This is the ninth post in a series of posts about Affiliate Marketing.  I intend to publish these each Monday and Friday and may also publish other non related posts on Wednesdays.

Benefits of Being an Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to advertise online.  It is also an easy way for anyone with a website to make a profit online.  Affiliate Marketing is an agreement between the product owner and the affiliate.

The affiliate advertises the products from one or more sources on his website.  Customers interested in a particular product click on its link and go to the owner’s website where they can purchase the item.  The affiliate then gets paid a percentage of the selling price by the product owner.

Affiliate marketing is a win-win situation for both the product owner and the affiliate because of the commission paid on sales.  You might be thinking that the product owner is losing out but if he has a number of affiliates he is going to get more sales than he could attract on his own.

Affiliate marketing gives the product or service much more exposure than the marketer could get with other forms of advertising.  It is the equivalent of having an army of sales people who only get paid when they make a sale.

The affiliate also benefits as any customer who purchases through his link earns him commission.  Thus he puts the information on his website and it is available 24/7/ 365 days a year unless he removes it.  He is not doing any further work to earn from future sales and can concentrate on other newer products to earn from.

Affiliate marketing does not require you to have offices or staff.  You can work from home with virtually no production costs.  The product has been developed and proven by the owner and all you have to do is find as many prospects as you can who will purchase the product and earn you the money.

Affiliate programs are usually free to join, thus no start-up costs.  There are thousands of products and services you can choose from all with their own affiliate programs.  Sales experience is not necessary as most affiliate programs offer excellent support with sales and promotional material freely available.

In affiliate marketing you do not have to worry about holding stock, shipping or order processing as these are the product owner’s responsibility, all you have to do is find prospects to send to the product’s website.  Customer service is also the product owner’s responsibility.

Because the Internet is global you are not restricted to finding prospects in your own area, they can come from anywhere in the world.  You can intensify your advertising in areas producing the best returns and by promoting the most aggressive and productive strategies available.

An affiliate marketer has very little risk involved as if the product is not selling you can dump it and choose another product to promote instead.  There are no long term binding contracts tying you to products that are not earning enough money for you.

The best benefit of becoming an affiliate marketer is the opportunity to increase your income and that you can make a profit even if affiliate marketing is only a sideline to your main business.  Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest and most effective business opportunities available today.

This series will continue in part 10 which will be published on Friday.

Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to reading them.  I will publish all comments which are not classed as spam by Akismet.

Richard

Affiliate Marketing Part 9 – Benefits of Being an Affiliate Marketer is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog

This is the seventh post in a series of posts about Affiliate Marketing.  I intend to publish these each Monday and Friday and may also publish other non related posts on Wednesdays.

5 Qualities You Must Have to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing

Having read the headline above you are now probably asking yourself what are the 5 qualities you must have to become a success with Affiliate Marketing.

The first quality is the willingness to learn and be trained.

If you try to promote an Affiliate product on your own the chances are very high that you will fail to earn anything.  If you are just starting out in the field of Affiliate Marketing you need someone who is an expert Affiliate Marketer to guide you on your journey to success.

Your willingness to learn and then learning the tricks of the trade, will enable you to stand out from the crowd.  You will have advantages over those not willing to be trained.

The second quality is the willingness to invest your time and effort.

You must be willing to invest your time and effort even if direct results are not immediately apparent.  It may take several months before you see the results of your efforts but you must be patient.

Payments to affiliates are not made immediately on the sale of a product but rather are made when the guarantee period has run out.  If it is a ClickBank product this will be 60 days after the sale date.  I have seen guarantees ranging from 30 days to 1 year.

I had one customer who downloaded a free product and then asked for a refund or else he would report me to Paypal for not refunding him.  I replied to say that as it was a free product a refund was not due and removed him from my mailing list and blocked his email from ever signing up again.

The third quality is self determination.

If you wish to be successful in Affiliate Marketing you must have the ability to push yourself ahead.  No one will stand behind you to keep you on track.  You must keep yourself in the frame and keep pushing yourself forward.

The forth quality is discipline.

If you know how to teach yourself to work hard every day with all the energy you can muster then you will be close to achieving what you have set out to do in the first place.

The fifth quality is optimism.

You must fill yourself with optimism and ignore negative attitudes and nay sayers.  Do not let other people tell you that you will not succeed.  Believe in your success no matter what happens.

Your eventual success lies in your own hands and only you have the desire and capacity to achieve your goals.

Affiliate Marketing is all about putting your fate into your own hands.  The right attitude is the key to your success and when you do succeed you can show those who said you couldn’t do it they were wrong.

This series will continue in part 9 which will be published on Monday.

Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to reading them.  I will publish all comments which are not classed as spam by Akismet.

Richard

Affiliate Marketing Part 8 – Qualities for Success is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog

This is the seventh post in a series of posts about Affiliate Marketing.  I intend to publish these each Monday and Friday and may also publish other non related posts on Wednesdays.

Have You Got What It Takes To Be An Affiliate Marketer Contd.

Do not look at every one of them because marketing is all about attracting you to look at the sales page and to get you to park with your hard earned cash.  You should learn how to and to be taught because we need the skills to succeed in affiliate marketing.

Most, if not all, of the top people in internet marketing will tell you that they bought all the shiny objects that promised the earth until they realised that the hype did not get them anything and then then settled down to learn what they needed to succeed.

An affiliate marketer needs to know how to market his site effectively as it will enable you to get thousands of visitors some of whom will translate into customers and sales.  You need to build for the long term and not be tempted into short term gains.

You also need to know how to upsell your customers to more expensive products or services.  This in turn will get you recognised as an expert in your field and as such it will be easier to make money in the future.

Some people think that just by having affiliate links or their website they will make good profits but this is not the case.  You need to build strong relationships with your customers so that they will come back to you time and time again.

It is very important for you as an affiliate marketer to have a good business relationship with customers or visitors to your website.  You should also be creative.

The key to being successful with internet marketing is to develop good content on your website and weave your affiliate links into that content.  You have to provide your prospects with good quality content so that they keep coming back to your site.

After reading all the above you should now be able to answer the question – have you got what it takes to be an affiliate marketer?

This series will continue in part 8 which will be published on Friday.

Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to reading them.  I will publish all comments which are not classed as spam by Akismet.

Richard

Affiliate Marketing Part 7 – Have You Got What It Takes To Be An Affiliate Marketer Contd. is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog

This is the sixth post in a series of posts about Affiliate Marketing.  I intend to publish these each Monday and Friday and may also publish other non related posts on Wednesdays.

Have You Got What It Takes To Be An Affiliate Marketer

Everyone has their own interests or hobbies.  Some like reading books, other people like gardening, music, sports or pets.  The range of interests is very wide.  These things help us to relax and enjoy our life.  Not everyone makes money from their interests or hobby for most it costs them money to keep up.

A money making hobby could enable you to treat yourself and your family to extras you would not otherwise be able to afford.  That is why so many people go online to try and make some extra money.  However most of them are doomed to fail because they do not have the knowledge needed to succeed.

Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing partnership between a vendor and one or more affiliates.  The affiliate is paid a commission for referring clicks, leads or most often sales to the vendor.

The affiliate’s advantage is that he can make money without having the upfront costs of creating his own product.  The affiliate also has no worry about customer support as that is the vendor’s responsibility.

So you want to be an affiliate marketer with all the benefits that you can get, but do you have what it takes to be an effective affiliate marketer?  Before you begin putting your efforts into affiliate marketing you need to decide what area interests you?  What products do you know the most about and could sell the easiest?

Once you have decided on your speciality have you got the qualities of perseverance, patience and determination which you need to be a good affiliate marketer?  Do you know what your strengths are?  Do you know what your weaknesses are?

Have you a strong desire to succeed with affiliate marketing?  Once you have asked yourself the above questions and decided on your area of interest you are ready to begin your search for products to promote.

It is not an easy task to become an affiliate marketer as there are so many adverts out there promoting the latest shiny object as the best thing since sliced bread.  These adverts promising the earth are not necessarily the best as most of them cannot deliver what they promise.

This topic and the series will continue in part 7 which will be published on Monday.

Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to reading them.  I will publish all comments which are not classed as spam by Akismet.

Richard

Affiliate Marketing Part 6 – Have You Got What It Takes To Be An Affiliate Marketer is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog

This is the fifth post in a series of posts about Affiliate Marketing.  I intend to publish these each Monday and Friday and may also publish other non related posts on Wednesdays.

Essential Tools for the Successful Affiliate Marketer

How do you become a successful Affiliate Marketer?  What do you need for success?  Are there any shortcuts to success?  These and other questions are what new Affiliate Marketers who want to become big Affiliate Marketers ask themselves.

Affiliate Marketing is promoted as one of the easiest and most effective ways to earn money online but it is not as easy as it seems.  You need to plan your journey to success and maximise the potential to earn by utilising the right tools for a successful Affiliate Marketing business.

The first essential tool is your own website. 

You need to build a good, credible and professional looking website.

Your website is the first point for all your marketing efforts.  As such you must first build a user friendly website which will appeal to all your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and services you are promoting and make a purchase.

The most important thing to consider is that most people go online to search for information and not necessarily to buy something.   If your website is full of original, relevant and useful content your visitors will love the appealing and helpful information they find there.

Bear in mind that on the Internet content is king and by posting relevant and useful articles you will increase your credibility making you a trusted endorser of the product or service you promote.  Establishing a top of the class reputation is a great help in building up a loyal customer base.

The second essential tool is Incentives or Bonuses.

In the Internet marketing world competition is very intense and you must always be one step ahead of your rivals so that you can capture a significant share of your target market.

You must use every possible and legal means to encourage people not only to visit your site but also to click through to the websites of the products and services you are promoting and subsequently purchasing through your link.

Building an opt-in email list is one of the essential and best ways to gather prospects.  You can offer them a newsletter or ezine or better yet offer them an incentive to encourage them to sign up.

Your incentives could be free software, access to exclusive services or other free gifts that will be of use and helpful to your prospects.

The third essential tool is Link Popularity.

The importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be stressed enough.  This web traffic is critical to your sites success, no traffic = no customers = no sales.  Attracting people to your site is the first step you must take after you have it constructed.

Without going overboard you should do everything you can to get a high search enging ranking.  My hosting company Hostgator has a free tool which creates and submits a site map for my site to the four main search engines and also helps to create back links to my site.

One way to help get back links is to post articles, with your website in the resource box, to Article Directories and some ezines.  You gain exposure and have the opportunity to advertise for free.

The more sites you submit to the more links you will get.  Make sure your articles are relevant to your sites information and original.  DO NOT take some old PLR from your hard drive and submit it as it more than likely will have been submitted and published already.

This series will continue in part 6 which will be published on Friday.

Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to reading them.  I will publish all comments which are not classed as spam by Akismet.

Richard

Affiliate Marketing Part 5 – Essential Tools for the Successful Affiliate Marketer is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog

This is the forth post in a series of posts about Affiliate Marketing.  I intend to publish these each Monday and Friday and may also publish other non related posts on Wednesdays.

The term Affiliate Marketing has a number of descriptions although they all mean the same thing.  Affiliate marketing is how most marketers make an income from the Internet.

It is a co-operative effort where a product vendor allows other marketers to sell his product for a commission.  It is a cost effective and easily measurable method of delivering long term results.  There is a wide range of sites out there making or trying to make some income for their owners.

On a daily basis new people come into the market and give affiliate marketing a go, but in many cases these new affiliate marketers do not fully understand the process and make costly mistakes.  They then say it doesn’t work and rubbish it which makes life harder for everyone.

Selling and advertising are an important part of affiliate marketing but are only a part of the many functions contained within affiliate marketing.

In affiliate marketing an affiliate receives compensation for every visitor, subscriber or customer provided by his efforts.  This compensation is based upon an agreed percentage for each product the affiliate marketer promotes.  Some promoters pay for each visitor to their site, others for each subscriber signed up to their program or for each customer who purchases their product.

The percentage paid varies for each type of product and can be as high as 100% or if being paid for each visitor may be only a few cents.

Affiliate marketing is typically run by affiliate networks such as Clickbank, JV Zoo or Amazon.  Within these networks you have two main bodies – the merchants and the affiliates.  The merchants are those who make products available for the affiliates to promote and the network acts as a third party between them.

The network provides the technology to deliver to deliver the merchant’s offers to the affiliates.  It also collects the payment for the product and pays the affiliate his commission before passing the balance less the network fees to the merchant.

The merchant is any website owner who wants to take advantage of performance based marketing and pays the network to publish the details of the product on their website along with details of the affiliate commission to be paid.

The benefits to the merchant of using an affiliate network to promote his products are many.  He doesn’t have to maintain an affiliate program himself, he has access to markets and customers without having to spend the time necessary to source them himself.  He doesn’t have to keep track of affiliate codes or payments due.

With larger priced products eg $497 – $4997 and upwards, typically coaching products, the merchant would send an email to his list before the product is launched asking his customers if they would like to promote the product on his behalf.  This email would give details of the product, the affiliate commission payable, the launch date, promotional emails etc to enable the person to make the decision to promote or not.

The affiliate also gains from using an affiliate network.  He can choose what products to promote and these can be from different merchants.  He knows that he will be paid without having to chase the merchant.  He picks products relevant to his customer base and promotes them.  Eg if the affiliate marketer has a list of Golfers he would promote golfing products to that list.  If his list is stay at home housewives he promotes online job opportunities, or children’s products and information sites to them.

Affiliate marketing is an excellent situation for both the merchant and the affiliate.  If the affiliate is doing well with a particular merchant’s products that merchant may well offer him bonuses or other offers not released to the affiliate network.

This series will continue in part 5 which will be published on Monday.

Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to reading them.  I will publish all comments which are not classed as spam by Akismet.

Richard

Affiliate Marketing Part 4 – What is Affiliate Marketing? is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog

This is the third post in a series of posts about Affiliate Marketing.  I intend to publish these each Monday and Friday and may also publish other non related posts on Wednesdays.

Rebates or Discounts – Should you Offer them?

What is a rebate or a discount?

Quite simply it is a reduction on the price of the product or service you are offering your customers.  The customer is getting a bargain but the seller is losing out.  If you as the seller offer a 50% discount on the product then you will need to sell twice as many items to make the same money.

If it is your own product this may not be as important as you will attract more affiliates to sell the product for you by offering them 50% commission or even 75% commission.  On the other hand if you are selling some one else’s product for which you earn 50% commission then you are definitely losing out.

As an example:  You are selling an affiliate product priced at $197 for which you will get $98.50 commission and you then offer a 50% discount to your buyers you then only end up with $49.25 for each sale.

Whilst this may attract more buyers in the initial stages it can end up costing you large sums in the long term.  Why?  You ask?  Your customers will expect you to keep on offering 50% discount on every product they buy from you in the future.  You will attract customers who will never pay the full price for anything from you in the future.

These cheap customers have a something for nothing attitude and are of no real value to you in the long term.  The best way to get customers to buy from your link for the affiliate product at the full price is to offer something of value as an incentive bonus.

Even if you have to pay for each bonus item you give to your customer it is much better than giving a discount.  These customers will have bought at the full price and will be a better class of customer who will buy from you at the full price in the future.

Offering a discount is easier and does not take as much work as finding bonus items that are of sufficient value to encourage a customer to pay the full price for the product or service you are offering.

Let the lazy Affiliate Marketers offer the big discounts on price.  They will attract the cheap customers and leave you to make your future profits from those who purchase from you at the full price and you will leave them behind in the money making stakes.

People need, want and will pay the full price for the product you are offering and if your bonuses are better than those being offered by other affiliates for the same product or service you will get the sale.

In the past I lost out on some commissions as customers got more from other marketers than I was able to offer.  One customer said he signed up because of what I said about the training course but still signed up with another marketer.

It is much better to add value to your offer than to offer a discount on the price.  By offering a discount you may even break the terms of your affiliate licence and be barred from selling that marketers products in the future.

This series will continue in part 4 which will be published on Friday.

Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to reading them.  I will publish all comments which are not classed as spam by Akismet.

Richard

Affiliate Marketing Part 3 – Rebates or Discounts is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog

This is the second post in what will become a series of posts about Affiliate Marketing.  I intend to publish these each Monday and Friday and may also publish other non related posts on Wednesdays.

Uniqueness Contd.

In my last post I was talking about becoming visible and credibile in your niche.  You might be wondering why this is important?  The answer is very simple poeple do not like to buy from strangers over the internet.  They want to feel they know, like and trust the people they are going to buy products or services from.

By investing your time and effort into becoming visible and credible you will ensure you gain a good reputation and your credibility will make you unique.  This will help you to gain customers for the products or services you recommend.

To help ensure your customers buy a product for which you are an affiliate marketer from you and not your competitors you need to give them a very compelling reason to do so.

Add Extras or Free Gifts

When someone buys from your link you should offer them something extra or a number of different extras which enhance the initial product.  Do not under any circumstances offer something which has no relevance to the product you are promoting as this will ruin your credibility and reputation.

These extras can be ebooks from other recognised authors who give you permission to offer them.  But even better is to offer training which will make the product or service better or easier  to use via a webinar which you run only for those who buy from you.

Running a webinar is not something you should be thinking about if you are just starting out in affiliate marketing as the costs may be out of your reach at present.

If you are intending to run a webinar then you may be able to get the producer of the product or service to speak on it.  To do this you will need to plan far enough ahead.  People love webinars especially if they are free and this may just give you the edge in getting people to buy from you and not your competitors.

Your webinar may be limited to just 100 spaces and you can then offer a recording or a transcript to those customers who do not get to see it live.  By recording the webinar you will have a video product for future use.

You can also make an audio product from the webinar and turn the transcript into an ebook thus giving you 3 products to help promote the original product or service.

You need to have an edge over your competitors and this will help you to stand out from the crowd.

This series will continue in part 3 which will be published on Monday.

Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to reading them.  I will publish all comments which are not classed as spam by Akismet.

Richard

Affiliate Marketing Part 2 – Uniqueness Contd. is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog

This is the first post in what will become a series of posts about Affiliate Marketing.  I intend to publish these each Monday and Friday and may also publish other non related posts on Wednesdays.

Uniqueness

In my post 5 Things to Consider Before Starting an Affiliate Marketing Program:  I listed the items needed for Affiliate Marketing.  In this series of posts I intend to give you the information you need to be successful.

The first thing to think about when selecting a product to promote is how much competition will that product have?  Is it going to be one where all the top marketers in the niche are going to promote?  If it is I would advise you to leave it alone until you are better known in your niche with products of your own already published.

You will need to be unique in your promotion.  All the top marketers will be offering bonuses worth a lot more than the product itself.  So unless you can offer something unique you will not be able to compete with them.

You can create your own products from PLR but DO NOT publish it as you get it.  A lot of what is available today as PLR was first published 5 or more years ago and as such may be well out of date.

This means you have to research the topic and update your PLR to current status.  In doing this you should also get new graphics for the ebooks and you can then put your name on the cover as the author.  Before doing the above ensure that the PLR rights allow you to do so.

To establish yourself as unique and an expert in the niche you need to become visible and creditable in the niche.  This is not as easy as I make it sound.  There are several ways to become visible and trusted and if no one knows you it will be nearly impossible to succeed in Affiliate Marketing.

One of the easiest ways to become known is to write articles and ebooks relating to the niche you want to be known in, posting on blogs and forums related to the niche.  You can group a number of articles together into an ebook and using JV Giveaways give it away to get names onto your mailing list.

Top marketers all say the money is in the list and yes it is but until you have a relationship with those names you will not make any money from them.  If you have an ebook about Dog Training you could have your auto-responder set to send out further articles about Dog Training on a regular basis.

I would suggest once or twice a week but make sure it goes out on the same day each week.  For once a week messages the follow ups should be set at 7 day intervals and for twice a week you should set your auto-responder to send out the follow up messages at 3 days later and then 4 days followed by 3 days and 4 days alternating for the number of messages you have.

This series will continue in part 2 which will be published on Friday.

Your comments are always welcome and I look forward to reading them.  I will publish all comments which are not classed as spam by Akismet.

Richard

Affiliate Marketing Part 1 – Uniqueness is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog

Scotland had its hottest March day on record yesterday at 22.8 degrees Celcius (73.0 Farenheight) beating the record set way back in 1957.  In N Ireland we have been having some very warm weather as well, St Patrick turned up the sunny side of the stone and this is supposed to give us a good summer.  We wait in hope.

Some parts of the UK are about to have a hosepipe ban imposed as their water companies say they have not had enough rain in the right place to fill the reservoirs.  We do not have that problem in N Ireland as we have had plenty of rain over the winter.

The good weather here in the UK seems to have brought the spammers out from their hibernation.  I have been getting up to 30 spam comments per day here on the blog and about 300 through my emails.

I have had 365 genuine comments on the blog and Akismet has blocked a further 2,113 spam comments here to date.  This is a ratio of 6 spam to 1 genuine comment.

The email ones are “M*x Gentlemen”, “V*agra”, “B*auty Makeovers and C*smetics” and from various banks saying my online account is being suspended.  As I don’t have an online bank account with these banks I totally ignore the emails and just delete them.

With getting so many spam emails I do not even scan them to see if any genuine emails have slipped through into spam so some people who have emailed me and have had their emails put into the spam box may think I am ignoring them by me not replying.

My posts will be sporadic here until after Easter as I am pretty busy as part of the organising committe for the Caravan Club Irish Division National Rally which takes place over Easter.

If you are interested in Giveaways I have updated my JV Giveaways page and will shortly be releasing details of my own giveaway.  Anyone interested in becoming a Contributor let me know in the comments and I will ensure you get the first notification details.

Your comments are always welcome and if you have anything you would like to add please do so below.  I look forward to reading what you have to say.

Richard

Good Weather in UK is a post from: Richard Moloney's Blog