5.2.07

Building an Affiliate Program Through A Blog by ThickWallet

Does Your Affiliate Program Have a Blog?

It better.

Blogs were built to be personal. Blogs were built to be social. People being social is what we call networking. Networking builds contacts. Contacts build business. So in a nutshell, Blogs are the online equivalent of a networking receiption for potential business partners. If your affiliate program does not have a blog, you are missing out on one of the easiest and most cost effective ways to build your affiliate program.
How To Build Your Affiliate Program Through a Blog

Building your affiliate program through a blog is really quite easy, here are some tips to get you started.

* Do Not "Hype" Your Program - There is a time and a place for everything. Your affiliate program blog is not the time or place to hype your program. The top notch affiliates, the ones you who are the true revenue generators, will see through this and move on. Save the hype...spend your time promoting your blog, not your program.
* Show How to Best Promote Your Program - It's your program, so you should be the expert on how best promote the program as an affiliate. Show potential affiliates specific examples of how they can promote your program through their site.
* Give Affiliate Best Practices - It's not enough to just show people how to use your affiliate program, give them the knowledge of how to become a better affiliate for any program. You will not only attract more affiliates writing about best practices, you will also be branding you and your program as an expert in affiliate marketing. Being a respected authority will build trust with perspective affiliates.
* Leverage Third Party Content - Do not be afraid to link to, discuss, or build upon content that is not your own, even if it is from a competitor. You can't be expected to know everything and come up with every new idea, but part of having the best affiliate program and being the best affiliate manager possible is educating your affiliates on the lastest in affiliate marketing. Leverage other's content to improve the performnce of your affiliate base.
* Bait Potential Affiliates - I have said it before that linking is the best way to get someone's attention online. Want to land some large affiliate marketers? Start linking to and discussing what they are talking about. They might not notice the first time, but eventually they will.
* Avoid Reporting on Industry News - That is what Google News and dozens of other sites are for. Don't waste your time. Write some more affiliate best practices.
* Be Creative, Original, Open, and Honest- This is the toughest one, but the most important one. I like to think that being open and honest will lead to being original. Original companies, people, and blogs are almost aways creative. Start with being open and honest, the rest will follow.

Are You Building an Affiliate Program Through A Blog?

If so, add your thoughts, ideas, experiences in the comments section about what has worked best for you in building your affiliate program through your affiliate program blog!

About the Author

ThickWallet is the author of Screen Glare the definitive online resource for affiliate marketing and affiliate program management information, insights, and helpful tips.

18.10.06

Make Money With Affiliate Programs: Make Money With Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing is probably the quickest and the easiest way of making real business on the Internet. You don't need to get your own merchandise – you simply sell other people's goods or services. You don't even need a merchant account, and sometimes it's possible to start out without even having your own website. Though if you are serious about your affiliated business you'd better to have a website of your own.

Most of the top companies on the web have affiliate programs. Amazon, AT&T, Barnes & Noble, Chase bank, Delta airlines, Gap, KMart and Walmart are just a few examples. Did you know that you can be paid a commission to promote online products of any of these companies? But the best thing about affiliate marketing is that it is so easy to set up business relationship with your affiliate partners.

Where to pick up a profitable affiliate program?

There are dozens of affiliate networks and affiliate program directories on the Internet. The easiest way is to go to affiliate network or affiliate program directory and sign up for a partnership that suits your website topic. The major affiliate networks like ClickBank or Commission Junction have thousands of affiliate programs in all sorts of categories. You can find a listing of multiple affiliate networks at: http://affiliated-business.com/make_money/index3.html

How to monetize your promotional activity?

The mostst rapid way to make money on the Internet is to promote affiliate programs directly using Google Adwords. You simply promote your affiliate partner's goods by means of Google ads. This way you can start promotional campaign in half an hour. However, it is getting more and more expensive to advertise with Google Adwords as there are lots of people doing the same and there is too much competition making money this way.

Use more reliable strategies to make money

Focus on a particular niche area. Launching a web site with content reflecting a narrowly focused product or service niche is a well known method of gaining web traffic in your area of specialty. Let's say you decide to do a site on matchmaking. You could then join all the affiliate programs concerning matchmaking. You can find many of them through the major networks, but you might also need to search on Google for something like – ‘matchmaking affiliate program'. An excellent resource that can help you determining relevant and focused areas to fill your site with is called NicheBot. They offer innovative tools to research and pinpoint market niches for your web site based on the WordTracker database and Google.

Create a website that provides a solution

In order to develop a solid selling strategy, you have to penetrate into your target market. Blogs and forums are the "perfect" place to conduct a research, before creating a marketing strategy. Once you meet your target cyber audience, start recording their problems, concerns and inclinations. After you created a "Problem List", pinpoint your target market's problems, with identical solutions. Start researching for products online, with the parameters you've developed. These products must be solution-oriented and offer an affiliate program! Then you must create either testimonial pages or review pages that discuss and pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with. Many programs actually provide either an article or recommended text to sell their products for you and allow reproduction of those articles with your links embedded. This is the best method of getting increased orders for your chosen affiliate programs.

Search Engine Optimization can make you a lot of money

One more approach to the affiliate marketing is to build lots of little mini sites focusing on different keyword phrases that people are searching for. Thus you can get free search engine listings in Google and other search engines. This is a great strategy because it is based on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the traffic that you get is free. SEO is great and can make you a lot of money but it is also quite tricky. It is becoming more complex as more and more webmasters participate. But the basics applied to your site can increase profitability dramatically over time.

As I said, it becomes not so easy to climb the top of the search engines nowadays. It requires a lot of knowledge, and quite a bit of effort. Normally it is going to take months of dedication to reach search engine tops. Correct usage of title tags reflecting individual page content is one of the most critical points of SEO techniques. 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 technics here: http://affiliated-business.com/promotion/Free_Promo_Technics.html

If you've succeeded implementing all the above mentioned strategies, your website is guaranteed to become one of the leaders in your specific keyword niche. As a keyword niche leader you'll be receiving great amounts of targeted traffic, which in it's turn will prowide you with steady streams of affiliate income.

About the Author
Daniel Russo is a successful affiliate marketer, author and founder of Affiliated Web Business. To learn how you can succeed in Internet business and affiliate marketing, go to: affiliated-business.com and discover the most powerful Internet marketing concepts and secret insider tips on how to be successful and make money online.


Source: ArticleTrader.com