mlm affiliate program

Four Questions Before You Look For Affiliate Programs

2010-01-15T17:21:00.003-08:00

I’ve been receiving emails from people asking for my advice on which affiliate programs are the best, who pays the most and most often, and many other basic questions. I’d like to answer those questions on this forum, but I can only type so fast.

I went out this weekend looking for content that I could publish here temporarily while I got down to writing. I had a hard time finding unbiased content. Most of the so-called reviews out there are infomercials, and that’s not what I was looking for with this blog. So you’re going to have to bear with me. I’ve been looking and learning and reading and talking, and I’ve got a lot to say. I just need the time to write it down, and I will, starting tomorrow. No, really I will.

In the meantime, you need to ask yourself this — are you ready for an affiliate program, or Internet Advertising in general? I put together four questions you should ask before you embark on your affiliate program or any Internet advertising.

Before I get to the four questions you should ask before you enbark on your affiliate program, I am going to review two concepts that I use often here on Affiliateblog. The first is what I call the macro view of your Internet presence:

Incoming visitors - Internet Presence - Sales or Actions

You are really running two campaigns with your Internet presence -- the first campaign is concerned with getting visitors to the site, and the campaign is ongoing. The second campaign is to get those visitors to do something. That something may be just to spend more time at your site, or it may be to sign up for something or buy something.

The other represents the process of Internet advertising:

Impression - Click - Action

Most affiliate programs pay publishers in the last part of the process, the Action. I’ll be using both of these concepts in my questions. So here we go…

1. Do you know enough about your visitors?

There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there. While some affiliate marketing hubs are experimenting with context-sensitive serving of affiliate banners and banner rotation on affiliate sites, YOU will be the one to decide what kind of products and services you want to offer your visitors. This seems like a minor detail, but it is a major factor in your success.

If you haven’t already, take a look at the stats for your web site over the past month or so. Where do your visitors come from? Have you paid for Google, Yahoo or other search engine traffic? What are the keywords that people used to get to you? More complex and specific search terms tend to result in more immediate conversions, while broader search terms may result in sales later. If people get to your site using what you believe to be broad search terms, you need to be sure that the cookie life (the amount of time that passes between someone from your site visiting the affiliate merchant’s site and the sale) is long.

Do you have textlinks or other advertising on other sites? Do you know the demographics of the visitors from those sites? Have you spoken to the webmaster, owner or manager of the sites on which you advertise and asked him or her about their visitors? Do you know the websites? Have you visited the sites that advertise on the same sites as you? When you investigate all of these things a profile of the visitors to your site should begin to emerge.

Which search engine brings you the most traffic? If it’s Google, the user is slightly more apt to be male, and in the middle (of MSN, Yahoo and Google) as far as propensity toward buying something (42% more likely than the average user). There’s a terrific article on marketingvox.com if you want to see more details. You can also find some interesting demographic info on the major search engines from AQABA.

You should pay particular attention to the domains of your visitors. If you have a lot of AOL traffic for example, you should consider that the profile of the average AOL user is 35 or older (77%) and married (62%).

If you have trouble with textual representation vs. graphical representation (as I do), there is a terrific product called VisitorVille that takes your web logs and animates them. The text is represented as pictures (buildings, people, buses for the search engines, etc). You can see it here. Disclaimer: I am a VisitorVille affiliate.

After all this you should be able to sit down and come up with the profile of a typical visitor. This profile should hopefully include estimates of age, country of origin, education and income.

Try to think like your visitors. Try to anticipate their interests and the products and services they might want to purchase. Affiliate programs raise the bar from PPC — your payment comes at the end of the Internet marketing process (the Action) rather than at the beginning (Impression or Click) like Google Adsense or Doubleclick. You need to apply more brainpower to the process, and you’ll make more money if you do it right.

2. Is your site perfect?

You’re asking someone to buy something from your site. If the pages have sloppy html code, broken links or instability from a bad Cascading Stylesheet, it makes you look cheesy. We’ve all been uncomfortable buying something off a cheesy website. You don’t want to be that website.

Let’s start with the html code. Are you sure there are no errors in it? Have you used an html checker like the one at W3C? I find mistakes in my code all the time. Unless you check your code on several browsers in several resolutions you might not catch an error. The validator will. If you use Cascading Stylesheets you should also visit the CSS Checker.

Speaking of validators, you should check your links often. W3.org also has a link validator.

The site should also be optimized for search engines, be easy to understand and navigate, and should have a sitemap for people (and spiders) to find their way around. You should have had ten of your closest friends take a look at the site and give you their feedback, and you should always listen to unsolicited comments from users with an open mind and place value on them. If someone takes the time from their busy day to send you an email about your site, they feel strongly about it and you should take a close look at what they’re talking about.

Understand that if your Incoming Visitors campaign is not working right, you’re wasting your time with your Sales or Action program.

3. Do you know what kind of ads you’re going to use, and where the ads are going to go?

People have been ignoring banners for ten years. That’s why they shake and make sounds (someday I’ll tell you about the screaming match I had with a creative director the day we put out the first talking banner ad) to try to get your attention. Where you put it on the page is going to make a huge difference. Briefly — banners need to go somewhere the eye naturally rests (next to the masthead, near the navigation, at the bottom of the page).

Placement of any ads is a huge part of getting them noticed or clicked.

A lot of people (including me) believe that text ads should be placed at natural breaks and be close to the same in text size and color as the text. You need to surf around and look at where people place their ads, and you need to figure out where you think they would work on your site.

If you plan to create pages for some of the products you endorse (a great idea), you need to figure out how prominently you want to place the advertising. Most people won’t buy something if they believe you’re shilling for a particular company. They will buy from someone they believe honestly endorses the product or service. You need to figure out how to keep the distinction.

4. What’s your hunch on the right kind of offers for your site?

I ask this question a lot. Now that you have a better idea of the demographics of your visitors, try to decide on which action you think they would be more apt to take — pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale or even pay-per-click (hard to come by) on your site.

If you have a general interest website that gives away free stuff it’s probably going to be difficult to sell people products from that website. It might be smarter to try to get them to sign up for a free products newsletter from one of the affiliate programs, or you may want to look for offers that target the age group of your site rather than offers that target a specific interest. You might be looking for smaller-ticket sales or only leads. Leads get the user to the end of the advertising process chain, but require less of a commitment.

Try to come up with the four, five, six or fifty ways to slice this all up, by type of action, by type of sale or lead, or any other way you can come up with. Then you can go out and find the different offers that might appeal to your visitors. When it comes time to place the ads, try to put different ads in similar spaces on the same pages, and see how they do.

Get your questions answered and you’re ready to take the plunge into affiliate marketing.

Make Money Online Fast

Affiliate Program Marketing

Finding Affiliate Programs -- Where To Start

2010-01-15T17:21:00.001-08:00

When most people have a task to do, they usually do well once they get started, and finding affiliate programs for your site or blog is no exception — you just need a little kickstart to get your brain into the right mode.

There’s a really easy way to get things started…go look at one of your competitors. There are tons of ways to do this — the easiest way would be to put your keyword(s) into Google and see what pops up.

The order of the results is based in good part on Google’s PageRank, which has a lot to do with the number of other sites that link to a particular site.

Pick one of the results near the top and click on the link. Hover on a banner or text advertising box and see where the URL leads. Take note of the particular network such as Commission Junction, ClickBank, Linkshare, etc. and the particular programs on the site. I keep a list using Microsoft Notepad when I surf competitive sites for clients.

Most of the time I ignore CPM-based networks like DoubleClick or AdBrite, and contextual ad networks like Google and Yahoo. I do pay particular attention to the category affiliate network banners and text ads. For example, if you surf a few competitors and find a lot of banner advertising for web site hosting, that means your competitors are having at least some luck with website hosting affiliate programs.

When you come up with a good list of networks, programs and categories, go visit the networks that appear the most on the sites (try to go to 5 or 6 different sites so you can see any patterns that emerge).

You should now have a terrific list to start from, including a list of networks, programs and keywords. Now all you have to do is poke around and see which pay the best and try to figure out which your visitors might like.

While you’re on the other sites, try to get a feel for where on the page the ads are placed, which can make a huge difference in clickthrough and conversion.

Make Money Online Fast

Affiliate Program Marketing

Effective Money Making Website Residual Affiliate Programs May Be Your Answer

2010-01-15T17:20:00.000-08:00

There are many opportunities that can be grabbed online. Some websites offers part time and home based jobs like freelancing and others. Some also hire people that can be able to answer other company’s surveys. They only require their members to do their job well and to have their software that consists of the program they will use online to do their job.

Some websites also provide hints and tips for worthwhile home based jobs. Making money is rather a direct way to put it, but that may be the bottom line in any case. Even if you run a non-commercial site, you may want to offset some of your costs by sharing it with your visitors.

Web hosting is an important part of your online business. This is why it's extremely important to pick a web hosting service that is extremely reliable, has near perfect uptime, and offers great customer support.

There are web host that pay a residual affiliate commission to members that sign up under your affiliate link. Be sure to look into the affiliate program that pays a good percentage of the sale.

Web hosting services are offered with different packages to make sure that they fit your needs. Determine what kind of package is a perfect fit for your online business. Depending on how many sites and the amount of traffic you receive to your site should determine the package you pick.

If you only have one site with a few visitors per day you can usually get by with the smallest package. However as your business grows you can always move up to the bigger packages.

Make sure that when searching for a web hosting service that they offer reliable service with great servers that will not be down due to problems. Your business depends on your site being up all the time, so make sure that the servers offered are top quality.

If you have a large online business you may want to purchase a semi-dedicated or full-dedicated server. This way you have more control over how it's used, and you'll have more storage space and bandwidth to work with.

Another important issue to consider is customer service. Make sure you can contact your web hosting company on a drop of a hat. If you are having problems and you're not able to reach them for a few hours you can lose lots of money. Choose your web hosting company wisely, because your entire online business depends on it.

There are some websites that offer opportunities on earning extra money from residual affiliate programs.

Unlike most affiliate programs, you earn residual income on many great products and services each and every month, not just on a single sale. You can get your own professional websites instantly. You can also take advantage of their many benefits and agent support features.

The Commission Junction is a good example and provides access to thousands of advertisers, and millions of ads, banners, and products within one web-based interface. With one ID and password, you can manage all of their pay-for-performance partnerships, retrieve new ads or links for their sites, and generate comparative reports. They are one of the best reporting systems today.

Just a warning, remember that always put in your mind that not all websites that offer these opportunities is reliable, some are those sites that just want you to pay for a membership fee. There are websites that scam people who are looking for a job, so just always be alert and it’s better to know the background of your prospective website. It is for your own financial protection to do a little research of the residual affiliate program you are considering.

Make Money Online Fast

Affiliate Program Marketing