http://www.epokeraffiliate.com/

Google AdWords Clobbers Affiliate Sellers

First, we must understand their point of view. Unlike some other search engines, Google is committed to providing the best quality search results possible. That is an admirable effort, and they are certainly not setting out to do harm to their loyal advertisers who bring them millions in ad revenue each month.

However, a new AdWords regulation will put a crimp on those marketers who run ads using an affiliate URL as a landing page.

Google's reasoning is this.

For any keyword search, a good sized portion of AdWord results has, at least until now, consisted of affiliate ads promoting identical seller sites.

Here is an example.

Before the Holidays, this writer searched Google for the term "chocolate." Of the ten AdWords listings retued on the first page, three were affiliate ads promoting Dans.com, a chocolate maker in Vermont USA. Another ad on the same page belonged to Dan himself.

From Google's viewpoint, and mine as well, that was not a quality search result.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, that won't be happening again. The new AdWords policy states that, for any keyword search, when two or more ads are found that feed to the same affiliate URL, only the ad with the highest popularity and ranking will be displayed.

At the same time, the new AdWord policy cuts a bit of slack, in that affiliate advertisers are no longer required to identify their affiliate status in their ad text. But overall, it has dealt a severe blow to thousands of affiliates, their market exposure, and their potential for income.

So What's The Solution?

There are three things that can be done to regain that exposure.

1. - Optimize the existing ad according to AdWords standards and hope you'll land the top ranking. That will be tough if you're competing against ten or twenty other affiliates who are all doing the same thing.

2. - Create a redirect page on your website that will feed to the seller's page, and use that unique URL as a landing page for the ad. The unique URL alone will successfully circumvent the new AdWords affiliate policy. Still, this may be regarded as somewhat sneaky or unethical.

3. - The best answer can be spelled out in just two words - Content Pages.

To clarify, a content page is just a simple webpage, hosted on your own website, that presents a short (500 words or less) report relating to the product itself or to the related niche.

And of course, your affiliate link will be embedded into that content, rather than being used as a direct link in your AdWords ad. Once again, the unique URL for your content page will effectively and legally get around the new affiliate policy.

Now, I'm a firm believer in content pages. They not only make your site more important to your visitors and to the search engines, they can (when well written and keyword relevant) help to pre-sell the product. An informative content page can often make the difference between a sale and a loss when there happens to be a weak salesletter on the seller's website.

Another advantage ... you can embed multiple [related] affiliate links into a single content page, giving your potential customers several buying options to shop from.

Where Can You Get Content Pages?

It isn't as tough as it might sound. Here are two ways to go about it.

1 - Write the content yourself. Stick to the topic and use relevant keywords/keyphrases to tweak the reader's interest, and that of the search engines as well. A personalized review of the product usually works best, offering your own experience in using it, and your resulting benefits. Then format the content as HTML, optimize the page for search engines, upload it to your site, and use that unique URL in your Google AdWordsTM campaign.

2 - Search for topic related pre-written articles at sites like EzineArticles.com and place your affiliate link(s) in a short blurb before and after the article itself.

Be aware that the terms of use on most public articles do not allow you to edit the body of the article itself, or to omit the author's resource box. Check to make sure you can effectively use the article and still abide by all terms of use.

Dan B. Cauthron is a 30 year direct marketing veteran and has been successful on the Net since 2000.

Subscribe to his original content No Nonsense *Revenew Quick Tips* NEWSLetter and receive Dan's Hand Picked eMarketing Success Library free of charge - http://DanBCauthron.com