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.

Popularity: 100% [?]

In this article, I am going to talk about a social networking site that is loaded with rich prospects. Not yet as popular as MySpace or Facebook, Gather.com is a social networking site that is any Internet marketer’s dream. In its own words Gather is a ‘place where informed, engaged people share perspectives on everything” Consider the following about Gather.com

• At least 75% of the members have a college education
• A majority of the members fall within the 30-60 age group
• More than 80% of the site members enjoy a $50000 annual household income
• These members enjoy spending

These well placed citizens on Gather.com would constitute quality traffic. Can you ignore it? Of course you can’t. So your first step is to visit gather.com and register for a free account.

After signing up, you can head to ‘My Gather’ and create your member profile. You can then post an article or comment. You can also browse around, read other people’s articles, and share images. You can join groups that appeal to you and also invite other friends or associates to join.

Since your intention is to generate traffic, you must make your profile attractive by posting quality articles that are interesting to read. You must ensure that your headlines are catchy with relevant tags.

When you post your articles, you can also include links, images and lay them out to look pleasing so that you get a lot of highly targeted visitors who click the link to your website and can convert into customers.

Gather.com is a social networking site, and as such, you can promote yourself. You can network with members who are in your target market. Get your friends also to join gather.com and rate your posts - highly.

You can ask people to recommend your posts and share it with others by bookmarking it on del.icio.us or ‘digging it.’ If you have any free stuff to offer, mention this at the end of your article with a link. This can get you heavy traffic.

Commenting on other popular members’ articles particularly if they are in your niche can get you lots of highly traffic.

Gather.com is also a great place for pay per click advertising and paid ads. So cash in on this little known social networking site to attract these prosperous members to your website.

Like Gather.com, there are other social networking sites that can also be effective in getting you highly traffic. Social media marketing is here to stay. By using the web 2.0 websites and blogs wisely, there are a lot of benefits to be gained, apart from the obvious ones.

Popularity: 87% [?]

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.

Popularity: 33% [?]

If you have heard of the Internet marketing business for quite some time, then you already know that niche marketing is one of the most popular methods of making money online. Best of all, this market is nowhere near saturation because of the ever-increasing demand for quality information.

So let us quickly look at how you can select a niche that pays.

Choosing THE right product from a hot list of products is probably the most difficult thing for a marketer. Coming up with an idea that sells is something that gives jitters even to the experts. Here are a few things you can do to improve your chances.

Keep your eyes open: The first thing to do is to spend some time surfing the net. Look at ads on websites. What products are they selling? Visit blogs and look at the “paid sponsors” section. Watch the news and read papers. See what products are being offered on the market right now. Search for a keyword and see what comes up in the search engines. Visit websites like google.com/trends or wordtracker.com and look up the demand for keywords you like. Watch TV and find what products are selling hot. Market research is vital to finding the right niche.

Look inwards: What ideas do you have in your head? Are your ideas already on sale? Explore new ideas and new angles of old ideas. Can you come up with a better idea and beat your competition?

Turn to ClickBank: Just as their tag suggests, ClickBank is the world’s biggest marketplace. So, they have a finger on the pulse of the market. If it is selling hot, it will be on ClickBank. Visit their website and click on “Buy products”. This will open up a large category of products. Clicking on any of these categories will take you to the sub-categories of that category. Click on any of the sub-categories and see what kinds of products are selling in that niche. Read through the sales pages of these products and discover their USP. This will give you a good idea of what you should select.

Once you have identified your niche, half of your business structure is in place. But you need to build the other half too.

The power of niche marketing comes from the fact that the market consists of consumers looking for a particular product. Even if you develop a product, you can’t succeed till you shine a torch on the fact that you are the best in your field. You need to reach out to people.

For this, it is essential that you know your target audience. Knowing who you are marketing to, makes it easy for you to channel your energy and marketing $$ only on that section of people.

For example, take a car dealership. The first thing you have to decide is where the dealership is located. If it is in New York, chances of consumers coming from Seattle to buy from you are less. So, narrow your focus to people within a 50-mile radius. This increases your chances of clinching a sale.

Defining your target audience helps you to:

• Maximize your profit by targeting a defined market. Your efforts will no longer be like a shot in the dark.
• You can optimize your search engine accordingly, so your customers can easily find you.
• You can offer solutions specific to your niche.
• This makes it easy for you to develop new ideas for supporting products.
• It is easier for you to dominate the market if you know the dynamics of your niche.

This should give you a good idea of how to develop a niche and become the expert of your field.

Now that you have the product, it is time to market it. Niche marketing can be done in two ways: Membership websites and websites with no up front charges.

Membership websites obviously ask for a fee upfront, before they give members access to their site. This is a recurring income business model where members keep renewing their subscriptions if they are happy with the product you offer.

Websites without an up front charge are a little different. They offer the cake free of cost and tell members to pay up for the icing. If you like the cake well enough, you will pay for the icing.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Do you Blog? If you don’t, you are making a costly marketing mistake and literally blocking people from reaching you.

Blogging started as a single-sentence commentary in the 1990s. It was a way for visitors and readers to voice their opinions. Then it slowly evolved into pages of personal take on almost anything under the sun.

Soon, blogs became the ‘in’ thing. A web persona - any web persona- had to have a blog where they talked, argued and ’sold’ gently. Moreover - and this where its power was really unleashed - the blog became the source of ever-increasing traffic between related sites. So, any web marketer with a niche made it a point to host his own blog, all the while visiting blogs of related products and leaving comments, which again earned him or her multiple streams of focused traffic.

Here are 5 reasons why you simply should participate in communities:

1. It is simple: Think of it as a virtual notepad, where you jot down your thoughts, ideas and comments. A PC and Internet connection are all that you need to become a big player in communities that relate to your niche.
2. It is authentic: Blogs, your own and others’, allow you to voice your philosophies. They are also a platform where users can voice their true opinions, fears and needs. In short, this is the place where you get to meet real people with real-life experience, unscathed by paid adverts.
3. It is free: You can set up your blogs for free, if you want, though this is not the recommended route for those looking for huge profits. To build proper traffic using Web 2.0, you will need a blogging system that is far more extensive and ‘accommodative’. Using a blogging service like Wordpress allows you to plug into the latest in building traffic to your website. But we’re not talking about Wordpress.com here. That is just another hosted website. You can get the correct version of Wordpress from Web 2.0 Submitter.
4. It builds your credibility: As you offer more and more intelligent opinions, people begin to realize that they can depend on you for the truth. You become an expert and the rest, as they say, is history!
5. Blogging helps you sell: There is a simple formula for making money over the internet: expertise=attention=making money. Before you become THE expert in your field, chances are that your mom and older sister were the only ones to read your posts. But post recognition, you can build traffic through emails, subscriptions, joining a blog network and using an RSS.

Thus, you can see how easy it is to drive traffic to your service and boost your business by participating in communities. You can also see why not participating in communities is the #1 mistake you could make if you are trying to sell a product.

Before you get too excited and start downloading Wordpress with single-minded determination, let me tell you that there are other, equally powerful Web 2.0 marketing resources that can skyrocket your sales figures. We’ll be looking at them tomorrow.

Of course, if you’d rather grab all the information in one go, all you need to do is follow this link: Web 2.0 Submitter.

Popularity: 23% [?]

In my last article, “Discover The #1 Secret To Leverage Forums For Traffic“, I talked about forums and how you can leverage them for traffic through the content you post. Blogs can also be monetized through content. Blog marketing is a hot topic with internet marketers, so lets see how you too can get the best out of them.

Blogs are easy to start. Blogs are cheap Internet advertising strategies. You can start one for free on blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc. They are often a great alternative to building and maintaining a website. In fact, most Newbies in online business get started with a blog to get a feel of the whole thing and then plan bigger projects.

The success of blogs is mainly due to that thirst for information, which leads visitors to browse the Internet. Happily, the search engines also demand good quality content and since you need to rank high with the search engines so that they bring you focussed traffic, you can use blogs to achieve this.

Blogs are must-haves for Internet business success. Bloggers wield a lot of powerful influence because when someone is considering buying something, they prefer to turn to their favorite blogs for more information and product reviews and to express their concerns. People trust blogs and visit them regularly, especially when it is refreshed on a daily basis. See what we mean? Now lets move on to ways in which you can pull traffic using your blog.

• Your blog title and description must be keyword specific. When you sign up to start a blog, say at blogger.com, you are asked to give a title and a brief description. Here’s where you think hard. Based on who is your target audience and what topic you are passionate about writing on, you can do some quick keyword research with the help of a keyword research tool and name your blog.
• Generate keyword rich content for your blog. You want to be found by your niche market don’t you? Update your blog on a daily basis so that your visitors bookmark you and keep visiting to see what is new. While original posts are best, you can also use an automatically updating feed getting content from other blog posts and articles. With each post treated as its own page, to the search engines your blog will appear like a multi page website with regular fresh content that is rich in keywords and links.
• Your blog profile must be complete with information about yourself as a person. Visitors love to see that you are for real, what you like and dislike, your favorite things etc. Sprinkle in a few relevant keywords, too.
• While at it, you can also post on other blogs and link back to your blog. Make contact and start the process of relationship building. The more links you have to your blog, naturally the more traffic you will see.
• Allow people to subscribe to your blog through RSS feeds. The advantage is, your content will be delivered to your readers by their consent. Each time you post new content they are notified about it.
• Submit your blogs to RSS directories as a one time activity.
• Each time you update your blog, ping it to let the directories know.
• Preferably create an RSS reader of your own - it’s a good branding exercise for increased visibility.
• Consider pod casting. Technology changes by the day and you might like to keep up with it. There are pod casting services that can upload, store, host and set up the RSS and submit to directories as well as ping.
• Try video-blogging.

Blogs are probably the easiest way to be indexed by the search engines for your specific keywords, and are a great platform to launch your products, pre sell your products and keep in touch with your niche market.

Popularity: 27% [?]

I’ve already discussed how effective online press releases are in boosting page rankings in my last article “Do You Know The Incredible Back Door Shortcut?“. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that internet press releases give you a number of free backlinks to your site. But why are these backlinks so important in the search engine optimization game?

Links For Sale!

One of the most expensive propositions on the internet today is buying links. Since they are such an important part of search engine optimization, people are willing to spend a lot of money buying lists of links. Exactly how much are people willing to spend? The numbers are pretty big- in fact, many people have invested so much in buying links that it’s almost run them dry. This is how important backlinks are in search engine optimization.

For those who simply can’t afford to invest in expensive backlinks lists, the online press release is really a life-saver. You don’t have to shell out loads of cash and you don’t have to worry about the kind of links that you’re purchasing. Best of all, you don’t have to worry about being labeled as spam- online press releases are completely legitimate. In fact, they are exactly what search engines love!

Why Online Press Releases Are Better

To understand why online press releases are better than buying backlinks, we need to understand how the press release works in our favor. It’s actually very simple- when you send out a press release, you also include a link back to your site. The search engines pick these up because they are original content- best of all, the links are all pointing in your direction. Having a number of press releases circulating in cyberspace is exactly like having a number of free backlinks.

Online press releases have a number of other advantages over buying backlinks:

• Perhaps the most important factor is the money factor. Releasing an online press release will cost you less than a fraction of the amount needed for a well-populated backlinks list.
• A winning edge that the press release has over other methods is the content. Since it is original and unique, it immediately makes a personal connection with the consumer. This builds a feeling of trust in the consumer. That’s something a backlinks list simply can’t do. If there’s one thing that’s as good as high traffic, it’s high traffic consisting of repeat customers!
• Online press releases are structured around one of the most important things in internet marketing- content. This means that you can use your press releases for a number of other promotional activities. Many successful online businesses archive their press releases in a separate section of their website. Others post them as blogs and still others have included them in things like eBooks.

Purchasing backlinks can drive more traffic your way but they can be an expensive proposition, especially when you have to invest in them more than once. Online press releases bring you free backlinks and far more traffic.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Web 2.0 is the latest buzzword in Internet marketing. Not surprising at all, considering what a goldmine it is in terms of all the benefits an Internet marketer can draw from it. Basically, web 2.0 is a platform that allows people to connect, interact with the website and with each other and share information online. Therefore, web 2.0 encompasses all those online communities like blogs and social networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, video sharing websites like YouTube, social book marking sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon etc. You get the general idea. Now the question is, how do you get the web 2.0 to give you a steady rush of highly traffic? That is the focus of part 1 of this training series.

Every Internet marketer loves free-traffic. This has become a huge possibility, thanks to web 2.0 sites where users have a high level of interaction, passing around information to each other.

As a result of this, there are hundreds of niche topics and markets people tend to be a part of. And just because of this, the web 2.0 social networking sites have become a goldmine for Internet marketers.

You have a huge market to which you can market your products and services, and not spend a dime towards this effort. Your first task is to find the most popular web 2.0 community-based websites where you are allowed to insert your URL. This will help people who want to share your information, making your URL more visible as it gets passed around and this, in turn, brings back highly traffic to your website.

You will be amazed at the number of marketers who are still not using the power of the web 2.0 to get a lot more traffic than even the search engines can turn up.

So create your free account right away with the following top ranked sites, and start building your community, with links that point to your main website.

• YouTube
• Squidoo
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• MySpace

There are several more, and we’ll talk about them through this training series. Creating a profile on these sites is quite easy and all you need to do is spend around fifteen to twenty minutes on these sites every day.

Savvy marketers also increase their page rank with the search engines by creating multiple user profiles for related topics. Once this is done, they link these profiles to each other.

On most of these sites you will find a Forum or a discussion board that allows its members to discuss any topic. These are highly influential locations where members share stuff. Social networking sites allow you to belong to different groups or networks within the site.

Web 2.0 sites are great places to share viral videos, which are a very effective marketing medium online. Millions of viewers see and share videos that appeal to them, thus spreading the marketing message and driving traffic to your website.

Social networking sites let you feature links to your website and blog. For any Internet marketer, one-way links and traffic along with high search engine page rankings are crucial to their success. Web 2.0 helps achieve all these, free of cost.

To find out more ways to leverage web 2.0, watch for my next article on “How To Turn Customers Into Raving Fans Before They Even See Your Site”.

Popularity: 21% [?]

In this article I am going to describe and give you practical tips about different ways to bring focused traffic and build your lists. Do you have a list? If not, start building one right now. In affiliate marketing, no such traffic, no list. No list, no money. The equation is obvious.

Here’s part 1 to get you started immediately - How to bring in that traffic with blogs. It’s easy and you can do it now.

By the way, do you have a website? Then you must be constantly trying to find new ways to get focused traffic. Among different effective ways, blogs are amazing. Apart from the fact that search engines are partial to them, blogs can generate heavy traffic. Search engines index them frequently and it’s not hard to see why webmasters like blogs. For the affiliate marketer, blogs are cheap to start and maintain unlike websites.

You can add a blog to your website or start a blog on wordpress.com or blogger.com. These free resources can get you started right away. I personally like wordpress the best because there are so many plugins and features that the wordpress community has developed. It far outweighs any other CMS (content management system) out there.

Your blog must be relevant to your website topic or business to serve its purpose of attracting traffic. So if your website sells pet food, then your blog should be related to pets. The best way to bring traffic to your blog is by adding new content a minimum of four times a week. The most successful blogs are updated on a daily basis.

You need not necessarily write the content you add to your blog; you can also post free content or outsource the writing to a professional. Each blog post can be as short as 200 words or longer depending on what you are writing about. Your posts can be information, product reviews, tips, etc.

Since you want your blog to generate traffic, make sure you have a link to your website on the blog. It is also possible to link to your site through your blog posts. In addition to this, you must also link to content on your website so that people find it easy to go there.

Once you post content, you must get your blog indexed by the major search engines. The easiest way to do this is to post content daily. You can also submit to blog directories so that you can come up in specific searches. Here are specific action tips:

• You must post at least four posts a day with your keywords incorporated into it. You can use RSS 2 Blog to create multiple posts and post them at periodic intervals.
• To index your RSS feed, submit it to Google’s Reader and My Yahoo. Also submit your blog to directories like DMOZ. You can also get your feed listed.
• Link your blog to your website, and other relevant websites
• Pinging services can be used to show that your blog has a new post. On WordPress this happens automatically.
• Become a member through a free sign up with websites like Facebook, MySpace, and Ryze etc. and display a link to your blog. Facebook, MySpace and YouTube are websites that have the largest traffic statistics on the Internet and the search engines can find you easily. It is also advantageous in getting you a backlink ranked high.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Are you using appropriate Web 2.0 Marketing strategies to get the traffic you deserve?

Talk about marketing products and the four P’s come into mind: Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement. The first step is to identify the service or product that consumers need. Then, you have to affix the right price. After that, it is promote, promote and promote. Traditionally, marketers focused their attention on advertising and publicity through special events that spread brand awareness. But, in recent times, marketers have started using another powerful strategy to earn ‘clicks’ - Web 2.0.

Why?

Traditional marketing is controlled. It is a process where marketers develop, craft and deliver messages through their PR department. But with Web 2.0, this top-to-bottom pyramid level of communication has been inverted to peer-to-peer communication. The advantage is obvious: information passed on by peers is highly trusted. It also spreads faster.

Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way messages spread across the web. A number of online tools and platforms are now defining how people share opinions, perspectives, thoughts and experiences. Social media tools like blogs, podcasts, videocasting, social bookmarking, wikis and photo sharing are just some of the methods that are becoming more and more popular.

So, the first thing you need to market via Web 2.0 is to have direct access to Web 2.0 marketing resources. Let us look at the various tools marketers use.

Blogging: Marketing on the web cannot be done without a Blog. That is why Web 2.0 places the greatest importance on blogging software. Among all the blogging services available out there, Wordpress is perhaps one of the strongest. It is strong in that it incorporates a number of free and paid plug-ins that make it possible for you to unleash the power of Web 2.0. While free plug-ins are useful, some of the paid plug-ins like the Wordpress Sitemap Plug-in and the Adsense Deluxe help you harness focused traffic to your website.

Linkbaiting: Obviously, the ‘in’ thing in the last couple of years is to create a social marketing buzz. Linkbaiting is another tactic used by web masters to attract cross-links. A number of websites allow you to create it. Examples are Technorati, Reddit and PRWeb.

RSS feeds: RSS feed creation and promotions are potent methods of spreading the word about your website or services. The more number of sites you submit your feeds to, the better ranked your websites would be. By using some of the best automation tools available, you can improve traffic to your website by 70% or more.

Social bookmarking and media bookmarking are powerful tools to woo traffic. One great free service is OnlyWire. They are free and good enough for beginners. But as you start getting serious traffic, you need to consider other bookmarking sites.

Video, video marketing and video syndication are some of the big tools of 2007. Most web marketers ignore video because it can be a little daunting, which is precisely why you SHOULD go for it right away, before the web gets cluttered with it. Video is getting big and the only way to beat your competition is by getting ahead of the curve. You can easily learn how to create video for the web, how to edit your video and how to make free legal soundtracks for your video from various Web 2.0 resources freely available on the net.

Of course, most of the information given here may sound vaguely familiar. But trying to do all of these by hand and one-by-one is going to cost you something very valuable - time; time you should spend on strategizing and providing new services. You could always hire someone to do these tasks for you but the ideal solution would be to have access to cutting-edge automation software that does all the hard work for you and keeps your marketing strategies running on autopilot.

Popularity: 17% [?]