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% [?]

Testimonials are a great strategy to pull traffic to your website and in list building. What makes them special? Testimonials come from the actual users, which gives them their authentic feel.

Buyers write testimonials when they are happy about using your product or service. They like to highly precisely what they liked about your product and how it benefited them specifically.

Testimonials from your customer help you increase sales. On the other hand, when you write a testimonial for another site and let them publish it, it becomes a good linking strategy as well. When you write a testimonial and have it published by a website that receives tremendous amounts of traffic consistently, your link is going to be exposed to all that traffic. You also gain link popularity.

Testimonials need not be confined to merchant sites. You can also write testimonials and have them published in ezines with your link.

By their sheer simplicity, testimonials make an effective marketing strategy and a list builder when used in the right manner. How do you go about it?

You can let your existing customers know you care about how they perceive your product or service by asking for feedback in the form of testimonials. Have a separate testimonial page linking to your products pages.

Every affiliate marketer can greatly benefit from unbiased testimonials. Here’s how you do it:

• The testimonials you use must produce measurable results. Its not enough to publish a testimonial that just rambles on about feelings. The testimonial must be specific about the benefits and results. This could be in the form of saving money (how much in what time); testimonials could also highlight your responsiveness to your customer, good presentation of product, promise of quality kept, etc. The exact info would be based on what your product is.
• Testimonials must be short and well worded. Long lengths of text are usually quickly browsed through without actually reading them.
• Ensure that you include information about the writer of the testimonial instead of a couple of initials. This will establish credibility. So, first and last name, city/state, website url if there is one, occupation, plus any other info that the customer feels comfortable about disclosing in public.

The thing about testimonials is that most people wont volunteer one. You’ve got to ask for them. And watch your list grow as you feature them on your website and elsewhere.

Popularity: 89% [?]

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% [?]

What’s the one thing that can make or break your business? You probably have every ingredient in place to make your business a roaring success - you have the product, your website is up and your marketing strategies are in place. But are you equipped to deal with your customers? You see - it is not enough to generate hordes of traffic to buy your products. It goes far beyond that.

Every business aims at repeat sales. This means you want your customer to come back often. Now, what is it that will tempt them to return to you for more of what you have to offer? Great customer service. When you have a strong customer support system, it leads to customer loyalty. Not only will these happy customers keep buying from you, but also recommend you to others because they have a positive experience with you and want to share it with everyone they know. Does that sound good to you?

We cannot over-emphasize how vital it is for your business to have an efficient and effective customer service system in place. Just some of the benefits you can expect through keeping our customers happy are:

• Save time
• Increase sales
• Increase profits
• Better exposure
• Brand building for your business
• Happy customers

When your customers have quick access to support from you, they feel more confident about buying from you. We’ve all experienced lousy service at some point or other in our lives - can you remember how you felt? Interestingly, we all tend to have a long memory when it comes to bad experiences and we probably thought to warn our friends by telling them about it.

Thus, to keep your business going great, you have absolutely no option but to provide world-class customer service - all the time. Think about this - for every satisfied customer, you’ll have created an advertisement for your business, and a very powerful one. As a first step, look at the following questions and see if you can answer with an enthusiastic ‘Yes’

• Are you easy to find?
• Are you easy to contact?
• Can you customer understand exactly what you deal with or sell?
• Is it easy to select your product?
• Do you have a simple to use payment system?
• Do you have an easy product return policy?
• Is it easy to get prompt answers to queries from you?

If you put yourself in your customer’s shoes, you’ll probably come with a lot more questions to deal with. It is easy to turn any ‘no’s that you may have answered to the above questions. And here are some tips that will help you improve your customer satisfaction program:

• Have a customer feedback system to show you care
• Provide a lifetime refund guarantee where feasible
• Be easy to contact - in fact, put your email address and phone numbers on each web page of your website. You’ll be surprised at how many people actually pick up the phone and call.
• Ensure that you have an FAQ page - answers to frequently asked questions. This is a quick way to minimize queries

Exceptional customer service is the one thing that can make or break your business - and you can easily ensure that you have a great support system in place.

Popularity: 16% [?]

In this article, I am going to cover how you can select the best performing keywords and phrases for your business.

Before I go into that, let’s first discuss the purpose of setting up any business, virtual or real. A business is set up with the intention of making profits from it, right? And how can we make higher profits? There are several ways of doing this actually. The most important ways, however, are:

1. By cutting costs
2. By increasing sales

This article deals with both these methods of increasing revenues and turning your online venture into a money-minting enterprise! But first we’ll see how we can increase the sales volume by attracting more free traffic to your website with the use of correct keywords.

What Are Keywords?

When a person, belonging to the market segment you are targeting at, wants to search for your product on the internet, he opens up a search engine first, like Google, AltaVista, MSN, Yahoo or HotBot. He then enters a specific word, or a combination of words, to search for your product. Then, depending upon how well a particular webpage has been optimized for that specific combination of words, it is displayed in the search results. Needless to say, the better optimized pages are displayed first, and as such, they have a higher probability of a click through, leading to a potential sale.

Keyword Research And Analysis

This means that if you want to increase traffic to your website, you need to find out what keyword combinations in your industry are being searched for the most, and then optimize the pages in your site accordingly, so that they are displayed at the top positions in the search engine results. This is what is called keyword research and analysis.

In simple words, keyword research helps in searching for competitive keywords and phrases, and then analyzing those keywords and phrases in order to surpass your competition.

1. Keyword research helps you find the number of times a particular keyword has been searched for.
2. It also gives you the alternate phrases that can be used for a particular keyword.
3. Keyword research lists your various competing sites for that particular keyword.
4. It helps you track your website’s search engine position for the various keywords and phrases related to your product niche.
5. Keyword analysis helps you optimize your pages for certain keywords and phrases, based on keyword density and keyword location.

Use Of Automated SEO Software For Keyword Research And Analysis

By using some SEO software for keyword research and analysis, you are able to:

1. Completely automate the entire process of research, analysis, and optimization which is associated with highly targeted keywords
2. Quickly analyze why a particular website has a higher ranking for a certain keyword or phrase
3. Conduct a quick and easy automatic optimization of your web pages for the specified keyword phrases, turning them into lean and mean search engine magnets

Popularity: 19% [?]

Like web optimization, you have to be careful with the methods you use to generate traffic to your site. You surely wouldn’t want people to ignore or dismiss you as spam or just another advertiser. Here are some traffic-generating tips that will get you lots of traffic without letting you get blacklisted.

• Writing articles on your AdSense keywords is probably one of the best ways to generate traffic for your site. Make sure the content is clear, informative and to the point. At the end of the article, encourage readers to visit your site. There they can learn more about your product or access more articles. Remember to add your name and website’s details at the end of your articles.
• Submit these articles to ezines and article directories. Encourage people to use your articles and share them with others. The more your articles get spread around, the more traffic they generate.
• Start a blog. Blogs attract a lot of visitors, often more than ordinary websites. You don’t have to post every single day- just a couple of times a week is enough. In fact, you can use your articles as posts itself. Remember to provide a link to your site on your blog.
• Swap links with other websites. This can greatly increase your traffic. If you exchange links with a site that generates a lot of traffic, you automatically get that traffic coming your way as well.
• Join networking sites, forums and groups that are related to your niche market. Interact with others and take a pro-active part in the community. Try and get involved in projects that are mutually beneficial- for example, you could showcase a person and their product on your blog. They could do the same for you in return.
• Give people an incentive to visit your site. Getting access to useful information is a good lure. But let’s face it, people love getting things for free. That doesn’t mean you have to hand out free samples every time- offering items like discount coupons or eBooks attracts lots of traffic as well and that often translates into AdSense clicks.

Remember that a good portion of the traffic you generate needs to translate into clicks and sales. In order to do that, you need to constantly think of new tactics to attract customers and encourage them to click on the ads. You also have to keep your website in optimum order. This is probably the most time-consuming part of keeping your online business going.

Popularity: 29% [?]

StumbleUpon

As a social bookmarking site, StumbleUpon is a favorite among many internet marketers. One of the reasons is that it doesn’t take a whole lot of time like some of the other sites out there. In a nutshell, you can quickly join groups relevant to your line of activity, add friends, etc. The next step is to add content that’s useful - either your own or others. When visitors stumble upon your page, and like what they see, they endorse it with a “thumbs up”. When this happens, it is seen by lots more people.

Before we go on to the step by step process of going about this, here’s what you can expect: Traffic - and a lot of it, and links. Rather than actual sales which can also result, you can look forward to a lot of exposure, publicity, readership to your blog, subscribers to your content feed, etc.- all of which are essential components of your online business.

Now Here’s How You Generate Traffic From Stumbleupon

As you become more popular, it increases the traffic to your website. You have to be a regular on the site, which goes without saying for any social bookmarking site. It is also important to be perceived as someone who posts useful content that appeals to the users. How do you do this?

Submit Under The Right Topic

When you browse around the internet and find a site that you like, you can submit it under the relevant topic. This is crucial. You must select the most appropriate topic under which to submit the site in order to receive the ‘thumbs up’ to it. If it is under an irrelevant title, then there’s a good chance that it might not get noticed at all. Be as specific as possible to ensure that more people see it. If your site is about football, then let it go under football and not sports in general.

Tags

Tags are to your submission what keywords are to your content. After you submit the site, you must add the right tags. This will enable the site you submit be stumbled upon frequently, as well as help those who are searching for these tags. When you use the right tags, your site will get more visibility.

Send To Friend

An important feature of StumbleUpon is the facility to send your stumbles to your friends, directly. Get the StumbleUpon toolbar. So should your friends. Each time someone sends them a stumble, a red number appears next to the stumble button. When they next use the button they can view the page sent to them. You can also add and receive messages to these.

Groups And Forums

You name it, and they’ve got a group or forum for any topic you want. You can join about 63 groups. The special part is you can post links on some of the groups which can be seen by other group members. Don’t even think of spamming though as it is the best way to get deleted.

Blog

Start your StumbleUpon blog and post HTML and images on it. This kind of blog is more visible since it can greatly increase your stumbles and add more friends. This in turn creates a good impression.

Popularity: 12% [?]