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Posts Tagged ‘affiliate programs’

With most affiliate programs you will receive textual ads and banners for online advertising placements. There are several free ways you can use these ads and banners.

One of the most popular ways are Traffic Exchanges. You register with various traffic exchange programs, upload your text ad or banner, and your banner will appear on various registered web pages throughout the world. The number of times you banner or text ad will show will depend on how many points or clicks you accumulate through “surfing” the traffic exchange. The more points or clicks you have the more your ad will be shown to others. This is a very effective method of advertising. It can be time consuming but doesn’t have to be…you just need to organize yourself to do 5-10 different exchanges each day.

Once you sign up for a traffic exchange bookmark the signup page in a folder with all exchanges. Then using Firefox as your browser, right click the folder, where it says “open all in tabs” click on that and all your exchanges will open. Sign in and start to surf.

Traffic exchanges are relatively easy to use and FREE!

The other two types of advertisement placements are online classifieds and paid placements.

Online classifieds is one of the easiest ways to get your product in front of customers on high traffic websites; and it can be done for FREE. Type in your search “online classified” or a similar phrase and look to see what the rules are for placing your advertisement or banner. Several major website will allow you to place classified ads for free. While others, like Yahoo, will charge a fee for placement. These can be very effective depending on the volume of ads being submitted at any given time. If it is a high traffic site, your ad will only appear for a matter of hours before it is pushed down by new advertising submissions. Daily attention and resubmission is necessary to an effective ad campaign on free sites.

Paid placement of advertisements is a very broad category and covers many different scenarios. You can do a PPC campaign (pay per click); where you only pay the site for clicks to your sales page. This can range anywhere from 0.05 to 5.00 a click, depending on what you are willing and can afford to pay. It is best before you start to read as much as you can about PPC campaigns because if you aren’t careful you can spend a lot of money very fast with little or no results. You must keep very close track of expenditure and income for this to work.

There are also the paid advertisement placement sites that will charge you a set fee to place your ad on their site for a designated period of time.

You can also use affiliate-networking sites to sell your products, but each site has different criteria so you would have to contact them directly to see what they offer in terms of tracking and costs. These too can become expensive unless you are an experienced marketer with a unique product to sell.

Ezine or E-magazines are another great source of free and paid advertising. Ezines can range from sites that will accept articles with your bio and link to your site for free. The advertising part comes in the form of that bio. Some sites will not allow you to put an affiliate link in the bio, that is another reason why in a previous article I suggested a “doorway page”.

There are also Ezines that have an opt-in option for you to receive emails from other clients. In exchange for you putting your article or advertisement on their site you will agree to receive emails from various members. This is not considered “spam” as you have to agree to receive this email before you can place your ad (word of advice, use a separate email account). This is all free advertising.

This is just a brief overview of the methods with which you can place your advertisements online. In all of these examples it is best to build your own content rich website. This will be the most effective for advertising.

No matter if you are using free advertising or paid advertising all online advertising is composed of four basic elements.

1. You need an ad
2. You need a website address (URL) to point the ad to or an email address
3. You will need to prepare for the posting process
4. You will need a location to place the ad

Most affiliate programs have pre-written ads for you to place at various ad sites. You will need to read the guidelines for each program to make sure you follow them. Use the URL given to point the buyer to the appropriate website. If you have a website of your own, some affiliates will point their ads to that URL.

For most people writing these ads is the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Even though most programs have their ads set up, there are still some that don’t. Take a moment to thoroughly check out the website you want to promote, then take a few key points and you will have your ad. Write them down in notepad, and play around with the wording until you like the ad. Then try it out. Just remember it is not rocket science, if you have ever written an email to a friend you can write an ad. It really is that simple!

Whether you ad is designed to point to a URL or an email address, all free or paid ad locations require that you submit an email address to the ad site in order to post an ad. That is why it is highly recommended that you have a secondary email address for just this purpose. When you post a FREE ad on any of these sites your email address will get harvested for all sorts of emails, including spam. At no time use your primary email address when submitting to any free ad site, always use your secondary.

In addition many sites require that you submit an address and a phone number to post an ad, most times you will get away with just putting N/A in the required fields. There are some issues involved with this type of service that you will have to resolve for yourself, but remember that what ever information is given to this advertising site, is in reality giving the hosting company of that site a lead for their business offers. Some people do not give real phone numbers or addresses to avoid just this type of junk mail, but it is not recommended.

Once you have started to place your ads on these free sites you will need some type of tracking system. This is a very important step. You need to know which ads are producing and which are not. This is a very simple piece of code that you can put at the end of each url and it should tell you where the ads are coming from. For example: http://NKraska.MyWorldMoms.com/?SOURCE=blog; if you were to click on this ad it would take you to my sales page, but it will tell me in my account stats that I had a click from this post. It is that tiny bit of code at the end: (/?SOURCE=blog) that tells me where the customer clicked on my ad. Different affiliate programs have different code to track, so always check with the program. This particular code will not always work with individual affiliate programs.

All of your affiliate programs will have a stats page to show you where your clicks are coming from. It is a good idea to make a spreadsheet of some sort on your desktop with all the ad sites, and login information as you sign up. Then as you get further into free advertising you can set up your own system to keep track of your click throughs.

Nancy Kraska Owner of Home Work For You, . Avid reader. A food-alcoholic. Sometimes Crafter.

Stay tuned to Part #3—The Quest for FREE Ad Sites!

I am often asked what an affiliate program is and how do you make money with them. Simply put an affiliate business program is a program in which you earn commissions by selling someone else’s product or service. Otherwise, you can also earn money by simply advertising for their site. If you decide to join an affiliate program on the Internet, it would be best if you had your own website, and preferably one that is ideal to selling goods and services for your merchant partner. The site should accommodate a specific group of people or niche market. Once someone purchases a product through your site, you will receive a percentage of the sale in the form of a commission.

Here are four guidelines on building your online presence for your affiliate business:

1. If you can afford it, hire a professional web designer and be sure to ask for samples of their work. You want to see current working sites they have done, to make sure they are what their finished products looks like. Remember the lowest price is not always the best product. You don’t want a site that is like so many others, nor do you want a site that is all images and no content. You want a site that, gives sufficient information to the customer and is easy to navigate.

2. If you don’t have the resources to hire a professional web designer, you will have to have a hosting site. Do not go with a free hosting site for your business. Free hosting sites tend to put unrelated banners and text ads on your site for free advertising for them. This can distract from your site. It is a good idea to purchase your domain name and pay for your hosting account. Another alternative is to create a blog or a squidoo lens page. Both have been designed with an organized system for you to add your content and links.

3. One of the biggest mistakes new home business owners make is putting too much on their site. It is very common for the first time webmaster to add as many unnecessary elements to their site such as email buttons, counters, guest books, weather forecasts, calendars, and a host of other items that are not needed or professional. Produce each page of your site, whether a webpage or a blog, clearly, be concise, and it should load quickly into a browser. Slow loading websites often times get overlooked by the consumer. The less links you have on a site the less chance you have of broken links. That is why it is necessary to check your links often to make sure that your customers do not get error pages. Nothing is worse for a consumer than to go to a store to find out it is not open when it should have been. The same is true with an online business.

4. Perhaps the most important guideline on building your presence online with your affiliate business is the have content that is so useful to your customers that they will bookmark your site to come back to reference it often. Your goal is to offer unique content, articles, news and other web content related to your affiliate programs that your customers will come to appreciate, use, and hopefully pass on to others.

Now that you are ready to start promoting your affiliate business programs, you will have to have “online presence”
to stay competitive. Building that online presence, and make money with the affiliate programs you promote is not as easy as you might think. It is not just a matter of getting a website putting it on the Internet, and presto you make money. This can lead to the number one mistake of most new affiliate marketers who want to make money is to do it themselves and cut costs wherever possible. This does lead to a large number of internet sites that look unprofessional and cluttered.

Remember to find your niche with each website and stick with that niche. This is probably the number one concept to understand for the newbie. When I started several years ago, I believed that all I had to do was offer affiliate programs together on one site, drive traffic to that site, and money would roll in like clockwork. I never thought as to who the people were that would want what I had to offer, nor did I set my first website up to cater to any one particular group. I have learned through trial and error, that although there are millions of people looking for a home-based business on the Internet, no one will look at my site if it is a hodge-podge of work at home offers. Stay focused on your particular niche.

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Never before has there been so many people interested in making money online.  Fortunately, there have never been so many legitimate opportunities to make money online.  If your goal is to make money on the Internet, then your choices are greater than ever before.

There are several ways to make legitimate money online.  The most common ways to make money online is to get paid for filling out online surveys or web surfing.  Although you can make quick cash with each, it is somewhat limited as to how much you can make.  If you are really serious about making money online then you need to set up your own website and join some affiliate programs.

So you might be wondering what is an affiliate programs.  An affiliate program is a system set up by different online merchants that will pay you a considerable commission when you send them paying customers through your website.  Both the merchant and the affiliate benefit making it a great way to make a significant amount of money online in a short amount of time.

Even though setting up a website of your own is less expensive and far easier than you might think, you really don’t need a website to make money online.  There are a variety of strategies and methods you can use to get started making money on the Internet immediately.

If you are ready to begin making money online, you need to set your goals and to be realistic in what you expect to achieve in the allotted amount of time.  Making money on the Internet is no different than making money in any brick and mortar business—you will start out small and grow your income over time.  Even though you have seen the ads saying you can become a millionaire in a matter of months, it is very rare that this will happen to you.  But it can happen!

The initial cost of starting making money online is relatively low.  It is entirely possible for you to start out making a profit, without having any out of pocket costs.  All you need to get started is a computer and the Internet, and obviously if you are reading this, you have it already.

Once you start your work at home adventure you will hear many people say you cannot do it.  That it is impossible.  My favorite is “Are you crazy!”  I always answer I must be if I listen to you.  Do not let negative thoughts and attitudes dissuade you from your dreams. Just because someone you know lost money, or was disappointed, doesn’t mean you will have the same results.  You have no idea how much time or effort someone else puts into their home business.

Millions of people are making money online today even while millions more believe it cannot be done. The online entrepreneur who is making money online are really happy that there are those who believe it can’t be done…after all that creates less competition.

Not that long ago it would have been impossible to even imagine the ways you can legitimately make money online.  The Internet has changed the way we live and the way we make money.  It is a worldwide market!  It does not depend on education level, heavy investments, or who you are.  You can work part time, full time, to supplement your income, whatever your reason if you have the desire and a readiness to learn, you can be part of this growing industry of online business.