Affiliate Gold

The advice here can help you make money on affiliate programs, maybe even as much as a few thousand a month. But what about people who make six figures off of affiliate programs? What's their secret?

Well, I call that Affiliate Gold, and really it's a very simple principle: Build a site around an affiliate program. The easiest way to do this is have a review site. For instance lets say you make a site where you review all of the online dating websites, and each review is an affiliate link. So basically every visitor comes to your site looking for information on which program to sign up with, and every time someone signs up you make money. Chances are 90% or more of your visitors are going to signup with someone, that's why they're at your site in the first place.

Reviews are not the only way to do this though. You can also make a site that sells anything via an affiliate program. The site can even be one page with only a few paragraphs of content and a link to a place to buy the product. The real trick here is not in making the site, it is in promoting the site.

Going back to our original example of a photography site (if you're reading this article as part of the website success guide), lets pretend Ray makes a page that gives a brief overview of Digital Camera's and then includes prices on popular models from leading e-tailers, like Amazon.com and Buy.com, in the appropriate affiliate fashion. He might earn some money from it, but not all of Ray's visitors are interested in digital cameras, or are interested in buying a camera at all. However, now imagine that this page is #1 on Google when you search for "digital cameras." Ray will likely get thousands of visitors to that page each month, visitors who are looking for digital cameras.

There is no greater partnership than that between an e-commerce site and a content site. A site that offers photography information, and a site that sells photographic equipment, would be a perfect match. However running an e-commerce site is complicated, and often requires a large investment to setup inventory. So for the small guy the best partnership is a content site and an affiliate site.

So you make a small site selling a single product, or group of products, via an affiliate program, that's the easy part. The hard part is getting it to the top of the search engines. If you think back to the chapter on search engines you'll remember that to get to the top you need incoming links, right? But then, who would want to link to your small affiliate site? Well, you will.

You can build a content site related to the product you are selling. You don't even need to put advertising on this site, as your sole purpose with this site is to gain incoming links. People link to free content, directories list free content, you can offer free content and get a large page rank. Then, using your knowledge of search engines and link popularity, you link from your content site to your affiliate site.

If you can get ranked #1 on the search engines for the product you are trying to sell, you've struck affiliate gold and you will make very good money.

Now you shouldn't just link from any site to your affiliate site. Off topic links made specifically to increase rank are frowned upon by search engines and may result in negative action taken upon you. This is why you build an on topic site to link from, there is nothing wrong with cross promoting two on topic sites.

Sure, building an entire site, or maybe two or three sites, just to promote an affiliate program does seem like a lot of work. However the payoff can be huge. Imagine how much you'd make if you ranked #1 for "Viagra?" Additionally your affiliate site need not be only one page, nor need it be a separate site, you could promote it as a subsection of your content site just as easily.

Before you try to make an affiliate site like this you need to research your keywords and the competition. You should first of all figure out which terms related to your product are searched the most. For instance which is searched for more often, "Digital Camera Deals," or "Digital Camera Sales." Once you find the most popular set of keywords for your product (the keywords you will use to link to your affiliate page) then you need to find out the current competition for those words. So do a search on Google for those words and check the PageRank of the first site to come up. If your Overall PageRank Power is greater than the PageRank of the current #1 site then you will likely have the #1 spot if you make this affiliate site and cross-promote it with your current site. This is especially true considering that 100% of your incoming links will be using your keywords for the anchor text (afterall, you will have complete control over that) and for your competitors this isn't likely to be the case. Using your Overall PageRank Score in calculations like this is a good way to decide when to create a new site, and also to predict how successful that site will be.

So, to summarize, there are two main steps for reaching affiliate gold.

1. Build a site whereby your visitors are already planning on joining something or making a purchase before they ever visit your site (ie make your site a normal step on the path towards completing the transaction).
2. Get your site to the top of the search engines, possibly by cross promoting with a popular free content site.

Read more!

Affiliate Program Primer

Many webmasters think of affiliate programs only as last ditch attempts to make money. They serve affiliate program banners as defaults after exhausting the ad networks, make little money on them, and decry affiliate programs as poor earners. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The most successful affiliates usually don't even use banners, instead they integrate affiliate links within their content, and sometimes the affiliate link is the content. These people can make more off affiliate programs than off advertising, much more. However, it takes a lot of planning to be successful at affiliate programs, and I'm going to show you how to do it.
Choosing an Affiliate Program

The most important thing with affiliate programs is to choose the right one. I don't mean choosing the one that offers the biggest commission, because a big commission won't mean anything if you never make a sale. You need to choose the right program for your users, and that means understanding your visitors. You must be able to answer the question: "Why do people come to my Website?" If you answer "to get information", think again. You need to know why they want that information: you need to know their motivations.

Why do people come to your site? Think long and hard on that question, it may seem simple but in reality it is very tricky. If you ran a video game cheats site you may say that people come to your site because they are interested in video games. That would be wrong. Sure people who visit your site are interested in video games, but that's not why they visit your site. They visit your site because they are looking for cheat codes.

Would you think that people that go to a classic literature site are interested in classic literature? The fact is, they aren't. Most of them probably hate classic literature. So why do they visit the site? They're students, they're working on homework.

An affiliate program selling video games would do okay on the video game site, and a program selling books might make a few bucks on the literature site. However, if you want to make good money off affiliate programs you need to use programs that will help your visitors reach their goals. In both of the examples listed above that means you need to help your visitors cheat. Obviously if you're looking up video game cheats you want to cheat at video games, selling a product that helped you cheat would something that would interest your visitors. And of course students often want any help they can get, especially when they have a paper due the next day, so an essay affiliate program would perform very well.

Read more!

Advertising and Affiliate Jargon

The words presented below are very common in any discussion of the online advertising or affiliate industries. Knowing them is essential.

CPM: Cost-per-thousand-impressions, or CPM for short, is a term used in describing the amount that advertising costs. It gets it's abbreviation because M is the roman numeral for thousand. CPM is a type of advertising that pays per impression, which we know from the previous chapter as a page view. For instance if you made $10 CPM you would be making $10.00 USD per thousand impressions, or 1 cent per page view. Most advertising, even if it is not sold in CPM form, is usually measured in CPM form. For instance you may measure a CPC campaign (see below) in virtual CPM, or based on the revenue generated what would be the equivalent CPM amount for this ad.

CPC: Cost-per-clickthrough, sometimes called Pay-Per-Click, CPC advertising is advertising that pays only when a banner or other advertisement is clicked. A typical rate might be 33 cents per page view, so to make the equivalent of $1 CPM or a virtual $1 CPM this ad would need to be clicked on 3 times out of every 1000 displays.

CPA: Cost-per-action, sometimes also called Cost-per-sale, CPA advertising is advertising that pays when a banner is clicked and a user then does some action on the advertiser's site. The exact action will differ from one campaign to another but typically the user either has to sign up for something or buy something. In reality CPA advertising is pretty much the same thing as an affiliate program.

Affiliate Program: Also possibly called a revenue sharing program, a partnership program, or any other variation of the term, an affiliate program is a program in which you typically sign up with a merchant to sell or advertise their products and then they give you a commission based on the sales you generate. Variations of the typical affiliate program could also pay you based on user registrations or any other user action. As has been mentioned there isn't much of a difference between affiliate programs and CPA advertising.

Tiered-Systems: You often find a tiered-system in an affiliate program, although some ad networks have them as well, and it is seen as a way to increase the funds you make from the program. How it works is that not only do you get commissions based what products you sell, but if you refer sometime to the program you also get commissions for what they sell. How many tiers there are depend on how far the referrals go, for instance in a 4 tiered-system you could get commissions from someone referred by someone referred by someone referred by you. Many of you will undoubtedly find this type of system familiar because of other Multi-Level-Marketing or Pyramid systems like Amway. Typically these systems look good at first, but in reality the kind of exponential growth you may envision is not realistic. Don't bank on these systems, just appreciate them for the little extra revenue that they may generate.

Advertising Network: Most advertising buys are in numbers that small sites cannot deliver, so in general smaller sites, meaning almost all of you reading this book, will join one more many ad networks. Ad networks help attract advertisers by providing a large inventory of available impressions, they do this by letting an advertiser buy ads on hundreds or thousands of sites at a time. The advertising is usually low paying and untargeted but it is the best kind of advertising a smaller site can get. Networks often take a commission that can be as a high as 50%, of all ads sold on your site.

Advertising Agency: An advertising agency is one that will represent your site and seek out advertisers to buy targeted advertising. Targeted advertising brings in substantially more money than untargeted advertising but it is harder to get. Here is also where demographics are the most important. The right demographics can bring in good targeted advertising which will in turn fatten your wallet. Some advertising agencies also function as advertising networks as well, and these are the types of networks you usually want to join. Also, like ad networks, ad agencies will charge a commission on all ads sold.

Scumware: A relatively new term that describes unscrupulous programs that infect your system, usually without your knowledge, by being bundled with other popular software. Scumware can do a variety of things from popping up extra advertisements when you view websites, to replacing existing website advertising to their own, to adding additional advertising to websites. Scumware controversy is a very hot topic now with civil lawsuits and criminal investigations being fairly common news topics. This is also called spyware.

Pop-Up: Advertising that pops open in a new window on top of the window you are viewing a website in. Pop-Ups are almost always sold on a CPM Basis. Also known as an interstitial.

Pop-Under: Advertising that pops open in a new window underneath your current window. Like Pop-Ups Pop-Unders are almost always sold on a CPM Basis. Also known as an interstitial.

Superstitial: A superstitial is an ad format created by Unicast (http://www.unicast.com) it is basically a popup ad that uses Flash. However it can do much more than the traditional banner because it can be interactive enough to allow a user to even make a purchase entirely through the advertising, so they never leave your site. One major issue with this ad format is that Unicast has invested money in proving it's effectiveness in various studies. These statistics, and perhaps the ad's similarity to TV commercials, have drawn some big name advertisers to this format.

Read more!

DLGuard Review

As a fellow digital publisher, you probably have a few nagging concerns in the back of your mind. Are my downloads protected? What if my customer shares my download link with others? Will a search engine index my download pages making my downloads available to the world?

These are all legitimate concerns of anyone serious about becoming an infopreneur. Whether your digital product is an ebook, a complete website, or simply a pdf file it’s important to not only track your customers activity but ensure that your digital product doesn’t wander around the net.

Fortunately a great string of products have been developed to calm these fears and ultimately increase your bottom line. After performing my due diligence I continued to hear wonderful things about a product named DLGuard.

Some of the more powerful features include:
Shopping Cart (sell and protect multiple products)
Membership Subscription Support (support recurring payments)
Set download time limits (protect your downloads with expiring links)
Collect email addresses (develop that mailing list you’ve been thinking about)

DLGuard is written in the powerful PHP programming language which ultimately means that any important code stays secure on your websites server far from prying eyes. You buy the product once and say goodbye to monthly fees!

Digital Audit Trail

Online disputes between buyers and sellers online are usually mediated by your transaction processor(PayPal, 2CO, ClickBank, Stormpay) and defined in their terms of service. However, it’s important to understand that the person that usually ends up prevailing is the one that can provide the most compelling evidence. DLGuard provides this through this by providing an audit of the digital trail including the buyer’s ip address, number of download attempts, and more.
DLGuard supports all of the popular third party payment processors including:

Paypal
Clickbank
2Checkout
WorldPay
PayDotCom
Ebay
E-Gold
AlertPay
DLGuard also supports custom configurations if you already have a standard merchant account.

Sam Stephens, the author of DLGuard is one of the most active and responsive software authors on the net today. Honestly, this man may have cloned himself for I see him repeatedly in the Warrior Forums as well as his own forums not only giving specific detailed answers to users questions but frequently offering to actively fix a user’s challenge. Ultimately, this fanatical support is what finally led me to the buy button.
My next journey with DLGuard will be utilizing it’s support for eBay’s vast digital product marketplace. Check back for an update on the progress. As a DLGuard user myself, I think that’s strongest testimonial an Internet marketer can provide.

You can get more information about DLGuard Click Here!

Read more!

Blogging To The Bank 2

How would you like to make some extra money to supplement your day job from the comfort of your living room? Well that's exactly what I set out to do when I bought Blogging To The Bank 2.0 by Rob Benwel

The first thing I did besides download all the excellent bonuses was print out the document and read it front to back. It's a reasonable length, 61 pages, but as everyone knows it's not quantity that matters its quality that counts...right.

Now when I first bought
Blogging To The Bank 2.0, I was already aware of some Internet Marketing techniques like keyword research and SEO. But don't worry, because if those terms don't mean anything to you now, by the time you've read through Rob's eBook you'll have enough of an understanding to implement his blogging for money strategies.
He takes you through how to research your niche and how to find out exactly what the people are typing into the search engines. Plus how many people are actually typing it in too. Too many people setup blogs and fail, but Rob Benwell certainly seems to be doing things right. I wanted to see what he was doing, and more importantly, how I could use that information.

Before I read the eBook, I was anxious to see whether he was a black-hatter, or a white-hatter. I never use black-hat techniques myself, as I want to build long-term businesses, not just sites that last for a few months and die a death. I saw on the sales page, a comparison between hand-built sites, and automated sites, and that convinced me to buy, as it showed the hand-built, non-automated sites were the way to go. It looked like Rob was getting his success through white hat blogging.
This will give you an idea of how big your market is. With this precious data in hand Rob shows you how to gauge your niche instantly to see if its going to be profitable before you go spending your precious time on it.

Now you may or may not have heard that content is king, well if you haven't, then I'm certain you will again and again after reading this review. Well Rob gives away his secrets of how to get top quality content from multiple sources that you can use on your blog. Rob goes into the various methods of promoting your blog, and one of the useful bonuses you get with this book is a piece of software that can "submit to over 150 directories in around an hour". This is a useful addition, as it will help grow the inbound links to your site. Rob covers a lot of different methods for getting links in, and promoting your site.

He then moves onto Web 2.0 methods for Traffic & Promotion. Its a useful introduction whether you are promoting a blog, or any other site, and covers some of the top Web 2.0. sites that I use myself with good success.Content that will keep your niche buzzing with excitement. He reveals his exact technique that he uses on his blogs to make him up to $30,000 every month!

Now I mentioned SEO before, well in a nutshell SEO is a process of optimizing your blog so the search engines will love it and you therefore get good rankings in the search engines. But not only will the search engines love it, your readers will too.

I found Blogging To The Bank 2.0 a very good product indeed. I was completely new to the world of blogging when I first bought this and I didn't even really know you could make money from blogs. I now have several blogs that are each earning me a nice little chunk of money each month. Nothing I could retire on, but hey I've only been blogging for 3 months.

I would say the only thing that I thought was missing from this was setting a Wordpress blog up. After doing my research when I started I was heavily advised to use Wordpress but
Blogging To The Bank 2.0 doesn't cover how to set it up. However, I quickly realized that Wordpress is open source, which means free, which also means loads of help on the internet if needed.

So to conclude I think this is an excellent product and would recommend it to anyone. Whether you've never blogged before, or your a veteran blogger who wants to blog for money, Blogging To The Bank 2.0 will defiantly give you a head start.

So don't waste anymore time...

Start
Blogging for Money Now!

Read more!

Brad Callen's Affiliate Elite Review - Affiliate Elite Software

Affiliate Elite is the latest breakthrough in terms of affiliate marketing software, created by internet guru Brad Callen. Affiliate marketing is a tough business, and the only way to succeed is to stay one step ahead of the competition. There are certainly many scams out there in this industry, and one needs to know that the product they are buying is of the highest quality and will deliver promising results as soon as possible.

Affiliate Elite does deliver, and quickly. I am sure there are many people that have stumbled upon the latest affiliate product, had a surge of excitement, gone ahead and made an impulse purchase, then felt the feeling of buyer's remourse because the product you just bought needs a college degree in physics to understand. You probably tried for a while, cut your losses and moved on. This is not be the case with Affiliate Elite.

The main function of Affiliate Elite is to find profitable affiliate products to promote. Most users effectively earn back the cost of the product within one week. Users are provided with all the inside information needed to quickly and accurately choose affiliate product based on proven performance and fact. This information is not available anywhere else.

Affiliate Elite does not require much knowledge or skill... and, you do not need to be an internet marketing expert to use Affiliate Elite. In fact this product is ideal for both newbies and experienced users alike.

It will be worthwhile dedicating a few hours to the training videos provided Affiliate Elite after you have purchased. This will definitely get you familiar with the product and, up and running faster. If you get confused or get stuck there are forums to help you through, however, if you already own Brad Callen's Keyword Elite or SEO Elite, then the product and its interface will make sense immediately.

To succeed and generate serious profits in affiliate marketing in 2008, you need to have access to as much information as possible about products you want to promote and your competition. If you have access this information and know how to exploit it to your advantage, you will be on your way to becoming a Super Affiliate.
Brad Callen's Affiliate Elite

Read more!

Brad Callen's Keyword Elite Review - Keyword Elite Software

I wanted to take a few minutes and tell you about a new software product Keyword Elite that's, literally, tripling and even quadrupling thousands of Google Adwords and Adsense User's monthly earnings.

This new keyword software program allows you to plug in a root keyword and it will immediately generate thousands of highly profitable Adsense keywords. Heck, it'll even create Adsense optimized web pages for you... but that's really a side benefit of the program.

You can also monitor your Adwords competition to see which keywords are actually making them the most earnings each month... Then, you can steal their keywords and use them as your own!

The software even allows you to create your own Adwords ads and them upload them to your Google Adwords account, without even logging into your account.

Anyway, I won't go into all of what the software can do in this email, but you can visit the URL below to watch several demo videos that the creator of the software has made.

If the videos and testimonials at the website don't get you excited, I don't know what will. I'm excited just writing this email :-)

Anyway, visit below to have a look at the demo videos. Enjoy!
And while your at it take a free report too.. Keywordelite CaseStudies

Brad Callen's Keyword Elite!

Read more!

Ross Goldberg’s Traffic Manifesto Review

As an internet marketer for the past few years, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of how to generate traffic to my web sites. I always start with keywords and SEO, then go from there. In fact, I’d say 80% of my efforts in traffic building are strictly SEO; however, as the internet changes, I’ve found that I need to learn some more tactics in order to keep up with the trends.

Ross Goldberg’s ebook, Traffic Manifesto, is an excellent resource to have in your IM library.

It’s encyclopedic in nature, in that it covers ALL things traffic-related, from SEO to PPC to article marketing to social bookmarking. In all fairness, there were few traffic generating methods I wasn’t aware of beforehand (though I certainly hadn’t used most of them!) but it’s super helpful to have all this information at your fingertips. With such an extensive variety of traffic-building methods available, you’re sure to run across a few that fit your marketing style best.

This meaty book comes in at over 100 pages, so there’s plenty here to get your juices flowing. If you’re new to internet marketing, it’s definitely a helpful resource. If you’re already an expert, well…the information in it can be found for free on the ‘net, but here it is, all in one place, compiled and ready to go. I don’t mind paying a few bucks if in the long run, something will save me time. Save yourself some time and download Traffic Manifesto.

Have you read Traffic Manifesto? What are your thoughts?

Read more!