Understanding Affiliate Marketing Business
In order to make money online with affiliate programs, you need to have a good understanding of affiliate marketing business. You may have a great knowledge of HTML and site building, you may even be pretty good in Search Engine Optimization, but in order to make sales with your site, you need an understanding of consumer psychology from a marketing point of view. Who are the affiliate marketers pocketing thousands of dollars per month with their affiliate businesses? They are affiliates, but they also have a good understanding of the “Marketing” component in affiliate marketing business.
According to Wikipedia,
“Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development… It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves. Marketing is used to identify the customer, satisfy the customer, and keep the customer.”
You can post a product review with a link “Click Here to Purchase” or you can post a crochet tutorial and feature Amazon crochet supplies on the same page, but will you get a good return from these posts? Marketing is about promoting in a smart way. You have to have a good understanding of the niche you are working in, you have to know the products you are promoting – their differences, similarities, advantages over similar products, you have to understand the needs and wants of your potential customers and know how to reach the audience that is already looking for the products you are promoting and ready to make a purchase. If you want to succeed in affiliate marketing career, learn what marketing is all about – read a book, take a course, learn how you can “educate and satisfy a customer”.
Make Money With Adsense and Blogger
Affiliate Marketing vs Drop Shipping
Know what you want and have a plan
As simple as it may sound, affiliate marketing is all about knowing what you want and having a plan on how to get there. Writing a post or an article or two, bookmarking them, and signing up for ten affiliate programs will do little good if you don’t have a game plan. The main difference between affiliate marketers who succeed and those who fail is the ability to stay organized or the lack of it. Just like with everything else in life, if you have a clear picture of what you want, if you can visualize your success, then your chances of succeeding increase dramatically. What’s your Affiliate marketing plan? Have you found a Niche you want to work with? Do you know a lot about the niche? Have you researched your competition? Do you know what’s in demand and what key words your competitors are using to bring in the traffic and the profits? How do you plan to monetize your site? How are you going to drive the traffic to it? If you are persistent enough to stick with the plan, to work on a site or blog daily, to build up content a little at a time, and to make progress every day, no matter how little the progress may seem, you will succeed. All it takes for your affiliate marketing career to take off is one successful project built from scratch, and once the project is working for you and you are enjoying the rewards, replicating success is an easy task. If your affiliate marketing efforts haven’t been rewarded, come up with a plan and take action! Success comes from persistence.
How to Choose Affiliate Products to Promote
Drop Shipping vs Affiliate Marketing
7 Ways to Make Money with Internet Marketing
Drop Shipping vs Affiliate Marketing
How does Drop Shipping compare to Affiliate Marketing?
Both, Affiliate Marketing and Drop Shipping have great income potential. The main difference between the two is that with affiliate marketing you simply lead customers to the products you promote while with drop shipping you are more involved into making a sale. An affiliate doesn’t have to have a store and can simply display ads and include links to products on a site or blog. A drop shipper has to have a store with products but doesn’t stock inventory. With drop shipping, you make sales, process payments, and have product manufacturers ship products directly to customers. Many Ebay sellers are in the drop shipping business.
Advantages of Affiliate Marketing over Drop Shipping.
- A lot easier to get into – not too many technical skills required to get started
- Can work at your own pace and schedule - don’t have to provide customer service
- Can build a site and continue making profits from it, with little mainenance while building new sites and filling them up with completely different products
- You are not personally responsible for order fulfillment and don’t have to handle payments – simply get affiliate commissions check
Advantages of Drop Shipping over Affiliate Marketing.
- Build a Real store with repeat customers (compared to mostly one time sales in affiliate marketing)
- Unlimited Growth potential and Business Expansion (word-of-mouth, referrals from satisfied customers)
- You set your own price and decide on the product mark-up (vs. fixed affiliate commissions – percentage or set amount per sale)
According to Wikipedia,
“Two significant benefits of drop shipping are the elimination of upfront inventory and a positive cash-flow cycle. A positive cash flow cycle occurs because the seller is paid when the purchase is made. The seller usually pays the wholesaler using a credit card or credit terms. Therefore, there is a period of time in which the seller has the customer’s money, but has not yet paid the wholesaler.
Drop shipping also eliminates some duplication of effort, since only one warehouse will pick, pack and ship the product. This approach can reduce total inventory management and shipping costs.”
Whether you prefer drop shipping or affiliate marketing or rely on both to provide a steady income is up to you. Internet provides so many great opportunities for creating wealth, and it’s up to you whether you take advantage of it.
How to Choose Affiliate products to promote.
Today, I am sharing a few tips on how to choose affiliate products to promote. All you need to do is follow the 3 easy steps.
- Come up with 10-15 things you know a lot about. It can be your hobby, your job, a skill you acquired. For example, golf, basketball, italian cooking, dog training, resume writing, etc.
- Research affiliate programs to see what affiliate programs are available and how they are related to the 10-15 ideas you just came up with. Although I don’t like to recommend Clickbank products because quality of some of the products can be somewhat questionable, Clickbank.com may help with the research, in terms of which products do sell. You can also check out this Affiliate Programs Directory to get some ideas.
- Research Key Words using Google Adwords Key Word Tool. Marketing is all about Demand. If people are not searching for a product or a need to satisfy, there are no sales to be made. The key word tool will help you determine which ideas are worth promoting. Obviosly, the more people are searching for certain products, the more money is out there to be made with affiliate marketing.
So, to sum it all up, match up your interests and knowledge, do some research and find the products that sell, and you will be well on your way to making a good career in affiliate marketing.
Can you really make money on Squidoo?
Let me go ahead and answer your question “Can you really make money on Squidoo?” Yes, Yes, and one more time Yes, you can make part-time and full-time income on Squidoo. And it’s not only established lensmasters who have been on Squidoo for years making money with their lenses. New people join Squidoo all the time and “crack the Squidoo success formula”.
I know how disappointing it may be to spend hours crafting a lens and see infrequent visitors. I have been there – back when I had no idea how to promote online content and how to optimize my lenses for Search Engines. I didn’t do key words research and didn’t build backlinks. I also had no idea that there are thousands of people who make a career out of Affiliate Marketing and earn a comfortable living doing so. Back then I didn’t have a Blogger blog or a WordPress site. I used to check my lens stats and get upset that hours of work were completely wasted. I even left Squidoo for several months because I came to a conclusion that Squidoo was a complete waste of time.
It all changed when I logged into my Squidoo account to find a couple dollars in Earnings. I started searching for answers. I joined Wealthy Affiliate University to learn more about Affiliate marketing and SEO. I realized I had to be persistent, if I wanted to get Squidoo Tier 1 and 2 pay and get affiliate commissions. I started doing Key Words Research. I learnt to name lenses using my Key words. I started backlinking and interlinking my lenses. I realized I could benefit from niche marketing. I started blogging. I learnt WordPress. Google started seeing my lenses and sending traffic my way. My lens stats changed dramatically – hundreds of daily visitors to top rated lenses, plenty of clickouts, and best of all – affiliate commissions.
So yes, making money with Squidoo is very possible. In fact, a lens can bring $500 in commissions in just a month, or $500 in just a day (although it is not a very typical result), depending on the products you choose to promote and the kind of traffic you drive to your lens. This Squidu thread may be a good motivation to keep working on Squidoo. How to make $500 on Squidoo.
Earn Money Online with Google Adsense
Earn Money Online with Google Adsense.
Google Adsense is a Google program that connects website publishers and advertisers. When a visitor clicks on one of the Google Ads displayed on a site, the site owner earns revenue. Google Shares revenue with website publishers, so you don’t get the full amount of what the advertiser paid for the ad click, but Google Adsense Earnings can really add up, with many Google Ad clicks bringing in anywhere between a few cents and a few dollars. If you can build up a steady website (or blog) traffic and the ads displayed on your site are of interest to the visitors, Google Adsense revenues can become a nice part-time or full-time income. Only $5 per site a day adds up to $150 per month. Imagine if you can draw thousands of visitors per day. Even with low conversion rates of say 1-2%, a site with 1000 visitors, can generate 10-20 clicks.
When you sign up for Google Adsense, Google doesn’t guarantee any earnings. Per-click earnings are unpredictable, but generally the better your sites rank for “popular keywords”, the better is your income potential. I personally think that Google Adsense is the easiest way to earn money with a site. It is harder to earn money with a new site, but once your site is established and has plenty of valuable content and good backlinks, you are almost guaranteed to see nice Google AdSense income.
You may join the Adsense program at http://AdSense.Google.com/. It’s a good idea to have a site with quality content before you apply for the program, so that you application is approved right away. You don’t have to be an experienced webmaster to get approved for a Google Adsense account, many people make money with Adsense and Blogger when they are starting out. But eventually, you will want to establish your own website in order to maximize your Google Adsense Income.
How to get links to website
You may already know that if you want to make money with your website, you have to get good traffic to your site. And the best way to get good web traffic is to get on the first page of Google and rank well for your key words. When your website is new or is getting very few visitors a day, building backlinks to your site is very important. That’s when the question comes up: How to get links to website. There are many ways to get links to website – you can join Squidoo, Hubpages, Yahoo Contributor Network, Ezine Articles, and many other sites that allow you to include a link to your site in exchange for a well-written article (your articles rank well on Google because of the High PR rankings of the publisher’s website); you can also find popular blogs and offer to do blog posts for them in exchange for backlinks,or join forums and participate in discussions on your niche topics, and include links to your site in forum signature.
If you asked me about the easiest way on how to get links to website, I would suggest commenting on popular blogs and including a link to your website with your blog comment. But to save you some time, I suggest that you follow these simple rules when trying to get links to your site.
- Have quality content on your site. Successful bloggers are very careful about the sites they link to and will often check the link you submit to assure that linking to your site will not affect their site’s Google rankings (Google doesn’t like spammy and poor quality sites).
- Comment on blogs within your niche, but not on blogs promoting similar products. Comments on blog posts related to your website’s topic have more value in Google’s eyes.
- Have an opinion on the topic and contribute to the discussion. Coming up with a generic comment like “Great site, man. You really know what you are talking about. Just subscribed to your feed.” and posting it on every site you visit is a pure waste of time. These comments usually end up in the spam folder, and what bloggers usually get out of comments like this – “I didn’t read a word on your site. I am here for the backlink, and I hope you don’t have a spam filter on your comments and don’t approve blog comments manually…” What do bloggers do with comments like that? Trash them and report them as spam, of course. If you really want to get a valuable link to your site, do take some time to read over the blog post and relate to the blog post in your comment. It doesn’t take long to come up with 2-3 sentences on the topic you already know a lot about.
How to get started in affiliate marketing
In yesterday’s post on How to Build an online presence, I mostly talked about building websites and how small projects contribute to bigger success. But if you are just starting out in Affiliate Marketing, you may not know how to build sites and may not have worked with blogs. Domains, hosting, SEO may all be “foreign terms” to you. That’s exactly how I felt when I first started out in affiliate marketing. In fact, when I first started writing articles, I didn’t even know what I was getting into.
Do you really have to have a site or a blog to get started in internet marketing? The answer is “no”, not at all. You can launch your affiliate marketing career for free, without a site or a blog, with very little knowledge of what internet marketing is all about. I recommend that you try Squidoo. Publishing an article on Squidoo is quick and easy, and Squidoo is a great place to test the waters and see whether writing articles and promoting affiliate sites for living is something that you may actually want to make a career out of. Squidoo platform allows you to post articles (called “lenses”) and include Ebay and Amazon products in your lens. You may also add affiliate banners and links from Advertisers not affiliated with Squidoo. Squidoo splits Amazon and Ebay commissions with the lensmasters and also pays Lensmasters based on Squidoo Lens Ranking System. The only drawback to Squidoo is that it does take time for newbies to start seeing any earnings, and many people give up after a month or two.
If you really want to speed up your affiliate marketing career launch, I suggest that you open a Squidoo account and get a feel for what Squidoo is all about. Then, learning the basics of online marketing is important, if you want to make it and make it big. Any career worth pursuing usually requires some sort of formal education, and affiliate marketing is not an exception. Check out my recommendation on how to speed up the launch of your affiliate marketing career.
How to Build Online Presence
If you are serious about making full-time income as an affiliate marketer, be prepared to work on building a strong online presence. 2-3 posts on your blog every couple weeks will not make you rich, but 1 post a day or 1 post every other day on a topic that you have expertise in is more likely to bring an audience to your blog or site. You may have heard that many people find it challenging to build an online presence. It takes patience and persistance to work on a project that may not bring any income for weeks or even months. That is the hardest part of an affiliate marketing career - it takes time to get noticed by Google, it takes time to attract an audience, it takes time to see your work pay off… Everything takes time when you are just starting out in the affiliate marketing business. But what many people don’t realize is that once you have one project that is working for you, you have a site that can help you promote another site, a friend pointing in the new site’s direction and telling Google ”this site is cool too”. Now, when you have a lot of friends, Google trusts you, and ranking on Google for your key words becomes easier.
If you want to build a strong online presence, you have to look at every page and every site you build as an individual project that will eventually become a building block of a bigger project. You start out with a blog post, then post on a related topic, then have one post point to another post or another page of your site. You use article marketing, guest posting, social bookmarking, and forums to promote your site. And before you know it, Google decides you are serious about your topic, and your site is worth sending traffic to. Once your first site is established, building a new site and promoting a new product becomes an easier task – you know what works and what doesn’t, and you have a site that can give you valuable backlinks. The smaller projects will eventually help you build your online presence and your online brand. And the strong online presence will be your key to success in affiliate marketing career.
7 Ways to Make Money with Internet Marketing
How do you make money with Internet Marketing? Here are 7 ways to make money online, using internet marketing skills.
- Write Articles on websites like Squidoo, Wizzley, Hubpages, Yahoo Contributor Network, to name a few, and get paid for article views and affiliate sales (in some cases).
- Post Youtube videos, drive traffic to the videos, using Internet Marketing techniques, and get paid for ad clicks and video views.
- Run a blog (Typepad, Blogger, WordPress) and monetize it with Google Adwords. Get paid for Ad Clicks. You can read this article Make Money with Adsense and Blogger for more details.
- Run a blog or a website and include affiliate links to sites like Amazon and Ebay, or stores like Target and Wal-Mart in blog posts and on site pages, and get paid for sales completed through your affiliate links.
- Sell Ad Units on your blog or site to Advertisers interested in selling products to your blog’s (site’s) audience.
- Start your own Web-design and Internet Marketing business and sell your services to local companies (or online).
- Get hired to blog for big companies and handle all aspects of Online Social Marketing for them.
There are plenty of ways to make money online. Internet Marketing is a fun career with great income potential. Be creative, be willing to learn, and love what you do, and “sky is the limit!”