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% [?]

Among list building methods for affiliate success, ezines are one of the most preferred. Simply put, ezines are online newsletters. Affiliate marketers use these to communicate and stay in touch with their subscribers. Through ezines, marketers share news, promotions, updates etc. Ezines can be used effectively to attract focussed traffic to your site.

Almost every ezine is ready to accept advertising from other marketers. The revenue from these ads can nicely offset operational costs associated with running the ezine apart from becoming a source of income in itself.

The best ezines to place your ads in are those that are very closely related to your own niche market to maximize the returns on the ad you put in. Different ezines have different rates depending on the number of subscribers they have and the specific niche. Rates are also based on the position of your ad.

Solo ads are found to work best in ezines even though they cost more because this means readers will see only your ad. In order to create a good solo ad, find an ezine that is directed at the exact target market you want. You can find other websites that run ezines related to your niche market. Searching on Google using your keyword or phrase followed by the word ezine or newsletter easily does this.

After you shortlist the most targeted ezines and newsletters to advertise in, find out the cost and number of subscribers each one has. We recommend actually subscribing to an ezine to see a few issues before advertising in it to get a good sense of the ezine. This will ensure that it speaks your language and reaches your message to your niche.

It is worthwhile spending time on designing your ad. What you say must be geared to getting your readers respond by doing what you expect them to.

Every activity in affiliate marketing must be tracked to monitor effectiveness. By tracking your ads you can know which ezines are bringing you the best response and which ones are not as effective as you expected. You can rephrase your ads to see which words work better so that you don’t waste money.

Some tips to ensure the success of your ezine advertising

• As you might have realized by now, choosing the right ezines to advertise in is the most important aspect of ezine advertising. Suppose the ezine you choose is crowded with ads, you hardly want your ad lost in it.
• When you offer something for free, as a sign up bonus in your ad, chances are quite good that the visitor would want to see what it is.
• Here’s something to check - if the ezine publisher has a policy of not running two ads for similar products within the same issue then you have a better chance of having your ad read by the ezine readers.
• Repeat your ads 2-3 times. The ezine publisher will probably offer you a bulk discount rate.

These are just a few of the many ways in which you can use ezine advertising successfully.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Much of your marketing efforts rely on email marketing. So you want to make sure that the emails you send your subscribers reach their inbox and are read by them. To be successful with your email marketing efforts, you need to develop your own lists. Why? Because if you rent a list and email them, no matter how legit, its very short term. With your own list, you can build a customer relationship and communicate with them again and again. You build your list as a result of your subscribers opting in to receive your messages and avoid the risk of being reported as spam.

In spite of a well-planned marketing strategy and designing an effective series of emails, sometimes these emails end up in cyberspace, thanks to automatic spam-filters. To avoid this happening, you will need to be conversant with the words, phrases and characters that can kill your email before it reaches your recipient.

There are a lot of unscrupulous marketers out there who send unsolicited messages and give the legitimate ones a bad name, causing people to be doubly wary about which websites they subscribe to and which emails they receive.

The first step, then, is to do some quick research on the kind of words and phrases that can activate these filters and avoid using them completely. Filters especially look for certain symbols and words and by knowing what they are you can avoid them. So make sure your emails comply with the CAN SPAM Act.

You must put specific information in the title and from fields of your emails. Include your name and state your purpose. Don’t write so much in your email that your recipient has to keep scrolling till eternity to get to the point of the message. Rather than use superlative words, present the topic and content of your email so that your recipient is keen to know what it contains and how it will benefit them. Sign off with a call to action.

Many affiliate marketers invest in a reliable email service provider who also makes sure about email deliverability, hosting, customizing content and compliance with the CAN SPAM Act.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Expert internet marketers know that lists are the foundation of their online marketing business. I have put together some critical tips to cost effectively build your email lists - use this as a checklist to enable you collect focused email addresses at every opportunity. 

• Make sure that each and every one of your web forms includes an email list opt in box, whether it is to do with registration, information requests or ordering products.
• Ensure that your website URL appears on all official stationery, promotional material, newsletters etc. You’d be surprised at how many people will immediately visit your link to know more and be ready to optin for email communication.
• While browsing your website your visitor must be able to optin from any page of your website.
• If you use direct mailing methods or paper forms offline, make sure your customers are requested to give their email addresses. At offline events it is standard practice to have a “Visitors book”. Have your visitors write down their email in it so that you can be in touch with them.
• Each and every paper that goes out to your customers and contacts must include an email request. Use every possible way to get hold of email addresses to build your lists - when you respond to customer questions, your invoice, etc.
• An effective way to build your list is to look at your current list. When you mail them request them to tell a friend or refer you to someone. Since these people receive the message from someone they know already, they are receptive to signing up with you! In turn, these people can refer you to others. Not only do you get an authentic list but also an endorsement. Provide a link that your optin list can forward to their contacts and grow your list.
• Be honest about the frequency of mailers you intend to send your optin list before they sign up so they know what to expect. If you send too many mailers too often, you’ll just get blocked.
• Solicit feedback from your subscribers so that you can design your messages according to what they want. If not, they will simply use the ‘unsubscribe’ option and that’s the end of the relationship.
• Your optin list is looking for value when they sign up with you - so make good use of your autoresponder to keep in touch with them with useful stuff.
• Remember that every interaction with a prospective customer is your chance to grow your list. Use ethical ways to build your list.

As you experiment with different methods you will learn different ways to succeed. List building is an activity that never stops as long as you are in business!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Most online marketers sign up with affiliate programs at some time or other. Chances are quite good that you have, too, before you launched your affiliate program and decided to recruit your own affiliate army. Have you noticed how some affiliate managers regularly connect with you while some go silent after that first automated welcome note?

This sort of thing can easily make an affiliate gradually ease out of the program and join another one where there’s continuous support and communication. It is necessary to at least maintain a once-a-week contact system with your affiliates so that they are always motivated to keep promoting your program and stay active. Here are some ways:

• Start an affiliate blog. Your affiliates can subscribe to this blog via an RSS feed that will update them as new posts are added. Post news about any important news about Internet marketing that appears useful and interesting. Provide links to websites where free ecourses or ebooks are being offered so that your affiliates can keep themselves in tune with what they need to know. Post success stories that are inspiring on the blog. Allow your affiliates to comment and participate.
• Have a monthly newsletter. This is a great way to be in touch with your affiliates and can also serve to keep them active. Announce contests and bonuses on the newsletter and list the winners of the previous months. This can be inspiring for others to strive to win.
• Each time you intend to add a product, create a buzz among your affiliates through teasers. By allowing them a preview, you can help them get prepared by getting ready with their content to suit the new product. They in turn can start the teaser campaign or viral marketing among their customers and subscribers. This will help make the product launch successful.
• While passing on information to your affiliates, consider what works best. Some affiliates prefer teleseminars, which they can attend from the comfort of their own location. Teleseminars also help in training affiliates about marketing, product features and benefits and other vital info. These calls can be recorded and a link to this posted online on your blog and your affiliate library, so that those that missed it can access it. This can also be very useful to new affiliates who keep joining.

Keeping a free line of communication between your affiliate army and yourself is very crucial to maintain loyalty as well as enthusiasm. When you take care of your affiliates, they will tell others and this will encourage them to sign up as well.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Here’s a compilation of all the things you must be wary about in your on-going list building process:

• You’ve got to remember that when a visitor signs up on your list, he or she is doing the same with your competition - and there is nothing you can do about it. Your list will receive email messages from both you and the competition. Over time, they may decide to use the ‘unsubscribe’ option and there’s a good chance it could be with you. Is there anything you can do about that? Yes - one way to stop this from happening is to design your emails so that they are distinctive. Don’t make the mistake of sending the same email twice. It’s also important to be alert about what the competition is doing - and BE different.
• You are probably signed up with several affiliation programs that are good money-earners. You are selling someone else’s products here, and you will obviously be sending traffic to a squeeze page. This is where the traffic will register with the original seller whose products you are promoting. But hey, granted you will earn commission on sales through you; however, what about the contact information of the customer who bought the product? It is the original seller who gets to be in touch with the customers - what about you? Perhaps you have other products you’d like to offer them! So what you do is - send these customers to your own squeeze page first! Let them sign up here for something in return - maybe an ebook or information related to the product. From here, they can move to your affiliate’s squeeze page through your free download or even your autoresponder. When you do this you will also be able to build your lists - and a targeted one at that!
• WOW! So you have a free ebook to give away. There are plenty of free ebooks that you can distribute even if you didn’t write them. But wait - did you notice that this ebook has the name and URL of its author with an optin form where the visitor must register to get actual access to the ebook? What this means is your subscribers will head there directly. What do you do then? You can counter this by getting your potential customers to first opt in to YOUR list before receiving the ebook download link. You can even bundle two or more ebooks that relate to the same topic as a gift for signing up. In fact, better still; get the resale rights of the book, rebrand it with your own opt in form so that everyone is happy.

The important thing is to use list-building methods in such a way that you get the contact info of the visitor and keep them!

Popularity: 18% [?]

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: 13% [?]