Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an Internet based marketing practice in which a business rewards it's affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's efforts. It all comes down to driving traffic to a businesses site really. If you are a website owner and can help a business in this way, you will be rewarded.

 

 

There are three individuals or groups that are involved in affiliate marketing. The business selling the products, the affiliate promoting the products and the customer who visits the affiliate's website. Usually the affiliate earns a commission on sales of a businesses products but it can be possible to find affiliate marketing schemes that generate revenue on an ad-click basis.

 

Types of affiliate website include:

• Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e., search arbitrage)
• Comparison shopping websites and directories
• Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back
• CRM sites that offer charitable donations
• Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions
• Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
• Personal websites (This type of website was the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing; however, such websites are almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate websites.)[citation needed]
• Weblogs and website syndication feeds
• E-mail list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in -mail lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy
• Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website
• Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates
• Cost per action networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliates
• Websites using adbars (e.g. Adsense) to display context-sensitive, highly-relevant ads for products on the site

 It is important that when you are looking into affiliate marketing you do not participate in any schemes that may be spam based, either email or search engine, and do not choose a program that uses adware; spying software illegally placed onto web users computers.

Great marketing schemes I use myself include Click Bank, Amazon Associates and and Google Adsense. I will be reviewing each of these programs in later posts.

Next Time: What Is Clickbank?

 

 

 

 

 

Blogging - Making it pay

If your only goal from blogging is to express your thoughts and feelings, perhaps even share some expert knowledge then all you really need to worry about is choosing a great topic for your blog and for every entry. If you have found this site then I am guessing you want to make a profitable blog and so once you have chosen a great topic for your weblog there is more to the business you need to worry about.




First of all I must talk to you about driving traffic. Without traffic you have no chance of making money online because you have no-one clicking on your advertisements. So how do we do this? Well actually there is no single 'get traffic quickly' method that will do this for you, no matter what you might read online. You need a combination of methods and some patience. You need to make sure your domain name is a common one so that you can get a modest click-rate right from the word go and so that your site is easy to index by search engines. Then you need to submit your site to lots of search engines and continue to write good, high quality articles regularily. Usually I would stop here when discussing blogging with beginners because I feel it is important to master the basics of blogging before moving on to the more elite stuff.

However, in this article I am going to reveal a tried and tested blogging technique that could boost your blog traffic by an order of magnitude. I use this method for all my blogs and you really can notice the difference. This phenomenon is so simple but so effective and is called back-linking. You need to sign up to sites like Ezine Articles and Go Articles which are free online article directories. You can get free content for your blog from these pages but in this instance you are going to give away your high quality articles. But won't that aid the competition? Yes is the short answer but for every article you submit you must submit a source web address, then anyone who ever uses your article must quote the source. This is just online referencing but because the source is your domain name this gives you lots of links pointing back towards your site. Search engines love this process and it really boosts your ranking = more visitors!

Now I will discuss how advertising on your blog can help supplment your income with simple but continual effort on your behalf. I will assume your visitor counts are reasonable and will outline the different methods you can use to make money online.

Advertising and affiliate marketing are the two buzzwords in the 'making money online' sections of most how-to websites. Both are relatively easy to setup on your blog but placing adverts on your page is perhaps more eyecatching and requires less work. This will be our starting point. So what do I mean when I say you place adverts on your page? Well as an example there is a marketing program available from Google called Adwords where companies will pay Google to advertise their sites on their search engine and on affiliated sites. Google gets paid every time a web surfer clicks on the link they have advertised. Bloggers and other website owners can also benefit from this program by signing up to the Adsense program which in a nutshell allows Google to advertise on your site. So when somebody comes to your site and clicks on an advert hosted by Google, Google get paid and you get paid. Simple! The amount you get paid per click is small but with large visitor numbers and a high click-rate you can begin to earn a steady income.

Remember that the Google adverts are created based on the content of your site so this is a real quality over quantity matter. If you write great content you will get great adverts and hopefully a great revenue stream. Good Luck!

Next Time: Affiliate Marketing