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Tuesday 28 October 2008

Top Tip For Video Affiliate Marketing On A Budget

Though my video marketing abilities are slightly shaky myself, I have embraced the idea of video marketing as a traffic generation tool, but also as a means to promote affiliate promotions for affiliate earnings to increase, the main video uploading and sharing sites like Youtube,google video,Metacafe, Revver and many more are the obvious top choices for your affiliate marketing campaigns to be successful.

But it seems that video marketing is embracing more and more the web 2.0 and social scenes more, by being able to embed videos just about anywhere on the internet, through the use of easy to copy and paste embed code from various viral applications, for instance there is a site called TubeMogul.com, which is a naturally free application which you can submit videos to and these will be automatically submitted to over twelve of the high traffic video sharing sites with the option of tracking the results through an account interface much like Googles own analytics.

Now just imagine if like all of your other promotions that you plan out in advance, you make the time to create really short videos for each of your separate affiliate programs, each day or within a set time frame, your traffic will build far quicker with video marketing alone, but combined with all of your other affiliate marketing methods you will drive far more traffic to your affiliated offers than other affiliate merchants and publishers in quick time.
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Saturday 25 October 2008

PepperJam Network Launches Storebuilder!

Finally Pepperjam have released the store builder portion of their affiliate network for affiliate publishers to create and customize a small store front from selected merchant product feeds within your account.

I have tried this out and the store builder is easy to use and you create a quick store with many pages, they may need to in a future release though add some kind of extra customization features such as size formats and things like that, but I am really happy about the storebuilder for now until it goes through the usual process of Beta for all the Pepperjam affiliates.

Plus if you aren't really that technical working with the raw data feeds that most affiliate networks and merchants provide, then this tool is for you most certainly!!

If you've never heard of the Pepperjam network you can sign up here! Pepperjam Affiliate Network
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Thursday 23 October 2008

An Interesting Affiliate Discussion Forum

Throughout my online marketing in affiliate marketing, I came across an affiliate marketing forum that discusses almost every aspect of affiliate programs, affiliate networks and affiliate earning methods.

A lot of the affiliate merchants and managers frequent the forums often ready to answer your affiliate question and problems you may have so join for free and find out what you've been missing at the A Best Web Discussion Forums


I've only just started there, so meet me on there if you wish, my user name is really original as Wayne Tully!!
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Tuesday 21 October 2008

Affiliate Banner Positioning Placements

Realistically banners don't often convert very well in affiliate marketing, but they can be used in a variety of creative ways that could potentially earn you some hard earned affiliate commissions and also the placement of your banners could be a key factor of your banner campaigns.

I tend to look at banners as extensions of a product or service, a way to show that a business is serious an professional in it's approach with a quality graphic that displays the product brand, logo and motto. Banners can be used in a variety of creative ways in newsletters, email messages and mini websites to name a few, content relevancy comes into play here again as your banners must be totally relevant to your site as a whole and not steer away from your business brand.

In a blog for example, banners could be placed in the sidebar, although there is some debate as to the effectiveness of certain sizes of banner types, but the use of multiple banners that crowd and clutter your sidebar may not be worth it. Instead one skyscraper banner ad may prove better over three or four square banners that would have fit into the skyscraper banner.

If your blog is specifically for one affiliate program, then this could work better than anything else because your targeted content is written specifically for your single affiliate promotion and your skyscraper ad therefore would match more highly for relevancy.

On websites and other web pages, the wide format of banners could be used more in the form of a header graphic at the top of the page or as a footer to the page, these could prove quite effective, again if highly relevant so that your content leads into a banner to click, at the en of an article or content much like a text link, banners could help to visually split up the content and make it more scan-able.

Small micro banners are increasingly being used as powered by logo's which serve as banner logos to show what website, webhost or online publishing site you use for your affiliate website (Tip cheeky affiliate links work well here!)

What banner positions do you place your banners and why?
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Sunday 19 October 2008

14 Ways To Promote An Affiliate Link

Affiliate marketing brings with it all sorts of marketing obstacles, but if you know what you are doing and what to o it's just a case of doing it really!

Here is 14 ways I would promote an affiliate link for your best affiliate program, your top converting affiliate program deserves the best marketing potential and these methods are all good ways that have been used over and over with high results more affiliates from all over the world.

Just remember the more creative you are and not run of the mill you will be far more successful than most affiliates....Two tier affiliate programs anyone?

1. An Email List

If you have an email list and a few subscribers, it is worth creating a email series that targets your main affiliate product topic and write some useful content around it, with your affiliate links placed within the content, you could leverage your expertise here and build some trust along the way and income, but you do have to grow your subscriber list for this method to be effective, so now a good time to start!

2. Create A Report


Create a free report, pdf or online report, about or closely related to the product you are promoting and place your affiliate link within, the content that you write about will help build you up an the product, providing more information and customers are likely to buy from you or at the very least visit your website from the link you put in your report.

3. A Domain Name Link

By having your own domain name for each affiliate will help you build some professional links too within link directories, so find as many free link directories as possible and submit your links in the categories for your site.

4. An article or blog post, website content place a keyword text link that is highly relevant within the content of your articles, not really needing to be prominent links, just deep within the content information, this provides somewhere for your readers to click and follow on from your useful information.

5. Craigslist Ad - Writing a Craigslist ad to target the classified ad searchers and provide a small introduction to your affiliate offer, this is a quick and easy way of driving some traffic to your affiliate promotion if you write with search engine optimization in mind and the searchers who will find your ad if you add the right keywords.

6. Focused Blog/Website
- Create a targeted and specific blog or website which concentrates it's focus on one affiliate program alone and you could write articles around your affiliate product and subject far more convincingly plus you could build up your reviews and recommendations over time with valuable and targeted content.

7. Write a detailed review, one that explains the benefits and everything possible for people to make their own minds up about buying your promoted product, this follows on from having your own blog or website really, but it is extremely effective.

8. Your own web hosting account - Having your own web hosting account for your affiliate campaigns and promotions works particularly well for html and php redirects and other things like domain forwarding of your affiliate links and other redirection techniques.

9. Joining forums
- Related forums of the niche that your intended customers hang out in, spamming is not an option here, but rather get to know other people, the top users in the forum, answer questions find potential networks or partnerships that will benefit you and your promotions later on.

10. Blog Commenting - A comment on a related blog or blog post, try and go for the do-follow comment boxes if you can, but even so a well commented blog works just as good to be a part of the discussion early on, just like in the forums.

11. Email signatures
- Attach your best converting affiliate link to your outgoing email, every time you send and email out make sure it is highly relevant to whatever you are emailing, this provides and extra process for you to receive some traffic off your everyday emailing.

12. Social network profiles - Build up a few social networks on your profile page and add a couple of targeted links for new friends to come and check out, building communities are one of the top ways of driving your affiliate income upwards just like through blogs and forums.

13. Article Writing - Write articles and submit them to article directories (affiliate links are not usually allowed within article directories) so have a good portion of your articles content or the other side as it were, so that you can provide a valid doorway into your affiliate promotion through great content.

14. Joint Ventures
- Joint venture with a business partner, who has a similar site, but not in the exact same market or in direct competition as you, and all you do is swap affiliate links or auto responder emails, which in turn meas you are promoting each other stuff, but what is really effective if one of you has the bigger subscriber list, this could be a good partnership method for targeted affiliate link marketing.

What other methods would you suggest to drive traffic through your affiliate link?

* See also - 14 Alternate Ways For Affiliate Marketing Success
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Shareasale Affiliate Network Review


shareasale.com is one of the premier affiliate networks that you can use to set up base as an affiliate marketer of whatever affiliate programs you wish.

This is the page were you can search and join the available affiliate programs, bare in mind that the few pay per click programs, you have to have a full account and that is when you have earnt your first check. Learn how Shareasale can increase your sales, develop your brand, and generate interest in your site.

All the tracking is included within your account with lots of features to add to your affiliate marketing experience, I recommend you use as much as possible, so that you can maximize your affiliate campaigns and money made with affiliate programs.

The other useful affiliate tools that are in your Shareasale affiliate network account are as follows:-

Your affiliate activity and reports statistics
- These are great for finding out what links and affiliate programs got clicks and more important sales, you should get to know your shareasale stats intimately.

Locate Merchants on the Shareasale network, see what deals they have to offer and build affiliate relationships with affiliate merchants.

Get Your Promotional Links - Find all the links and promotional tools that your chosen merchants have to help each individual affiliate earn commissions, banners, text links, data feeds, videos, widgets or even use the create a page tool for a page full of products.
Also find out if some of your links are out of date with the invalid link report just like at Commission Junction links will appear in your account when they are clicked on and they are indeed invalid.

Tools Section
- is also worth a look for advanced affiliate methods with rss feeds and the integration of the deals database with rss or xml, and using the video builder to create videos from your existing video footage recorded elsewhere, plus support from the shareasale forum.

What I find really good is a small section below your account table showing links to seasonal holiday promotions which I recommend everyone should have in their affiliate portfolio
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Friday 17 October 2008

Set Up A Couple Of Seasonal Affiliate Campaigns

Seasonal affiliate campaigns should be worked out in advance and added to on a regular basis, updates are made to keep the content fresh and affiliate links working correctly.

A handful of seasonal affiliate promotions work well in times of slow income when your other affiliate programs may slump slightly throughout the year, so for example seasonal means something an event or holiday that only happens once a year can be accounted for by planning beforehand with your affiliate promotional campaigns.

Halloween, Christmas and Thanks Giving are a couple of examples, but also what about themed year round promotions on birthdays, things like this have long term income involved if you do it right, and residual income is what affiliate marketers should include in their online earnings portfolio.

Side earnings are always best earned on the side of your main promotions, ones which take minimal though, moderate planning, but effectively they run themselves with little supervision.

I have recently taken time out to promote a collection of halloween lenses on squidoo as an example for our purposes here, the first one of these niche specific seasonal lenses halloweencostumes4u is not perfect, but it's a start, one that could improve with time each year, this is how your affiliate promotions happen, they are built, refined, optimized and fine tuned to what works.

So remember seasonal could also mean other things like:-

* Easter
* Valentines Day
* Country Specific Holidays
* National Whatever Days
* New Year
* Sports Events
* Anniversaries Of Any Kind
* Parties And Celebrations
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Thursday 16 October 2008

Revenue Sharing Sites And What To Use For Your Affiliate Campaigns

Revenue sharing sites are nothing new for anyone wanting to earn online, freelancing becomes the top priority for these revenue sharing sites, but how do you start to earn online from them?

Share Your Photos, Video And Blog Content and earn from doing so, I'm sure you've heard this before online, this is the evolution of the internet, almost everyone wants to earn online from doing what they do anyway, by chatting and uploading photos and all that social networking stuff.

Writing what you know and what you can easily share online with others is one of the main appeals of writing to earn, although revenue sharing means you are sharing revenue with the site owners of that particular website, but the more you write and establish your niche corner or voice the better your online earnings in a sense.

Revenue sharing sites could be used with your affiliate marketing campaigns too to monetize your revenue share income that you recieve from your writing.

Other revenue sites may not allow additional affiliate links as this may be part of their own policies or specific terms of service on the matter, but it is worth trying to see if adding relevant affiliate links within your content could be an effective monetization method for your additional affiliate promotions.

I am currenty experimenting with a few revenue sharing sites here and there so I could give you an idea of what to use for yourself, some are good, some are just not that good, but if you are writing content and are good at it in some way, why not give it a go.

Here are the revenue sites I currently write for, so if you can find one or tw and go with them you have a good idea of what you are getting yourself into, also if you feel like it is too much writing to do on a regular basis, then you can do several articles that are solid top articles and have them link back to your site.

Xomba

Hubpages

Squidoo

Today.com


Out of the ones above I frequently link some of my articles together if they are relevant so that they build a sort of network of relevant and further content, Hubpages is great for this, plus as Hubpages and Squidoo are authority sites then these seem to get more traffic for me.

Revenue sharing sites should be used as part of your affiliate marketing strategy in some way that best fits your own schedule.
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Amazon Associate Control Panel Gets A Face Lift

Throughout the time I have been using amazon as an affiliate or as Amazon itself refers to us affiliates as associates, I have been really impressed with the control panel that they provided, it had everything you could need, reports on all of your 100 astore id's, banners, links and specific widgets to promote any product within the Amazon product database, but now they have updated and improved much on the layout of the control panel due to extensive customer feedback of it's use by amazon affiliates.

Now they have a tool called site stripe which you can link up from any amazon page when you yourself are viewing or searching for any amazon items, this makes it far quicker to link to the right product items and quickly embed links into your content on your blog for example, also the layout of all the tabs and other promotional tools are all laid out at the top rather than just the side which was as it was previous, this way you can find and locate certain things that much quicker and also build your affiliate campaigns faster too.

Plus you can add links to your affiliate astores direct from Amazons main website, making it far easier to add product links from any page and any product straight to your amazon astore - which is your mini affiliate store.

I'll keep you more informed of the latest updates soon, until I've had a chance to play around with them.

If you have not joined Amazon as an affiliate yet, I highly recommend you do as it is free like it should be and it's a great training ground for all the affiliate tools and practice runs for being a super affiliate.
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Wednesday 15 October 2008

Recession Equals More Profit Online

While the title of this post may confuse you and throw you off the idea and mind bend your nuts, as how the hell can you earn more in the times of recession and inflation in certain corners of the affiliate markets?

It's a simple notion to realize, when in times of economic meltdown or financial hardship, things fluctuate greatly, as people try harder to either save money and earn some extra money too or work longer hours within their regular job, it's an easy thought to think about in terms of your financial status.

Think about it, would you rather do work that is low pay, normal pay or were you have to be part of the daily grind and your job isn't safe, people now what with the financial crisis are losing their jobs and the future looks unclear, but in these times you can take advantage of this and start to work towards a goal of working on your own terms, one that only requires your effort and input.

It's only through troubled times can you be set on the right path, my path is clear now, is yours?
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Tuesday 14 October 2008

Single Affiliate Promotion Start Up!

I have been going through my many promotions and I thought I'd share with you a simple plan of action for starting to earn through an affiliate program and following through with actually gaining new customers and affiliate commissions.

Now before I start, my affiliate campaigns are based solely on trial and error and a lot of research in the area of affiliate marketing, so I'm no way a top expert, but rather a conditioned professional(eh?)

Finding an affiliate program, product or service

Now to start off with I assume you know that affiliate marketing if done right can and will require a lot of effort, but once you have one affiliate campaign up and running, then in theory you move onto the next affiliate campaign, either to compliment your existing affiliate promotion or within a completely new niche market area.

Affiliate products can be found anywhere
, in affiliate networks, a search on Google or your favourite top marketing guru ( They are happy clapping affiliate marketers at heart!)
At first try to find your affiliate program or product within your own area of expertise, because if you do that you reinforce your own strengths and capabilities and the stronger your product reviews and affiliate content will be for your campaign.

Only once you have your affiliate product in line with your affiliate plan can you proceed to the actual affiliate marketing core of promotions, by using a handful of diverse marketing methods you run the risk of spreading yourself too thin, but if you plan your marketing outright, there should be no reason why this method will not work to your advantage.

All the top methods for online marketing include in no particular order:

Article marketing

Link Submission

Email Marketing

Content Reviews

Joint Ventures

SEO

PPC


In between these there will be other top marketing golden nuggets that you might become an expert at, but one that I highly recommend you start to try and have a go at is affiliate marketing within social media sites, because this way of using affiliate marketing can be quite lucrative and also creative if you soon realize that spamming is not the way to go inside of the most popular social media sites, such as Twitter, Myspace and Facebook.

Whatever collections of methods you choose to market your chosen affiliate programs, you need to know every possible outcome and result from your efforts and you find this information out through website stats, most webhosting accounts come with a control panel that has a web stats package, but some find these inaccurate at the best of times, so the free Google analytics script may be used to find all of the conversion metrics and other stats information about your search engine visitors, keyword arrivals, daily hits, clicks and bounce rates.

By analyzing your results you are off to a better start with all of your online promotions if you know what keywords people are using to find your site and whatever else, by building relevant affiliate links over time within your sites content you are increasing your chances of building your affiliate earnings in the long run.

Multiple Streams of Internet Income: How Ordinary People Make Extraordinary Money Online
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More New Affiliate Networks Tracked On Affmeter Pro

Affmeter an affiliate revenue statistics site has included up to 13 more affiliate networks to earn from and check the statistics through their premier program Affmeter Pro

here are the follwing affiliate networks that have been included:

* Affili.net
* Amazon.com
* AvantLink
* CanadianSponsors.com
* CPA Empire
* DGM Australia
* Forex-Affiliate
* Kolimbo.com
* MarketHealth.com
* Pepperjam Network
* Share Results
* Trienta Affiliates-UK
* Zzounds.com


There are some I recognize, but some have slipped passed my affiliate radar, so it is worth checking out all the available affiliate networks, to see what could be a fit for your affiliate promotions.

You can find out more at the affmeter website
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Sunday 12 October 2008

Mass Affiliate Marketing Or Super Affiliate Status?

When it comes to the act of affiliate marketing, there are two types of affiliate at play, one that promotes every affiliate program they can blindly and hardly makes any affiliate commissions or the other is the type of affiliate you dream about being, where you file away all of your affiliate promotions into tiny little folders in your bookmarks because you planned everything for your affiliate business and you are earning from our efforts each day, this is the mark of the The Super Affiliate.

Affiliate strategies
make the most of your affiliate earning online and he play a vital structure to your affiliate business.

Mass affiliate marketing has to be a planned method of promotion, to have all o your promotions all planned out and laid out in online files and offline notebooks.
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Saturday 11 October 2008

Ebay Affiliate Tips

When you become an ebay affiliate you have to take into consideration of the facts of affiliate marketing, the techniques involved in your affiliate earning, here I will go into some of the more important tips to do with your ebay affiliate promotions.

Using the rss feeds, these are the quick feeds that web savvy people use to subscribe to a particular content feed such as a blog or quality website, but in turn you can use an ebay product search feed to add to many public feed readers and other functions online to create rss ads on web pages, so this creates an updating feed of current auctions on your website. Rss feeds you will be seeing lots more of these with affiliate vendors in the future.


The simple affiliate stats dashboard analysis is easy to use to determine what clicks originated on what pages of your sites and the sales that you make, it gives you the options of tracking down by use of simple date based formats to find the information that you need.

Although most affiliate programs do provide affiliate stats as part of their affiliate tools, but this is far simplified affiliate stats than the ones previously at commission junction were the previous ebay affiliate program resided.

One of the best things I like about the ebay affiliate program, just like the Amazon program for affiliate earning is the simplicity of the promotions, you just seem to plug them in with relevant content on your site and the features of some of the tools just work.

The links generator is one of the simplest tools to create trackable links to any landing page on the ebay affiliate network site, so for example you could target a specific link to a relevant category on a page that has auction items that are niche specific. so to show you I have created an example here affiliate marketing with the keyword text link.

Also when you join the Ebay affiliate program you can target other geo targeted countries that run the ebay affiliate program, this could provide more earning opportunities for your affiliate promotions

The editor kit is perhaps the best out of the lot, as you can create a banner type list of currently running ebay auctions base on the keywords that are relevant to your content or website/blog, so you could write an informative post and include a relevant editor kit listing at the en of the post, or if you want to be using ebay as one of your primary promotional affiliate programs, you could add it in between blog posts, with an ebay listing blog post.

The quick banners are a soon to be released feature that will show live flash based listing customized to your keyword specifics and other optional preferences, all in all the ebay affiliate program is up there in my affiliate top ten of earners and managing your affiliates has never been easier.
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Thursday 9 October 2008

Ebay Affiliate Auctions Running Now

What follows is a view of the ebay to go tool from the ebay network affiliate program, this is how this affiliate link will look and you can tailor the results to your specific keywords and choose other templates.




Now what I like about this affiliate tool is the fact that all the specific affiliate products are all bunched and listed together instead of a typical banner product list format, and the products appear in like a mini store or online shop window, so when you hover over a specific product you bring up the title of that product item.

I'm really enthusiastic about this affiliate tool for ebay as I am currently testing this out, I will see how well it converts on my other sites and blogs.
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