How A Beginner Could Choose A Suitable Affiliate Program To Kick Start Best Online Home Business

The thought of being able to make money online with affiliate programs may have sounded like a great business opportunity to you. The thought of being able to work at home in your own internet business, without having to worry about the things that have traditionally come along with running a business, such as inventory, storage, packing, shipping, complaints, returns, phone calls, emails, checks and credit cards,  just to name a few, must have seemed like the greatest business idea you had ever come across! 

Now that you are all set up with your affiliate programs however, you may be wondering, what can I do to generate traffic to my affiliate links?  Lets explore some of the ways we can accomplish this.

The first thing you will want to do is to have a webpage with brief descriptions of all of your affiliate programs along with your affiliate links accompanying it. The reason for this is, for the most part, you will want to promote your own website as opposed to your individual affiliate links. Your webpage dose does not have to be fancy. Once you have accomplished this you will have a huge advantage over simply attempting to generate traffic to your individual affiliate links.   

Start a business Blog. A Blog, short for, Web Log, is a great way to promote yourself as a knowledgeable person. People will begin to believe in you and will eventually trust you. Just make sure to post a new article every day so that people will keep coming back to read your latest article. That will breed familiarity. People will buy much more readily from people who they know and trust. Another reason to post every day is that, although it won’t be long before the search engines find your Blog, you can ping the search engines every time your Blog is updated and search engines L-O-V-E new content! Make sure to have a bio along with a link back to your website. Your bio should contain a brief description about you such as, [ John Doe is the owner of yoursite.com. John specializes in helping people to work at home in their own home based business. To learn about the different business opportunities John has to offer you visit his website at www.yoursite.com].

Write and publish your own business articles. This is the greatest form of free advertising available. By writing and submitting articles, along with your bio at the bottom of each of your articles, you will not only have more and more non-reciprocal links pointing back to your website but most importantly the search engines will begin to spider your articles(read them word for word.)  When people type into a search engine, keywords or phrases, that match what is in your articles, they will show up on the search results along with a link back to your website! Make sure to insert keywords into your articles that are relevant to your website such as business opportunities, affiliate programs, work at home, home based business, etc. The more relevant links there are pointing back to your website the higher your page rank will be. A higher page rank means your website will show up higher on the search engines results page, so keep writing those articles!

Ezines are email newsletters that people subscribe to on every topic imaginable. Find Ezines that are relevant to the business you are promoting such as business opportunities, affiliate programs, work at home, home based business, etc.  Most Ezines will accept advertisements. This is not spam because the subscribers have agreed to accept offers from time to time as part of their subscription and can unsubscribe at any time. With Ezines it is better to advertise your individual affiliate programs along with your affiliate link as opposed to your website with a link back to it.

Email lists are another great way to advertise your individual affiliate programs. These are people who for whatever reason have agreed to receive certain offers. Find lists that are relevant to what you are promoting such as business opportunities, affiliate programs, work at home, home based business etc.

Pay-Per-Click(PPC) advertising such as Google AdWords is a form of advertising for the first time in history were you only pay for advertising if people are actually interested in your ad, since you only pay if someone is interested enough to click on it! These are ads that show up along with the regular search engine results. In the case of Google AdWords for instance the ads appear overhead and also on the right side. This form of advertising however requires a deep technical understanding to make it cost effective, otherwise, it will suck up your advertising dollars in no time!

Promoting your affiliate links dose not have to be expensive. It all depends on wether you would prefer to spend time, money or some sort of compromise between the two. You have various options available to you and what path you decide to take is entirely up to you.

Have you ever wondered what exactly is up with Affiliate Marketing? This informative report can give you an insight into everything you've ever wanted to know about Affiliate Marketing. 

If you've been involved with affiliate marketing for any length of time, then you're probably aware of the fact that affiliate marketing "gurus" have access to knowledge that you don't, and that bridging this "information gap" is the key to earning a solid income online.

Here are four ways top marketers are getting rich through affiliate marketing.

1. By marketing to affiliate marketers. This one becomes painfully obvious when you think about all of the infoproducts dedicated to helping affiliate marketers earn more money online.

As long as these infoproducts actually serve to help their readers, they can be a highly effective tool in assisting affiliate marketers in increasing their profits.

Unfortunately, the Internet is littered with scores of ebooks filled with worthless, rehashed information.

But if you've had some success with affiliate marketing, why not but together your own infoproduct that helps others to experience the same success?

Or, you could put together a 10-page ebook that presells a product and earns you affiliate commission. And, if you like, allow your readers to give it away and watch as your commissions skyrocket! 

The information about Affiliate Marketing presented here will do one of two things: either it will reinforce what you know about Affiliate Marketing or it will teach you something new. Both are good outcomes. 

2. By capturing e-mail addresses rather than sending prospects straight to a merchant site, and following up with them through long autoresponder series, as well as free giveaways that pre-sell their own products or the products of a third-party merchant.

By operating in this manner, these savvy marketers are creating actual "residual" income. A list of just 10,000 people can result in passive income of thousands of dollars a month. The good news is, that it isn't that difficult to build a list of this size, or that expensive either.

3. By brokering joint venture deals with other list owners. If you can leverage someone else's mailing list for an instant surge of profits, you stand to be highly profitable.

If you already have your own list, why not send out a mailing inquiring about brokering joint venture deals with your subscribers? Take the path of least resistance and use the power of network to your advantage.

4. By embedding affiliate links in free special reports and information products they are selling.

If you give me general details on how I can solve a pressing problem, and then tell me that product A, B, or C is the "ultimate solution" to solving that problem, your odds of selling me that product increase dramatically.

So use your free and for-sale items to boost your affiliate commissions, while exploring new ways to achieve greater returns on your efforts. 

Those who only know one or two facts about Affiliate Marketing can be confused by misleading information. The best way to help those who are misled is to gently correct them with the truths you're learning here.

1. Mindset: Get in touch with your grey matter. Program your mind with positive, committed thoughts. If you can believe it, you can achieve it. It sounds a bit like a sales seminar, but bottom line is, if you don't believe you can make a living online, you won't. You have to be committed. Commit to yourself that you will develop an income online – no matter what it takes. Think of your business as a bacon and eggs breakfast. The chicken was involved, the pig was committed!

2. Viewpoint: This is your business. Once you've accomplished your first hurdle and committed yourself to making this work, you have to look at your business from the proper viewpoint. No rose coloured glasses here. This is your business. You are the CEO of your own marketing company. You can choose to offer your services to one or several companies. Bottom line, you are responsible for every action in your company. Every decision you make affects your bottom line.

3. Learning Curve: Expect it. Becoming an affiliate is like going to college or university. You start at the beginning, learn the basics and build on what you learn. Take it step-by-step and you'll build a much stronger business. Think of it like becoming a doctor. One doesn't decide to become a doctor with the expectation of opening a successful practice one week from now. It takes time to learn the products or services you're marketing and it takes time to learn to run your business.

4. Budget: Time and money. Set a general budget for both. As a business owner, you'll use plenty of time developing and promoting your affiliate business. Budget as much time as you can each day and make sure you use your time wisely. Set up a budget for your monetary expenses too. You can run a business online with a shoestring budget, just don't expect a mammoth income in the beginning. The more you can invest in your business, the better. This doesn't mean that simply throwing money at your business will make it grow. Every dollar that goes out your door, needs to come back in and bring another dollar with it.

5. Goals: s/he shoots - s/he scores! Your goals will get you through the tough times. There'll be lots of days when you feel like quitting. If you make your goals tangible, you'll make it through the tough days. Money isn't a motivator, but what money can buy, is. Set your goals for a family vacation, a new car, boat, or home. It's much easier to get excited about a shiny red corvette in your driveway than $100,000 sitting in your bank account. Money is only numbers on a piece of paper or a computer screen, but it can bring you a luxurious lifestyle, and that's where the fun is.

6. Nuts and Bolts: Once you've got your house in order, with the proper mindset, you're looking at your business from a realistic viewpoint, you've got an open mind and you're ready to learn, you've set aside some time and money and you've got pictures of your dream house, car and vacation plastered on your wall, you're ready to go hunting. The next step is to find a business that interests you and offers an affiliate program with a reasonable commission. For information products, one of the most popular and profitable online, you can and should expect a commission of 25% or more.

Pick a product that interests you. Buy it and use it. Your business is based on your recommendations of a product or service. If you haven't used it, how can you recommend it? Avoid running around in circles after the newest, hottest selling product of the day, it only leaves you dizzy and broke.

Choose a product you're interested in. If you like astronomy, becoming an affiliate of a star chart company may be a good fit. Selling women's pantyhose may not.

7. Look before you leap: Finding a company to represent as an affiliate is one thing, finding a company that respects its affiliates is another. Do a bit of research before you jump on the bandwagon. Send an email to the company as if you're a potential customer. 24 – 48 hours is a good response time. This shows that someone is actually running the company. It also gives you an idea of their commitment. Generally, the faster the response, the more committed the company is to doing business. The quality of the response is also important. Did the response answer your question? Was it written in a friendly, professional manor? Did they answer your question directly or simply send you to a FAQ sheet?

8. Flip the switch: If everything checks out up to this point, then your next step is to take action. Fill out the affiliate application form and get your affiliate URL. Now the ball is in your court. It's time to get down to brass tacks. If you freeze now, you make no money and flush your goals down the toilet. If you take action, you make it one step closer to your goals.

9. If you build it – they will come: OK not really, but you do have to build it. If you want to maximize your income and be taken seriously, you need to own a website. Just like a brick and mortar business, you need a professional location to offer your products. Yes, you get an affiliate URL when you sign up as an affiliate, but promoting an affiliate link looks amateur and will help you LOSE 98% of your sales. We'll cover this in point 10.

10. Follow-up = Sales: Only 2% of your prospects will sign up or buy what you're offering, on their first visit. 98% of your sales will be made from your follow up. There's a very simple method for following up and making sales automatically.

i. Check your favourite search engine to locate a free ebook, software program or report that relates to your offer. If you're promoting a website that sells peanut butter, a free peanut butter recipe book would be a good match. Your give-away must always relate to the product you're promoting to maximize the results of this system.

ii. Build a page on your website to give away your free peanut butter recipe book. Design the page as if you were designing a sales page. Make people's mouths water until they want the recipes so bad they'd gladly pay for them, but then give it to them free. All they have to do is fill in their name and email address in the simple form and you'll send their recipe book to them instantly via email.

iii. As soon as your peanut butter prospect fills out the form on your site and clicks the send button, they are taken to your affiliate URL where they can buy peanut butter. At the same time, the peanut butter recipe book is sent to their email address.

iv. Now your peanut butter prospect receives an email from you each week with new tips and useful peanut butter information. This information positions you as a peanut butter expert and gives you the opportunity to promote your peanut butter affiliate website once a week, to hot prospects. This is where you'll make 98% of your sales.

Although this may seem like an overwhelming amount of work for the beginner, it's all very simple. The whole process is run from an autoresponder, a simple piece of email software that automatically sends your prewritten email messages on a predetermined schedule.

Your success as an affiliate is determined by you. 95% of the people that read this simple How To guide will do nothing with it. 5% of the people that read this guide will put all the pieces in place and start making a living as an affiliate. You have to decide which side of the coin you want to be on.

Making money through affiliate marketing is one of the most rewarding careers one could ever have. What’s good about this business is that anyone can join and make their way to success. Affiliate marketing has been known to be cost-efficient, assessable method of conveying long-term results. In fact, you can start even with a shoe string budget. And with affiliate marketing, you can have the benefit of working from home and enjoying the freedom and flexibility of working for yourself.

But there are also some people who failed in this kind of business. It could be because they lack knowledge and tactics. If you are a web site owner and you want to join in an affiliate marketing business, you should know where to get good affiliate programs.

Clickbank is an ideal place to start. Here, you can find one of the largest affiliate marketing programs in the industry. You just need to visit their site, http://www.clickbank.com and secure a clickbank ID. From the Clickbank’s home page, proceed to “Earn Commissions” and look for the products and services that perfectly fit you and your site. These products are typically ranked according to their popularity.

Clickbank is one of the affiliate networks that serve as a 3rd party between the web merchants and the associated affiliates. It is responsible in providing the technology to deliver the merchant’s offers and campaigns. The affiliate network also do the job of collecting commission fees from the merchant and giving it to the affiliates involved in the program.

Clickbank provides you a large and increasing network of publishers or affiliates to tap into. To be more specific, clickbank has more than 100,000 affiliates who are experts in finding potential customers for your affiliate program. The reason why more and more affiliates are joining Clickbank is obvious – the process of gaining commissions in this network is absolutely fair and transparent. 

For web merchants, joining Clickbank is so easy. You just need to sign up in their site for free and allow them to sell your products. Keep up a promotional web site that gives your potential customers detailed information about your offered product or services. At your website, you must also maintain a comprehensive technical support pages for your product. In return, Clickbank will promote and sell your product, give customer service for your product, allow their affiliates to pass on traffic to your web site, enable you to encourage new affiliates to advertise your web site, furnish real-time sales reporting for you and the affiliates and send you and all affiliates a paycheck  twice a month. 

If you’re a Clickbank affiliate wannabe, you surely won’t find it hard to be a part of this network. First, you are required to place their link on your website and if you don’t have a Clickbank account, you need to complete the Clickbank affiliate form and create your own account. Then, if you already have a Clickbank username, you are free to choose whatever marketing tools you want to use bring in more clicks and generate more sales. After selecting marketing tools, you can now get your affiliate link.

That’s how simple it is to join Clickbank. But being a Clickbank super affiliate is no minor achievement. It means you need to possess the ability to sell lots of affiliate products. You also need to have expertise in search engine optimization, email marketing, newsletter marketing, reciprocal linkage, link exchanges and other methods of promoting your merchant’s goods and services. 

Among the secrets to become successful in affiliate marketing is to come up with good content based website and put your affiliate links in all your content. Your main purpose here is to give your visitors good quality content about the things they are interested in. Set aside the job of selling. It must be done by the sales letter page you are transferring them to.

Promote multiple affiliate programs in your website but don’t promote everything the world has to offer. Just choose the affiliate programs that fit your site and focus on it.  Then, it is advisable to automate the whole process, giving you more time for other ventures. Yes, you’ve read it right! Automation is another key to become a super affiliate. 

Of course, you have to spend more time in reading, learning and taking up the changes in affiliate marketing business. Through this, you’ll remain on top of the trends. If you are knowledgeable with online marketing, you’ll understand how important it is to stay up-to-date.  In this kind of business, what worked and what was accepted few months ago may not work at present. So always see to it that you know what’s new in affiliate marketing everyday.

It’s really hard to be a Clickbank super affiliate, but you shouldn’t say NO to the thought of giving up. Bear in mind that in affiliate marketing business, you need to develop persistence, patience and knowledge. These traits will teach you to carry on no matter how tough the job is. Also, check your statistics. This will help you find out what is working and what is not. Make necessary changes if needed but do it one at a time and be patient. 

Don’t forget that in affiliate marketing, everything won’t take place overnight. And it will not happen without blood, sweat and hefty time commitment. Again, just encompass patience, persistence and knowledge; then do above mentioned tactics. Before you recognize it, you will start gaining profits. Believe me, the fruits of all your efforts here in affiliate marketing will be way too sweet.

Over the past years, web hosting has grown bigger than it often. With more associates getting into this business and finding the many benefits it can give them, the demand for web hosting has not ever been higher. These seem to be the trend of today. 

It is evaluated that by 2008, the internet sales industry will top then dollar bank. And to think, majority of those sites will be offering different affiliate programs for people to  

choose and participate into.

This only means one thing. It is easier now to find the right web host for your application. The possibility of quality web hosting companies separating themselves from the rest of the industry is anticipated. If this is done, the unprofessional and incompetent  

ones will suffer.

Support will be the number one deliberation for people when choosing a web host. It will be distinct that traditional advertising will become less and less effective. Most people would rather opt for the web host based on things that they see and hear. Also  

based on the recommendations by those who have tried them and have proved to be a victorious.

This is a great opportunity for web hosting affiliates and resellers alike. There would hundreds of web hosting and programs to pick out from that the difficulty in finding the right one for them is not a problem nowadays.

How does one become a flourishing affiliate in the niche markets using web hosting?

If you think about it, everybody who needs a website needs a web hosting associates to host it for them. As of now, there is really no leading hosting business so most people choose hosts based from recommendations. Usually, they get it from the ones that  

have already availed of a web hosting services.

With the many hosts offering affiliate programs, there is the inclination to find the one which you think will work best for you. Think of the product you will be boosting. Pattern them to the site and see if they are catering to the same things as you are.

When you have been with one host for quite some time and seem not to be making much in spite of all your effort, leave that one and look for some other. There is no use in trying to stick to one when you would be before off in some other. Things will only  

have to get better from there because you already have been in worst conditions.

Try this out. If you are quite happy and satisfied with your web host, try to see if they are tendering an affiliate program you can participate on. Instead of you paying them, why not make it the other way around; them paying you. The process can be as   

easy as putting a small “powered by” or “hosted by” link at the footer of your page and you are already in an affiliate business.

Why select paying for you ,for your web hosting when you do not have to? Try to get paid by letting everyone know you like your web host.

Always keep in mind that when choosing a web host, choose the one that is known for its brilliant customer support. There are also many hosting affiliate programs. Residual affiliate program is also being hosted. This is the program wherein you get paid a  

percentage every month for a client that you relevant to. This can allow you to have a steadfast source of income. With perseverance, you can even be quite successful in this field.

There are a lot of niche markets out there just waiting for the right affiliate to infiltrate to them and make that dollars dream come true. Knowing which one to get into is being confident enough of your potentials and the good results you will be getting.

Web hosting is just one affiliate market you could try out and make some good and continuous income. Just remember that to be successful on your attempt also means that time, effort and patience is needed.

Nobody has devised the perfect affiliate market yet. But some people do know how to make it big in this kind of market. It is just knowing your kind of market and making the earnings there. 

Spiceday

- - - - - - - 

Spiceday  is a regular contributing copywriter to <a href="http://www.spiceday.com">www.spiceday.com</a>