Affiliate programs are one of the quickest and easiest ways of making profits online. But if you don’t market effectively, they can also prove to be the black hole that sucks away all your money and effort.

Affiliate programs work in two ways to make you money: they can be used as a full-time career option or can be used as a supplement to beef up your main income. Your aim should be to start slow and then make your way to bigger bucks.

Affiliate marketing is a source of multiple streams of income. You can choose to be a product producer with an affiliate program or you can take the easier route and just become an affiliate yourself.

You can promote as many products as you want. You can choose a single-tier program or a multiple-tier program.

All of these factors decide the amount of money you make. Most of the affiliate programs you see are single-tier. You sell a product and you earn a commission on it. End of story.

In two-tier programs, you earn a commission when you refer someone else to your website. When that person sells the product, you will earn a smaller commission on that too. So, you earn every time the people below you make a sale. These programs are comparatively rarer.

What should you do to become a top affiliate marketer?

• Do build a base: Your first step as an affiliate is to set up shop. That means you have to set up a website or a blog. This is the place where your customers come to find you and your affiliate ads. The easiest way for you to kick-start your program is to set up a blog through a reliable free blogging service. You can have several websites or blogs recommending your products.
• Do select your product carefully: Select a product through one of the clearinghouses like ClickBank.
• Do track your efforts: Ideally, you should not have to spend all your time tweaking your affiliate links or strategies. You must invest some time in tracking your efforts and maintaining links.
• Do choose a catchy name: The name of your blog should be short and catchy, so people can internalize it quickly and remember it at will.
• Do put up your affiliate links carefully: Remember, these links are the lifeblood of your income. Get them wrong and you’ll be throwing good money out of the window, literally. Copy and paste the text of your links carefully.
• Do drive in traffic: Being a super-affiliate is all about being able to drive in hordes of traffic. You can use multiple websites or blogs to drive traffic your way. Increase your web presence by starting an eZine through popular eZine creation websites. Feed your websites with fresh content using RSS feeds.
• Do use social networking: Social networking is the hottest item online, as of today. With a nice profile in sites like MySpace, TagWorld and others, you can drive traffic to your blog. Use search engines effectively to build up your web presence.
• Do use viral marketing to improve sales.

In my next article, I will be discussing something that is rarely talked about. Nevertheless, it is one of the most powerful tools available to affiliates to attract volumes of traffic - a well-written sales copy.

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As a first step, identify what you are interested in, because this will help you find the right products to promote. When you are enthusiastic about the products you sign up with, it shows in the way you promote them and it doesn’t seem like work at all. Your eagerness to share the product comes through in a genuine manner and it becomes much easier to convince others. See what we mean? So identify what you are passionate about. In fact, make a list of all the things you love. If you love music, go a little further and identify a ‘niche’ in that broad topic.

After you’ve zeroed in on a few music related topics you are passionate about, you can use ClickBank, the affiliate networking site to find sites you can broker for. When you go to the “promote products’ sections and click on the marketplace link, you will land on the ’search the ClickBank marketplace’ page. Here you can choose a category from the dropdown list.

Check out the ‘money and employment’ category for a huge database of niche market ideas in that category. Now all you need to do is find the niche market that interests you. You can check out the links to know more about the sites. See, right now your motive is to find ideas of the markets you can broker for and finding the specific sites is the next step. So shortlist the niche markets that grab your attention.

Probably the most intricate step is to find the sites to broker for, but once done with this, you would have set up a system that will earn you money for years and years to come for just a couple of hours of focused work. Let Google help you with this. Type in the search phrase with your niche market name followed by two tier affiliate program. You’ll get your search results. See the number of results? Look through it to find a site that suit the parameters we talked about in part two of our training series, namely provide promotional material, dependable tracking and a percentage from the sales of the affiliates you recruit.

With the steps outlined above, you can find a niche you love, a two tier commission structure, a commission of $10 or more from the sales of marketers with whom you broker the deal, promo material, and tracking system. Go for it.

Notice that you don’t even need a website to get started with JV brokering. But suppose your two-tier affiliate program asks you for your website URL? In most cases, you can continue signing up by mentioning ‘coming soon’ or not available. You can also find niche two tier programs from affiliate directories.

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Delegation is a critical skill you must develop. The process involves working with an employee to establish specific goals and giving them the necessary authority and responsibility to accomplish them. You continue to keep the overall responsibility and stay in charge.

People often find delegation a big challenge. They fear handing over certain tasks for various reasons. Some believe no one can do it better, some do not have enough confidence in someone else’s abilities.

But as your business grows, it is inevitable that you hire people to handle various tasks. There’s no reason for you to work crazy hours all seven days a week. It is easy to delegate, once you find good people and train them. Unless you delegate certain tasks you cannot succeed or achieve your goals. Delegation helps you achieve things you would have never managed to achieve alone. So lets look at the practical aspects of delegation:

• What can you delegate?
  Rather than work hard, you need to work smart. Focus on what you do best and delegate everything else. Delegate jobs you don’t enjoy doing.
• What if you have a problem letting go?
  Remember we said NO micromanagement? Don’t turn into a control freak. Trust others, save time, conserve your energy to plan, grow and enjoy your life.
• It is easy to find good help
  There are several trustworthy websites online through which you can hire help. You can also talk to people you trust or request referrals.

Now lets look at specific jobs you can easily delegate:

• Email management - you can delegate checking email and responding to it.
• Managing the phone - you can get someone to receive, respond to and redirect phone calls
• You can delegate routine customer rather than talk to each customer yourself.
• Scheduling and confirming your business appointments and travel management
• Direct mailing to customers
• Bookkeeping and accounting
• Data entry
• Managing bills receivable and payable
• Web design and monitoring
• Search engine optimization
• Link management - link exchange, one-way link generation
• Affiliate program management

The above is not a comprehensive list, but you can see the potential of delegating tasks to people qualified to handle them. Now look at what you must remember when you delegate:

• Be clear about the task to be delegated
• Delegate it to the appropriate individual
• Set a time frame for each task
• Get progress reports from time to time
• Make sure you provide the necessary authority with the delegated task
• Praise a job well done
• Avoid being a perfectionist

What if you are a one-man operation, though? There are many Internet entrepreneurs who run a home based business and make a fortune. But as the business grows, you too need to share or outsource your routine work. That’s what I’ll discuss in an upcoming article.

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A lot of Internet marketers ask this vital question - which should we find first - the market or the product? So lets get this cleared right away. It is not only easy, but also sensible to find your market first. Only then, understand what they want, look for those products and offer it to them. if you find the product first and find that there’s no hungry market for it, then you have just wasted time and effort that you could have effectively spent making a profit.

Here’s how you go about finding well-established products that are profitable:

Focus On Niche Products

A search will reveal the ones that make the largest commissions per sale. But remember, you must also get the products that aren’t so competitive that everyone is trying to make money from it. Did you ask why? Simply because when there is fierce competition you will have to invest in advertising and promotion - which involves time, effort and most of all - cuts into your commission.

Competition is good - but there are plenty of products and markets you can focus soon. So look for hungry markets niche products with high demand and lesser competition. Niche marketing is the way to go, because you can cater to a specific need.

Find Good Quality Products

The advertisements and sales letters must be accurate in their claims of the product. Can you imagine great promotion - the product turns out to be bad - and you end up getting involved in refunds? The market will just dry up. One way to figure out the quality of the product is to check it out for yourself. The easier way is to read reviews online. Marketplaces like Clickbank where you can find hot niche products will also rank affiliate products, which in turn, will tell you about their quality.

Pick Products You Like

Choose it -

• If you loved it and experienced it
• if you see a lot of repeat sales

It means its good, there’s a hot market and the sales material works.

Bottomline - High Margins?

Is the money you will earn worth the effort you put in? Personally I recommend products that offer you a high margin. The more you make per sale, the better your profits. So look for an average commission of at least $35 per sale.

Does The Product Have A Great Sales Page?

The job of a sales page is to convert the visitor into a customer with accurate information. It should grab the visitor’s eyeballs, get them excited, feature testimonials and offer a refund, among other things. Look at the sales page - does it grab you? if it doesn’t, it is likely that it wont pull in customers.

The Affiliate Program For The Product Must Be Reliable

Prompt service, good products, regular payouts and good reviews are the hallmarks of good affiliate programs. Look for them. One of the best sources is Clickbank, an affiliate network.

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Link building takes time and effort but the long-term benefits are worth it. So how will you build link popularity for your site? That’s our focus for today.

In a previous article, “Why Should You Build Links?“, I talked about how important it is to build your site’s link value since it will increase your chances of getting linking requests and gradually get other sites to link to you, increasing your link popularity at the same time. There are certain things that you must bear in mind when you build link popularity:

• Go only for the relevant links. Quality scores over quantity any day and you need to ensure that the links pointing to your site are from web sites relevant to yours.
• List your website in all the major directories.
• Submit your website to the about.com site if it is relevant to a particular topic.
• Which sites link to your competitors? Find those and try getting them to link to yours.
• Make a list of links when you get in touch with related sites for linking.
• You can also try to get websites complementary to yours to link to you. if you sell dog food, then you might want to a website dealing in kennels to link to you.
• While visiting websites related to yours, if you comment on their guest books or participate in their forums, include your website URL in your signature.
• Write a testimonial for the website you want to link to you so that they can link to it on your website.
• Affiliate programs are a great way to build link popularity

Search engines prefer to see links that come naturally to your site and there are several ways to achieve link popularity, increase your search engine rankings and generate huge traffic to your site.

How Great Content Can Help With Link Popularity:

Just as search engines love natural inbound links, they also love quality content. This is a major factor that brings in natural back links. You can write keyword rich articles, publish them in high-ranking websites, and also submit them in article directories. By adding a resource box where there’s a link to your website, you can see a lot of traffic and inbound links.

Consider Blog Publishing

By starting a blog, you can post the kind of content you want your niche market to see. Unlike in article directories, you can also freely add links to your products or services where appropriate. Blogs can be submitted to blog and web directories enabling you build link popularity. In addition, RSS syndication will also make you more visible.

Posting In Forums:

These are search engine friendly places where you can sign up for free and provide useful content. Apart from the advantages of establishing yourself as an expert, you can also generate a lot of natural inbound links to your site through your signature file on the forum.

Obviously, there are plenty of other ways to build links to your site. High page ranking by the search engines equals traffic equals better conversion rates and profits.

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In this article, I’m going to look at the best sites to broker for. After all, this will be the basis of your earnings. As a JV broker, here’s what you do:

• Find someone who wants to sell products
• Find a marketer to sell these products
• Broker a deal between them
• Earn profits

You’ll remember in my last article, “Taking The First Step Towards Profits“ that I talked about how two-tier affiliate programs are the best ones to sign up for. To get a little deeper into this, here’s what you should look for.

Sites That Pay A Minimum Second Tier Commission Of $10

We are looking at a minimum commission of $ 10 per second tier sale. This is not tough to do. Even if the marketer you broker a deal with makes ten sales, you earn $100. If the marketer has a huge list of subscribers, just by sending them a simple email, you are looking at a high conversion rate that can earn you thousands in commission. See how powerful this method is? So even with a product that doesn’t cost much, you can still make a lot of earnings by identifying and leveraging marketers with huge lists.

Sites That Give Your Marketer Promotional Material That’s Ready To Use

The marketer you are brokering the deal with will love it when he can earn without doing a thing. If you outline even a couple of simple jobs like sending out an email or setting up a banner ad, chances are that they’ll never get around to doing it. Instead, if the product site you are brokering for provides all the promotional material in a ready to use form, you can tell your marketer that all he needs to do is copy paste it into his email software and send. Don’t forget to tell him that he’ll see money within the hour of doing this. It’s a lot easier to send out an email campaign that has already been written for you than go through the process of writing them and then sending them. So you simply need to find a site owner who is smart enough to provide the promotional material to sell his products.

Sites That Give Your Marketer Promotional Material That’s Ready To Use

In fact, this is your first priority as the success of your JV brokering depends on this. What if the marketer doesn’t sign up right away through your link? There is every chance of them signing up even a couple of months later. How do you keep track? More importantly, how do you ensure your commission on the sales generated by them?

Here’s where you need to ensure that your site owner has a cookie tracking system in place. Sign up with sites that offer you a two tier program as well as track everything through cookies valid for several months. No matter when your marketer signs up through your link you will get a commission on the sales they make.

Popularity: 29% [?]

There has been a lot of controversy about how well safe lists work, but you’ll find that they are very effective in bringing traffic.

What are safe lists?

Basically safe lists are groups of people who agree to receive messages from one another. Similar to optin lists but more advanced, safe lists are operated from a website. So lets say you want to send a message to other members on the list. You will need to go to the website and post your message, after which it is personally sent to the members to ensure there is no junk being sent indiscriminately. Those managing the safe list take adequate care to ensure that bouncing emails and overfull inboxes are dealt with appropriately. Since the members on the safe list are double opt in, all the email ids are authentic.

You can join as many safe lists as you like and there are both free and paid ones. So what is the best way to use safe lists so that you don’t devote more time and effort than is necessary? Here are some tips:

• You must be wary about safe lists whose site is not professionally designed. Beware of websites that have too many ads, banners, overloaded with graphics and dollar signs. You must have enough information about the safe list. If no contact information or support link is forthcoming, forget it. If the safe list has no affiliate program or does not disclose the number of members on the list, don’t even consider it.
• Safe list users tend to look at ads when they clear out their safe list email folders. Often a catchy subject line appears tempting them to click and read the ad, resulting in making them sign up for a newsletter, an ebook, a bonus or even buy something. The point of the matter is - you must make sure your subject line is catchy.
• It is also worthwhile to write appealing ads. Your safe list advertising must be excellent to ensure that your affiliate marketing business is a success.
• Make sure you track your safe list ads. You will find a majority of the better safe lists have built in tracking tools.

There is a reason why safe list users don’t feel very comfortable using safe lists to bring traffic and in list building. This is simply because they lack the tools to deal with the huge email volume being received. One of the first things to do is get a large capacity mailbox. If you are looking for a paid email account, ensure that you get email filtering, web based email, POP3 and free affiliate programs. You can also get automatic email deletion.

To get more tips and strategies on how to use safe lists, and get access to several other effective ways to profit from affiliate marketing, get your complete list-building blueprint to success at 15Kin7days right now.

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Internet marketing lets you make thousands of dollars in as little as thirty minutes without any training at all. You don’t even have to worry about high initial investments. In fact, you can set up multiple streams of income with no cost or low cost methods. To get started it takes a mindset that believes this can be done. After that, it is smooth sailing.

You know what keywords are. Google search is based on keywords typed by people looking for information. Keywords have multiple crucial roles to play in the success of an internet business. But for someone who wants to make money online without a website, keywords have an even more important role to play.

Search engines experience hundreds of millions of searches each day and these can be repetitive for the same keyword. Some keywords have a consistent demand over a period of time. But there are others that become high-demand from time to time. This can happen for various reasons. During these times, there’s a spike in the keyword’s demand. If you are smart enough to identify it, then you have found your unlimited internet goldmine.

The idea is to make the most of those keywords that see a sudden spurt in demand. Did you ask why? Here are the answers:

There’s a high buzz factor with these keywords. When you catch them at their peak, you can enjoy no cost viral traffic. traffic in internet marketing is sales, which in turn leads to profits.

You can expect a spike in some keywords when there’s a great new product or when there’s something so newsworthy that everyone’s using the keyword to know more. What you can do is cash in on this and make a huge income either from affiliate commissions or Google AdSense or - both.

To actually find these keywords, you can use a Google feature called Hot Trends. It shows you what keywords people are using on Google search. You can see searches that are suddenly popular highlighted in this feature, along with deviations in the normal trend. You also know in what context the keywords are being searched with all the relevant information like location, etc.

From this list you can pick at least ten that have the potential to make you a profit. Here you must identify two types of keywords - revenue keywords and information keywords. Revenue keywords are the product related ones where people are likely to buy. So what you do is create an ad around that keyword on AdWords generate traffic to the affiliate program promoting the product. Find out how much competition there is and the number of existing ads in Google AdWords for the keywords. Choose the ones where there are hardly any AdWords ads. Next, find a website that has this product with an affiliate program. Sign up for the affiliate program and create an ad around the keyword for the product. Enjoy your commissions. And keep monitoring the keywords.

This entire technique will not take you more than thirty minutes. Surprised? With the information keywords, people are after information. But you can capitalize on these also to get you AdSense income.

Check out the whole package at Project Quick Cash with all the techniques. Do it now.

Popularity: 27% [?]

There are two important concepts you must understand to start enjoying success on the Internet. The first one is affiliate marketing. You’ve probably heard and seen a lot of information about affiliate programs. Possibly, you’ve also wondered how a handful of well-known affiliate marketers have made millions by just selling other people’s products.

Well, affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money online. All you have to do is select the right products you want to promote, sign up with the program, direct visitors to your affiliate link, and earn commissions on each sale you make. It’s as simple as that and does not require any specialized knowledge to be successful. You could be earning as much as 75% commission on each sale depending on the product.

But here’s what you should know - just don’t sign up for random programs that look good. There’s a big secret you should know when it comes to choosing the affiliate program. Only look for ‘two tier” affiliate programs. In these, you earn a first tier commission on your sale. Then you earn the second tier commission on sales generated by people you refer to the program. Easy, isn’t it?

Now lets look at the next concept - Joint venture brokering. You locate different site owners who are already well established and receive a lot of traffic. If they are related to the site whose affiliate program you have signed up for, you introduce them to ‘your’ site, and give them the idea of making money by signing up through your affiliate link. This means you are brokering a deal for your site. For every sale they make after signing up through you, you will earn the ’second-tier’ commission.

The marketers you identify to sign up through you can promote the site either by adding banner ads to their site. This will enable you earn a commission each time someone clicks the ad to buy the product from the site you are brokering for. If the marketer has a huge email list that’s interested in the product you are promoting, all the better. You can earn a commission for every sale resulting from the list.

Can you see how you can practically earn a fortune as a joint venture broker from a little research? All you need to do is identify a site owner who wants to sell his products and a marketer who can sell that product. You act as the middleman, coordinating the deal - and earn your profits in the process. Legitimate. Easy. In upcoming articles, I’ll show you exactly how to find the products, the markets and several advanced techniques you can use to set up your automated cash formula.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Apart from the conventional tried and tested methods as an online marketer you must also keep track of new methods and concepts when it comes to traffic generation. And if it costs you nothing - even better. This brings us to Squidoo, the Web 2.0 program that’s being raved about by everyone who knows about it.

What sets Squidoo apart from similar sites is that it has quality content. Most of the pages on Squidoo, not surprisingly rank high with the search engines. The site itself is ranked seven on Google and in the Alexa rankings Squidoo is rated among the top thousand websites on the Internet.

On the Squidoo website you can set up your own ‘lens’ or web page on any topic that you are passionate about. You can leverage your lens by making a keyword rich Squidoo URL. Most forward-planning marketers create more than one lens for different topics using their primary keywords.

The keywords can also be used in the page title and scattered strategically through the content on the page. The concept of long tailed keywords, which are keywords that run to more than just 3-4 words, works effectively here, bringing in the focussed traffic that you want to grow your list and your profits.

Squidoo owes its success to the fact that its members are a dynamic community that is continuously coming up with excellent content and links. You can easily establish yourself as an expert in your area.

By optimizing your Squidoo lenses to the search engines through keywords, you will be accessing the entire Web 2.0 media tagging system. Your rankings will improve to a great extent if your links to your other sites and content are relevant.

Creating original content is the first step. It must be appealing to the visitors and the community. Since there’s community ranking, with quality content, you can be rated highly by the users. By browsing around the site, you get a good idea about how others are tapping into Squidoo and use the same methods to be successful yourself.

Squidoo tips on tags

When you make your lens pay close attention to ‘tags’. You will be asked to choose your primary keyword or tag along with three more. Don’t stop here. Add at least 25 - 30 more tags. Why do you need to do this? Tags attract the search engines. These tags, with no intervention from you, are coded into the html of your website - so imagine the result. Google just swallows it. So when users use Google to search for your tags, chances are good that your page will come up, or at the very least, the overall tag page on Squidoo. By adding the right tags to your Squidoo lens, you can maximize the chances of your being found.

The next thing about tags is this. When visitors search on Squidoo using the tags, the results are brought up based on the tags on all the pages and then by page rank. So if your site is about affiliate marketing, one of your tags must be ‘affiliate marketing’ for you to actually receive traffic on your site. Elementary.

Keep adding tags to your Squidoo lens via the edit tags option.

Now you can see how you can use Squidoo to generate traffic and back links to your website. If you are in affiliate marketing, you can display affiliate links.

Popularity: 17% [?]