02 Nov 09 The Benefits Of Joining A Good Paid Affiliate Marketing Site

Affiliate marketing programs offer excellent opportunities to earn income from sales made by people you refer to various offers. This is usually done through links from your website to the sales pages of the businesses running the offers. However, creating a viable income from affiliate marketing does not happen by doing nothing and navigating the world of internet marketing can certainly be a challenge for new online business owners. An affiliate marketing paid membership site can offer an excellent way to learn the skills you need to be successful at affiliate marketing. A good quality paid membership site will offer a range of downloadable ebooks, video and audio training sessions and a host of other resources to assist you to become financial successful from internet marketing – sooner, rather than later.

If you are considering joining a paid membership site to improve your affiliate marketing skills, you will need to consider value for money. There are a host of paid membership sites vying for business which usually charge between around $10 to $60 per month. The higher end sites would need to offer significantly more benefits than the lower cost ones to really be worth such a significant financial commitment.

Although the main purpose of an affiliate marketing paid membership site is to provide the education and training you need to make a good income from affiliate marketing, another significant benefit you can gain from joining a paid membership site is passive income from referring people to join the site. In other words, you become an affiliate for the paid membership site and get paid while you learn!

Another benefit of joining a top notch affiliate marketing paid membership site is the opportunity to interact with other affiliate marketers in their online community. Many new affiliate marketers have found joint venture partners for new business opportunities through communicating on a paid membership site forum. They have also received tips on good affiliate marketing opportunities and have learned from the experience of others.

A high quality affiliate marketing paid membership site will also do a lot of the hard work for you in terms of evaluating various affiliate marketing programs. A paid membership site that is run by successful affiliate marketers and that has a large subscription base with a solid online community is in an ideal position to save you a lot of time and energy researching affiliate marketing opportunities.

Sometimes you can join a paid membership site with an initially free membership. This allows you to test the genuineness of the site and access some of the resources. Once you are confident in the quality of the information and resources available to you, you may wish to upgrade to a paid membership which will allow you access to a range of additional resources including the online community. Upgrading on a paid membership site to a higher level membership is likely to be most beneficial if you plan to get involved and interact with others.

The main pitfall of affiliate marketing paid membership sites lies in the fact that you cannot necessarily know if you will get value until you sign up and pay your money. Another pitfall you may encounter with some paid membership sites is that the owners may use the site to promote affiliate programs that will benefit them rather than give you the honest truth about the programs. Short of personal recommendations, the only way to determine if a paid membership site is likely to be worthwhile is to try it out.

A good affiliate marketing paid membership site can make all the difference to your success or failure as an affiliate marketer. It can be hard to earn a good income from affiliate marketing without guidance. A paid membership site offers you that guidance. You will need to take the time to find the best value for money sites with vibrant online communities. However, if you take the time and trouble to really look for the best paid membership site for your needs you will benefit by having all the affiliate marketing help you need right at your finger tips.

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29 Oct 09 Ask Yourself One Question! Making Money With Affiliate Marketing Part I

So you have decided to give Affiliate Marketing a try or you are looking at different ways to make money on the internet; either way, I know you have been poking around in the businesses on the internet. That’s the only place you will find this series. So, now that we agree you have been looking for an opportunity, I can imagine you have found a few that interest you. If you have been looking around for more than a few hours, you realize there are some tall promises of making huge money by clicking a few buttons and turning your computer into a cash spewing machine. Well, if it was that easy everyone would be doing it and nobody would be telling you how you could do it; they would be keeping the secrets to themselves. So why then are there so many claims and why are people trying to give them, sell them or otherwise get those ideas into your hands?

Well; you see, my fine Affiliate Marketing friend, YOU, are the reason those ads are out there. It takes you, the customer, to buy into those various different ideas and then part with your cold hard cash to purchase said venture. It is your belief that you too could make some money doing whatever it is the seller is selling. As we go through this series, we will look at the various different opportunities that exist on the internet. I don’t pretend to be all knowing about all things; but, I will do my best to impart on you some of my thoughts that guided me down the road I have chosen in internet marketing.

But; before we can do anything; I mean anything, I need you to ask yourself one very important question. This question will be the determiner of all things you endeavor on the internet. It comes before you determine what type of business you might be looking for, before you make a business plan, before getting money for your business, before you get a web site, before you pick a business name; it even comes before breakfast! The question is:

WHY? Why do you want to make money on the internet? What is it that is driving you? Is it the want or need for money? That’s not enough! Why do you need money? To buy something? To get out of debt? To buy a house or a car, take a trip? Do you just want to be stinkin’ rich? Without a “why”, you might as well give up right now, send me $20 and move onto something else. The internet is no place for you.

I know, that sounds pretty crass! Well, it is; but, it’s the truth. If you have been at this for more than an hour, you know by now, you won’t make money quick! It’s sales hype. If you don’t have a “why” etched in stone and tattooed on your forehead or painted on the wall in front of you, you WILL fail! That I can guarantee you. You have to be determined to make a business work, in the real world or on the internet. On the internet, it is too easy to get distracted, discouraged, derailed, you name it! You have to have a “why.” It will be unique to you and your situation and it has to drive you like never before. If you get a good enough “why” you will be able to succeed online or anywhere for that matter. I’ll show you the ropes in future installments. Right now, I want you to get comfortable with a piece of paper and a writing implement and write down all the reasons you can think of “why” you want to make money on the internet. Be specific! There just might be a quiz next time! Seriously; this is a truly personal experience for you. Be completely honest with yourself and get some real reasons down on paper.

For me, I couldn’t stand the thought of failing. I absolutely had to be able to look at my family and know I made something that they could be proud of. I had been in so many opportunities over the years that I was determined to build a business that worked.

I found my why. You MUST find yours.

Stone Evans; known as The Home-Biz Guy around the internet, says you must have three intangibles if you are to be successful. The first is “why”, which we covered above, next is:

“You must BELIEVE that it is possible.”

“If you don’t believe that it’s POSSIBLE for you to make money with affiliate programs or make your living on the Internet, you won’t. It’s that simple.”

“Figuring out that it was possible, was just a matter of realizing that many other people were ALREADY making great money online. If they could do it, I could too. It would just be a matter of figuring out what those people were doing and then adapting it to my situation. “

There is no shortage of undeniable PROOF that people (millions of them) are making money online with affiliate programs. Just get online and do some research and you’ll find countless testimonials and stories of REAL PEOPLE making real money on the Internet. Or head to your local bookstore and you’ll find the same documented evidence of this fact. Truth is it’s getting easier and easier to make money online with affiliate programs.

I’ve always said that “affiliate marketing” is the job of the future. In the “old” days, you had to go to a potential employer, apply for the position and hope for the best. Now you can simply go to any company you want, fill out their affiliate application and start work immediately. Affiliates are the new working class. Believe me, making money with affiliate programs or making your living on the Internet is WAY MORE than possible.
It is pretty much (or will be soon enough) unavoidable now. Affiliate marketing is the “job” of the future that’s already here TODAY.

The last intangible you MUST have is:

You must be willing to MAKE THE LEAP.

Ready, FIRE, then aim… This is the operating philosophy you MUST adopt to succeed with affiliate marketing.

That’s backwards for most people who like to aim before they fire. The fact is the Internet is a moving target… The only thing constant about it is change. You need to stop analyzing the game and simply jump into it. You can’t learn from the outside… You have to be IN THE RING to truly understand it.

The lesson here is that you will never really be READY to start an affiliate marketing business. You simply have to start one. This is what I call “Making the Leap.”

The good news is that the cost of failure on the Internet is very small. In the “brick and mortar” world you need to evaluate things very carefully before you decide to open up a business. It’s almost always necessary to invest thousands of dollars to get an offline business off the ground. However, on the Internet you can often start a successful business for less than $100.

You simply need get IN THE GAME… Each moment that you stay “out there,” you’re wasting valuable time that you could be learning the skills necessary to become a successful affiliate marketer. In fact, if you’re not in the game yet, you’re ALREADY behind the times. Make the leap to becoming a successful affiliate marketer today!

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27 Oct 09 Ten Ways To Make Your Affiliate Site More Profitable

Is your affiliate website ready for business? You may have your content written and your affiliate products in place, but there are more things you can do to make your site more profitable.

1. Have a specific theme for your site and make sure your content, logo and other graphics are relevant to that theme. Don’t add kitty graphics to a website about gaming.

2. Have as much original content – content that you have written yourself – on your site as you can. Your visitors don’t want to read the same articles on a website that they have just seen on the one they were just at.

3. Create “printer friendly” pages for your important content. People are looking for information. Let them print it out. When they go back to read it later, they’ll see your site’s url at the bottom of the page.

4. Put your web pages into a logical order. Think like your visitors and group like content pages together. Make your site as “user friendly” as possible.

5. All links should be “clickable.” Check and recheck the links to other pages and to your affiliate products.

6. Create a Frequently Asked Questions page – especially if you sell your own products. When someone asks a question, publish that question, with your answer, in your FAQs.

7. Have contact information available on each of your web pages. Create a link to a Contact Me form instead of using an email addres. This will cut down on the amount of spam that you receive.

8. Offer Freebies. Free reports, ebooks, autoresponder courses and newsletters give your visitors a reason to come back. Set up an autoresponder for each freebie to help build your subscriber list.

9. Continue to add more valuable content to your site. One way to do this is to add an article directory to your site. Allowing your website visitors to add their articles will create good content for other visitors and it will help get their article noticed. It’s a win-win situation for all.

10. Add links to other sites. Make sure those links are to websites’ themes are compatible to yours. This will ad interest as well as increasing your search engine ranking.

Using the above methods will increase visitors to your site. By adding fresh, valuable content regularly those visitors will return. The more people that come to your site (and return to it), the more profitable you website will be.

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27 Oct 09 Turn Your Old Articles Into Profitable E-mail Courses

If you’ve written numerous articles, you can use them to further promote yourself and your business, e-zine or web site.

You can re-use your old articles by transforming them into another form of promotional tool.

And one way to re-use them is by turning them into e-mail courses. By doing so, you’ll be able to offer a new product that will help you establish your credibility as a business owner, e-zine publisher or web site owner.

Even though you’ll make use of old articles, you won’t be offering a re-hash.

Why? Because once you transform your old articles and gather them together to form an e-mail course, you add a more focused learning dimension to them. For this, you’re able to create a new and effective marketing tool.

So how do you do it? In a nutshell:

1. Gather all your articles and find a common theme among them. If you’ve written a number of articles aimed for beginning online business owners, these articles can make up one e-mail course. Your e-mail course can be a short one (2-4 articles) or a long one (5 or more).

2. When you’ve identified a common theme, arrange your articles in a way that provides some sort of logic or flow to them.

3. Assign one article as one e-mail module or follow up. If you’re using 4 articles, your e-mail course would consist of 4 modules or follow ups.

4. Take a good look at each article. Does it look like you can weave the activities within ‘lessons’ or will it require you to separate the ‘lessons’ from the ‘assignments’ — information first (your re-written article) and then hands-on activities or tests after?

5. Do your articles use the ‘you’ voice? If not, re-write as if you’re telling your friend a story. Do your articles sound formal? Even though you’re ‘teaching’ something, strive to keep it lighthearted. Be engaging and friendly, but never be too flippant or condescending.

6. Include additional resources at the end of each module or follow up. These resources could be online references and researches, and even more intensive lessons.

7. Proofread.

8. Insert your promotional texts in the beginning, middle or end of each module or follow up. However, don’t overdo this. People who will request your e-mail course are going to see through you once they find out that your promotional texts far outweigh the lessons and valuable instructions in your e-mail course. Put value over the content of your e-mail course first and your workshop takers will trust you and believe in your expertise.

9. Put your e-mail course on autoresponder and set the time each module or follow up will be sent. You can use free or fee-based autoresponders.

Before you announce your e-mail course, test and re-test it thoroughly. When you’re certain everything is fine, go ahead and announce it.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing
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26 Oct 09 Affiliate Program As It Should Be

Every off- or online business has a target of growing its market share. Under all other equal conditions the percent of the market, occupied by a company, means certain level of recognition, brand, exposure and, therefore, sales and income.

For small business owner a shift from 0.01% internet market share to 0.04% may result in tremendous four times income growth, the problem is in the limits of resources this particular owner has access to. Usually they are weak enough to allow such expansion at their own cost.

Help may come from two massive marketing instruments: – viral marketing; – business partnership based on outsourcing necessary resources.

Today we are going to speak about latter instrument of gaining exposure you deserve.

Business partnership is an agreement between two or more legal entities to cooperate together in order to reach mutually beneficial results. By extrapolating such statement into a framework of gaining market exposure, we can narrow this meaning down by focusing on uniting promotional efforts for reaching mutually beneficial results.

In practice the owner of affiliate program with the aim of gaining extensive market exposure attracts fellow marketers to promote the owner’s(s’) product(s) for a reward usually in the form of commission from retail price per sale. A commission for popular info products may vary from 5% to 70%.

Promotional materials (like, endorsement letters, reviews and articles) can greatly assist your partners in promoting your product as highly effective pre-selling tools.

The dilemma of joining affiliate programs

The most common mistake beginners do is registering with all possible and impossible affiliate programs they see in hope to promote them all and collect all the money they were promised to get on the page of respective affiliate program owners.

In dominating majority of cases they end up with wasted time and money. The reason is simple, they don’t have necessary resource – a database of consumers, subscribers, business partners – people who may be interested in such type of offers. Instead, those newcomers decide to start their online businesses by promoting other people’s products, what is extremely hard, because you will build client database and credibility for the company products of which you promote, not for yourself. The only thing you can do is to grow the subscription database, unfortunately, the most valuable asset – loyal clients – won’t be accessible in any case.

Some well-known internet millionaires, making fortunes cross-promoting 3rd party products may truly support the idea of “easy income with affiliate programs”, but they tend to forget that all their profits were possible due to huge subscriber databases, thousand of affiliates and customers a newcomer does not have!

That is why start wise by creating your own product, grow your credibility, circle of loyal customers and then join and promote as much 3rd party products as you consider necessary.

Setting up partner program

Every partner program you will create or setup should have, at least, basic must-have features:

1. Database driven registration of affiliates.

2. Tracking affiliate sales in order to count commission.

3. Admin control panel to support affiliates and track their sales.

There are 3 basic methods of having fully functional partner programs application, not going far into science, they are “do it yourself”, “setup 3rd party application”, “use 3rd party service”.

The first method is for those, who are knowledgeable programmers and fortunate enough to invest a lot of time in creating such a solution for personal needs or those, who are lucky to have a lot of money and hire those knowledgeable programmers. Responsibility for taking under control all support and function-related issues would lie on your shoulders.

Setting up 3rd party affiliate program solution requires much less time or money, if any. The result will be the same as above – fully functional partner program and inevitable support problems. The only difference is that you won’t be able to develop that partner application the way you need and like.

The main advantage of 3rd party service is the ability to stay unaware of how your partners sign up, track sales, receive checks and so forth, because in this case servicing your partners or affiliates will be the headache of independent company, not yours. For such “reluctance” 3rd party affiliate program provider would charge you on monthly or per sale basis, slightly decreasing your net profit at each sale.

Having your own affiliate program in place enables you to expand your market boundaries exponentially.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing
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26 Oct 09 11 Tips For Joining Affiliate Programs

Here are some things that I look for before joining an affiliate
program. They are items I feel are imperative to being in a
successful affiliate program.

1. The affiliate program has a great payment structure. For me, a
high commission that is also a high percentage of the purchase price
is essential. Nothing under 25% commission.

2. Make sure the affiliate program you are joining has a good looking
site. You do not want to be sending visitors to a site that you do
not like yourself.

3. Make sure they offer a comprehensive affiliate statistics page
that lists the number of click throughs, number of sales and amount
earned. This should be broken down per month.

4. Also make sure that the affiliate statistics are updated
automatically and immediately. You do not want to find out today
about a sale you made a week ago.

5. Ensure they give a wide variety of text links, banners and
graphics to put on your web page. Although I prefer text links,
certain types of banners and graphics still work well.

6. Know how often you are going to be paid. If you are tossing up
between 2 programs and one pays monthly and the other pays quarterly,
the one that pays monthly is better. You do not want to wait months
before getting paid for your hard work!

7. See if the affiliate program gives examples of how the top
affiliates are doing. This can be a great pointer to whether it is
good or not. If some affiliates are earning many thousands per month,
it is a good affiliate program.

8. Along these lines, also see if they give examples of what
marketing methods these successful affiliates are using to get the
best results.

9. An affiliate program that offers a special monthly newsletter just
for the affiliates is great. Here you can get extra tips and
techniques that are working well.

10. See if they offer email notification when you make a sale or get
an affiliate signed up under you (if it is a 2-tier program). It is
good to see `You have made another sale’ in your inbox.

11. Ensure top level support is given. If they cannot answer your
query straight away make sure they can respond within 48 hours.

There is tremendous demand for affiliate programs and choosing the
right one is no easy task. Make sure you do plenty of research before
joining one.

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26 Oct 09 Affiliate Program Basics

Affiliate Program is a ground floor opportunity. All you have to do is send visitors to your affiliate web site by placing a textlink or banner on your website and receive a commission on each sale, without the complication and expense of selling anything yourself.

Instead, you earn a commission for producing a ransaction. Affiliate programs, also known as Referral Programs, Associate Programs, Profit Sharing Programs or Reseller programs, give affiliates the ability to create an online business selling thousands products and services.

One of the first affiliate programs was run by the mega- bookstore, Amazon.com. They still have the largest base of affiliates on the net although they may not be the best affiliate program for many! with over 600,000 web sites being affiliated.

Affiliate programs are generally offered by sites selling goods or services, although some affiliate programs reward other types of transaction such as getting a visitor to sign up for a free newsletter, or a download.

Some affiliate programs pay per lead rather than per sale, in other words, you bring them a prospective customer and they pay a fixed “finder’s fee” for the chance to market to that customer.

This is a typical arrangement for affiliate programs in the insurance, real estate and credit card industries, for example:

Types of Affiliate Programs

Pay per sale: If you refer a visitor to the online merchant’s site and if visitor makes a purchase you get a percentage of the sale as commission.

Pay per lead: You get paid a one-time fee for generating a lead for the merchant. Usually you get paid $2-$5 if the visitor you referred fills out an application.

Pay per click: You get paid for every visitor you send to the online merchant regardless of any sale or purchase. Usually companies pay $0.05 – $0.15 per click.

Two-Tier: You get commission on direct sales you generate and also you get commission on sales generated by affiliates you recruited. Usually companies pay 25% commission for direct sales and 5% for sales generated by your affiliates.

Bounty: You get a one-time finder’s fee payment for the visitor you referred. You will not get commission on any future purchases that customer makes.

When you join an affiliate program, you will be given a specially formatted URL (Links) that you should use to link to the affiliate provider’s site.

This will enable the affiliate provider to monitor traffic to your site and pay according to the type of affiliate program.

The Benefit of an Affiliate Program

Is that you just need to drive traffic to your affiliate site. Write a few articles and provide a few links.

You don’t need to find or deal with brokers, wholesalers, inventory, process orders, shipping & handling, customer service, tech support, handle returns, warranties, employees, etc-

An affiliate doesn’t even have to be present, your site will keep earning money while you’re sick, on vacation, or just doing something else.

Another advantage of being an affiliate, is that you do it from almost anywhere in the world..

How The System Works?

Many affiliate programs pay a commission based on a percentage of the revenue generated by purchases made by visitors coming from your website.

For example; if you’re participating in an affiliate program that offers a 25% commission and you

send a visitor who purchases US$100 worth of products, you’ve just earned US$25 in commissions.

The commission rate itself can vary from 20% up- to 50%+ in the case of intangible products such as eBooks or website subscriptions.

Affiliate programs vary widely in terms of overall quality, reliability, commission , statistics, the amount of help that the merchant site offers in marketing the products or services it sells, and so on.

By thoroughly understanding an affiliate program, you’ll minimize the risk of not getting paid – and maximize your potential earnings.

Albert Hallado

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26 Oct 09 A Theme-Based Website, Part 3- Choosing Affiliate Programs

In parts 1 & 2 , I determined that developing a theme-based
site is a great way to generate income. It’s going to be a
WINing situation for the search engines, my visitors, my
merchants and ME. I’ve chosen a theme that I know (or can
find out about) and love. I’ve found lots of keywords that
are related to my theme and have lots of ideas for good
content to offer my visitors. Now I need to find merchants
who sell products, programs or services that are
appropriate for my site and will fit with my content.

Once again, I’m going to look at my list of keywords.
Since people are going to use these words to search and
I’ve used them to write my “keyword focused” content for
each page of my site… it only makes sense that the
products and services I want to represent should also be
related to these keywords. That will help me to seamlessly
recommend the product within my content and really use my
content to presell.

There are several ways to find merchants.

Technique 1: I’ll do a search on my keywords at several
of the engines – Google, AltaVista, Overture, or any of
the others. Then I’ll have a quick look at the first ten
or twenty listings. If I use SiteBuildIt!, the Manager will
automatically show me ten related sites for each keyword.
(You can take the quick tour of SBI! at…
http://quicktour.sitesell.com/assist3.html ) Wherever you
get the listings, some will be merchants, while
other are content sites. (Of course some are always
irrelevant. Lots of room for my theme-based site!)
I’m going to take a look at the merchants’ sites
and see if they have something I’d like to offer my
visitors and if they have an affiliate program. If so,
great. They go on my “keep in mind” merchant list for that
keyword. Next I can explore the content sites. Maybe I’ll
find ideas for content, but I’m mainly here to see if THEY
link to any merchants. If so, I can click through and see
what I find. Can you see the beauty of this? I’m going to
have content ideas and possible merchants all organized by
keyword. That’s going to make things pretty easy when I go
to build my “keyword focused” pages, no?

Technique 2: I’ll do a search for each of my keywords,
plus the word “affiliate”, like this… +Italian wine
+affiliate. Or I can try this… affiliate wine. What
will come up are either merchants with affiliate programs
or content sites that are affiliates. Again, for the
merchants, I’ll see if I like their product and affiliate
program. For the content sights, I’ll check their links.

Technique 3: Now I’m going to check the directories.
There are a lot of affiliate program directories out
there. I’ll check with a few of the best, like
AssociatePrograms.com, Refer-It.com, CashPile.com and
Associate-It.com. The directories list programs by
category, so I’ll go right to the catagories that fit my
site theme and see if there is any program I like.
They often have reviews as well, which I’ll check.

Technique 4: One more thing I could do is to join
affiliate networks. These networks provide merchants with
affiliates and vice-versa. It’s a good place to get
exposure to a wide variety of merchants. I’m sure to find
some I haven’t run across already, so I’ll check to see if
any programs are featured that will work for me. I can
join Commission Junction, BeFree, LinkShare, and/or
ClickTrade.

That took a bit of work, but now I’m ready to narrow down
my choices and weed out merchants with less than great
products, or poor affiliate programs. I’m going to be
pretty particular. The products I choose to represent will
reflect on me. And the quality of the affiliate program
will be reflected in my commission checks. I want my
visitors to be happy and come back to my site. And I want
fair compensation for delivering such valuable, presold
customers to my merchants’ sites.

In part 4 of this series, I’ll explain how best to build a
theme-based site. Questions?
mailto:yourhelpline@mail.com

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26 Oct 09 12 Tips For A Successful Affiliate Program

1. Look around at other competing businesses that offer affiliate programs, and think of ways that you can make your
affiliate program more attractive.

2. Pay your affiliates well for their efforts.

If you’re thinking about offering a 10% commission for sales of your product and a competing business is paying a 50%
commission for referrals, you’ll lose affiliates to your competitor.

3. Make your affiliate program more lucrative by offering residual commissions.

This is an excellent choice if you offer a product that is paid for on a residual basis such as webhosting or access to your membership site.

4. Offer lifetime commissions.

Your affiliates will see the power of lifetime commissions, and work hard to promote your business and send you more
sales.

5. Make your affiliate program two-tier.

Reward your affiliates by giving them a commission on the sales of people they refer to your affiliate program.

6. Don’t leave your affiliates out in the cold.

Provide your affiliates with lots of sales items that they can use to successfully promote your products.

Some items you could offer your affiliates:

- e-zine ads (sponsor ads, classified ads, 2 liners)
- signature file ads
- sales letters/solo ads
- brandable ebooks
- sample recommendations
- email courses
- your articles that they can reprint with their affiliate URLs in your resource box.

7. Be quick to respond to your affiliates’ emails.

An easy way to lose your affiliates is to not respond to their questions in a timely manner, or to not respond to their e-mails at all.

It shows that you don’t value them, and since their are tons of other affiliate programs, you would be losing potentially
very good affiliates to other businesses.

8. Provide your own tips and advice.

Follow up with your affiliates with tips and strategies that they can use to increase their commissions.

9. Reward your top affiliates with higher commissions and bonuses.

You’ll be able to achieve more sales over the long term because your top affiliates won’t jump to another affiliate program where their efforts are more appreciated.

10. Publish an affiliate’s newsletter.

Your affiliate’s newsletter will help you to share your tips with your affiliates, and keep them going in the right direction.

You could also use your newsletter to keep your top affiliates excited about your program.

Some effective ways to do this are:

- Share what your top affiliates do to earn big commission checks.
- Showcase their sites and tell why their sites sell.
- List your 5 or 10 highest earning affiliates for the month.

11. Track your affiliates’ sales accurately.

Your affiliates will find out if they send you customers and you don’t credit them with their commissions.

Your affiliate program will lose credibility and you’ll end up losing your affiliates as word gets around.

12. Participate in affiliate marketing forums.

Share your valuable advice and expertise with the members of the forums you participate in.

Include your signature file that promotes your affiliate program, and always follow the rules of the forums you join.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing
Filed in Internet Marketing with Comments Off

26 Oct 09 Affiliate Program Checklist

Affiliate and other cooperative programs are announced almost
daily. Website owners are flocking to these programs. Enthusiasm
is high. But………why not compare and evaluate first?

The following checklist was prepared from the point of view of one
seeking a program to affiliatae with. But it can also help a program
initiator compare current programs in order to make his better.

A. Does the Program Offer a Strategic Fit to Your Business?

1. PROGRAM PURPOSE – Define in broad terms
2. COMPLEMENTS YOUR PURPOSE – Does it help you better
realize your website long-range goals?
3. VISITOR LEARNING – Are your visitors interested and will
the
program help them learn?

B. Do You Trust the Business Initiating the Program?

4. SUCCESS – Does the business have a history of successes?
5. BELIEVABLE ADVERTISING – Does it promise impossible
rewards: get-rich-quick and MLM schemes? Or is it honest and
realistic?
6. REPUTATION – What does the business literature tell you about
their past operations?
7. WHAT CLIENTS SAY – Contact current clients and ask for
their opinions. Would they recommend this business
organization? Are they benefiting from it?

C. Is the Program Well Designed?

8. AFFILIATE QUALIFICATIONS – Are they signing up
everyone? Or are they being picky? Picky is better.
9. AFFILIATE RESPONSIBILITIES – Better, too, if there are
specific responsibilities. Are affiliates asked to do
promotion, communication with customers, sales?
10. INITIATOR RESPONSIBILITIES – Does the outfit offer help
in promotion, sales and after-sales support?
11. PAYMENT & TERMS – Is there a fee or commission
structure? How frequently are payments made? Does affiliate
get credit for future sales?
12. TRANSACTION TRANSPARENCY – How frequently are
transaction reports made? Are transactions independently
checkable by the affiliate? Is there a third-party audit?
13. CONFLICT RESOLUTION – Is there a SIMPLE method for
resolving conflicts?
14. RETURN TO SITE – Is there a simple way for a website
visitor to return to the site of the affiliate after a
transaction is executed?

D. Will You be Part of a Community?

15. COMMUNICATION MEDIUM – Does the program have a
newsletter, a mailing list, a forum, or some other means of
communicating among all affiliates?
16. AFFILIATE DECISION-MAKING – Does each affiliate have
a voice in making decisions that affect all affiliates?
17. MUTUAL PROBLEM SOLVING – Is there a method whereby
affiliates can pose problems and have them solved by the
affiliate community?- – - – - – - – - – - -

Be extremely careful when evaluating an affiliate program. Most
people dwell on the financial arrangements. These are important, of
course. But more important, I believe, are efforts made to achieve
community. These efforts may bolster your ability to achieve
greater financial goals.

Spend time in evaluation. It will pay off in the long run.

——————————-

Paul -the soarING- Siegel is the founder of the Learning Fountain
Network (* Excellence * Honesty * Ethics), at
http://www.learningfountain.com; and editor of LearningFOUNT, a
newsletter focusing on Helpfulness Marketing. To subscribe, send
email to: mailto:LearningFOUNT-subscribe@topica.com.

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