Working With Affiliate Programs

by: Jude Wright

Working With Affiliate Programs by Jude Wright (c) 2004 Everywhere you look you see affiliate program offers for every product or service that you can think of. Some have fully automated systems that sell high volumes of hard products all over the world. In case you don't know, "hard" products are those that you can touch...unlike an ebook or downloadable web template. Many affiliate programs have several thousand affiliates and one or two of the bigger companies have over one million affiliates. What are the advantages of joining an affiliate program? They provide a ready-made business. This is a very big plus for those people who want to earn some kind of living off the Internet but lack the knowledge or inclination to set up a business by themselves. Commissions and rewards are generally good, and the more established programs offer a real chance of advancement to higher and better-paid levels. Other affiliates are usually on hand to offer practical support. What are the limitations? You are restricted in your promotional activities due to the fact that you do not actually own the affiliate site they give you. You won't be able to put such things as banners, images, links, meta tags, etc. onto your page. The URL of your affiliate page is often either too long or contains such awkward things as question marks, which many Search Engines will not index. Any promotional ads or articles have probably already been used by thousands of other people and consequently may have lost its impact, making it more difficult to achieve sales or referrals. If the program you have joined has not yet established itself (or in some cases even if it has), then you may encounter problems with payments owed to you not being honored. You also run the risk of low quality products or sub-standard statistics that do not accurately record how many referrals or sales you have made. You may be required to purchase a minimum quantity of the product on a regular basis before you start to qualify for commissions or even before you can become an affiliate. You may not get the technical or affiliate support you might expect from the company. This may be due to inadequate staffing, or the company's negligence. Other people in your downline do nothing to promote the program. At least four of the above limitations can be overcome with a little time and effort. You could, for example, come up with fresher ads to promote the program (provided this is allowed). If the company supplies the email addresses of people in your downline, then you could offer to help the less active members. Very often these people are passive not because they are lazy or apathetic but merely because they don't know HOW to promote effectively! your guidance could mean the difference between no sales or referrals and healthy downlines and residual incomes. As regards promoting your actual page, here are a couple of little tricks that should overcome a number of restrictions: Cloak your Affiliate URL to stop hijackers Affiliate Masker While this will not help you to get listed on the major Search Engines, it will make your web page easier for prospects to remember and type into their browser's address bar. Go to your affiliate page. Place your mouse pointer anywhere on the page and right click once. In the drop-down box choose "View Source". This will display the HTML for the page. Save this to your hard drive as a HTML document using the "Save As" function. Upload the page to your web site. If you don't have a web site then get some free web space from one of these: http://www.tripod.com/ http://www.fortunecity.com/ http://www.hypermart.net/index.gsp http://www.coolchat.com/ http://www.crosswinds.net/ http://www.htmlpublishing.com/ http://www.freehomepages.com/ http://www.pageproducer.com/ Submit your 'new' page to the Search Engines. You are also now able to place banner codes, links, images, testimonials, in fact anything you want onto these pages, because you are in control of the HTML. A word of caution, though. Don't change the actual HTML of your original affiliate page. Just put the other stuff, like banners etc, around it. Making this "mirror page" of your affiliate page will dramatically improve your advertising options.

Why Two-Tier Affiliate Programs are Best

by: John Lynch

When you join an affiliate program or start an affiliate program of your own, you have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier affiliate program. With a single tier program you earn a commission on any sales you make and that is it. If you are running your own affiliate program, you pay your affiliates a commission for any sales they refer and that is all. However, with a two-tier program, affiliates are allowed to recruit sub-affiliates and are paid a small percentage of the sales these sub-affiliates generate. For example, the affiliates may earn a 30% commission for selling product X himself; and when one of the sub-affiliates makes a sale, the affiliate may get a 10% commission as well. This is very profitable for the affiliate as he can recruit an army of sub-affiliates, all earning commissions for him without any effort on his part except for the initial recruiting process. If you are starting an affiliate program of your own should it be two-tier or single tier? Some might shy away from the seeming expense of a two-tier program. But is it really that expensive? Many affiliate program managers make the wrong decision on this. Let's look at an example. You have an affiliate program up and running and an average affiliate joins your program. Mr.Average has a web site that receives average traffic. He also has an ezine with thousands of subscribers published monthly. Mr. Average posts your affiliate links to his web site and promotes your product to his ezine list. Initially, he generates good sales. However, a point comes when he saturates his market with your product and his sales begin to drop. He begins to lose interest in your program and your sales remain small. What happens if you set up a two-tier program? Rather than trying to keep your commission pay outs small, you motivate your existing affiliates to recruit other people to your program. This will exponentially increase your affiliate sales. Would it not be worth paying the referring affiliate a percentage of their sub-affiliates' sales? Now when Mr.Average joins your affiliate program this is what would happen. When he has saturated his market with your product, he would now promote your affiliate program to his customers and ezine subscribers. Many of Mr.Average's customers and subscribers decide to join the affiliate program. This in turn will motivate Mr.Average to continue promoting your products and recruiting affiliates. Now what is the situation? 1) Your income increases because of increased sales. 2) You have a much larger customer base to which you can sell 'backend' products. 3) An increase in your income because of the life time loyalty of the customers referred by your affiliate. 4) An army of sub-affiliates who will sell your products, and in turn promote your affiliate program to their customers and subscribers. The little extra in affiliate sales commission pay outs will be more than compensated for by the exponential sales increase. This is why the two-tier affiliate program is a guaranteed winner and should be the automatic choice for potential affiliates and affiliate program managers. © John Lynch ( For details of two-tier Affiliate Programs go to: http://www.merchant-account-service.com/affiliate_programs.html )

Why Join 2 Tier Affiliate Programs?

by: Terence Tan

Like the more common single tier affiliate programs, 2 tier affiliate programs are a great basis for web-based partnerships between merchants and affiliates. Merchants can focus their efforts on what they should do best-creating high quality products and getting them to customers. Meanwhile, affiliates concentrate on producing interesting content to attract web traffic. And when they successfully refer visitors to buy affiliate products, an affiliatecommission is earned. However, 2 tier affiliate programs have an additional attraction for affiliates. When they sign up sub-affiliates under them, and these sub-affiliates successfully make affiliate sales, the original affiliate also earns a referral commission. The result is that affiliates not only make a profit from their direct sales efforts, but also benefit from the leveraged effects of sub-affiliates under them. While 2 tier affiliate programs are definitely a new and rapidly growing trend in affiliatemarketing, the traditional rules still apply. Choose only good products, with high sales conversions (check out the persuasiveness of the merchants website), and only work with merchants who pay regularly! After all, there's no reason to waste precious traffic on affiliateproducts are hard to sell, or on merchants who don't make it a point to send those commissions on time. All else being equal, 2 Tier Affiliate Programs are a good alternative for webmasters hoping to add an additional stream of revenue to their sites. (Please feel free to to freely reproduce and distribute this article, so long as it is reproduced in full, including the hyperlinks, and no modification is made) About The Author Terence Tan is the project manager of HugeAffiliates.com, a website dedicated towards the development of Multiple Tier Affiliate Programs as an alternative system of business. Visithttp://hugeaffiliates.com to learn how 2 Tier Affiliate Programs can multiply your affiliatereferral commissions.

What You Should Know About Affiliate Programs

by: Gabriel Ama

When you start out in the world of the Internet, you will come across different kinds of money-making opportunities and programs. While many promise to make you rich overnight, only very few are genuine opportunities that would lead you to your hearts' desire but certainly not overnight or as fast as you would want. It takes hard and smart work, patience, perseverance and an investment at times, no matter how little, to earn a living on the internet. There are different income opportunities on the internet: Network Marketing or Multi-Level Marketing or MLM for short as well as Affiliate Programs. This article throws more light on the latter income opportunity. As the name implies, an affiliate program is one in which one gets to earn commissions for marketing and successfully selling a company's or individual's products over the internet. You are in a kind of partnership with the person and you get to earn commissions on every successful sale. The way it works is that you join an affiliate program by signing up on a form through a sponsor's website and the beauty of the program is that you are given an exact same site like the one through which you signed up when you joined the program. The difference between your site and your sponsor's is that you are given an identification or ID that is unique to you just as your sponsor is also given, as well as others in the program. This ID is incorporated in the web address or URL to which visitors who click on are taken and who are interested in either buying a product or joining under you as a sub-affiliate. It is this ID tied to your website in the program that is used to track sales and commissions due to you. Some affiliate programs pay you commissions ranging from about 10% to as high as 75% of product price for your direct sales and commissions also on the sales made by your sub-affiliates. Some of the programs are free to join and only require your marketing the products to earn a commission on every sale while some require you to pay a monthly recurring fee while you market to earn good commissions. Very few programs pay you a monthly commission when you pay a monthly recurring fee, as well as other commissions when you recruit sub-affiliates that also pay the monthly recurring fee. This can be a good source of income that adds up as your downline of sub-affiliates grow from month to month. Unfortunately, affiliate programs have two flaws that one must watch our for. The first and more important is that some fraudsters could join through your affiliate website and when they want to make a purchase, replace your ID with theirs and thereby deprive you of your due commission. Fortunately, there are some affiliate programs that have found a way around this flaw by providing you with a hidden URL with affiliate ID that is difficult to crack by the fraudsters. A second flaw is that some affiliate programs are operated by fraudsters who will just milk you of your hard earned cash by charging you a sign up fee or even a monthly recurring fee and you will continue to wait and wait and nothing ever happens except that you lose your hard earned cash. Even with these flaws, affiliate programs are a nice way to earn good income on the internet. As a starter, what you can do is to join the free ones first and then take time to study how the whole thing works. I assure you that with a little patience, perseverance and willingness to learn, you will begin to identify legitimate affiliate programs that require a fee and you will learn the ropes about marketing them to earn good cash over time to allow you begin to live a life of your dreams. **************************************** Copyright (c) Gabriel Ama. Gabriel Ama uses the Plug-In Profit Site to earn multiple streams of income from the Internet. What about you?... http://www.pluginprofitsite.com/main-5262 ****************************************

What To Look For When Choosing Affiliate Programs

by: Jonathan Kraft

So you've decided you want to become an Internet Marketer, huh? Will you sell someone else's products or sell your own? If you choose to sell someone else's products, how will you know what to look for? After all, this is a new venture for you. Or maybe it's not. Maybe you have been trying out some affiliate programs which have not brought you any money, or, worse, have not paid you for the affiliate traffic you have sent them. If you are the new person, or the person who is floundering in Internet Marketing, this article will offer you some simple tips for choosing an affiliate program. This article doesn't cover getting traffic to your site, which is another huge piece of the puzzle, and will be covered in a later article, but let's just start with choosing affiliate programs. #1. You should find affiliate programs that: a) are relatively easy to set up (code is either created for you or easy to create) b) will pay you well. This depends on your definition of what being paid well means, but generally, for most beginners, and some novices, if you can see yourself being able to make more than $250/month, the program is at least worth looking at c) give you products which people actually use. There are lots of products in the market which will sell, but do you really want to be selling pet rocks? If you do, please don't take offense. Most legitimate affiliate advice sites won't feature affiliate programs that are exclusively selling something like 8-Track players and tapes. While there are probably collectors out there who would love an 8-track player and cassettes, the fact is that the market is done with 8-tracks. The point is, there should be a genuine need for, or interest in, what you are selling/reselling. So you find a program which meets the above criteria. Now what? Do a Google search on the company. Find out what people are saying about them. You may have to dig a bit, but the combined experience of the professionals (and not-so-professionals) who develop and contribute to the Internet on a regular basis is, collectively, the best source of advice you will find on making money, or affiliate programs, anywhere. If you want advice on some great affiliate programs, you can visit sites which have already reviewed the information about companies and present it to you in a straightforward way. If you are ready to find some great affiliate programs, then you will be able to find categories of affiliate programs on these sites, which will generally represent the type of products you would like to sell. Search engines love content, and so do your site visitors. Content is one of the most important aspects of getting people to your web site, and helping them to see the value in what you're selling. You should strive to choose programs with products which are related to your web site. In other words, if you have a site which features information about the Toyota Camry, you're going to be pretty hard pressed to be able to get your page content matched up so that you could sell, say... baby rattles. Find affiliate programs which relate to what you already do, and then promote those products. Finally, see if you can find someone to actually talk to (ok, email would be okay) who has received regular checks or payments from marketing products. We think that this is, perhaps, the most important part of any affiliate program, because the main reason you promote their products is to receive a check for your efforts. So there you have it, some simple tips for choosing great affiliate programs! Hope this helps you to reach your income goals, and also helps you to develop a long-term plan for on and off-line financial and personal success. Jonathan Kraft has been an online marketer for many years. He is a massage therapist, web designer, legal services broker, has been a high school teacher, and is an all around nice guy. He works with a team of people on www.affiliateadvice.us, where you can check out some great affiliate programs that meet all the above criteria.

What is an Affiliate Program and How Can It Make Me Money?

by: Lori Redfield

You may have heard the buzz terms, 'affiliate programs' or 'associate programs'. Chances are your think of them in one of two ways, either - it's got to be another one of those Internet 'work at home' scams. Or, "That's just out of my league." Promoting affiliate programs is in fact an attractive and viable way to initiate multiple residual income streams. It's not a get rich quick scheme. In fact, to be successful it takes a great deal of work and persistence. It also requires flexibility and an inquisitive nature that embraces trying new ways of marketing until you find something that works for your target audience. What is an affiliate program? Thousands of established businesses set up affiliate programs in order to have people like you promote their products or services. When you sign up for an affiliate program you are given a link with your own unique id embedded into it. With your own unique link it then becomes your job to promote the affiliate program and drive traffic to the businesses website. You never handle sales or products, but each time an interested prospect visits the website through your link and actually purchases something you earn a commission. One of the most effective ways to promote affiliate programs is to find a subject that you are passionate about. Something that (humility aside), you may even consider yourself an expert of. Take that subject and develop a website that is devoted to it. Building a website does not have to be intimidating. There are a tremendous amount of resources available to you to help you build one. You could also have the template of a website designed for you, or you could purchase a website at a price that may surprise you. Once you have your website built, you will submit it to the major search engines and every day set some time aside to promote your website. At the same time, find affiliate programs that complement your content and ad their banner ads or text links to your website. Working with a subject you love insures that you won't become bored with the website. The more content that you add to your site and the more you promote it, the more traffic you will get. It could take a good year to get the site to the point where you are actually surprised at how well it is doing. At that point, it seems to almost effortlessly improve itself. The key is to draw your visitors to the website because you have terrific content. It is even more effective to offer a newsletter that your visitors can opt-in to. This way you can send them monthly newsletters with articles that will interest them, convincing them to frequent your site over and over again. You can also include the affiliate program links in your newsletters as well. In the end, you have indulged in promoting a topic that you are knowledgeable and passionate about; while at the same time have initiated a residual income from. Now you will have even more expertise and confidence, and the next site will be a piece of cake! Lori Redfield is a freelance Internet entrepreneur. She and her husband work solely from home and support their family of five comfortably - with plenty of time for play! You can obtain more information by visiting her websites, www.freelancemom.com andwww.associatehub.com.

Vital Things To Check At Any Affiliate Program

by: Ispas Marin

Affiliate programs are now one of the most popular ways for webmasters with lot of traffic to their sites to earn good money. There are many factors which influence the amount of money earned by an affiliate. The most important is the quality of the affiliate program. So if you want to make lots of money, you must know how to choose an affiliate program. First of all you should look for a web site that has been on the net for some time. That's how you know that you can trust them and you will receive the money you make. There are many untrustworthy programs that fooled a lot of webmasters with promises but they never sent the money. Next step is to check the quality of the products the site is promoting. Don't advertise a product if you wouldn't use it for your self. You shouldn't be blinded by the high commissions an affiliate program is offering. If you join a program with bad products you will damage your image and you won't be able to advertise other products ever because people won't value your opinion. Try to find an affiliate program with a good commission rate because you don't want to waste your time if you can make much more money elsewhere. A good commission would be a 20% to 25% of the product price. We have discussed about the web site, the products and the commissions but none of this matter if the program doesn't have a great tracking system. You should look for programs that track visitors to their site using both CGI and cookies so you'll get your money for the sales you make. It's also good if you can check your stats in real time. Before you sign up in a affiliate program you should first check how long do they track visitors for. There are affiliate programs that track a visitor only once and if they come back another day and buy the product you won't earn ay money. So best for you is to find programs that track visitors for 30 days or more. Then you should be interested on how often the site sends your payment and if you have to earn a fix amount of money before they send them to you. So these are some tips in choosing an affiliate program that will bring you a high income. If a program has most of the things mentioned above then it's worth trying. About the Author: Check http://www.30daysinjuly.com if you are interested in having a 'coach' that will guide you to Internet Success and will show you how to create a profitable online business.