Affiliate Programs

As an affiliate marketer, choosing the right affiliate marketing program could be a daunting task. There are numerous affiliate networks being advertised on the internet and in most cases, the profit you make is not worth the time, effort and money you put in marketing products and services from other affiliate networks. But with Click-bank, the situation is different.

Many would agree that Click-bank is the goldmine that you are looking for. Here are 4 great reasons why this is true:

They say that the easiest way to make money is to love what you do. If you think you don’t have the talent for marketing, then you should try selling a product or service you are interested in. Click-bank is a world of opportunities.

The site lists more than 11,000 products and services so you will surely find one that will fit your taste. The best thing about this network is that you can earn hefty affiliate commissions ranking from 5% to 75% of the sales value! That’s something you wont get from another network which pays a residual amount.

Also, your personal dashboard and the live tracking feature will allow you to determine which marketing technique works best!

Registration to Click-bank is free.

Unlike other affiliate programs, Click-bank does not have a monthly service fee. If you wanted to become a member of the network, all you have to do is to enter all information requested and approve the confirmation email and you can start earning!

If you ever need to have capital in affiliate marketing, you will probably have to spend it on hiring people to take care of traffic generation and promotion of your affiliate link. If you have your own established site where you can promote the product or service you are an affiliate of, then you save on these expenses too.

Click-bank has earned a name for itself in the internet marketing business. It is known for quality products, high income opportunity, and secure and efficient database. Through its refund rating system, many buyers and affiliate marketers have realized that there’s no better way of determining the quality of a product. The system works this way: the more people who return and refund the product or service sold to them, the lower is the product or services’ rating. As the refund rate increases, the product slowly gets deleted from the index.

Click-bank offers a win-win situation

The site is secure so you can be sure that your personal information will be kept confidential. Also, because of Click-bank’s reputation in the internet marketing world, there’s a higher likelihood of someone purchasing the products that you are promoting.

Once you are a member of Click-bank, your ultimate task is to promote your affiliate link. There are several ways to do this: email marketing, article marketing, SEO, adsense and ad words. If you have your own website, then you need to focus on traffic generation - the more people visiting (and reading) your site, the bigger chance you have in making a sale.

In case you have a website, and want to know who is visiting it, you will need a web analytics tool. Of course, you could directly check the log and understand the behavior of users on your website. However, if there are too many records to read through, it can be a daunting task. A web analytics tool is a perfect piece of software that will give you the regular reports about who is visiting your website and how many times. You however need to know, how to use this utility effectively. Following is the explanation of the same.

The first thing that you need to do is collect the data. If you have web analytics tool handy, it would take care of the same. You must ensure that you have included all the data collecting parts of your website. These parts could be the CGI logs, Web logs, forms, and any other data that may be generated by the website.

Once you have successfully collected the data, it needs to be transformed. It can be a tedious task to review the web logs manually. You would therefore need to transform the available data into an easily understandable format that can be manipulated. Most of the web analytics tools do this functionality as well. However, certain non-web log formatted data such as CGI may need you do the conversion.

With the collected and then transformed data, you could start your analysis. This phase of the web analytics would interest you the most. You need to understand the pattern of the traffic coming to your website. Following are the points to check for:

Is there a specific time when most of your visitors visit your website? What are the most visited pages of your website? How many pages does an average user view before quitting your website? On an average, how long do your visitors stay at the website? Does your traffic come from the search engines? What are the most common pages that most of visitors exit your website from? Who is linked up to your website?

You should now be setting bench marks for yourself. With all the analysis done, you know the strong and weak points of your website. You can now plan your actions and execute them to reach newer standards. For instance, you could add more business links to the pages that are frequently visited by the people, and optimize the lesser visited ones for more traffic flow. In short, you should work in a direction to capitalize on the strong aspects of your website and improve on the weaker aspects.

Your potential visitors need to know what updates you have made to your website. Unless they are aware of the updates, your hard work would go in vain. This certainly calls for the promotion of your website, highlighting the newly made updates, to attract the visitors.

You must repeat the above process time and again. This is in fact, a continual process that you must do.

In the years I’ve invested myself in dedication to the business of Internet Marketing, I’ve observed that though technologies and different fields of expertise appear and recede overtime like any other ever-changing business outlook, only timeless, universal principles remain.

The first and foremost characteristic of Internet Marketing is automation. Alex Mandossian once said that “Internet Marketing is meant to train us as lazy workers but high thinkers.” We are constantly thinking of better ways to attain 100% automation, which is near impossible, for thinking itself is already hard work.

Despite this, Internet Marketing may not be simple, but it is definitely very systematic in nature, such that it is really an easy business to do due to the availability of metrics software for performance measurement. By knowing and understanding results-by-the-numbers, Internet marketers can tweak and re-launch sales and marketing campaigns for better returns. This is not something that brick-and-mortar businesses are capable of and ready to embrace as part of their daily business handling activities.

Coming back to principles, here are 10 things you can always bear in mind as you go about doing your business online. Even if you are attempting one niche after another (and that’s what some self-employed do these days), following a certain entrepreneurial pattern based on principles can help you get into the thick of action easily and systematically.

1) Provide lots of quality content on your website. The litmus test is: Would you freely publish something that you would otherwise sell?

2) Be tight, comprehensive and cohesive about your site theme. For example, your site may be about dogs rather than dog collars, which is a smaller, more focused niche. Nonetheless, you can design and implement a clear structure with different sections covering dog training, dog hygiene, dog naming, dog psychology, doggy habits, etc. You can aim for a portal or library of information and it can still not be confusing.

3) Setup a blog. You heard this many time: “Search engines love blogs.” Well, go and create one, link it up to your main site, publish snippets of information and send out RSS feeds. Search engines will find you fast!

4) Create a plan of using traffic exchanges, safelists, FFA lists etc. to draw traffic to your site. I, like many people, did not believe that you can funnel targeted traffic from these places, until I came across a few experts in this area.

5) Build a lead capture page offering a powerful freebie, an e-course or a reason visitors can’t refuse…on condition they must subscribe to you.

6) Create free materials like viral e-books to give away. Write articles and e-courses and submit everywhere you can. Reuse your articles to suit every possible form of online and offline media. Just keep your eyes open. What goes around always comes around. You are bound to be famous on the Internet in 6 months if not a year. Or start an article/free e-book directory service yourself! You can attract more writers and material seekers with the most minimal of effort.

7) Get your visitors and subscribers involved with YOU. Give them a role, a stake or control over the content of your site, forum, chat room, online survey or newsletter etc. You can sustain their interest and effectively build up not only traffic volume but also the quality of customer relationships overtime. The noblest yet most challenging thing to do is finding ways to build up their own monetary value. That’s what Jay Abraham, Bob Proctor and many other experts do.
Create an affiliate program for your products and services to encourage affiliates bring new referrals to you! It’s a great way to get targeted newcomers to your site.

9) Create postcards with your e-zine information and business cards to hand out at events. Also print out articles and hand them around at events (which must be appropriate in context). Your signature at the articles’ end leads them to your site. Show them you are the expert here!

10) One great way to multiply subscriber addresses in your list is invite fellow online marketers to swap e-zine ads with you. Many marketers know the benefit of this, and it’s free and easy to implement. All it takes is mutual agreement on how often and how many times to publish each other’s ads!

Yes, there is a lot of work involved, these 10 points are only general and the devil is in the details. But you see, even though I’m no SEO or link exchange techie, I am carrying out all 10 points in my daily work and with continuous measurement of my results my income has nowhere else to go but up as I optimize the monetary value of my effort. Ultimately I am doing what these 10 points say because they can sustain online longevity.

When you seriously put them into practice, turning your actions into regular habits is only a matter of time. In one year, your situation will be much better than where you are today, and all you need to do is create a system of productive action based on these 10 points. This is my encouragement to you.