What is Affiliate Marketing?
In my opinion, the best way to make money online is through affiliate marketing. This is when you promote another companies products to earn a commission of the sale. If you are an affiliate then you will have plenty of tools to track your statistics (hops, number of sales, money earned, etc.) Each affiliate program will give you a sales link that is unique so that when you refer people to the merchant's site it will be tracked back to you.
There are a LOT of marketers out there who earn a full-time living off of selling other people's products. If you are new to the Internet marketing game then it might seems far fetched, but think about how many people you know shop online. Do they use eBay? Amazon? NewEgg? Plus there are countless others. That means that there are millions of potential customers for you to reach.
People are becoming more and more comfortable with shopping online as time passes. I personally wouldn't think about buying shoes online, but Zappos.com sold so many that Amazon recently purchased them for almost $1 billion!
With affiliate marketing you can get paid a number of different ways. Sometimes it's a flat fee and other times it's a percentage of the sale. I like percentages of products or services that are recurring. Take Aweber for example. I promote Aweber because they are far and away the best newsletter provider that I have found. They also pay a recurring commission. Since once you have a list with them you aren't going to want to use anyone else, I can get a % of the monthly fee for several years in the future. It works with hosting companies like HostGator too. Normally people don't switch hosts after they sign up, so you can keep earning passive income long after the first sale was made.
You don't even need that much money to get started! Sure they are some small fees for a domain name, hosting, site design, and newsletter provider. However, you don't need a store so you won't be paying monthly rent. You don't need employees (at least to start). You won't have overhead like utilities to worry about. The costs of starting your own business online couldn't be cheaper.
Some people are uncomfortable working only with commissions. These are the people that want a set income each month, working 8-to-5, traveling back-and-forth to their office and working for "the man." While I think you can make a set amount each month if you work hard enough, if you aren't comfortable with how hard you work determining how much you make, or you don't want the ability to go anywhere in the world and still be able to work, then this site isn't for you.
If you want more freedom and the possibility of setting your own income, then keep reading because I am going to do my best to teach you everything you need to know to reach your goals.
Product Research
It doesn't matter if you think you have a profitable niche and you are getting tons of visitors to your site. If you are not selling products or services that people actually want, you aren't going to make any money. Don't waste your time trying to market a dud, do your product research first.
The first step to product research is to decide what kinds of products you are going to sell. Are they going to be physical products or digital? These are two different areas to tackle and while it's best to diversify into both down the line, it's better to start with digital.
Digital Products
This is anything that can be delivered directly over the Internet. The most popular digital product is the ebook, but can also include programs, videos, audio and much more.
The main advantage to digital products are the high commission rates. The merchant does not have a lot of costs to cover and does not have to keep an inventory.
Physical Products
These products actually have to be delivered to your customers home. This can include televisions, video game systems, cell phones, or about anything else.
You want find as big of commission rates with physical products because the merchant has a limited inventory, and has higher costs built in to their products. They actually have to pay people to put the product together and ship it to the consumer.
When searching for digital products a great place to get started is Clickbank. It's easy to signup and there are over 10,000 products that you can choose from. Clickbank makes it easy for you to find products that are selling. There is this thing called "gravity." Gravity refers to the number of affiliates who have earned a commission by promoting a particular vendor's products. The higher the gravity score, the more affiliates that have earned money promoting their products. The problem with high gravity is increased competition, but you at least know people are having success pushing that product.
Making Money with Contextual Ads
It is important to use different money making strategies on your site in order to maximize your revenues. Do not make the mistake of relying exclusively on banner ads as you will only limit your income. One of the best advertising methods for driving directed clicks is to use contextual ads. This is the practice of converting certain keywords to outgoing links, either with direct advertising where a sponsor pays you a certain amount for their desired keywords or with affiliate marketing where you choose what words match the offers of the products you are promoting. Either way contextual ads should do a good job of converting as long as you place them on the appropriate keywords.
You must continue to offer value to readers by only using relevant sites for your keywords. If the reader is interested in a certain keyword, then you want to deliver for them what they are looking for when they click through to the other site. Delivering relevant products for your users will help to build trust, and increase the chance that they actually convert on the site that you link to.
Advertisers love contextual ads as well for the same reason. They know that they clicks they are getting from your site are highly directed and come from people generally interested in what they have to offer.
One great way to use these ads on your site is with MBP Ninja Affiliate. All you have to do is enter the keyword or keywords that you want to link out to, and the plugin will automatically find the matches in your posts and convert that text to the link you provided. It's extremely easy to use and will help you get started making money with contextual advertising.
Making Money with Affiliate Programs
One of the best ways to make money online is with affiliate programs. You don't have to have a site with a large audience to get started, but if you do then you can earn a higher percentage. In most cases, you just sign up for a program, find some banners or text ads that interest you, put them on your site, and hope to start referring visitors in the hopes of earning dollars. Of course, there are better ways of going about affiliate marketing and that is why I'm here to help with my tips on making money using affiliate offers.
Use Relevant Products and Services
You have to match what you are offering with the needs of your audience. If you have a site about running, then offers dealing with running shoes, heart rate monitors, and races are going to be a better fit with your audience than web hosting companies would be. The more related the offer is, the higher conversion rate you are going to have. If you are trying to sell your readers irrelevant garbage, they will see right through it and you are going to harm your relationship with them. This brings us to the next point.
Trust
My affiliate offers seem to work best on readers that I have built up a relationship with. When they are reading what I have to say for a few months, they are a lot more likely to believe that I am offering them a solid product that will fit their needs rather than if they just stumbled upon my site. That is why when you are using auto-responders, do not get too pushy up front. Instead, wait until the reader is comfortable with you before you do much selling.
Targeted Traffic
Too many people worry about how many visitors they can get without focusing on the quality. If you have a hosting review site, you might get a lot of visitors for "free" hosting keywords, but those people obviously aren't looking to buy. Instead, focus on the keywords that Adwords advertisers are paying a lot for, because you know they convert to paying customers.
Use Posts
Banner blindness happens. Users start to completely ignore banner ads on sites. If you just put some banners up and hope people are going to click through the chances of it happening are slim to none. If you are writing a review about a company or product and use text links, the chances are a LOT higher they are going to click through. Incorporate the offer into a relevant article and I think you'll like the results that you see. That is one of the reasons I think MBP Ninja Affiliate is such a great tool. You can just enter the keywords you want to use your affiliate link on and it will replace them all for you.
There is a lot of money to be made with affiliate marketing. If you haven't been getting the kinds of returns you had hoped for or expected to find, try some of these tips out and let me know how it goes in the comments.
Friendly Affiliate Links with WordPress
I run several different affiliate sites, and one program that I think is a must have is MBP Ninja Affiliate. This program allows you to easily change your affiliate links to something more friendly. In fact, it doesn't even have to be an affiliate link at all as it can convert anything to something else of your choosing. Instead of having my twitter link be twitter.com/jamiefaidley, I can make it jamiefaidley.com/twitter.
While the twitter address isn't tough to remember, if you are a Commission Junction affiliate you know that the links are random letters thrown together. There is no way that I can remember what my Godaddy affiliate link is, but I know that sending people to jamiefaidley.com/godaddy is simple and maintains tracking.
MBP Ninja Affiliate does more than just help you with friendly links, it can also find keywords associated with that link and convert them. So let's say you are promoting hosting companies. In each of your posts that have the text "cheap hosting" you can convert that to a link to HostGator (and see, it's my nice and pretty jamiefaidley.com/hostgator link that it sends you to!)
Friendly affiliate links also help if you have additional writers. If they are supposed to be including text link ads in their work, having them us something simpler will lower the risk of mistakes being made. Any mistakes in the URL would lead to your visitor not being tracked to you and you would miss the chance to make any money off of the sales that you generated.
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Where to Put Ads on Your Blog
One of the more popular questions I have been asked when helping someone start a blog is where to put ads in order to maximize revenues. The important thing to remember here is that not every blog is the same, which means that you are going to have to test some different designs and ad formats in order to increase your click throughs, which should mean an increase in revenue from advertisements whether it is through affiliate programs or cost per clicks.
The picture on the left shows the hot zones according to google adsense. These are the locations that their studies show ad placements generate the most clicks. While looking to see what the graph shows and mimicking it on your site might work out just fine, let's dig a little deeper and figure out why those spots are as premium as they are.
The first thing that you might notice is that above the fold ads do a lot better than below the fold. This stands to reason since the user doesn't have to scroll down to see the ads.
You'll also notice that ads on the left do better than ads on the right, which fits in the Western style format of reading a page from left to right.
Users also focus in on the content, so the top of the content area is the best place for ads. However, the end of the content area also does well, and in my research I find that this is a great place for text ads for relevant sites, simply because the user has finished reading your peice and is either looking for more information on the topic, or they are interested in the topic and any related products or services will catch their eyes.
A few additional points that I have noticed personally. Larger banner ads do better than smaller banners. I think this is because the advertiser has more room to put information on a large banner and thus can draw the user in.
I have also noticed banners do well when the user is forced to look over it. If you put a banner between the menu and the content, or if you break up the middle of the content with a banner, those two positions have worked out great for me in the past.
I also like the stripe ads at the top of the blog, you can pick those up by going to Max Blog Press. Text link ads inside your content also do a good job of generating clicks, so if you write reviews or just link to something relevant in your content. You can automatically change the keywords in your blog by using the Ninja Affiliate program.
These are just some of the things that I consider when I'm putting ads on a site. Do you have any additional tips or tricks? If so, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.
How to Promote Your Site in Forums
Forums are a great way to promote a web site and I have been using them to drive traffic to mine for years. The best way to get people to come to your site is through an indirect link to your site from a signature file, which appears below each one of your posts. I have found this works better than just an outright "come visit my site" plug which tends to just aggravate and annoy other forum members. Let's take a look at how you can start increasing your traffic number through the use of forums.
Finding Forums
To get the most out of your traffic you are going to have to find a forum within your particular niche. It is not going to do you much good to post a link to your women's clothing site if you are in a men's weight lifting forum. How do you find a niche forum? Do a search in Google. After you have found a forum go through some posts to see if they allow signature files with outgoing links. Then repeat until you have from 3-10 forums that you can post in.
Register in the Forums
After you have your list it's time to go through and register your username in the forums, I would make it similar to the brand for the site that you are promoting. Then I would upload your logo as your avatar. When creating your signature, make sure you use some keywords as your anchor text back to your site. This way you get some SEO benefits, but make sure that you vary your keywords on each forum and change it from time to time.
Posting Messages
The key to posting on the forums is to add something of value to the topics being discussed. If you just go posting spam and worthless comments trying to plug your site then you are going to do more damage to your brand than you are going to help your site via the traffic you receive. The key is to show your expertise in the niche so that normal people will want to find out more about what you have to say on the topic by clicking through to your site. You will also want to post comments in the threads that are getting the most page views, but the real gem comes when you are able to start your own thread that really takes off as a forum classic.
So there you have it, a simple guide as to how you can promote your site in forums. Do you have any other suggestions? Let's hear about them in the comments.
How to Make Money With Your Blog
It doesn't seem that long ago that the great debate in the blogging world was if you could or should make money from your blog. Now that it is widely accepted the question has become how you can make money, or how you can make more money off of your site. If you want to know how I make money with my blogs then take a look at this list of top revenue sources.
Direct Sales
Your blog should be centered on a certain niche and that niche should allow you to sell something to your audience that they actually like or want to buy. You need to make sure that the content that you are producing is highly relevant to what you are trying to sell in order to maximize your return.
When you are starting out and building an audience it is a great time to learn about what kind of needs and wants your readers have. If you listen to what your readers are looking for then you are in a great spot to produce just that. This method is sometimes easier than building a great product and then trying to build traffic around the topic. Start with the traffic and then build a product catering to that audience.
The best thing about direct sales is that after you produce your product you get to keep all of the money from what you sell. The down side is that it can take a lot of time and effort to create a new product or service and if you don't think you can do a better job at it than someone else, it might not even be worth it.
Affiliate Marketing
The next best thing to selling your own product or service is selling someone else's wares for part of the profits. Do your research and find out what your readers are interested in and then partner up with companies that offer those kinds of products. The down side to affiliate marketing is that you only get to keep a part of the sales, but the plus side is that you don't have to go through the work of creating the product or service either.
Advertisements
This is the most popular choice of generating revenue for most blog owners, but I feel like it's the least profitable. If you are going to seek fee-based sponsors for your site then it's still best to match them to your audience, so you can plug offers in your posts and feel genuinely passionate about what the sponsor has to offer. If you do a good job of integrating your advertisers into your site then they are going to see a bigger return on their investment. This means they will be more interested in renewing or paying higher fees down the line.
Selling Text Links
This used to be popular, but with google cracking down on sites both buying and selling text links, I would recommend you faze this out of your business model.
These are just a few of the best ways to make money with your blog. If you have other methods that you use and have success, let's hear them in the comments.