If You’re an Affiliate Marketer, You NEED these Tools!

If You’re an Affiliate Marketer, You NEED these Tools!

There is a proverb that goes, “A bad workman always quarrels with his tools.” Why he does that is anyone’s guess… maybe he is hot tempered or maybe his tools are argumentative. Whatever the case, tools are crucial for both cantankerous workmen and SUCCESSFUL affiliate marketers.

Have you heard of the super affiliate who uses free hosting and free autoresponders? No? You haven’t? Don’t worry… no one else has either.

Many beginner affiliate marketers try to skimp on costs and make the mistake of trying to use free alternatives rather than paid services. Any saved costs is then squandered on some get rich quick system that never delivers on its promises.

As an affiliate marketer, it is of paramount importance that you understand that this is a business and all businesses have fixed and/or variable costs. There is no getting away from this fact. You will need to spend some money in order to make much more.

Being penny wise pound foolish will not only sabotage your efforts but also impede your progress. To be a successful affiliate marketer, 3 tools are crucial. In fact, you could almost say that they are the cornerstones in your business. Without them, it is almost certain that you’ll fail.

The first tool you’ll need is your own domain name. The operative word here is “your own”… Ignore the fact that that’s 2 words. You absolutely should not build your business on someone else’s web property.

Yes, you may have to spend a few dollars buying a domain, but at least you will know that you have control over it.

Many marketers spent a lot of time and money building Squidoo pages a few years ago. All of a sudden, Squidoo, changed its policies and these marketers found that their earning dried up overnight.

You will always be subjected to the whims and fancies of some other person/s decisions if you don’t own your own domain name.  Your content may be deleted, you pages may have ads for Viagra, etc. There is a price to pay for free domains. It’s just not cash.

The second tool you’ll need is hosting. Web hosting is extremely affordable. Companies such as Hostgator, Arvixe, Dreamhost and many more provide plans that most beginner marketers can afford. There really is no excuse to not get paid hosting.

Sure… you could opt for free hosting. Just like choosing a free domain, you’ll once again have no control over your business. Free web hosting usually comes with a ton of unrelated ads that will appear on your site.

Choose paid hosting. You can also host unlimited domains on the same account for one low monthly price.

The third tool you will need is an autoresponder. You may have heard the saying, “The money is in the list” repeated ad nauseam.

Yet, many beginners try to save money by not getting one. This is understandable since an autoresponder is an ongoing cost. However, it would be myopic to not build a list because of this.

Initially, the autoresponder may be costing more than it makes. However, with time as you build your list and your subscribers swell in number from hundreds to thousands, the list will pay for itself. You’ll be able to develop a relationship with many people through email.

This autoresponder is currently getting better results than Aweber! 

You can provide them with free, useful content so they start to trust you. This will reap rewards when you promote something they will find helpful. You’ll get sales and earn commissions that far exceed the cost of your autoresponder.

Besides these 3 tools, there are several other tools such as keyword tools, rank checking tools, spy tools, etc. However, these tools are nowhere near as important as those mentioned in this article.

If you’re a serious affiliate marketer who actually plans on making money be sure to grab a domain, hosting plan, and an autoresponder to make your business easier and increase its chances of success.

How to Find Affiliate Marketing Offers

There are many different sites that you can use to find affiliate marketing offers. 

Clickbank is one of the most well-known and also very popular and it focus on digital informational products. Clickbank is a great place to start if you are new to affiliate marketing because it has a wide variety to choose from and it's very easy to get started. Clickbank lets you, as an affiliate, sell electronic products even if you do not have a merchant account and the commissions generally range from 50% to 75% of the sale. Right now, Clickbank boasts over 100,000 affiliates that are selling over 10,000 products. 

In order to choose the right products, most people look at the "Gravity" and popularity score which is assigned to each product. The easy definition of gravity is a measure of how much competition there is for the particular product - however, the actual measurement is derived by a more complicated formula. In general, you do want a comparatively high gravity when looking for a product to promote, but not so high that it is too hard for you to compete. 

Commission Junction (CJ) is another popular site that has many affiliate marketing offers from which to choose. The merchants that put their products and services on Commission Junction tend to be bigger and more established companies who are experienced in product development, marketing, and promotion. CJ also offers many types of promotional links for its affiliates. So, you can promote the products and services that you choose with banners, text links, product links, and search boxes. 

Amazon was one of the founders of the affiliate movement and it is a noteworthy affiliate network to join if you want to sell products from your site or blog. While the commissions with Amazon are generally lower, it is extremely easy to get set up with promoting products on your blog or website, and it is much easier to make sales with these products. And you can even choose to set up what is known as an Amazon aStore. Another handy feature of Amazon is that it offers context link ads and Widgets. 

If you want to take your analysis a step further, you can take a look at OfferVault.com. This site allows you to search for the type of product or service you would like to promote and then gives you a list of all of the platforms that offer these products and services. Offervault offers both CPA and affiliate network offers and it is completely free for affiliates and publishers alike which makes it accessible to everyone -- even the newcomers to the affiliate marketing game. This site can save you lots of time in searching for the right product or service to promote and comparing various products/services and networks. New affiliate marketing offers are added daily to this site.

5 Tips to Succeeding at Affiliate Marketing

It does seem wonderful, doesn’t it? The idea of sitting at home in your pajamas and watching the dollars pour into your PayPal account. The beauty of not creating a product, handling fulfillment and customer support, etc. but still earning a juicy commission for each sale. And of course, who can deny the joy of not working for the man… and living life the way you want to.

Such happiness… but are these merely castles built on polluted air? Is it really possible to make a 5 or even 6 figure salary as an affiliate marketer? Or is this dream only reserved for a lucky few?

Here’s the truth. Yes it is possible to build a massive income solely usinf affiliate marketing - when you do it right!
If you’re reading this, you too can do it. The only things that separate the minority who succeed from the majority who don’t, are just a few simple practices and a mindset which makes all the difference.

This article will give you 5 tips that you should follow like gospel. You can bet your last dollar that the top affiliates are using all the tips below. Neglecting these tips can be perilous to your affiliate marketing quest. Or you could take a shortcut and check out our 12-part video series that goes step-by-step on how to create an affiliate website, drive traffic to it and monetize it HERE

1. Giving up is NOT an option.
The road to becoming a good affiliate or a top affiliate is a hard one. There will be a learning curve that you’ll need to go through. You will encounter failure repeatedly and will face self-doubts often.
If you throw in the towel and quit during the hard yards, you will never see success. Success usually comes to the affiliate marketers who keep trying, keep pushing forward, keep learning from mistakes and making corrections, etc. Success is not linear.
You must have the strength to persevere till you attain success. Failure may be a setback but never an option, Keep on keeping on.

2. Build a Website/Blog
You should start a blog or website so that you can attract visitors and content. Even marketers who use paid advertising, usually have websites with simple squeeze pages and funnels.
You’ll need to learn how to build a website or a blog, create content, etc. Yes… there is work involved. You should always purchase your own domain name. Do not use free domains or blogging sites.

3. Planning is key.
You must have a plan and work the plan. Do not create a new plan every 10 minutes and hop from plan to plan. Create a detailed plan of action and follow through with it to finality. Only by doing this can you hope to achieve any success.
Many affiliate marketers get distracted. One day they’re doing video marketing and the next day they’re thinking of selling tee shirts on Facebook.
The eagle that chases 2 rabbits catches neither… It’s a good saying. However, eagles always have the good sense to only target one prey. It’s marketers who have problems staying focused.

4. Never Stop Learning
It’s tough but that’s the way it is. The online landscape is always in flux. Nothing is constant but change. What does that mean? It means you will constantly need to keep learning and adapting.
You will need to stay updated and enjoy the learning process. For example, old static sites are dropping like flies in the SERP rankings for not being mobile responsive. So, marketers had to hurry and make their sites mobile responsive because more people are surfing the net with their smart phones these days.

5. Diversify when you’re ready
Never put all your eggs in one basket. When you become a successful affiliate marketer, you may look towards creating your own products. For example, if you’re making good money promoting a digital book about tinnitus, how about getting your own tinnitus eBook created?
You could make sales for yourself, recruit other affiliates to promote your product, etc. The possibilities are endless and highly interesting.

Learn to outsource the less important stuff. Focus on working on the business and not in the business. Of course, it will take time to reach this level where you can leverage. However, once you’re ready, go for it and your earnings will skyrocket. When this happens, you will become a part of the elite marketers that you once looked up to.
It may have taken you a while to get there… but you’re there now. Give yourself a pat on the back and keep going.

4 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Campaigns

The hard truth is that if you can’t get targeted traffic to your affiliate links, your online business is never going to succeed and is dead in the water!

You could have the best sales copy, the best product and a state-of-the-art website… but if there is nobody seeing it, you’re not going to make a cent. I know because I have been there!

Once you have all the vital components in place such as a good squeeze page, offer, sales funnel, etc. then you should dedicate the majority of your effort to driving traffic to your offer. This is vital if you want your online business to succeed.

This article will give you 4 ways of driving traffic. Focus on only 1 or 2 at a time till you master them. Many beginners make the mistake of dabbling half-heartedly in several different methods and not succeeding with any single one. Focus, focus, focus.

1. SEO
Search engine optimization is like Indiana Jones finding the Holy Grail. It’s next to impossible to master it. Truth be told, Indy’s chances were higher. That being said, you should still do your best to learn as much as you can about SEO.
The fundamentals are roughly the same. Optimize your content for the keyword and related keywords. Have a keyword optimized title, descriptions, tags, etc. Things have changed quite a bit these days.
You should write for people and not the search engines. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing. Good content will keep visitors on your site longer. This increased visitor retention will boost your rankings.
If you’re buying backlinks, make sure your anchor text is widely diversified to make it all look natural. And these days have a lot of anchor text that just says things like "click here" or "to find out more" etc. Your best course of action will be to get a guide on SEO and learn all that you can.

2. Forum Marketing
This is another excellent way to drive traffic to your offers or pages. The concept is simple. You will join forums related to your niche. You’ll then lurk for a while so that you can pick up on the vibe of the group, understand their lingo, problems, desires etc.
Next, you should join in the discussions and post helpful comments and information. This will get your name out there and more people will start trusting you. In your forum signature, you will have a link back to your page.
People who have read your posts may get curious and click on your link. The more posts you have on various forums, the more traffic you will get. Do not spam the forums. Just aim for a few posts in different forums daily and let the traffic snowball with time.

3. Article Marketing
Ho! Worry not! It’s not dead yet. Things have just changed dramatically. Gone are those days when you submit a dodgy article to article directories and your article ranks. Google has gotten much smarter these days.
Now, you will need to write content that is top shelf and highly useful to the reader. You may submit these articles to sites or blogs that have high traffic. Just Google “your niche + write for us”. This will bring up several sites that need content.
Assess the traffic the sites get and approach the site owners with your article and see if they’d be interested in publishing it on their page with a link back to your site. Trust me, blog owners are always looking for content to save them having to write it all.

4. Email Marketing
Yes… the list, the money… you’ve heard it all. You’ll hear it again too. Why?
Because it is 100% true. Make sure you have a squeeze page to capture the emails of as many visitors as possible. A fantastic tool for this is ClickFunnels. It is owned by Russell Brunson who knows a bit about online marketing!!!! This is the only way you will ever have a chance to market to them again.
Over time, the size of your list will swell and if you’ve been doing things right and building trust, when you are ready to promote an affiliate product to them, they will trust your recommendations and make a purchase.

These are just 4 of the many ways you can drive traffic to your affiliate links. Choose one and focus all your attention on it. Once that works, outsource the menial tasks to maintain it and focus on a new traffic method. In this way, you will have visitors from many different traffic methods over time.

There is a 5th one which has become more and more popular in recent times - https://lakesideprofits.clickfunnels.com/optin4xbzz70t
5. Social Media Marketing
Using all of the social media platforms but especially Facebook and Twitter you can really build your online business and start making money from affiliate sales. Check out our free offer below by simply clicking the image.

Affiliate Marketing Terms and Their Meaning

Affiliate Marketing is a concept with it's own terms. To get started, you'll have to know what the middlemen and affiliate program pitches mean when they use them, otherwise it will strike you as a bunch of gibberish. For those of you with some experience already in this matter, these terms are for the beginners.

These will get you started with your affiliate marketing understanding. Some programs are also multi-tier, which means you get paid on downline several tiers beneath you or more.

• Two-Tier Program: An affiliate program that pays you for your sales and those of anyone you recruit. For all intents and purposes, if you recruit and train your second tier, they will make you money.
• Super Affiliate: An affiliate marketer in the top 5% of all affilate marketers. These are the ones that make 80% of all the commissions in affiliate marketing and the aspiration of all affiliate marketers looking to get rich doing this.
• Pay Per Sale: The most common ways to get paid in affiliate programs. When you send someone to a site and they buy a product, eBook, download, or membership, you get paid a percentage of the gross on it.
• Pay Per Lead: This one is not common but very handy. When you send someone to a site and they sign up for a free trial, e-mail list or sales call, it's called a lead. Some companies pay you to give them leads, which is good for you, because you are getting paid to give a potential customer something for free.
• Pay Per Click: You get paid anytime someone clicks on a link from your site. The biggest example of a program that does this is Google AdSense, which gives you Pay Per Click ads to put your site and pays you every time someone clicks on it. Miva ARX and Yahoo! also have ad programs that work this way.
• Creative: The collective reference given by some programs to the sum total of all their advertising stuff, like ad gif's, testimonials, product photos, and copy text.Conversion: The percentage of people you send to an affiliate site that buy. 1% is the industry average. Getting conversions is the name of the game in affiliate marketing.
• Commission: This is how you get paid by all affiliate marketing programs. It's not a salary or a fee, and taxes are not deducted and thus your problem to track. Commissions are usually expressed in percent, although some are given in dollars per sale.
• Affiliate Program: An agreement with a given company that has this sort of program to advertise and promote their products in exchange for payment, usually as a commission per sale. You do this at your own expense, although the programs themselves are free to join. I have heard of those that require payment to join, but I strongly recommend against them, as there are plenty of good programs you can join for free.
• Affiliate Link: This is how the company knows who to pay. These are the hypertext links given to you by the affiliate program that differentiates you from generic traffic at large. Unless you send someone through an affiliate link, you don't get paid.
• Ad Copy: A written sales pitch, also known simply as 'copy'. Most follow the AIDA form (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) and examples can be seen on any site that's selling something.

Internet Marketing for Beginners

Really useful vlog and well worth grabbing a coffee for!

Affiliate Marketers Must Have Tools

If You’re an Affiliate Marketer, You NEED these Tools!

There is a proverb that goes, “A bad workman always quarrels with his tools.” Why he does that is anyone’s guess… maybe he is hot tempered or maybe his tools are argumentative. Whatever the case, tools are crucial for both cantankerous workmen and SUCCESSFUL affiliate marketers.

Have you heard of the super affiliate who uses free hosting and free autoresponders? No? You haven’t? Don’t worry… no one else has either.

Many beginner affiliate marketers try to skimp on costs and make the mistake of trying to use free alternatives rather than paid services. Any saved costs are then squandered on some get rich quick system that never delivers on its promises.

As an affiliate marketer, it is of paramount importance that you understand that this is a business and all businesses have fixed and/or variable costs. There is no getting away from this fact. You will need to spend some money in order to make much more.

Being penny wise pound foolish will not only sabotage your efforts but also impede your progress. To be a successful affiliate marketer, 3 tools are crucial. In fact, you could almost say that they are the cornerstones in your business. Without them, it is almost certain that you’ll fail.

The first tool you’ll need is your own domain name. The operative word here is “your own”… Ignore the fact that that’s 2 words. You absolutely should not build your business on someone else’s web property.

Yes, you may have to spend a few dollars buying a domain, but at least you will know that you have control over it.
Many marketers spent a lot of time and money building Squidoo pages a few years ago. All of a sudden, Squidoo, changed its policies and these marketers found that their earning dried up overnight.
You will always be subjected to the whims and fancies of some other person/s decisions if you don’t own your own domain name.  Your content may be deleted, your pages may have ads for Viagra, etc. There is a price to pay for free domains.
My 2 favourite places to buy domains are Godaddy and Namecheap

The second tool you’ll need is hosting. Web hosting is extremely affordable. Companies such as Hostgator, Arvixe, Dreamhost and many more provide plans that most beginner marketers can afford. There really is no excuse to not get paid hosting.
Sure… you could opt for free hosting. Just like choosing a free domain, you’ll once again have no control over your business.

Free web hosting usually comes with a ton of unrelated ads that will appear on your site.
Choose paid hosting. You can also host unlimited domains on the same account for one low monthly price. My favourite is Hostpapa. If ever you have a problem, their live chat never lets me down.

The third tool you will need is an autoresponder. You may have heard the saying, “The money is in the list” repeated ad nauseam.

Yet, many beginners try to save money by not getting one. This is understandable since an autoresponder is an ongoing cost. However, it would be myopic to not build a list because of this.
Initially, the autoresponder may be costing more than it makes. However, with time as you build your list and your subscribers swell in number from hundreds to thousands, the list will pay for itself. You’ll be able to develop a relationship with many people through email.

You can provide them with free, useful content so they start to trust you. This will reap rewards when you promote something they will find helpful. You’ll get sales and earn commissions that far exceed the cost of your autoresponder.

Besides these 3 tools, there are several other tools such as keyword tools, rank checking tools, spy tools, etc. However, these tools are nowhere near as important as those mentioned in this article.
If you’re a serious affiliate marketer who actually plans on making money be sure to grab a domain, hosting plan, and an autoresponder to make your business easier and increase its chances of success.