How you make big money as an affiliate

Some affiliates make huge profits – we’re talking millions of dollars in a year. It’s a fact. People don’t know this. Affiliate marketing is a new line of business, and it has great unexploited potential.

“”In the poker niche, some poker sites pay you $300 for each player you recruit. Mortgage institutions may pay $75 for every lead, that is, your visitor doesn’t even have to take a loan for you to get paid.””

Gigantic marketplace at your reach

The internet as a marketplace is huge, and still it lies waiting in your computer. If you can reach just a tiny fraction of the world’s web visitors, you may see life-changing money rolling into your affiliate account.

Amazing but true!

No automatic success

Now, don’t quit your day job! Not every affiliate business is successful. Making a lot of money is never easy, plenty of hard work is required. Persistency, ambition, maybe a certain talent. Good ideas will help.

But people live from their affiliate businesses, and some affiliates are extremely successful. The people behind this site have been extremely successful. In this article we’ll show you how to make your affiliate business boom.

How it works

Starting up an affiliate business is very easy:

Build a site, if you don’t already have one.
Sign up with a few profitable affiliate programs that are related to your site.
Link to the affiliate programs from your site using your personal tracking links.
Generate traffic to your site
Make your visitors want to buy the products of the affiliate programs.

That’s it. If you can do this, your visitors will click on the links and purchase products from the affiliate programs – and the commission goes right into your affiliate account.

How to find the best affiliate programs

Joining affiliate programs is cost-free, and you can use our site to find the programs that are best for your business. We provide you with updated lists of the top affiliate programs in each niche, with their respective advantages.

Categories of affiliate programs are listed in the column to the right. Read our reviews and join the programs that you like. If you already have a site, make sure you choose a niche that fits your site.

The most profitable affiliate markets

According to our experience, the biggest paychecks are delivered to affiliates in the following affiliate markets:

Poker
Mortgage
Education

In the poker niche, some poker sites pay you $300 CPA for each player you recruit. Mortgage institutions may pay $75 for every lead, that is, your visitor doesn’t even have to take a loan for you to get paid.

Merchants in these areas early realized the gain in paying others to do their marketing. Very high commissions have attracted lots of affiliates, and they have been very successful.

Sounds tempting? Check out our toplists, affiliate programs and reviews in the mortgage and education segments!

Tough competition in lucrative niches

If you don’t have a site, you need to decide which niche to work in. Choosing a niche involves several questions, such as which niche offers the biggest potential profits and which area you’re genuinely interested in.

Some affiliate markets turn over really big money, while others are much smaller. Making big money in a small niche isn’t a given, of course. On the other hand, very lucrative niches come with very hard competition.

Finding the most profitable niche might require pretty deep considerations. Some successful affiliates did put huge efforts into this analysis before even starting up (or buying) their site.

Again, if you plan to start up small or if you already have a site, finding good affiliate programs is easy using our toplists and reviews.

What makes you tick?

Don’t close your eyes to the importance of personal motivation. When the workload is huge and success comes in very small chunks, working in an area that you care for makes a difference. For most of us, love of money isn’t the prime mover.

It’s easier to promote things that you like.

Primary success factors – things you must do

Build a good site

Your site is your tool. When a person enters a site, you have only a couple of seconds to catch her. The site must be well organized and have the right look and feel in order to make visitors stay and take action.

Make sure that your site leads the visitors to the Buy button without hassle. Invite them to take action (such as making a purchase), and don’t let them off the hook once you have their interest. This is called conversion.

Taking action must be easy!

Create great content

Good looks aren’t enough. For your site to generate income, it needs to accomplish two things:

Attract a lot of visitors (traffic)
Make visitors purchase (conversion)

This is primarily done by filling your site with really good content and good usability. It should be relevant for the visitors, and it should encourage them to purchase from your merchants (marketing).

Search engine optimization

If you have chosen to attract mainly organic traffic, that is, through the search engines, the content also needs to be search engine optimized (SEO).

Rule the net with good SEO copy

Search engines pay more and more attention to text quality. Relevant and well-written text doesn’t only wins your readers’ heart, it helps you rank in Google and drives traffic to your site.

Write for your readers – and for Google. It’s called SEO copy.

Advertise and build traffic

Another way of attracting traffic is by paid ads and links. The main arena for this is called PPC (pay per click). You place an ad on another site and pays a small amount each time a visitor clicks on your ad. Learn more about Adwords PPC advertising!

The biggest PPC market for affiliates today is Google Adwords. You decide how much you’re willing to pay for each click and set a cap for your total spending – so there’s no risk for cost explosions. Some web hosts give away free Adwords checks when you place your site with them.

Notice that affiliate programs often limit where and how you’re allowed to advertise their products – they don’t want you to interfere with their own advertising.

Buying a site vs starting from scratch

For private persons and small businesses, the easiest and least expensive way to start a new affiliate business is to set up a new domain and build a site from scratch. It requires time and effort, but your capital investment can be close to zero.

If you have some resources and want things to happen fast, consider buying an existing site. Old sites may have a built-in credential with the search engines (page rank), and they may even have some traffic already. With the right actions, you can get an old site up in speed very fast.

Give luck a chance

So, that’s the short version of how to make big money as an affiliate. Successful affiliates can lead very nice lives, with lots of personal freedom and job satisfaction. Anyone with internet access can try their luck as an affiliate, but of course success is never certain.

One thing is certain though: you cannot succeed if you don’t try.

Trying is easy, and it costs almost nothing. If you try and fail, what’s the worst that can happen? This list shows the consequences of the worst case scenario:

Nothing happens

As you can see, this is pretty much the same as if you don’t try =)

Top 6 affiliate programs

If you’ve decided to give it a go, why not check out the top five money-generating affiliate programs all categories? Maybe one of them is the starting point of your new career.

CardOffers – $160 for credit card approval and $30 for application submit.
WebHostingBuzz – Promote a highly demanded online service
ThinkHost – The eco-friendly web host, plants a tree for every new customer
AdValiant Network – The best affiliate network on the market
Axandra – Promote best selling software IBP and earn high commission
MarketHealth – Niche affiliate network on the lucrative health market

For further help in becoming an successful affiliate, or get educated with some best selling literature on affiliate marketing on Amazon.com

X-Shops: Fast and Reliable Ecommerce hosting

Obvious: People Don’t Want to Pay for Online News

Mzinga and Babson Executive Education recently conducted a survey, which examined the adoption, use and current state of social technologies in business. The findings revealed that 86% of respondents use social technologies in one or more areas of business, including marketing, internal collaboration/learning, customer service and support, sales, and HR.

Paid Content UK conducted a Poll with Harris Interactive, asking respondents how much they would pay for online news, and what they would do if they’re favorite news sites started charging. The findings, perhaps not so shocking, indicate that users basically don’t really want to pay.

Paid Content’s Robert Andrews says they’ve “learned that only five percent of regular news site users would pay if their favorite haunt started charging, and that readers would prefer to subscribe annually.”

Even for annual subscriptions, users don’t appear to be prepared to spend too much. As you can see from Paid Content’s graph (below), the higher the price goes, the less the percentage of users who wish to pay it for an annual subscription.

So if they don’t want to pay, or they want to pay very little, what would they do if their favorite site(s) began charging for content? Well, most would just go somewhere else for their content and find a new favorite site. According to the findings from the poll, as many as 74% would simply find an alternative free site. In addition, 8% would use the site’s free headlines only, 12% are not sure what they would do, and only 5% would pay to continue reading.

You have to wonder if the big publishers out there considering a paid-subscription model are paying attention to this info. “If Rupert Murdoch thinks readers will pay to read his websites, maybe he should think again,” says Andrews.

“Bitten by the low prices of online ads and the recent slowdown in advertising generally, News Corp is not alone in re-examining the financial viability of online news provision,” he adds. “Other publishers, too, are considering models including charging-for-content, readers’ clubs with value-added extras, selling physical merchandise and memorabilia and even reader donations.”

The poll goes on to look at more specific details about demographics such as age, class, and region, to see who is willing to pay for online news. The option of finding another free site pretty much remains consistent across the board.

Source: webpronews.com

X-Shops: Fast and Reliable Ecommerce hosting

Most Businesses Implementing Social Media Without Measuring ROI

“This survey further confirms how important social technologies have become within existing business functions and processes,” says Barry Libert, Chairman and CEO of Mzinga. The survey was conducted among 555 people from “various disciplines”. Here are some additional findings:
- Over 60% use social technologies in some form as an ongoing component of their business

- Over 55% of respondents say their business currently devotes employee resources (part-time or full-time) to manage and drive their social media initiatives, while only 40% have also allocated budget to those efforts

- Common challenges organizations are facing include senior leadership acceptance, defining program strategies and goals, lack of dedicated resources, as well as lack of measurement and ROI tracking

The survey also found that the types of social applications being used among businesses is quite varied, but the majority are integrating them within their corporate websites. Most use vendor-provided solutions, but 26% have actually implemented proprietary solutions. 20% use free or trial downloads.

eMarketer has put together some graphs based on the data from this survey:

In addition, respondents considered themselves satisfied with the social tools available to them, for the most part. The survey found that very few are actually measuring ROI, however.
- 55% of respondents report that their current solutions are not lacking features or functions that they wish they had

- 79% of respondents are not currently measuring ROI in any for social media programs

- 41% of respondents do not know if their current social tools used can measure ROI

Lack of measurable data has been a common gripe of social media for businesses for quite some time. The thing is, there are so many different ways to use social media for the business perspective, that measurement can only come when a particular strategy is identified. Even in some of those it can be difficult.

We are beginning to enter a phase of social media, however, where these measurement issues are being addressed more and more. Analytics tools are becoming more common place, and will likely continue to do so. For example, YouTube and Facebook both have “insights” tools, which allow you to track engagement regarding a business social profile.

Source: webpronews.com

12 Design Tips for Building a Small Business Website

Designing a Website can be hard work, what skills do you need? can you do it yourself? should you do it yourself? When should you start to think about a website? After your company is up and running or is your business based on the web.

These are just a few questions you may be asking yourself and probably ones you should try get the answers to, by getting help from mentors or a web design company you should be able to come to the right answers.

I’ve put a list together of things you should take in to consideration when planning, designing and building your website, the main aim being delivering content that visitors like but also being good to get ranked on search engine.

1. Design a logo, make sure you have a good logo. This is your brand and what you want people to remember you for. This will generally be at the top of your site, so its the first thing people see. A logo/brand can say a lot about you so this is important.

2. Text on each page needs to be relevant, a minimum of 250 words, having keywords about your product or service is good to have in there. Possibly look at having copy written by a professional that knows how to write for the web.

3. Images are important also, good quality shots of a product can say a thousand words, bad pictures can bring down the look of the site. But make sure you don’t overload on pictures.

4. Each page should have its own page title, meta descriptions and meta keywords, a very important part in building your website.

5. Try use CSS (cascading style sheets), this works better for search engines and will also make for easier changes on the website, ie colour, font or font size.

6. H1-H6 tags should be used to highlight the main title on the page of where your text is, this usually relates to the page title, H2 tags would possibly follow as the titles of the following paragraphs. Bold text should be used to highlight keywords within the paragraphs also, but don’t overdo this.

7. If you can use text navigation as this allows search engines to index your website better.

8. Make sure it’s easy for an end user to buy your product or find the service, If its not easy to find what chance have you got to promote it. This all goes towards the conversion and bringing in the sales.

9. Links from your pages to other internal pages is also good, promote other products or services, making it easier for a user to find other things on your site. Again don’t overdo this too much.

10. Build a site map, this makes it easier for search engines to index, you can upload an XML site map to Google webmaster tools which is beneficial in indexing all pages on your site.

11. If you are gathering any info from the website, ie through a form you should have a Privacy Policy.

12. Finally install Google Analytics, this is very important as the data that if gives your back about your visitors and where they come from is invaluable.

This is only a few points to think about, but it should give you a start when you are thinking about the design and build of your site. I would recommend that you consult with a web design company as they should be able to design and build a site exactly to your requirements and generally more professional in hitting the mark of your target audience.

Author: Gordon Higgins

Google Splits Up Google Base

Google has split Google Base into two separate entities – Google Base and the new Google Merchant Center. The Merchant Center will replace Google Base for users who submit product-type items to Google.

“If you submit products to Google, Google Merchant Center is now the place to upload your feeds, check on the status of your items, and get information on the performance of your listings,” says Google Merchant Center Product Manager Loannis Kalafatis.

Google Base remains available for other types of structured content, but according to Google the Merchant Center is better optimized for product listings.

“In general, the Merchant Center interface is very similar to the Google Base interface, so we hope it’s easy to transition,” says Kalafatis.

Google says they will continue to add features and improve the tools for uploading and managing product listings with the Merchant Center. Users can use the same Google account information to sign in to the Merchant Center that they used for Google Base. Existing data feeds, items, FTP settings, etc. will be there waiting.

Non-product items users previously submitted to Google Base will stay there. Google says if you used Google Base for both products and non-products in the past, you will have to reset your FTP settings in Google Base.

Source: webpronews.com

McAfee And Adobe Partner On Security Software

mcafee Security firm McAfee has partnered with Adobe to develop software that will offer companies’ data protection and digital rights management.

McAfee will uses its policy-based data classification with Adobe’s policy-based document protection to allow organizations to secure business information such as intellectual property or regulatory compliance data.

“We are excited about the potential that this partnership can bring to our joint customers and partners,” said Gerhard Watzinger, general manager of McAfee’s data protection business unit.

“Both McAfee and Adobe serve millions of consumers and the world’s largest enterprises. By combining our efforts in the way information is handled and secured, our customers’ data will be better protected.”

As part of the partnership, McAfee is making its free diagnostic tool, McAfee Security Scan, available as an optional download to users installing Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash Player software. The tool allows users to check for anti-virus software and firewall protection on their computers.

When the scan is finished, users see a report detailing the presence and status of security protection.

More details about the partnership will be announced at McAfee’s upcoming security conference FOCUS 09, taking place next month in Las Vegas.

“At Adobe, our goal is to provide our customers with the most effective and reliable means to securely collaborate and exchange information,” said, Kumar Vora, vice president and general manager for LiveCycle at Adobe.

Source: webpronews.com