How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

by Justin on February 17, 2009 · 0 comments

There are seemingly infinite opportunities for making money online. But in my opinion, the easiest and most straightforward opportunity is affiliate marketing. Tens of thousands of people are involved in affiliate marketing. They work from the comfort of their homes and make a full-time living through the Internet. I have personally known people who make more than $50,000 per month via affiliate marketing. That is not to say all involved with affiliate marketing will earn this income, but it does illustrate the scope of income possibilities. It takes several years of experience to reach this high income level, but even if you have just 1% of the success that the top affiliate marketers have, I am confident you will be glad you tried it. I am personally involved with affiliate marketing and it provides comfortable supplementary income.

Before you get into the process of earning money through affiliate marketing, you should first learn a bit about traditional marketing. Before the Internet became widespread, companies had internal marketing departments. They advertised their products through traditional media outlets like television, newspapers, radio, and print magazines. These were the only methods of marketing for several decades before the Internet was born. Traditional methods allowed little to no opportunity for outsourcing the marketing process. The advent of the Internet, however, enabled advertisers to outsource their marketing process to individuals like you and me.

Today the Internet is widely used by millions of people all over the world, allowing them to purchase products and services from various companies with a click of a button. When transactions are made online, it is possible to track each user’s behavior. This tracking process prompted the birth of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing involves two parties: the advertiser, also called the merchant or retailer, and the publisher, also called the affiliate. In this case, since we do not have our own product or service, we are the affiliates. Affiliate marketing is also defined as performance-based marketing. In other words, the advertiser will compensate the publisher depending upon the performance of the publisher. Usually the publisher or the affiliate is paid for every sale that is generated via the publisher’s affiliate link.

For example, imagine that an advertiser is selling t-shirts online at T-Shirts.com and each shirt costs $10. The advertiser can choose to give away 20% of the sale price to the affiliate who referred that sale. If you as a publisher refer a customer to buy a t-shirt from the advertiser, you will get $2 for each sale. If you refer 10 customers to them, you will earn $20.

If you want to become an affiliate of a particular advertiser, you have to sign up for an affiliate account. After your account is approved, you will be provided with your own unique affiliate link. For example, if you are an affiliate of T-Shirts.com, you will be given an affiliate link that looks something like <www.T-Shirts.com/?=YourAffiliateID>. Your affiliate ID can be a username, a random number, or any other form of unique identification.

When an Internet user clicks your affiliate link, he or she will visit T-Shirts.com and the affiliate tracking system will record that you referred the visitor to their website. When the visitor purchases a t-shirt, you will be credited with $2 commission in your affiliate account. Note that you will not make money when the customer clicks the affiliate link. You will earn affiliate commissions only when the customer completes the purchase on the merchant’s website. The advertiser is paying you for the performance and not just the volume of visitors (hence the alternate name of performance-based marketing).

Affiliate Networks: As you can see in the above example, the t-shirt merchant does not need to worry about marketing at all. All they did was simply set up the affiliate system and pay the affiliates who referred sales to the merchant. The ease of this system made affiliate marketing very popular. Almost every merchant selling products or services online started their own affiliate system. But this phenomenon gave rise to a new problem. Affiliates who were promoting many different products found it very difficult to track all of their earnings in different affiliate accounts held with each merchant. This led to the creation of affiliate networks. An affiliate network acts as a meeting place between publishers and advertisers. Advertisers no longer need to install their own affiliate system. Instead, they can approach the affiliate network and set up their program. Affiliates can sign up with the network and promote any product that they find in the affiliate network. One of the biggest affiliate networks on the Internet is Commission Junction (CJ.com). They have been around for more than 10 years and are one of the most trusted networks on the web. Another prominent network is ClickBank.com. ClickBank is similar to Commission Junction, but ClickBank specializes in digital products.

Types of Affiliate Programs: There are basically two types of affiliate programs. The first is Pay Per Sale, meaning the affiliate earns a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount for every sale whenever a visitor clicks the affiliate’s link and purchases the product or service on the advertiser’s website. The second is Pay Per Lead, meaning the visitor need not purchase any product, but instead fills out a form or signs up for a free account on the merchant’s website. For example, many free dating websites will prompt visitors to sign up for a free account through your affiliate link. When they do, you will earn $1-5 for every lead depending on the advertiser.

Now that you know what an affiliate program is and how affiliate marketing works, let’s look at the different methods by which you can promote your affiliate link.

Websites: If you have a blog or a website about a certain topic, you can find affiliate programs related to your topic by searching Google. For example, if your blog is about skin care, search Google for “skin care affiliate programs” and sign up. You may also find skin care related affiliate programs inside affiliate networks. Once you have acquired your affiliate link, the next goal is to drive clicks to that link. You can place banners or text links on your website and wait for people to follow the link and make a purchase. An effective way to promote a product is to buy the product yourself and write a review of it in your website or blog. At the end of the review, you can instruct your readers to click the link and buy the product at the merchant’s website.

Article Marketing: If you have strong writing skills, you can write articles of 300 to 500 words about certain topics and submit them to article directories such as ArticlesBase.com. These article directories have vast databases of articles on nearly every imaginable topic. When you submit an article, they allow you to include a custom signature, which can also include your affiliate link. Once your article is accepted and published at an article directory, anyone has the permission to copy that article and post it in their own website or blog as long as they keep the signature box intact. If your article is strong, many people will post it on their website, which will lead more people to your affiliate link.

Another popular article directory is EzineArticles.com, but they have stricter guidelines which do not allow affiliate links in your signature. To promote affiliate products through EzineArticles, you should first build a one page website where you can market your merchant’s product with your affiliate link. Then you can link to your website from the article’s signature. If your marketing message (also called a sales copy) is very influential in convincing the prospect to buy the merchant’s product, it can be more effective than redirecting the visitor straight to the merchant’s website via your affiliate link.

Forum Marketing: A forum is a place where people discuss a particular topic with other like-minded people. There are forums on a vast range of markets. To find forums on a particular topic, search Google for a keyword from the topic followed by the word forum. For example, if you want to find forums about Weight Loss, search for “Weight Loss forum.” Forums allow you to sign up for a free account and participate in the conversations. Most forums have a signature box where you can insert promotional links. When you participate in the forum by posting useful information, your signature will be displayed along with each post. The more you post, the more your affiliate link gets clicked.

Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the art of promoting your affiliate links via paid search results. When you search for a particular keyword in a search engine like Google, the results that you see on the left side are the natural, or organic, search results. The links that you see on the right side of the screen are sponsored links or paid search results. Companies or organizations pay Google to include their link in the search results when a particular keyword is searched. For example, if you want to promote a facial skin cream via SEM, you should first sign up for an account at Google AdWords (adwords.google.com). Then you should instruct Google to display your affiliate link whenever people search for the term “skin cream” or “buy skin cream.” You then have to pay Google for every click that you get. For example, if a product costs $50 and the merchant is giving away 20% affiliate commission, then you will receive $10 for each sale as affiliate commission. When you drive 100 visitors to your merchant’s website through your affiliate link by paying Google $0.10 for every click, you total investment would be $10. In this case you need to make at least one sale to break even. With two sales, you would earn a profit of $10, and so on.

Search engine marketing requires a lot of experience and expertise. This method is not recommended for beginners, because if they are not careful and strategic, they may end up throwing away money in marketing and get no sales or profit in return.

Buying Traffic: Another good way to promote affiliate links is to buy traffic from other websites. This is similar to SEM, but instead of paying the search engine for getting clicks, you pay other webmasters to display your banner or text advertisement on their websites. Before you commit to a big advertising package, you should first test the quality of their traffic and analyze whether the traffic coming from their websites will convert into enough sales to give you a good return on investment.

Email Marketing: The process of promoting a product or service by sending direct emails to the target audience is called email marketing. The first step in email marketing is getting an email list of potential customers. You can build your own email list by asking people to opt-in on your website, or you can purchase one. One of the most popular email marketing services on the web is Aweber.com. They provide features such as tracking clicks in the email and sending automatic follow-up messages. These services cost only $19.95 per month. In email marketing, you should send emails only to those who have opted to receive your email. Otherwise, it will be considered spam and you will lose your brand image.

If you are a beginner in the Internet marketing industry, you should try article marketing and forum marketing first. Once you have gained experience, you can invest your earnings in creating a website or trying Search Engine Marketing. If you are interested in becoming an expert in this field, there are several online coaching programs with step-by-step guidelines for how to participate in affiliate marketing most effectively.

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How to Create an Information Business

by Justin on February 5, 2009 · 0 comments

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If you have been trying to make money online and if you haven’t made a fortune yet, the only people who are to be blamed are the ones who created websites like Get paid to read emails, Get paid to click ads, Get paid to refer to your friends, MLM schemes, Pyramid schemes, High yield investment programs etc. These people have completely ripped off people like you and me and it has wasted our time, not just hours, but years. I guarantee that you will never get rich by following these methods.

information productsThe people who make serious money online are the people who have created their own information products. They have built a business instead of trying out various “methods” to make money. Just knock this concept into your head: Making money online is NOT a business. Real business means building up a system which delivers value to the customer and earns you a profit on a CONSISTENT basis and which increases over time without the need for you to continuously work on it.

I am not telling you that you should not use these techniques. Even I have used them a few years back. But do not get stuck with it. Think long term and create your own product and let the customers pay you money directly into your bank account without any middlemen involved. In this article, let me take you by the hand and walk through the process of creating an information product and building a business around it.

Why 9 out of 10 Traditional Businesses Fail: The single biggest and most important factor which has been preventing you from starting a business is the fear of losing what you have worked hard to gain. It is true that 9 out of 10 businesses will fail within the first five years. But have you ever wondered why? That’s because traditional business models have low profit margins and involve huge investments. But the business of selling information products online is a completely different story. But the time you finish reading this article, you would be jumping with excitement about how easy it is.

The Advantages of Selling Information Products Online: This is the information age. People are looking to improve their lives by learning more. If you can fill this need with appropriate information, then they will reward you the green stuff (I mean Money!). But wait! I am not recommending you to author a book and put it in Amazon. Never! Even a monkey can put a book in Amazon and most of the authors are broke. Only a very few authors who have hit the bestseller list get exponential profits. I have boiled down the advantages of selling information products in following points.

  1. Information products have huge profit margins. Once the product is created, there is no cost involved to replicate the product. If you are selling the information product in a downloadable form, the bandwidth costs are negligible and your profit per sale will not be less than 99% of the sale price.
  2. You need not create the information product yourself. You can hire someone who is an expert in the topic, or you can buy the rights for an existing book and frame the chapters into lessons.
  3. Information products sold online have a more perceived value than books when you can deliver the information in various formats such as audio podcast, video presentations or downloadable PDF reports and hence you can charge more than an average book.
  4. The sales process can be automated and the business need not have too much man power. Right from advertising, getting payments to delivering the product to the customer, there is not need for you to interfere. The only work that you may need to do is answer support questions regarding refund of the product or delivery issues, and that too can be outsourced to someone in India or China.

I hope by now you are convinced that selling information products online can be very profitable. I can see that you are excited to get started. Let me walk you through the steps involved in creating your first information product.

The First Step – Choosing Your Market: You cannot sell a product without a market and you cannot sell it to the wrong market. The first step is choosing the direction in which you are going to proceed. Choose your marketing with extreme caution since you do not want to realize later that you have chosen the wrong market which would lead to waste of time, efforts and money. There are two main factors involved in choosing the right market:

  1. Market Demand and Future Potential: If you can identify a need for which people are proactively looking for a solution and if no one else is satisfying that need, you have struck a gold mine. But most of the time it is not always the case. The internet is too crowded and most probably someone else is catering to every possible need that you can identify. But do not lose hope, because there are many useless products out there and many people are not doing a good job. If you can create a better product and deliver more value for the same price, then people would be ready to kick your competitor out of the market and happily buy from you.
  2. Your Strengths and Passions: If your information product is about dog training and if you have never trained a dog in your life, then you are not going to succeed. Every man learns something in his life through experience and it is recommended that you create an information product around that topic. For example, a veterinary doctor could create an information product which teaches people how to take the best care for their pets. I have known people who make millions of dollars just selling such pet related information products. Even if you are planning to outsource the entire content creation process, you still need to have a passion in the topic so that you can identify potential weaknesses in your product and rectify them accordingly so that you stand out from your competitors.

istock_000008125274xsmallThere are many free tools online which can help you to measure the market demand. I have used only the Google Keyword tool so far and I recommend you to just use this and not to waste time and money on other paid market research tools unless you have grown your business atleast to $10,000 per month level. This keyword tool can tell you how many people searched for a particular keyword in Google search engine in the previous month. You can find it at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The Second Step – Creating the Product: Once you have identified the market the next obvious step is to create the product. If you are an expert in a subject, you can create your own content. If you have identified a market with tremendous potential in your field of interest but if you are not qualified to create your own product, you have two options. You can outsource the content writing to freelancers who can work on a contract basis to you. You can find freelancers at www.Elance.com and www.Guru.com. These two websites are the largest freelance networks on the internet and you can find experts on almost any possible topic. The second option in creating your own information product is to partner with the author of an already published book or purchase the information re-publishing rights from them and use it to create your product.

A good technique to improve the perceived value of your information product is to deliver it in different formats. Many people (like me) really enjoy listening to the lessons on their iPod or car stereo and would definitely pay a premium for audio lessons. If you are a native English speaker, you can just read out the lessons in a MP3 recorder and bundle the audio file with the product. If you are not a native speaker or if you think you have a bad voice, you can outsource this job too. You can find professional voice over talents at www.Voices.com.

Some people are visual learners. They would be ready to pay double the price of the ebook for a video presentation. Forget about cameras and studios. You can bundle your information in videos with three simple steps. One, condense the the text lesson into bullet points and distribute them into various power point slides. Two, install a on-screen video recording software such as Camtasia Studio (for windows) or ScreenFlow (for Mac). Three, play the audio file and go through the power point slideshow in sync with the audio while recording the screen with the software and BAM! Your video is now ready. This format would be very helpful for people to take notes, they can just write down the main points from the slide.

The Third Step – Creating the Sales Page: This is the most important step of all. If you cannot communicate to the prospect why they need your product, they are not going to buy it no matter how wonderful your product may be. I have seen many people mess up with this step and a poor sales pitch is one of the major reasons why people don’t get rich online. But do not worry, it is not rocket science. Here is a simple guide to creating a killer sales copy which would give you the maximum visitor to customer ratio:

  1. Before you write your sales copy, you need to understand who your prospect is. Use your creativity to imagine how would it be if you were the prospect and what would motivate the prospect to buy your product.
  2. Write down all the problems and mistakes that the prospect is doing right now and write about it in the sales letter. When a potential customer reads the sales letter and if he or she feels that you are talking directly to them, they would subconsciously feel that your product will solve their problems.
  3. Communicate to them the reason why you created the product in the first place. If the prospect feels that you created the product not just for money but to solve their problems, they would be very happy to buy from you. They need to understand that you created the product because you care for them.
  4. Today, no one buys a product without social proof. You need to incorporate testimonials of previous customers in your sales page. If this is the first time that you are going to sell the product, do not put fake testimonials. Instead ask an expert in your industry to review your product and you can put up their words on the sales letter. Expert’s proof is the next best thing to social proof.
  5. Clearly write down what your product will do for the customer and explain all the benefits that you have compared to other products in the market.
  6. Do not put links and fancy logos in your sales page which would distract the customer away from the message that you are trying to communicate. A simple HTML page with a clean border and text with a regular font like Georgia, Times New Roman or Verdana has been universally accepted as the best form of sales page layout.

The science of writing sales letter is called copywriting and it is a subject in itself. Top copywriters who work as freelancers for big companies charge as much as $10,000 per sales copy. You can also outsource copywriting if you have a big budget. Good copywriters can be found on Elance.com starting from $500 per sales copy.

The Fourth Step: Setting up Payment System: Before the e-commerce came into existence, it was as difficult to get the money into your bank account as it was selling the product. People used various methods such as receiving checks via postal mail, direct cash deposit and setting up credit card payment gateways required a lot of legal formalities and a huge investment.

istock_000004652423xsmallToday, selling information products online is as simple as selling candy to a kid. ClickBank.com offers services which makes selling a walk in the park. All that you need to do is submit your product for approval to ClickBank.com and setup the sales page and thank you page. ClickBank will charge the customer’s credit card and deposit the money in your account. Your earnings will be sent via check every 15 days. You need not even handle refund requests, ClickBank takes care of that. There are other payment systems for information products similar to ClickBank.com, but for a beginner, I do not recommend anything else.

The Fifth Step: Affiliates and Joint Ventures: Once the product is ready for sale, the next big task is marketing. But do not worry, all you have to do is create the product and wait for the paycheck. Apart from helping you in receiving payments from customers, ClickBank.com also has an affiliate network where tens of thousands of people are waiting to promote your product for a commission. Usually an affiliate commission of at least 50% is given away since the unit cost of a product after it is created is negligible.

When people come into the internet marketing space, the first thing they look into is affiliate marketing. There is nothing wrong in being an affiliate and in fact it is one of the best ways to get started making money online. But as I said before, one should not stick to it for too long and should consider creating an information product. But still many people refuse to create their own info product even after several years of hanging out in the internet and these are the people who will be excited to promote your product as an affiliate.

Thousands of people are coming into the arena of making money online due to various reasons and the good news is that the number is only going to increase. As time passes by, you will get more and more people who are ready to promote your products and make money for you and themselves.

I hope you got an idea of how to build a business by selling information products. Let me admit the inconvinient truth that what you have learned in this article is not enough. There is much more to learn if you want to own a successful and profitable information publishing business. Each step in this article can span into an entire subject in itself. I will be writing more articles in this domain. Keep yourself updated by signing up in my email list so that I will let you know when I am giving away new information.

Justin Jackson

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