How to select an affiliate program that works for you

Affiliate programs are a great means of earning some handy cash; but not all affiliate programs are profitable. Some will only take up your time and energy and some others may even spoil your website reputation. This is why you got to carefully select your affiliate marketing programs and make sure that they work for you same as your work for them. Given below are a few points that will help you make better decision in choosing an affiliate program that works for you rather than working only for the affiliate merchant.

Points to take into consideration before selecting an affiliate program

1.) Your website and your visitors
If you already have a website, make sure to go for best affiliate programs
that jell with your website theme. If your website is about cars then promoting cycle related products is going to have very less or no impact.
Secondly finding and scrutinizing your visitors and your target market is a good idea. In any affiliate program, your visitor is the one who is going to get you returns. So primarily get to know your visitors. Analyze your visitor behavior using your website statistics before deciding on which affiliate program to go for. Your objective should be to find out what your visitors are looking for and then promote products of their interest which also match with your existing products or services (if any).

2.) Affiliate merchant’s website
Most affiliates don’t give much importance to the affiliate merchant’s website, forgetting the fact that here’s where the actual sales conversion is to take place. It’s very important that the affiliate merchant’s website is designed to sell. So check and make sure that the merchant’s website is free from unwanted banner advertisements/pop-ups and focus on the affiliate product.
Other important things to check out are the sales copy, privacy policy, product guarantees, after sales service and special discounts/offers available with the product/service. Your main aim must be to find out if the product/service features would actually prompt the referred visitor to make a purchase.
Some affiliate merchants promote more than one product/service on a webpage which can dilute the conversion rate. It is best to go for affiliate programs that focus on a single product/service per webpage.

3.) Quality of goods/services
Just imagine how you would feel, if you were referred by a website to a product that turned out to be of inferior quality? Your visitors will feel the same way about your website if you promote inferior or overly priced goods/services. Always make sure to know about the product/service you are planning to promote. Check for testimonials and references from existing customers to find out about the quality of goods. If possible you can even plan on using them yourself to be on the safer side. In addition, also make sure to compare similar products available over the internet for features and rates.
There are many products that have trial periods or return policies associated with them. Products having return policies can increase the conversion rate but may also lead to debiting in case of a chargeback. Promoting products sold on a trial period basis requires cookie detection to track sales at the end of the period which is very unreliable. So it’s better to confirm with the affiliate merchant the tracking method used or the affiliate payment scheme, in case the products have trial periods.

4.) Reputation of the affiliate merchant
The reputation of the affiliate merchant is important because the odds are against you. There are chances that some affiliate merchants may not payout or make deductions to your actual payments. So make sure to find out using references about the affiliate merchant’s history of making proper payments.
Already existing affiliates of the affiliate merchant are your best source of information. In addition be sure to read their business literature to get an idea about their history of past and present operations.

5.) Commission scheme of the affiliate program
There are many different types of commission schemes that affiliate programs use to reward their affiliates. Some of the most popular ones are pay per click, pay per lead and pay per sale schemes. Some others even offer two tiered and multi tiered commission schemes. Some commission schemes can even be a mix and match of the above.
In case of a pay per click/hit scheme the minimum commission that you can expect is $0.5 to $0.10 per click. For pay per sale a good commission rate would be 15% to 50%. Some companies even offer lifetime commissions, but as most of them are based on cookie identification, they may not work out well.
With the competition increasing almost all merchants have started offering two tiered commissions, some even offer multi tiered ones. Joining these schemes can give you a chance to get paid for the direct sales you make and also for the sales made by affiliates referred by you.

6.) Tracking software used
Tracking software is used by the affiliate merchant to track individual affiliate sales. An affiliate merchant can make use of in-house tracking software, join an affiliate network or use services of an ASP in order to track leads.
In case the affiliate merchant makes use of independent tracking software or ASP services, make sure to find out if the software is reliable and has the ability to track all kinds of sales. If the software uses cookie tracking, find out the duration of the cookie. Although using cookies to track affiliates does not always work fine as the cookies can be deleted by the buyer.
Most affiliate merchants today make use of affiliate network services. Affiliate network services are the safest when it comes to making payments on time, conflict resolution and accurate tracking. Affiliate Networks are also great sources to find good affiliate programs and can help you get payments from different merchants through a single cheque. So make sure to register at some good networks. Some reputed affiliate network services are commission junction, LinkShare, Clickxgalore, and ClickTrade.

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Make Money With A Home Based Business in 2010

Would you like to make money by starting your own home-based business? People choose to work from home for several reasons including the desire to stay home with their children, the need for extra income, or simply being dissatisfied with their current job. A home-based business will provide you with an exciting way to make money and be your own boss. Numerous opportunities are available to internet marketers.

When starting your home-based business you should develop a business plan and research your options thoroughly. Making wise decisions and following your business plan each step of the way can help you in creating a steady stream of income. Operating a home-based business will require hard work and effort. You will not become wealthy over night. It will take determination to succeed as an internet marketer. The amount of money you make will be directly related to the amount of work you are willing to do.
When making your business plan, include both short and long term goals. Determine how you will achieve those goals and put your plan into action. Affiliate programs are excellent home-based business programs and there are numerous other internet marketing offers that will create steady income if you are willing to make the effort. Some of these opportunities may require an initial investment from you and others are advertised as free. Research all internet marketing opportunities carefully to make sure you understand the terms and conditions.

As an internet marketer, you will have to distinguish yourself from the competition if you want to succeed. You should know your target audience and know your competition even better. Do not let self-doubt stop you from accomplishing your goals. Every successful internet marketer gives their business the very best effort possible. Hard work and determination will make your home-based business a success and provide you with a steady stream of income.

Starting a home-based business is one of the most exciting and challenging endeavors you will ever undertake. A sound business plan and the will to succeed will set you apart from the competition. Choose the products or services you provide carefully. Make certain your services will be needed over the long term and make customer service your top priority. A loyal customer base is the key to the success or failure of your home-based business. A home-based business is an excellent way to gain independence and financial freedom. A sound business plan and a strong work ethic are all it takes to succeed.

by: Hans Hasselfors
This Article Was Published By Hans Hasselfors, from The Business Professional. Get the net working for you. Join a community of like-minded entrepreneurs and make your living online. Become a member of The Business Professional network:

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Affiliate Marketing And You

Affiliate marketing is defined as the use of promotion in order to sell a service or product for another company. The affiliate, or middle man, is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through their marketing efforts. The level of compensation depends on the main company. The affiliate's job is to drive sales by linking the consumer to the company who is providing the requested product or service. Many companies use marketing to increase their revenue.

Affiliate programs have contributed to the rise of many leading online companies. Affiliate marketing is a means of achieving a greater degree of success with websites who target specific groups of Internet users. One of the largest and widely known is Amazon.com, selling books, electronics, toys, and even pharmaceuticals. Amazon.com has thousands of affiliated websites, allowing consumers a wide array of avenues in which to reach their products.

Affiliate marketing has blossomed over the years with the increase in merchants fighting for the customer's attention. An affiliate works very hard to make sure the company is happy with their service, while keeping up with the ability to grab the consumer's attention, ultimately pulling them to their website. The three most common commissions an affiliate will receive are through either pay per click, pay per lead, or pay per sale. Pay per click is simply that, every time someone visits your site and clicks on the merchant's ad you get paid. Pay per lead means you most often need to get someone to sign up for whatever it may be the merchant is offering, like a credit card for example. Pay per sale means you must get the consumer to buy the product, this commission is by far the most lucrative.

Many people have turned to affiliate marketing as a way of supplementing income or as a full time stay at home job (great for moms who aren't ready to go back to work just yet). If you have the time and know your way around the Internet then this may be the right job for you. Internet marketing isn't going anywhere, with the rate technology keeps expanding, from small hand held devices to hot spot Internet connections the World Wide Web is by far the ultimate marketing tool. With the current decline in the economy causing consumers to tighten their wallets; more companies are attempting to get their products out to as many customers as possible through the fastest means available, what a better place than through the Internet.

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Ebay

Ebay seller - to buy all the things / great cheap or expensive, is also a place for profit.

The idea to sell or buy gifts / new and used goods, often intimidating, but Ebay has all the pressures and problems with the language!

When selling products, there are several possibilities. One of the options available so you can easily and quickly provide the items listed and the second option more depth on their way to goods such as cars or something that will sell it for more information about the buyer.

Please note that eBay will-medium businesses and large enterprises more competitive. Buy an autographed photo of Joe Montana is located in the basement is one thing, the source of the product and benefit from it is something else! This is a place with the right guidance comes into the picture.

Did you notice on eBay looking for something (such as fishing temptation, for example), and that they are really cheap! Possible involvement of more than $ 2 $ 0.99 plus postage and packing. How do these people earn money? Wholesale prices for the same product is $ 1 U.S. $ 2 to generate the temptation fishing really worth having?

It is a business strategy that comes into the picture, and if you do not understand the game, you might get corrected on this market. This strategy is not difficult. But understand that there is more than just a source for some of the transporters and wholesale products and sell them at a higher price on eBay. With the right guidance, you can eBay your campaign (or your own e-commerce eBay managed the shop!) Fairly simple.

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A Little Extra Money

If you have already eliminated the need for credit cards in your life but you haven't quite payed off your debt, there are a few ways to make some extra money. Some ways are online, and others are things that might be laying around your house. They might not bring in so much money that you're able to pay off all your debt, but they can be helpful.

One is to write articles online for eHow. They pay you for writing articles and after you've earned $10, they'll send you a payment through PayPal at the end of the month. The important thing is to write articles that people are going to be looking for. You also need to get a good foundation. The first month you might not make a huge hit but that payment goes up and up every month.

Have a yard sale. You probably have a ton of things around your house that you could be making decent money off of. Whether it's old toys that your kids don't play with anymore or a brand new computer that has a broken part, people will be willing to buy. Even if you don't make a ton of money, you'll still be cleaning your house, garage, basement and attic out.

Another helpful hint is to save your change. Usually after you go shopping or even after getting a coffee, you end up with a pocket full of change. Place an empty jelly jar on your bureau and every night when you're getting undressed, empty your change into the jar. After a few months, roll the coins and then trade them in for cash at the bank. If you don't want a ton of change, use it when you buy something. Cashiers like change so they don't have to open a roll of coins.

Combine all your errands into one trip to save gas. This not only helps because you're not driving as much, but because you use more gas when your car is cold. When you combine your trips, it stays warm. You don't have to take your car to the shop as much either. Also ride with friends to work. Ride in their car one day and in yours the next. You save mileage on both of your cars, you save time between services and you save gas.

Google provides backlink tool for site owners

One of the common requests I hear from webmasters is “Why doesn’t Google show me most or all of my backlinks?” Well, as of today, Google’s webmaster console will now let you see your site’s backlinks. Major props to the webmaster console team for this new feature. A few things to know:

- The backlink tool doesn’t show 100% of the backlinks from Google yet, but I expect the number of links that are available to grow.
- In particular, for my site I was easily able to see more than 10x more links in this new tool than the link: command gave me. The link: command has always returned a small fraction of the backlinks that Google knows about, mainly for historical reasons (e.g. limited disk space on the machines that served up “link:” data).
- You can download the backlinks in a really nice CSV format, suitable for slicing and dicing and other analysis. I believe you can export up to a million backlinks if your site has that many backlinks.
- Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.

I’m sure that there was more that I wanted to say, but why don’t people start playing with it and give feedback or post backlink tool-related questions? I know that the webmaster team reads to get feedback over here too; congrats again to that entire team for providing this. If you want to start browsing your site’s backlinks, sign up for Google’s webmaster console now.

PageRank

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page,^[1] used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E). The name "PageRank" is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented (U.S. Patent 6,285,999). However, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares of Google in exchange for use of the patent; the shares were sold in 2005 for $336 million.

Increase Backlinks With Blog

Lets get some backlinks for your site so you can start ranking for that term you always wanted and make some cash money.

In this blog post, we will be going over a two different ways to gain backlinks such as blog comments and Wikipedia links. These two methods work the best for sites with less competitive keywords in Google, the reason is because it takes some work to get these links.

Before I begin, I want to remind you yet again that you should focus on having your website content building the natural backlinks more so than working on building backlinks to an average website. When making a website, you should focus on content and then once you get great content you should start working on your link building campaign. Let us take a look at this image I made:

The chart reflects the traffic you will be building. As you can see, you wont be building much traffic at all at first, you would be focusing on the quality of the content and making your website better than the competition. Once you done with the content you will focus on building links. Since your links will be sending you a little bit of traffic your traffic will obviously will go up. Then once you get the necessary backlinks to your website you will start ranking for the search terms you are trying to rank for, and that is when your traffic will start taking off.

Once you website does start ranking for the search term, more and more people will find your website and see how great the quality of it is, and then they will build the links for you, and those are called natural backlinks. Sadly, you get the most natural backlinks once your site ranks for the keywords your after. Because people will search for the keyword, see your site, and then blog about your website or something along those lines. But, you will also be building natural backlinks from people stumbling onto your website the whole time.

I tell everyone this, focus on the quality of the content… then work on building backlinks. With that said lets get started.

Blog Comments
Blog comments are a great way to get backlinks to your website, heck I even sell them. But, they aren’t too powerful and you need a lot of them to make much of a difference. But if you just need like 200 backlinks to rank for a keyword than they are great way to get there. You should never rely completely on blog comments to help build backlinks, they tend to get less powerful over time.

A few things about blog comments:

• You need a lot to make a difference.
• Great for ranking for smaller terms.
• Sends less weight over time.

I personally use blog comments a lot, but only when my website is brand new. If you have a small term that you want to rank for that only needs a few hundred backlinks for your site, then Blog Comments are the way to go!

It’s pretty easy to get the blog comments, and I will be telling you the exact same way my comment writers use for my company. With blog comments you need to make sure that your website is very very related to the website you are commenting on. To find thousands of blogs to post relevant comments on, we use Technorati. To find a list of blogs about your niche, all you have to do is a search on Technorati. So, say you need comments about “apartments”, simply enter “apartments” into the search text box.

You will then see pages and pages of blogs talking about apartments (or whatever your blog is about). You then have to find blog posts that are related to your niche, that’s pretty easy, all you have to do is read the description about the blog post.

Once you find the blog post you want to comment about, simply go to the blog post, then read the blog post, and then make a decent comment about the blog post. Don’t make it too spammy looking so the blog admin wont delete your comment. A little trick I like to use so the admin won’t delete my comments is I make two or three blog comments per blog on different blog posts to make it look like I read over a his or her blog a little. On my own blog, I generally never delete comments from people that make a few at a time, they always seem to be readers of mine. I find that to work in a lot of cases. You should also use a web proxy when writing comments. I have gotten my own IP banned from Wordpress, and so have many other SEO experts I know. The best way is to buy your own cheap VPS and get like 29 IP’s and then put 3proxy on it. That’s the least stressful way to get proxies.

When you write your comments, make sure to save the blog post where you write the comments in a text file or something for later use, you may want to comment that blog post later to help boost your ranking a little.

Wikipedia
Good ol’ Wikipedia! These links help SO much! The links are nofollow, but I feel like Google gives special attention to outbound links on Wikipedia. When you get some Wiki links, you will be feeling the Wiki love.

But how do we get the Wiki links? It’s total pain! And to be honest, I fully haven’t mastered this yet. I don’t think I ever will. I only get Wiki links for my bigger sites that make me money. I don’t work on building Wiki links for websites I don’t really care to much about. It’s a lot of work, and most of the time your links will be taken off, so its a big pain.

The best way to get Wiki links is to put a lot of work into your Wiki account. Go over some topics you know and edit them a little bit. What you want to do is get some history behind you, get some trust behind you. When you first get your Wiki account, don’t just dive head into spamming wikipedia and hoping the mods won’t delete all your links – because they will.

When you first get your account, find some topics you know about and edit them. The amount of articles you edit is up to you, I think I have done only 20 articles in about 2 years time. So not much at all, but enough to get enough history behind me as I have about 8 Wiki links on that account.

Okay, after you edit some articles, you want to first find rare articles with a high page rank that don’t get edited to much at all. They take some time to find, but there out there. One way I find the rare article is I do a Google search on my niche, and then start at around page 5. I then look at the history and see when the article was last edited on, I try to find articles that where last edited around 2006 or before that.

Here is a Google search for the niche “apartments”.

Once you find your rare article, edit the content and then add your link somewhere on the page. I usually add mine to references. I also link to a subpage of mine, I think that linking to just the www.domain.com looks too spamy for wikipedia.

After you add your link its just a game of luck. Hopefully, the mods wont see your link and take it off. But, like I said before, Wiki links are a pain. However, once you get some they are worth it! Trust me.

Wiki link process review:

1. Edit topics you know.
2. Build your history.
3. Find rare article on your niche.
4. Edit the content and add your link in the references.
5. Pray the mods don’t take your link off.
6. Repeat.