12 Tips to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing is one of the first steps for anyone seeking to make money online due to the little amount of money needed to get started. Sad to say, many people don’t succeed as they lack fundamental advice that can help guide them along the right path.

Here are some tips you need to keep in mind and put to use in order to succeed with affiliate marketing.

1. Set financial goals. Before you dive into affiliate marketing, it’s absolutely essential that you set some goals and objectives. How much money do you want to make with affiliate marketing? Make sure you write down your financial goals and review them often. Begin with a reasonable amount that you can realistically achieve and increase it over time. Once you begin affiliate marketing you will then have a clear destination that you can work towards.

2. Follow your heart. If you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing then it’s really advised that you stick to niches that match your hobbies and interests. While more experienced Internet marketers have more flexibility in this regard, beginners simply lose motivation if they are promoting a product or service that doesn’t appeal to them.

3. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Once you find a market that interests you, make sure that it is one that is profitable. This may seem obvious, but many people end up focusing on niches that lack in profitability. Nearly any niche can be monetized, but for the majority of the time if you don’t see other affiliates promoting that particular product or niche then you should seriously think twice.

4. Ensure credibility. Make sure the affiliate program you decide on is managed by someone with a good reputation. This is to guarantee that the product not only sells well, but also that customers will be satisfied and not ask for refunds. Remember, a refund sale means no income for you so don’t waste your time on dishonest products and services.

5. Understand your audience. Prior to promoting the product or service you’ve chosen, take some time out to study those interested in the particular niche. By doing so you’ll be able to engage the people in a way better than others since you will be able to relate to them and understand their needs.

6. Provide value. When you launch your website to promote the affiliate product or service, make sure it is helpful, motivating, and rich in content. People will feel more likely to follow through and purchase the offer you’re advertising if you over deliver on value due to the feeling of trust you’ve established.

7. Optimize your site. Along with strong content, make sure you choose the best keywords and use them properly to increase your ranking in the search engines. If your site can’t be seen in the search engines then you’re going to have a hard time driving traffic to it.

8. Build backlinks. There are many different types of backlinks and your site needs a variety of them to increase in ranking. When building backlinks, be sure to include your top keywords in the anchor text of the link so that you rank higher for these keywords in the search engines.

9. Track your traffic. Use quality tracking software so that you know exactly how people are reaching your site, what they’re doing once they reach it, and where they end up going afterward. An excellent, free solution to tracking is Google Analytics.

10. Do article marketing. Make article marketing a strategic part of your overall affiliate marketing plan. Writing and distributing articles for free on various article directories, such as EzineArticles and ArticlesBase, still proves to be one of the best ways to generate traffic to your site. It’s also a fantastic way to put the reader into the buying mood.

11. Diversify affiliate programs. Never put all of your hopes in one product or service. If something goes wrong and you don’t receive payment from the merchant or the product simply isn’t selling as well as it once did then you will still have other programs to fall back on.

12. Don’t give up. Affiliate marketing is not about instant results. This business requires consistency so don’t be easily discouraged if some time passes before you see sales.

Melissa Tamura Writes about Accredited Online Colleges for Zen College Life. She most recently wrote about the best online psychology schools.

The Right Team to Take you from Zero to $5,000,000 in Four Years

If there’s one adage every successful entrepreneur will agree upon, it’s “hire the best people you can afford.” No entrepreneur is an island – or a business– unto themselves. Even the most successful entrepreneurs are generally really good at only one or two things. Their secret to successfully making money online with business after business is bringing on board others who are really good at everything else.

“Hire people who are better than you are, then leave them to get on with it… Look for people who will aim for the remarkable, who will not settle for the routine.”

— David Ogilvy

So who are the most important people to bring on board your team? What is the one weakness or gap in your knowledge that, if filled, would immediately result in a doubling or tripling of your income online.

For many first time internet entrepreneurs, the answer is bringing on board someone who’s “been there, done that.” When I started my first online business, it took months before I felt like I was finally getting down to business.

In the meantime, there was a flood of millions of small details to figure out: everything from corporate structure to accounting methodology to legal risks to a reliable hosting provider to pricing my products.

“If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings—and put compensation as a carrier behind it—you almost don’t have to manage them.”

— Jack Welch

How much easier would that process have been if I had someone experienced at my side that I could just turn to and say — “Hey Steve, how much should I price a product like this?”

That kind of advice, multiplied by the hundreds of such small questions that pop up in the course of establishing your online business, acts like an accelerant for your business growth. Mistakes that would have cost thousands can be avoided, and month-long research projects can be compressed into a few hours.

“The shortest and best way to make your fortune is to let people see clearly that it is in their interests to promote yours.”
- Jean de La Bruyère

How to Find your Five Million Dollar Team:

Don’t think that just because your business is small, there’s no way for you to bring experienced advisors on board your team. If you’re just getting started building your online business empire, you don’t need to hire a Fortune 500 Exec as a full-time employee (or even Board Member). There are plenty of other ways to get that same kind of quality advice without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary:

1. Hire Steve Peirce and the IncomeElite Team for Less than 5 Bucks!
   
   Bringing the folks of IncomeElite on to your team just may be the next best thing to being Richard Branson’s favorite nephew: you get tons of personalized advice, answers to nearly all the questions that will come up in the course of ramping up your online business, and access to the website templates, marketing plans, and sales techniques that the Income Elite team members have used to build businesses generating over $20,000,000 in profits. The best part is that (unlike Richard Branson) Steve Peirce and the rest of the income elite team are specialized in exactly the kind of online businesses that you can build from your home computer in your spare time – lean, mean, cash-generating machines built upon time-tested online marketing techniques, not some “secret system” that Google will shut down after a month or two. Membership in IncomeElite (which is required to access all of the how-tos, resources, and Q&A from Steve and the team) usually costs $97 per month, but they’re currently running a promotion where you can try it out for 5 days for $4.95!
2. Other Options
   
   Even 5 Bucks is too much for you to pay right now to get some quality people to join your team? Depending upon your situation, you may have other options as well. The Service Core of Retired Executives (SCORE) is one such option. SCORE provides qualifying small businesses with volunteer advisors experienced in that area of business. http://www.score.org/how_score_works.html If SCORE is not for you or you’re based outside of the US, you may have luck finding a retired exec who would be willing to provide similar mentorship on a more informal basis. Angel investors and other former entrepreneurs are often willing to help foster the next generation of entrepreneurs. Generally you’ll give up a small portion of equity (ownership) in your company in exchange for this advice, but it can be well worth it!

“Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.”

- Unknown

What is Article Marketing and Why Should You Be Doing It?

One of the key ingredients to making money online is to generate quality traffic to your website or blog… and there are many ways to achieve this. You have to work on getting traffic to your site both directly and indirectly, and you should work on building your reputation within your niche at the same time. One method that can help you accomplish these goals is article marketing. When used correctly, article marketing can be an extremely powerful method of traffic generation, and the best part is it is FREE. Well it’s free if you write the articles yourself.

Article marketing is the actual process of first writing an original article(s) and then submitting it to a variety of online directories, databases, and magazines, but most everyone I know usually just submit their articles to article directory sites like; EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleBase, etc….

Once your article has been accepted by a directory (or directories) it is then added to their large database of articles and it will then become accessible for anyone to copy and paste into their newsletters, blogs, magazines, etc…. The more directories you add your article to the better, as you are exposing your articles to potentially thousands and thousands of people with each directory you submit them to. At the bare minimum you want to submit each article to the top 3 to 5 directories for sure!

The person using your article must display the article EXACTLY how you wrote it, and they must also include your resource box at the end of the article which contains all the information about you and your site, but we will get more into that in a minute. The key to understand here is once you submit your article (and if it is well written on a fairly hot topic)… there is a good chance many people will take your article and share it with all their readers. If lots of people do the same thing… your article could easily be viewed by thousands and thousands of people in a very short period. Plus your article will stay in the database for many years, so there is a good chance it could be viewed for many years to come and hopefully continue making you money online.

Now getting back to the actually writing of the article… generally you write articles that are relevant to the nature of your website. You can’t directly promote your site, and you wouldn’t want to anyway because it would just turn people off and that is the last thing you want to do.

Instead, you want to provide valuable, worthwhile information that can help solve a problem, answer a question or teach them something new. In doing so you will be proving yourself as somewhat an expert in your field, and hopefully people will begin to trust and respect your opinion. In this way you can make a name for yourself within your niche, and your reputation will grow.

While that’s great (and important), what’s even better is that every time you write and submit an article you get to include some information about yourself with a link or two in the resource box at the bottom of the article. These links can lead back directly to your site, targeting whichever pages you choose. Additionally, since you are the one creating the link, you get to decide the exact anchor text you want to use. This provides an opportunity to build up a bunch of highly targeted, highly valuable one-way links leading back to your website or blog.

By doing this, you will be increasing your site’s value in the search engines like Google, and hopefully you will start getting ranked higher for your desired keywords. This is because incoming links leading to your site are one of the largest factors for determining your site’s Google PageRank. Not all links are created equally however, and you want to go after links that really provide a good amount of value. Links from the best article directories are extremely valuable because they are from high ranking sites, and they are one-way links that you didn’t have to pay or exchange for. Additionally, you can control the anchor text and destination page, so the links have the potential to be very powerful.

Therefore, with article marketing you are indirectly boosting your traffic and your online presence by raising your search engine ranking. Additionally, you will also directly see an increase to your website’s traffic when people read your articles and then click on your links to follow through to your page. The more valuable and original your articles are, the more people will click through to your site, and the more interested these prospects will already be about your ideas, products and services.

Article marketing brings along many different benefits. By providing high quality articles you can help build up your reputation, both within your community and within the search engines. You will see an increase to your site traffic and you will end up finding more prospects for your website and online business. If you aren’t article marketing yet, you are leaving a valuable opportunity sitting on the table.

So if you are serious about making money online… go and write an article right now and get the ball rolling.

I Used to Be a Dotcom Millionaire, Well at Least On Paper!

When I first started out online back in the late 90′s I got caught up in the big Domain Goldrush that was going on online. The big news back then was when some guy sold Business.com for millions of dollars and next thing you knew… domain speculators were buying up every domain name they could create, and I was one of them. At one point in early 2000 I owned over 3000 domain names. Yep… over 3000! I know that sounds crazy, and thinking back it probably was.

Actually the first 2 domains I ever registered were MakingMoneyOnline.com and MakeMoneyOnline.com. Then about a week after I registered them, some guy offered me $1000 for MakingMoneyOnline.com… but I turned him down. For the next week this guy kept bugging me about buying the domain, actually even calling me on my home phone leaving me messages. His final offer was for $35,000, which you can see by this site… I ended up not taking. In hindsight I probably should have taken it and used the money to finance my other domains, but oh well… at least I still have it now. Of course I made sure my wife was on board with me not taking the money… and she was

As for the rest of my domain collection… for a year or so everything was awesome… domains were easy to flip for a HEFTY PROFIT. I was selling several domains a week, many for between $1000 – $2000 each, and some for even more… which was a nice little profit. I believe the best place to sell domains back then was Afternic.com, which is still in business today, but with different owners.

One of the most popular parts of the site was their Domain Appraisal section, where I spent several hours each day. It was a free service where once you registered a domain name you could post it there and then other people would appraise your name for you. In all honesty… it was an absolute joke, as most of the people doing the appraisals were other domain owners, and everybody would give each other overinflated appraisals as they wanted you to do the same for their domains. I cannot tell you how many domains I owned back then, where people appraised them at $100K each. I remember one day I added up the averages of all my domain’s appraised values, and on paper I was worth about 8 million dollars. You can imagine how excited I was at the time… but unfortunately those millions never became a reality.

As I mentioned above… everything was awesome for about a year or so. People were spending crazy amounts of money on domain names to create all these startup businesses ventures with no real business plans, and the venture capitalist kept forking out the cash. At the time I was doing pretty well with my little domain reselling business.

Well as most of you know, those Free-Spending Days came to a sudden halt with the much publicized Dotcom Bust, and next thing you knew it was hard to get $100 for a premium domain name. Well those new darker times went on for quite some time and in the next few years my domain collection dwindled down significantly. Some I sold, and many I ended up letting expire as I did not want to keep paying the renewal fees. To be honest, a large percentage of the domains I originally registered were not really that great, but back then I just registered everything that popped in my head. Out of the original 3000 or so domains that I owned, after selling some and letting others expire… I ended up keeping a little over 400 domain names, and today I am down to just under 300.

So how is the domain reselling business doing in general nowadays? As for me, I have not really been trying to do much reselling lately. I have done an occasional flip here and there, but nothing much to speak of. As from my post last week you can see that I tried to test and see if I could sell a complete website via a post on Making Money Online Dot Com, but have not had much luck with that so far. I am actually thinking of adding a “Domains for Sale” section to our site and try and shrink my collection to a more reasonable amount, but we will see.

As for domain reselling around the world… it seems to be doing great. I am a HUGE fan of the website DNJournal.com, as they always have good articles about the industry, as well as great interviews with top domain resellers. But the main reason I check them out each week is they list many of the top domain name sales from the previous week, plus they keep a running total of the biggest sales for the entire year. Checkout some of the domains that sold last week and what they sold for:

Brazil.com – $500,000

Payment.com – $250,000

ChinaTours.com – $200,000

Payments.com – $150,000

Grafikkarte.de (“graphic card” in German) – $73,828

BookHotels.com – $70,500

iPal.com – $59,000

CouponNetwork.com – $59,000

LMK.com – $58,500

DomainAppraisal.com – $52,000

And if you think those were some crazy prices, checkout the top 10 sales so far for 2009

Toys.com – $5,100,000

Candy.com – $3,000,000

Fly.com – $1,760,000

Auction.com – $1,700,000

Webcam.com – $1,020,000

Server.com – $770,000

Brazil.com – $500,000

Talk.com – $500,000

Top.com – $464,750

Body.com – $400,000

So as you can see, even with this bad economy… there are still people and businesses spending BIG MONEY on premium domain names. Unfortunately, it is a little late to try and get into the game unless you know what you are doing and have a lot of money. But it is not impossible.

One option would be is if you could snag (register) yourself a great domain name that relates to a new industry that is just starting to develop. That might be worth a lot of money to you. One of my good buddies who I have done some domain reselling with over the years (who actually bought MakeMoneyOnline.com from me years back) registered the domain MyBlog.com. He registered it back when blogging just started becoming known. Well he ended up selling that domain a year or so later for $400,000. Now that was a pretty good return on his investment. So there is definitely possibilities out there, you just need to stay on top of the next new and greatest thing.

5 Best Bribes to Build Your Subscriber List

As everyone SHOULD KNOW or you probably have heard… that the MONEY is in “The List”! It is still the best and fastest way of making money online and off, and it will probably always be that way. That is why you see companies like Google and other huge corporations spend BILLIONS of dollars on companies that have HUGE subscriber bases or followings. They want access to those users!

As for us small business owners who don’t plan on selling our businesses for billions of dollars (unless someone offers it to us) building a strong list of subscribers is of utmost importance for our long-term success.

Your list can be used for keeping your readers informed of what is new on your site, let them know of new products you have coming out, promote affiliate products, recruit affiliates to promote your product(s), etc… the list could go on and on. It is not uncommon for Internet Marketers with large lists to make many thousands of dollars in one day by sending out a simple email to their subscriber list.

As for collecting names and emails there are many different options, but one of the best and most efficient ways is to use an autoresponder. Not only can you build a subscriber list with an autoresponder service, but you can also utilize their built in autoresponders which is basically a 24/7 (working while you sleep) sales machine. I am not going to go over all the reasons why autoresponders are so great in this post, as you can read that elsewhere.

I would say however that one of the best autoresponder services on the market today is Aweber. They were one of the firsts in the business and are still the cream of the crop (IMO). We have had our account with Aweber for at least 6 or 7 years now and we have over 40 different autoresponder lists for different niches setup with just that one account. It is a must-have in our marketing arsenal!

But enough about that… What this post is about is the “Best Ways to Bribe People to Subscribe to Your List”. Yes, I said “BRIBE” people to subscribe to your list. Nowadays it is harder than ever to build a list, as EVERY WEBSITE you come to is designed to try and get you to give them your name and email address. So the best way for you to succeed is to literally BRIBE them with something in exchange for their precious contact information.

You see some sort of BRIBE on most sites nowadays as well… like the site owner that is offering you a FREE eBook or eCourse for simply providing your first name and email address. We even do that on this site with our Private Label Secrets, which if you haven’t signed up for, you are missing out on a great resource (Yes, that was a plug).

So here is a list of some great bribes you can offer your readers to help build your list and start making more money online…

1) An eBook. This is probably the most used method today and still works pretty good. We use this method on several sites and it works great. The key is to offer an eBook that really relates with the niche you are in.

2) An eCourse. An eCourse is similar to an eBook, but is usually distributed to the reader over a period of time via email. The good thing about this method is you are carrying on a continuous dialogue with your reader each day (or at whatever intervals you prefer). The key is to end each email with a little taste of what is coming up next to keep your reader intrigued and excited about getting your next email. If you would like to see this in action, sign-up for our newsletter and we will send you our eCourse on making money with PLR products. You can always unsubscribe at anytime if you like, but I don’t see why you would.

3. Run a Contest. We have had some great success with this method over the years and will probably start having contests on this site soon. Basically you just say something like, “Sign-up for our newsletter and get into a drawing to win _______”. Now there are actually several tricks to this one to help you build your list faster and to keep your subscribers longer.

• Run a raffle for your subscribers once a month, or more often if you like. Give away something that your readers will want. Use your imagination on what you can do for prizes. If you have a marketing budget you can buy prizes, but if you don’t, you will have to be creative. Do you have a skill that is valuable that you could offer as a prize? I have seen designers give away complete site makeovers, banner creations, logo creations, etc…. What do you know how to do that would be valuable to your reader? There’s gotta be something!
• For one of our other blogs we are getting our prizes from local merchants for advertising on our site. They actually pay us to advertise on our site, plus they give us free stuff that we can give away to our subscribers. Not a bad deal for us at all. I have sitting in an envelope on my desk right now; eight movie tickets, four $25 gift cards for our local brewery, two gift certificates to Extreme Pita, four free 20 inch pizza coupons from our favorite pizza shop, and more things coming in the next couple of weeks. We are hoping to be able to give away one prize a day, Monday through Friday, 52 weeks a year. That should definitely help build up our subscriber base.
• (ADVANCED METHOD) Sell the eBook that you created instead of giving it away like I mentioned in #1. Create a simple sale page for it and charge $24.95 (just an example). That way you are giving the book an “actual value” instead of giving it away and saying it’s worth $24.95 (the “perceived value”). Next… you run a contest and use your eBook as the prizes. Maybe you give away 10 copies a month, or if you have lots of traffic, 10 copies a week. It really doesn’t matter to you, as you were going to be giving it away for free anyway. This can actually work better than just giving the eBook away, as many people assume if you are giving something away, it doesn’t have any value. But if they have a good chance of winning something of value, you have better odds of getting their name and email. NOTE: If you use this method, make sure that you take the extra steps to create a really good eBook, as you might actually sell some, and you want to be known as someone who over-delivers whenever possible.

4. Subscribers Only Gifts and Deals – Let your readers know that your loyal subscribers get free stuff and deals that regular visitors don’t. You can do all sorts of stuff with this technique. You can occasionally send your subscribers free gifts like ebooks, software, maybe some custom graphics… use your imagination. You could create them yourself if you have the skills, you could have someone else create them for you, or you could customize some PLR products you have. There are all sorts of ways to come up with worthwhile gifts.

You could also offer your subscribers discounts on products you sell. We plan to use this method for the new product we have coming out. We are probably going to be selling it for $7.00 (as per the $7 Dollar Secrets Method), but we are going to give all our subscribers a $5.00 OFF Coupon Code so they can get if for only $2.00. So again, if you are not subscribed to our newsletter, you should sign-up right away.

5) Access to Membership Area – Here’s a way to really build up a subscriber list, but it probably takes the most work. Again you can do this in a couple of different ways as well. You could have your main site that has lots of really good information on it, and then create a free membership section where you offer something more. Maybe something like “advanced techniques” or “how-to videos”, just something special that the regular visitors don’t have access to. To get free access, you readers will need to join by giving you their name and email address.

Another method would be to create just one great website and only allow access to subscribers. This method is a little harder to build your list, unless you already have a good reputation built up. With the first method, at least the reader has a chance to view some of your work first, so they can decide if they like you before they give up their contact information.

Ok… that’s it for this post, as it is starting to get REALLY LONG! I could probably add several more techniques, but my fingers are starting to get tired.

Why don’t you guys give us some more tips in the comments section below? What is something people could give away to bribe people to subscribe to their list?

Build It and Eventually the People with Money Will Come

I was having a chat this morning with one of my buddies who is one of those successful Bloggers/ Internet Marketers who many of us (at least I am) are striving to emulate. I called him up because this blog (Making Money Online Dot Com) has been live for about one month now and yesterday was my best day (as far as profits go) for this particular site.

Just yesterday alone, this site earned a whopping $148.97.  $145.20 came from 3 different affiliate product sales, and $3.77 from Adsense. Not a bad day at all for being such a new site. Unfortunately, as of me typing this… the site hasn’t made a penny yet today, but the day is not over yet.

The reason I am sharing this information with you is because of something my buddy told me when I first decided to start this blog. He gave me a very encouraging tip that I think a lot of the newer bloggers who aren’t making money online yet will really appreciate.

He said, “Build it, and eventually the people with the money will come”. When he first said it I chuckled, as it reminded me of the line from the movie, “Field of Dreams” where a voice keeps whispering to Kevin Costner’s character, “Build it and he will come”.

He explained to me that building a successful blog comes in basically 3 phases:

PHASE 1

When you first start out blogging you really have nothing but some (hopefully) good content. The next thing you need to do is market your site and build up your reputation, and the best way to do that is by networking with other bloggers in your niche. There are many ways to do that like leaving useful comments with back-links to your site on other blogger’s websites, as well a Guest Blogging. There are lots of ways to build traffic, but I am not going to go into that in this post. The key point here is to get your name in front of everyone you can.

PHASE 2

Soon your traffic will start to grow slowly, and hopefully your reputation. Here you will start to see some money, but the big money won’t start coming in just yet. The reason is that most of the traffic you are generating is from other bloggers in your same niche, many of whom are just starting out like you and don’t have a lot of money.

Traffic will continue to grow as more and more people learn about your site through word of mouth advertising, and you should start getting some organic search engine traffic in this phase as well. The key here is to not get discouraged that your aren’t making a lot of money yet, and to continue to do what you have been doing, as this phase can last for quite some time.

PHASE 3

This is the phase where the big money comes. Eventually, you will have built yourself an “Outstanding Reputation” as being an expert in your niche, and 95% (just a made up percentage, but probably close) of the bloggers that were around when you first started will have thrown in the towel… leaving you to shine with your other friends who have stuck it out. Now your name is everywhere and all the new bloggers are looking up to you. Your subscriber lists are all off the charts and anything you recommend sells like hotcakes!

I know it sounds a little oversimplified, but it absolutely makes sense.

So my question to you is…

Are you going to be one of the ones that stick it out to the end?

I know I am!