3 Keys To Success With Your Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based sales schemes.

Joining an affiliate program is a neat way to make money from your users. But just as you can join someone else's affiliate program, so you can set up your own program and invite webmasters to sign up. Here are my top 3 tips to succeed with your own affiliate program.

1. How to attract affiliates

One of the biggest fears new Affiliate managers have is in finding new affiliates. This fear is a stumbling block that stops many site owners from getting started with affiliate marketing. Interestingly, with a proper marketing strategy, getting affiliates may not be very difficult. Given below are some tips that may help in attracting new affiliates.

Find complimentary sites - "Complementary" sites are sites that sell products or services that compliment your offers. If you sell "gardening tools", a site that sells books on "gardening tips" would be a perfect affiliate.

Find content sites - There are many sites that do not sell any kind of product or service but are mainly content oriented sites. Such sites promote an idea, concept, study or belief. Content sites that are used as a resource for your target market are ideal affiliates.

Finally, there are several sites on the Internet dedicated to listing affiliate Programs. Get your program listed in these directories.

2. Classifying Affiliates for Better Management

The hardest part of administrating an Affiliate Program is deciding what your affiliates need to help make the sale. But, by carefully categorizing your affiliates, you can easily determine what their needs are and how to accurately meet them.

The first step is to pick at least three types of affiliate. Take a look at your affiliates and try to determine one outstanding characteristic that can easily be compared across the board and choose at least three types of the characteristic.

The Second Step is to determine the needs of each type. Each of your affiliate types will have different needs; some of their needs will overlap, but you should find a distinct difference in many of their needs. If you find that all of them have the same needs, go back to step one and re-think your types.

The Third Step involves the process of creating and compiling linking methods for each group of affiliates. Based on the needs you identified in Step two, create and compile linking methods for each type.

3. Safe Guarding Against Spam

Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely on other signups to generate profits, you will eventually have a problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitably get it into their head to blitz the Web with unwanted garbage.

When this happens you need to be ready to take action otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet company can boot you off your server and you can find yourself blacklisted. Not good for business. If you get an email from someone claiming they received spam with your URL, then take it as an early warning.

I am not advising you to immediately terminate the affiliate's account, but be sure to contact them to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate know you received a complaint and advise them to remove this person from their list.

If you only get one or two complaints, it's probably not spam, the complainants might simply have signed up for an email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all regarding the same URL.

The best thing to do in this case is to immediately terminate or disable the account of the affiliate URL that was spammed.

Affiliate Programs Worthless for 80% of Affiliate Market

No doubt you've heard of the 80/20 rule - which states that20 percent of affiliates generate 80% of affiliate income, andconversely, remaining 80 percent of affiliates generate only20 percent of all income for most affiliate programs.

There are ten basics that will put your affiliate marketingin the top 20 percent of affiliate earnings. Ten suggestionscreek that barely covers your hosting fees, to a roaring river

TOP AFFILIATE MARKETERS DO MOST OF THESE TEN ITEMS

1.Top affiliate marketers cloak web site links

Cloaking affiliate links should not be necessary, but is. Oddlymany site visitors refuse to visit your links if they see an affiliate code appended to the URL when they hover their mouseover a link on your web page. Sometimes they will type theaffiliate domain directly to the browser address bar whileremoving your affiliate ID from the URL. To short circuit thisodd behavior, simply cloak the URL. How? Visit this Link Tool:
http://WebpositionAdvisor.com/tools/link_cloaker.php

2.Top affiliate marketers write & distribute articles

Writing articles about your market niche is essential to gainreputation as an expert in your field. But the biggest benefitcomes not just from writing those articles, but from havingthose articles published by other web site owners and ezinepublishers. Your article gains you both reputation and linksfrom other web sites from the resource box appended to theend of each article. Here are major article distribution sites.
http://yahoogroups.com/group/free-content/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com

3.Top affiliate marketers focus on a market niche

Filling a web site with content reflecting a narrowly focusedproduct or service niche is a well known method of gaining webtraffic in your area of specialty. An excellent resource thatan help you determine relevant and focused areas to fill yoursite with is called NicheBot. They offer innovative tools toresearch and pinpoint market niches for your web site based onthe WordTracker Database and Google. http://www.nichebot.com

4.Top affiliate marketers use autoresponder series

Autoresponders are incredibly valuable tools that allow you to send a timed series of email messages to those that sign up for them. Most often those autoresponders are sent through a thirdparty provider. Some of the top providers are Sendfree.com and aweber.com, for a tutorial covering autoresponder basics, visit:
http://website101.com/email_e-mail/email_autoresponder_basics.html

5.Top affiliate marketers create web pages to pre-sell

Creating either testimonial pages or review pages that discussand pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with isthe best method of getting increased orders for your chosenaffiliate programs. Many programs actually provide either anarticle or recommended text to sell their products for you and allow reproduction of those articles with your links embedded.

6.Top affiliate marketers gather email addresses

The best affiliates collect email addresses on their web site by offering free reports via the above mentioned autoresponders or by giving away ebooks or through newsletter signup forms.The best use all of these methods or more to build their listof email addresses. This also allows you to contact potential customers that would otherwise never see your site again after clicking away to the affiliate program web site.

7.Top affiliate marketers advertise SOMEWHERE

Depending on your market niche you should advertise using PPCand/or ezine advertising. Some categories of Pay-per-click can be prohibitively expensive, but advertising somewhere is all abut mandatory to gain substantial additional traffic to yoursite. There are some great bargains in ezine advertising and some less popular PPC engines other than Yahoo's Overture and Google's Adwords. Try 7search, Kanoodle and FindWhat for lowerBids than the big boys of PPC.

8.Top affiliate marketers optimize for search engines

Search engine optimization is becoming more complex as more and more webmasters participate, but the basics applied to your site can increase visibility dramatically over time. The most critical of the many SEO techniques is to use title tags that reflect individual PAGE content. Many webmasters write a master title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worst thing you could do for search engine ranking. Learn more SEO:
http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/

9.Top affiliate marketers give away ebooks or freebies

Everyone knows by now that giving something away is a greattraffic generator and allows you to gather email addresses to allow contact of potential customers at a later date. This strategy is employed by EVERY successful web-based company at one time or another. Think of all the free things YOU have
collected online over time. Screensavers, software, ebooks, discount codes, toolbars, white papers. They work!

10. Top Affiliate marketers have their own mailing lists

The best of affiliate marketers have their own newsletter or ezine and gather email addresses on their site to build their list of subscribers. Having this list allows regular contact with potential customers interested in your site, your product and your market niche. If you don't write your own material or think you can't produce weekly content, there are hundreds of authors out there that will gladly product articles for you. The article distribution lists provide free content and ghost Writers provide high quality content for a fee.

If you implement ALL the above techniques, you are guaranteed to become one of the top affiliate marketers on the web. Then you can create your own product telling everyone how YOU did it, create your own affiliate program and have hundreds of usselling for you.

Affiliate Programs to Avoid

As an affiliate marketer of Internet dating services, I'm always on the lookout for good quality dating sites and products to offer my single visitors. Merchants help me out when they let me know about their new products and affiliate programs.

I was therefore thrilled when one of my friendly affiliate competitors got in touch to tell me that he'd started his own Internet dating service and affiliate program.

Having launched a community membership site myself last year, I could fully appreciate the huge amount of time and money my friend had invested to develop this new site. He was justifiably proud of his accomplishment and I was excited by the prospect of having a product to promote that would benefit everyone - my customers, my friend and myself.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way.

The first stumbling block was the low commission he offered. His top rate was 30%, with no commissions on recurring sales.

This puzzled me. As an affiliate marketer of dating programs, he should have been aware that new sites offer at least 50% on new and recurring sales to entice good affiliates to sign up. If commissions on recurring sales are not offered, then the rates on new sales should be increased to between 70 and 100 percent.

In most cases, his affiliate program would have struck out for me at that point. However, as this was my friend's site, it occurred to me that perhaps his product was so unique that the potential for high volume sales might offset the lower commission. Hoping for the best, I continued my review.

When I got to the site, the first thing I noticed was '6 registered members' prominently displayed at the top of the homepage. That normally wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that my customers are looking for friends and soul mates. If I send them to a site where there are only six people to meet, they'll likely be disappointed. Worse, by wasting their time, they lose trust in my judgement and then I will lose them as customers.

That's not good. My customers are literally my bread and butter. Giving them what they want and expect is how I stay in business. Paying for traffic that I send to a merchant site where there is nothing to buy, will put me out of business.

(This is how a membership site should be structured. When starting a dating service, the merchant pays for advertising to bring people to their site. To entice visitors to sign up as members, he will initially offer his services for fr*ee. When the database is large enough to attract paying customers, the affiliate program manager then invites potential affiliates to join their program.)

Although my friend's program had already struck out for my customers and me, I was still curious, so I kept on looking.

Next I clicked on a link labeled 'Dating Resources'. Expecting to find Internet dating tips and advice, I found links and banners pointing to Lavalife, FriendFinder and other affiliated dating sites instead. When I asked him about placing affiliate programs on his site, my friend said he simply wanted to supplement his income until the
dating service got *rolling*. I can understand his motivation. However, what he doesn't understand is the concept of customer 'hijacking'.

As an affiliate, you pay good money to get visitors to your site. You presell your merchants' products and expect the merchant to honor their end of the bargain by making the sale and sending your commission check. You don't pay for the merchant to send YOUR customers to THEIR affiliated merchants.

I didn't need to look any further. I told my friend that I would hold off on signing up and why. Fortunately, he understood and has already alleviated some of the problems I mentioned.

Knowing when NOT to sign up for an affiliate program can sometimes be a tough call. However, you can simplify the process considerably. Put yourself inside your customer's head. If the product won't work for them, the program strikes out. Simple as that.

Affiliate: $27,817 Monthly With Affiliate Programs

I still remember thinking that promoting Affiliate Programs was a waste of time. Until I started making a small fortune.
At the end of 2004, I started some time exploring the concept of promoting affiliate programs through pay-per-click search engines. I knew of some Internet Marketing gurus who were claiming you could make thousands of dollars every month. But I was skeptical. I remember thinking, "I know what these guys are about. They just want to sell more books."
But I decided that at least it was worth a look. The concept is quite simple. Choose a product - and one that has an affiliate program, of course. Set up an advertising campaign at a PPC search engine like Google and choose how much you want to pay per click. Write a three line advertisement and add your affiliate link. Whenever anyone clicks through your ad and buys the product, you earn a commission.
So I looked. And thought about it. And looked some more. I was still very uncertain about the whole concept, but I finally decided to test for myself whether it could really work. And since I knew I'd be spending quite a bit of money on advertising clicks, I felt it was well worth investing in a book so I could learn from more experienced marketers how to maximize the profitability of my campaigns.
As my business grew over several weeks I purchased and read several ebooks. By far the best I read was Chris Carpenter's Google Cash ( http://tinyurl.com/6gdaq ). His approach is genuine, down-to-earth, and he explains very clearly how to build your own affiliate marketing business. And importantly, he makes a fortune doing what he explains in the book.
I started by testing 20-30 campaigns on various products. Most of them were unsuccessful, but I expected that from what I had been reading. I would test a product, and if it didn't work, I would drop it quickly. The key with this business is identifying the affiliate products and campaigns that are successful. Once you find one that works, the money starts rolling in.
By February of 2005 I had identified several campaigns that were turning a profit. With one of these I was spending $0.08 per click to promote an affiliate product that pays me $18 commission on each sale. Approximately 1 visitor in 100 buys the product, so I make around $10 profit for every 100 visitors that I send.
What a formula! For every 1,000 visitors, that's $180 in commissions. That might not seem like all that much, but remember once you have a successful campaign it keeps going all day, every day. If you send just 1,000 visitors to a program like this every day, then by the end of the month you will have earned $5,400 in commissions, of which $3,000 is profit.
Does it seem too simple? Well, if it was so easy everyone from your Aunt Mabel to the mailman would be doing it. In fact, while the concept is simple, getting your campaigns to run profitably does take some work. Since I can't possibly teach you all you need to know in one article, I'll give you a few tips here and recommend Google Cash for a detailed explanation:

1. Choose Your Product Wisely. The program should pay a commission of $15 or more, otherwise it won't be worth paying for your clicks. And if the commission is very high, be careful. Some products like web hosting and satellite dish installations may pay commissions of $100, but you face intense competition from other affiliates, so the price you need to pay to get ad exposure and clicks will probably also be very high. Sometimes it is better to identify a niche product with less competition from other affiliates.
2. Track Your Campaigns Carefully. If you're paying around 7 or 8 cents per click for a program that pays close to $20 commission, you need to make at least one sale for every 250 visitors. If you send 300 to 400 visitors with no sale, consider dropping it.
3. Days Of The Week Do Matter. When testing campaigns keep in mind the day of the week and even the time of day. Some products sell better on Mondays through Fridays, during business hours. Others, like entertainment products, sell better in the evenings and on weekends.

Getting back to my own experience, after identifying several campaigns that 'worked', I spent some time fine-tuning them using techniques I read about in Google Cash. By the end of February I had earned $27,817 in commissions for the month, all on products I had never even heard of at the end of 2004. My profit was a neat $10,795.
It's incredible really. I made this money without a web site. From home. Working an average of just an hour or two a day.
I'm finally making the amount of money online that I dreamed about.
How about you? Would you also like to build an affiliate marketing business? Could you use some additional income? I encourage you to proceed, but be smart about it. There are risks involved and you should be aware of them. You should read Chris Carpenter's book. That way you'll be on a fast track to more profitable campaigns. And his book will save you hundreds of dollars, easily, as you avoid some common mistakes and pitfalls.
Good Marketing!

Affiliate: 4 Steps to eBay Affiliate Success

Getting started with the eBay affiliate program is as simple as 4 easy steps. eBay knows you have a business to run, so they have created a step-by-step guide to see you down the road of success. With the eBay Affiliate Program, you could bring in an extra $25,000 a month, as well as gain access to many tools and strategies that will optimize the working of your website, its effectiveness with search engines and on the Web in general. Getting started in a successful venture has never been so easy.

Step# 1

To register for the eBay Affiliate Program simply to go http://affiliates.ebay.com/ and do a little research. When you have seen the unlimited opportunities for success that the eBay Affiliate program affords its members, you will next want to click on the ‘API Program Join Now’ button. At this point you will be prompted to select the platform you would like to join with. The platform you choose will influence the tier and type of business your eBay Affiliate Status becomes. Each platform offers unique advantages, and should be considered carefully. Once you have selected your program platform, simply click the Join Now button for that particular platform.

Step# 2

After you have completed your application, the eBay Affiliate network you choose will send you an email with your login details and instructions on getting started. The application process itself is easy, and simply requires some information about your business. This information helps eBay optimize the tools and guidelines they provide you for your success. The application takes only a few minutes, and is not sold to competitors. The Affiliate network you chose will be in touch with your personal information and you can get started with your successful new venture.

Step# 3

Once you have received your password and login information, you can proceed to the affiliate network site http://affiliates.ebay.com/tools/ to find eBay banners, text links, and search boxes. This website offers detailed tracking statistics. The tracking statistics will help you see which products and companies are performing best. This information will help guide you as you develop your affiliation with eBay, and will enable you to make the best decisions for your website’s performance.

Step# 4

The last step to success with the eBay Affiliate Program is to further grow your eBay strategy using the affiliate website and all of its many features. The affiliate website will not only get you started down your road to success with eBay, but they will provide you with invaluable tools to maximize your strategy. These tools and kits will help you transition into the affiliate member you want to be, and will continue to keep you updated so you stay current with trends and technology.

These 4 easy steps take you from learning about the eBay Affiliate Program, to being a super successful eBay affiliate.