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Welcome to the lucrative world of Affiliate Marketing. In Affiliate
Marketing a company pays an affiliate (you) to generate sales from a button, banner, or link placed on your website, newsletter, e-mail or pay per click ad.
 There are thousands of companies in hundreds of industries that will pay commissions to you for leads, registrations or sales.
It is extremely easy to become an affiliate. There are several large Affiliate Program Providers (APPs). APPs serve as go-betweens for companies and affiliates. For you as an affiliate, these APPs provide a valuable service. They collect payment from the merchants and consolidate affiliate reporting and payments.
An APP brings companies and affiliates together to form partnerships. A partnership works like this: the affiliate places links to the merchant on their website, newsletter, emails, or Pay per Click ads such as Google AdWords. When a potential customer clicks through the link they are sent to a specified page of the merchant’s site. When they complete the action desired by the merchant (fill out a form, buy something, etc.) the affiliate is compensated. The APP facilitates all aspects of the partnership and tracks all elements of the transaction.
Joining an APP is totally free and there are no personal purchase requirements. You just fill out a form. In some cases, applying affiliates must wait a few days for approval, but usually acceptance is automatic. The top five APPs are: Commission Junction (CJ), Clickbank, Linkshare, BeFree, and Performics. CJ is the largest of these Providers and manages the network, tracking and reporting on activity in real time, as well as handling monthly commission payments. CJ tracks billions of affiliate link impressions each month. CJ’s clients include leading online marketers: eBay, Capital One, NextCard, and The New York Times Home Delivery.
Every month Commission Junction either sends you a check or deposits your commission directly into your bank account according to your preference. Because affiliates are so beneficial to merchants many new merchants join CJ and other Affiliate Program Providers every week.
Affiliate Programs are the ideal way to make money quickly and easily online. (No need to come up with your own product or concern yourself with any of the hassles or headaches involved in actually stocking, selling or distributing a product). Just figure out a clever way to promote the product or service effectively and then sit back and collect your monthly commission checks. Or, better yet, have them deposited directly into your bank account.
Here is the clever and easy way to promote products and services:
More than 200 million times a day people use Google and its partner sites to find what they are looking for.
Google AdWords Select is a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising system maintained by Google. If you use Google you have probably seen the AdWords. They appear as little text ads next to search results on Google.
They also appear on AOL, Ask Jeeves, Earthlink, Teoma, Sympatico, and many other search engines.
Content-Targeted Advertising service is Google’s latest addition to AdWords. It displays AdWords ads on web content pages related to your chosen keywords. This provides broader exposure and greater reach for your AdWords campaign. Not only will the AdWords show on Google searches and on the search results of their partners, but also on other websites such as HowStuffWorks, Weather Underground, and Blogger.
With Google AdWords you create your own ads. You choose keywords which tell Google where to show your ads. You only pay when someone clicks on them. You have total control over every aspect of your campaign. Real-time online reporting tells you what’s working. You can put limits on daily spending. Changes are free and instant.
The Google AdWord system works differently than a traditional Pay Per Click service. AdWords ads are ranked based on a formula of the Cost Per Click and the Click Through Rate (CTR), which enables an ads rank to improve without increasing the cost. The better your CTR, the higher up on the screen your ad will be placed. This is advantageous to you, because your ads are more visible to the customer. Therefore, you get more clicks.
Initially this system may be a little confusing, but once you master it, it is very effective. As your ad’s CTR improves, its ranking in the search results also improves at no additional cost.
Here is an overview of the process:
You write small Google AdWords promoting companies, products and services. In your AdWords is a link that, when clicked, takes the user to the product or service that you are promoting. Your Affiliate ID is passed along with it. When the customer that clicked through your ad buys something on the site, or fills out a registration form, then you receive a commission. If the customer did not buy at that time, no need to fret, many merchant sites place a “cookie” on the customer’s computer for a certain period (such as 180 days). That means that, within the next 6 months, anytime the customer goes back to the site and buys or registers, you get a commission.
In the past, to be successful in Affiliate Marketing it took considerable time and money. Typically, it took 6 months from concept before you received any commissions. Once you had an idea the next steps were to register a URL, build your website, and pay to have your website hosted. Then you had to spend a lot of time and money to get listed in the Search Engines and on other marketing efforts (not to mention the time spent maintaining your website).
Now, with my concepts you can start earning money immediately without having to build a website. Once you’ve found a very successful program you may want to build a quick webpage to get even more profits, but it’s not necessary to begin receiving commissions (You’ll read more about this later on). Here is how the process works: - Find a product that you want to promote (Step #2 on p. 38). For example, I found an Online Casino affiliate program that pays $40 per registration.
- Join the Affiliate Program and get the link with your Affiliate ID embedded in it (Step #3, p. 48).
- Next, make a list of keywords that people would likely consider when searching for that product or service. (See the techniques discussed in Step #4, p. 50).
- Write some effective ads for Google AdWords (More on this in Step #5, p. 59).
- Log in to your Google AdWords account and submit some ads with their corresponding keywords. Put the link with your affiliate ID in it into the destination URL field, and put a bid in for the keywords on your list at 5 cents each (Plenty more on this in Step#6, p. 65).
The above casino example generates about 600 clicks (visitors) each week from the Google AdWords at a cost of $50 and generates at least 3 Casino registrations each week. That typically brings in $280 of profit a month for something that took 10 minutes to setup. And some months are much better. Sounds pretty easy right? Being an affiliate is an easy way to make money. You guide customers to the product or service they want, the merchant provides the product or service, and you simply collect the commissions! Step by Step Examples of Profitable Campaigns In this Section, I would like to familiarize you with some of my profitable campaigns to illustrate what the process looks like from conception to profitability. I will give you step by step examples of some of my successful campaigns. You can follow along here and simultaneously review them online.
Don’t worry if you don’t understand all of the concepts right away. I cover everything in greater detail later on.
The first example is an extremely simple program that I created. It consistently made around $350 a month in profit. This is a quick program that only took a few minutes to setup. It is a very small program with relatively small profits compared to my other campaigns. Things get much better! I am showing you a simple example to introduce you to the concepts. Example 1 – www.ebay.com I often buy and sell items on eBay. While on their site, I noticed that eBay.com offers $5 per registration to their affiliates, and $.05 for any bid coming from your affiliate link.
In other words, an affiliate earns a $5 commission when someone fills out a free registration form. That sounded great!
I next conducted a search with the free Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. This tool tells you how many times a keyword or phrase was searched for on Overture’s Search Engines during the previous month. This is useful in determining the popularity of particular keywords and particular markets.
Google does not have this tool. Therefore Overture’s estimates can be applied to searches, for the same keyword, on Google’s Search Engines fairly accurately.
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