Affiliate Money Maker

I am finally getting to posting about building an affiliate downline - something I’ve been promicing to do for a while now. An affiliate downline can be a very powerful source of additional income for an affiliate marketer and it definitely should not be overlooked.

What is an Affiliate Downline?

Many affiliate programs and networks have two-tier structure. This means that you as a member of an affiliate program or network can refer other affiliates to promote the affiliate offers in this network and get paid for that. The exact scheme may differ from program to program: some may pay you for new affiliates referred to the program who have signed up, some will give you some % of sales the affiliates you have recruited make, some may even have both options. The affiliates you have referred to a program are your affiliate downline.

Who Benefits from Building an Affiliate Downline?

As a matter of fact, everybody does. This scheme is so popular in affiliate marketing for a reason: it works for all sides. An affiliate program or network clearly benefits from having more people promoting their products. You benefit from getting extra commissions from the sales or signups in your downline. Your downline also benefits from it - they ahve probably joined the program based on your positive feedback about it, i.e. you have helped them find a good affiliate program where they can successfully make money. And contrary to a common misconception, if an affiliate program pays you for sales your downline makes, this money comes from the affiliate program itself, it is not extracted out of the commissions other affiliates in your downline are getting for their sales - they won’t get less cause of the downline commission the program pays you.

But is it enough to simply refer people to an affiliate program? Be ready that not everyone you refer will do more than just register. Many people will never make the next people and start actively promoting the affiliate offers, and even those who will promote them cannot be 100% successful - there are so many things holding people back from succeeding as affiliate marketers! I personally have quite a big downline in many programs I work with but only a fraction of those people are currently active.

One more common fear concerning building an affiliate downline is that it means creating competition for yourself. Well, maybe I’ve been lucky so far, but out of my downline not a single person is really my competition (and not just because they are inactive!). My downline is promoting products other than the ones I am promoting. Even if your downline is promoting exactly the same products, they will probably be using different techniques (e.g. PPC as opposed to SEO) or targeting slightly different markets and audience, or targeting them from a slightly different perspective. You probably do not want to build a huge downline in some really niche programs where not much of that differentiation is possible - but other than that, I’d say you’re fine.

OK with all this out of our way,

How to Build an Affiliate Downline?

Here are just some tips on how to build your downline. I’m pretty sure that these alone will get you started and you will easily recruit a few affiliates truly interested in making money through your affiliate programs.

1. Refer your friends and personal contacts - they are the people who know you and trust your opinion, and you will also be able to help them get started with promoting the affiliate offers, thus turning them into successful and active affiliates. One of my friends is my best downline asset in one of the programs I work with.

2. Participate in affiliate and Internet marketing communities - the chance of attracting the attention of serious, experienced affiliates is high there. Do NOT spam your affiliate links there however - this will make a negative impression instead of getting people interested in your affiliate programs!
3. Make a blog about affiliate marketing - but be sure you post in it regularly and your posts offer some interesting angle, not just repeat what everybody else writes about. Most of my downline signups came from this blog. A blog is also a useful tool for being part of an online marketing community.

4. Write honest reviews of the affiliate programs you work with -  this is the best way to target people who already consider joining a certain program and just want feedback from those who have experience with it.

5. Participate in communities related to the products your affiliate program offers and you promote - this way you can attract people who use the products by showing them a way to make money and target affiliates working with concurrent affiliate programs in the same market. These affiliates are already familiar with the market and may be interested in expanding the set of products they are offering.

There are of course other ways possible - so if you had success building your downline some other way please share  it in the comments.

Where Can You Build Downline?

Out of the programs I work with, the following have an option for recruiting second tier affiliates (some of them I have reviewed earlier - these reviews are linked from here, others I will review soon):

• MoreNiche (partial review here)
• MarketHealth (former JoeBucks) (review here)
• GenBucks (review here)
• Leading Edge Cash
• WorldNiche
• MagnaRX Cash (review here)
• ShareASale
• ShareResults
• IncentReward
• OAInternet
• Click Kingdom
• Cash Associate

These programs offer all kinds of products for you as an affiliate to promote and pay you commissions for your downline sales. I will be reviewing the ones I have not reviewed yet soon and posting all the details about each of them.

And as usual - if you have signed up as my downline  you are free to contact me and ask me any questions you might have about this particular program. Like I promiced, I will help you get started with it.

Leading Edge Cash has just introduced a new product for its affiliates to promote - 1 Button To Wifi.

This is a way to save greatly on long distance calls without the limitations of other VoIP phones you’ve probably heard about so far. The user registers on the product site, buys the device, it is shipped to him for free, then easily connected to an existing DSL Internat cable. After this, all they have to do is press one button on any phone they’d like to use to make their calls - and their phone connects to the device from anywhere they are at the moment and they can dial any number they wish. The difference in costs is enormous, the comfort is there and there are tons of additional features such as free calls between the network users and a lot more. The users are only charged for the actual calls they make.

1 Button To Wifi is a great new opportunity to make money with as an affiliate marketer, but  it is also a great tool for your affiliate business. I as an affiliate often need to contact the affiliate managers, business partners and so on - and doing it by phone is so much faster than by email or waiting till the person gets online in a messaging client. I will absolutely be getting me this device to save on my phone costs.
If you also wish to buy it go ahead and do so at the 1 Button To WiFi site, and if you wish to offer this great product to your site visitors and get paid for it register as an affiliate with LEC and get your links.

If you’re an affiliate using pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic to your landing pages, this is something you will want to take notice of. I’ve come across this post via Search Engine Land mention about MSN rejecting a Spanish language ad for US audience:

Although Google made it easy for us to set up advertising campaigns, Microsoft apparently does not want business from Latinos in the US. They rejected all of QuieroLatino’s ads and sent us a shocking explanation:

The reason for the disapproval is because of the use of a foreign language on the landing page. You are using the English US distribution channel and targeting the US and so you must use only the English language on the landing page.

This is really weird of Microsoft. I personally work a lot with affiliate offers in different languages, I love working with offers for non-English speaking customers, I’ve had so much success in the Spanish speaking market and I must tell you that about 1/3 of all sales I’ve made on my Spanish landing pages came from US-based customers. Now, I work primarily with organic traffic but I was considering using PPC… Now evidently Microsoft won’t be my advertiser of choice!

As an affiliate, I need to fax documents every now and then. Not often enough to buy a fax machine, but still. Every time I sign up with an affiliate program, they will normally ask me to fill out and fax them a tax form. If you’re a home-based affiliate marketer without all the traditional office equipment, you will find this story useful.

You may have heard about these services that will help you send faxes right off your computer - so have I. I had no idea whether these services are free or paid - and if they are paid of course I wanted to make sure they actually work and not just charge me, so a free trial would have been really handy. At first, I remembered that a friend of mine had once mentioned efax.com - so naturally my first choice was to go look at them.

Well, I must tell you efax.com absolutely SUCKS!  They do have a free trial, but here’s what happened. I registered a trial account with them and everything seemed fine so I thought I’d try faxing my documents the next day. Not so easy! The next day I signed in only to find out they didn’t like my credit card.  I tried two more cards  (all three were used to pay in multiple other places - no problem ever) - no luck again. Their support was absolutely useless as well so I just demanded that they close my account and went on to look further.

I headed to Google and ran a quick search. Google returned  almost 9 million results for “send a fax by email” - wow that’s impressive. What have we got here?

The first one was TPC Fax (tpc.int) - a site last updated in 2001. You see, in the old days of non-monetized Internet there was a community initiative to support sending faxes by email through privately operated printer servers. This was a free community service supported exclusively by good will of people participating in this project. Well that was a long time ago. I don’t know how reliable or widespread it was, but currently it is not working any more.

Digging through a bunch of FAQ’s and equally old sites that are of no use any longer,  next I got to trustfax.com - they have a free trial as well, but their free trial outgoing faxes are watermarked. Not good, I thought.

Next one I checked was interfax.net - this one has got no free trial. Having had enough bad experience by now, I didn’t risk signing up with a service that I couldn’t test first.

Next site I found was maxemail.com - and luckily my search was over here! They let you send 5 trial faxes during the 30-day trial period. Their support is very friendly and personal. You get email confirmations for the faxes you send. I have sent 3 faxes so far and they were all successful. I am now considering upgrading to a paid plan with them. I am really happy about their service.

So if you’re looking for a cost-efficient and reliable solution to fax documents, why not give MaxEmail a try.