Affiliate Money Maker

Those of you who are into building your own email lists may know how difficult it may be sometimes to get your visitors to fill out a form and provide you their data, even if it’s simply their name and email address.  What if you need to collect even more data, how do you justify it to your visitors and make them feel it’s worth doing it?

What I came across recently is a fantastic way to talk people into giving you the info. Here’s how Jim Kukral, a prominent internet marketer, accomplishing this:

Hehehe great deal indeed, Jim! As creative as it gets

I know that many affiliate marketers run blogs - these are handy tools for selling the affiliate offers as well as building your downline. But do you do it right? Is there anything on your blog that could scrae off your audience? Is there any field for improvement?

Bill Slawski has posted a nice list of tools for testing a blog - some of them are more of an entertainment value methinks, but then you never know what can be useful to improve your stuff!

I have run my blog through some of these and did have a couple of “ahha!” moments. Go ahead and test yours - and who knows, maybe acting upon the results you get will just happen to bring you more conversions or signups.

With all the hassle about the recession, job layoffs etc. more and more people look into either making some additional income or even becoming completely financially independent. Online affiliate marketing is a good way to start your own business without the expenses and troubles associated with starting a traditional brick-and-mortar business. But before you start, you need to know a few things.

• Don’t think that affiliate marketing is easy or that it will not require any time investment and effort on your part. Don’t trust the “gurus” talking about only spending 15 minutes a day - they may be at that stage but if you’re only starting, you will need to put a lot of effort into it to make it work.
• Don’t put all your eggs into the same basket - even though it may take more time and effort, try at least a couple of affiliate programs to see which one will work better for you.
• Start by promoting the offers you are genuinely interested in - be prepared that you will have to write and talk about these offers and of course it is much easier to talk about the stuff you know and like.
• Take other people’s feedback about a product’s conversion rates with a grain of salt - you can promote the same product but you cannot copy their sites, get the same traffic they are getting and so on hence results will vary. On the other hand, DO listen to what people say about their marketing methods, tips and tricks where it applies to your product and your market niche - these tips can be very helpful and save you a lot of your own trial and error.
• DO learn at least a bit about SEO and PPC - these are the main methods you will use for promoting your sites and products.
• Keep track of what you are doing and analyze the results - this will help you fine tune your affiliate business.
• Every product will most likely convert sooner or later - it’s a numbers game, a conversion depends on the traffic - how much of it you get and how targeted it is. However, you need to define for yourself what is the acceptable time and effort investment for the commission you would be getting. Some sites and/or products may convert at a rate of 1:10, others may convert at a rate of 1:50,000 - but if that 1:50,000 converting product brings you a commission of $10,000 you may still be interested in pursuing it.
• When starting with any new product, research your market. See how much competition you got, see what they do, what works and what doesn’t.
• Besides putting your effort into promoting the products, you can also build yourself a passive income source by building your affiliate downline - here are my downline building tips along with a list of affiliate programs I know of that have a downline option and pay you for sales made by affiliates you have recruited.

And remember - whatever you do, be persistant and determined to succeed. Don’t give up and then it’s sure to work for you!

It’s the holiday season and everybody is making their wishes for Christmas and the New Year - and I thought I’d make my own little list of the things I’d like to see next year as an affiliate marketer. This is just my personal view of things that would make life easier for affiliates but I’m pretty sure many affiliates would like to see the same. If you have any other additions to this wishlist feel free to add them in this post’s comments.

Affiliate managers - many of these wishes can come true if you make a little effort within your affiliate programs. The more affiliate programs and networks take part in fulfilling these wishes the more enjoyable affiliate marketing will be come in the new 2009 year - and the more we will both win from it in the long run.

1. Affiliate programs should provide descriptions of their offers to facilitate the affiliate’s activities - and by description I do not mean just the ad blurb that is not so easy to decipher or just the commissions percentage that the affiliates get. I mean if you have a product that is only targeted to a certain location and the traffic from any other IP is even forwarded to some other site - an me happening to be just outside of that location - how am I as an affiliate supposed to know what your offer is all about and how am I supposed to promote it?

2. Payment methods - have some flexibility! We live in the world where your affiliates are no longer just in the US - so while checks or PayPal may be nice for the US-based affiliates they may not be so well suited for others located elsewhere. There is a wealth of payment methods available out there these days - from prepaid cards (such as epassporte or payoneer that I mentioned a number of times already in this blog) to direct deposit which SHOULD be available for those outside of US. Just think how many affiliates your program or network may be losing due to an inconvenient payment method being a showstopper! I am talking not only of small proprietory affiliate programs - I also mean large networks such as ShareASale (yes guys, you are guilty of this too!) With an abundance of affiliate programs and networks in nearly every market niche, this too is a deciding factor for many affiliates whether to join your programs and promote your offers - or go to a rival.

3. If you are spamming me with your monthly newsletters is it so difficult to have a live person answer my question once a year? AffiliateBot, I am talking of you here! I emailed you with a question God knows how long ago - all I got from you in reply was a bunch of monthly newsletters. Is there anyone alive over there? I see there is a bunch of offers I could really use for my sites in your listings - but I’d rather go somewhere else since I never get any personal communication from you. It does not make me feel appreciated and does not promote a sense of reliability. There is a bunch of others guilty of the same. If you run your affiliate program through a large network do not assume it frees you from the necessity of talking to your affiliates. If I bump into your site on the web and ask you a question before joining your program through a large network chances are I will be more willing to work with you if you reply my email. And no, “Call us if you have any questions” does not exactly cut it - I may be outside of the US and calling internationally is not exactly what I’d be willing to do for the sake of an unknown quantity that you are to me at this point.

4. Nice and detailed stats - if I put my efforts into promoting your offers I just HAVE to know where my traffic comes from and goes to, what my conversion rates are for any given period of time, where the sales come from and what exactly is performing well or not so well. I’d like to be able to set up my own custom tracking codes and be able to see the info related to them. In the long run, again, it will benefit both sides - if I see some things are working better than others I will tweak my campaigns so that they work better, bring more sales and more money for both of us.

5. Landing pages - you should have them! The better your landing page is, the better it will convert and the more affiliates will want to send their traffic to it. I love affiliate managers who keep testing and tweaking and improving their landing pages and hope to see more of them in the new year.

6. International offers - this is a wake up call! It’s not about the US only any more! If you ship internationally do put some effort into nice, professional translation of your site and creatives into the languages of the countries that bring or could potentially bring you the most conversions. So far, even the afifliate programs/networks who do understand the importance of international markets are often guilty of lacking international content (MoreNiche, I am talking of you guys now! Not you alone of course - but you too!)

With all that said, I’d like to thank all the nice, hard working, helpful affiliate managers I met over the year 2008 for the pleasure I’ve had working with them. I hope that the next year will bring us more sales and create new opportunities, regardless of the recession.

Starting in April, Google’s policy on display URLs in AdWords will change:

 In response to advertiser and user feedback, and in an effort to provide more relevant advertising results and a higher quality experience for our users, we have made the decision to no longer allow certain exceptions with regards to our display URL policy. This includes, but is not limited to redirects and vanity URLs. This policy will be strictly enforced regardless of past approvals and will apply to all advertisers, beginning on April 1st.

Why should you as an affiliate marketer care?

Many affiliate marketers use PPC and specifically AdWords to drive traffic to affiliate offers and generate sales.  It’s a quick way to make money as an affiliate as it doesn’t require a long term link building campaign to achieve desirable traffic amounts, albeit with its own specifics. PPC for affiliate marketing can be done in two ways:

• either an affiliate drives PPC traffic to his own site
• or the traffic goes directly to the affiliate’s referral URL directly on the product site.

The second option surely seems like an easier one, considering that the affiliates save the potential customer an extra step before making a purchase. But in terms of this AdWords  policy change, it would mean that affiliates will ahve to display their URL with the affiliate code in it, right? Which now doesn’t seem like a good idea as if somebody removes the affiliate code from the URL the affiiate won’t get credited for the sale…

That’s the reason why affiliates became worried about this policy change. There has been a number of posts on this topic, including this one by John Jonas .  He gives affiliates who do direct linking some tips on how to handle this new policy while outlining the negative sides of each solution as well.  Essentially, what he advises is:

•  getting better at AdWords than others advertising the same product
• setting up your own domain
• cloaking

Go read the complete post, it is worth it.

One thing I should warn you about, however, is  the difficulty of the third root, should you decide to choose it. It is REALLY REALLY REALLY difficult to do it right without having special tools - or a ton of your own resources.

Which is why I thought I’d post a link to a 10% discount code for Fantomaster’s cloaking tools, the leading tools in the industry. Some of you may find them useful, and with the price tag these tools have, this discount will come handy.

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.

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.

No matter what tactics you pursue as an affiliate marketer, what affiliate programs you work with, whether you use PPC or organic SEO, targeting the right keywords is your key to success. Finding those keywords that bring you sales yet are not so evident that everyone and their dog uses them making for huge competition can make a whole lot of a difference. I think it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to even say your keyword choice can make you or break you as an affiliate business.

Clearly, you need proper tools to find the right keywords. Out of my own experience, WordZe is the best keyword research tool out there. It not only lets you create your keyword lists but also research the competition and even spy on what others do in your market. What else an online marketer needs?

A free 30-day trial!

Don’t take my word for it but see for yourself if WordZe suits you as a keyword research tool. Right now, the WordZe folks have announced this crazy offer: only till January 14, you can sign up for free and play with it all you want for the whole month.

Quoting the WordZe site, here’s a list of features that you get:

* 3,000 Searches Per Day
* 10,000 Keywords Per Project
* Unlimited Projects
* WordRank Reports
* Keyword Digger
* Historical Keyword Data
* Keyword Expander
* Weekly Top Keywords
* Monthly Top Keywords
* Keyword Importer
* Access to the API, and more

Go sign up for free 30-day WordZe trial and see for yourself!

Affiliate marketing is potentially a great source of income and  there are people who make a living off it and have quit their daytime jobs. However, it’s not a secret to anybody that out of all the people starting as affiliates only a small part will be successful and make a noteworthy income. While there are different tricks to how you can make it happen, knowing why it might not happen is just as good - so as to be warned and try to avoid the pitfalls that can kill your success.

There is a great list of a total of 99 reasons why you can fail at affiliate marketing over at AffEarners forum. Go give it a read and try not to repeat the mistakes listed there!