Web Hosting - You Need to Buy It, and You Need to Promote It

Affiliate Marketing :: Web Hosting

Web hosting is something every webmaster has to have, because without it, you don't have a website. Free web hosts normally have major drawbacks, usually massive amounts of advertising. I don't recommend using any kind of free website hosting option. I do recommend hosting your website with a reputable and stable company.

I also recommend considering promoting web hosting affiliate programs. Web hosting is one of the biggest opportunities on the internet today, and most web host affiliate programs offer massive commission amounts. Like most other high income niche markets, the webhosting market is extremely competitive. In fact, it's just about as competitive as the gambling niche or the pharmacy niche, so be ready for a long hard battle if you're going to try to make money promoting hosting.

Recommended Web Hosts

iPowerWeb - These guys offer one of the most powerful and most affordable web hosting solutions online. They have packages starting at $7.95 a month with free set-up.

LunarPages.com - Lunar Pages responds personally to your website hosting needs. With experience serving over 70,000 websites, Lunar Pages know what they're doing. Packages start at $7.95 a month.

Globat - This testimonial says it all: "99.999% uptime is no exaggeration." That's EXACTLY the kind of uptime you need when you're trying to make a living online. They often offer some really amazing prices and specials too.

Domain Registration - Brainstorming Domain Names

Affiliate Programs :: Domain Registration

Eventually every affiliate marketer decides to register a domain name. I personally have over 200 domain names registered, but I'm going to let most of them expire this year. I always have more ideas than I have time to implement them. But I've definitely developed some distinct ideas about domain registrations, and I think a lot of other people are opinionated about domains too.

Hyphens. These are on a lot of people's minds. Should I hyphenate my domain name, and if I do, how many hyphens is okay. A lot of folks claim that you get a boost in the SERP's from having a hyphen between your keywords in your domain, because it clues the search engine that those are two separate words. My theory is that most search engines already (and if they don't, then they will soon) are able to distinguish the keywords in a domain with or without the hyphen. I do think that more than one hyphen makes your domain look spammy and less authoritative.

Keywords or brands? I'm of the opinion that most of us will never own a domain name that becomes a brand like Coca Cola. So yeah, I think you should go with keywords in your domain over something really clever and memorable like Overture. Although if you can get your keywords in your domain name AND make it memorable at the same time, even better.

Recommended Places to Register Domains

Dotster - You can register domains for as little as $15.95 a name here, and their customer service and software interface is state of the art. As they say, why pay twice as much?

Domain Maniac - Domain Maniac offers $15 domain registrations, and they're one of the most popular registrars on the web. Highly recommended.

Mega Domains - I haven't used their service personally, but I know they have a great reputation. If the other two don't suit your needs, be sure to give Mega Domains a look.

Other Sites

Casino Affiliate Programs - One of the nicest communities of webmasters on the internet, and responsible for a great deal of my own success.

Associate Programs - I've only recently started hanging out here at Alan Gardyne's site, but I highly recommend it.

If you'd like to be listed here on our other sites page, then please email me.

Site Map

Main Pages

Work from Home and Make Money with Affiliate Programs
You can work from home and make enormous amounts of money with affiliate marketing programs. I believe this because I've done it. I currently make over $5000 a month promoting affiliate marketing programs, and you can make money the same way. Working from home is fun, relaxing, and it beats all hell out of the rat race.

Frontpage Templates
Frontpage templates make being an affiliate webmaster SO much easier. These templates eliminate the need for you to know how to design a website, and using Frontpage to edit them eliminates the need for you to know a lot of complicated html.

Related Articles

James Martell's Methods and Yahoo
In James Martell's Affiliate Handbook, he mentions that he focuses on optimizing almost exclusively for Google, since they get the bulk of search engine traffic. But there's been a little bit of controversy lately about some of James's sites being penalized by Google. My personal suspicion is that his sites were excessively cross-linked, and some of them might have had duplicated content. But one of the things I have noticed is that the Martell sites are doing very well in Yahoo.

Search Engine Affiliate Programs
A lot of pay per click search engines offer affiliate programs, and websearch is definitely one of the growing trends on the internet, so this sector is worth a look at. In this article I'm going to look at a couple of different pay per click search engine affiliate programs and describe how their payouts to affiliates work. They're listed in the order in which I recommend the programs.

Two Tier Affiliate Programs - 2 Tiered Affiliate Programs
A two tiered affiliate program is one that pays commissions on your sub-affiliates' sales as well as your own. Which means you can become an active recruiter for an affiliate program, and eventually make a full time living from your 2nd tier affiliate webmasters, provided your recruite enough of them, and provided that they perform well for the merchant.

Casino and Gambling Affiliate Programs
Gambling affiliate programs and online casinos are incredibly profitable for the rare webmaster who can keep up in such a competitive industry. Poker is one of the hottest and most-searched for terms on the internet, and the online gambling industry is growing incredibly rapidly in all niches, in spite of the Department of Justice's attempts to discourage advertisers for that market in the USA.

An Affiliate Dictionary - Common Web Terms and Their Definitions
When I first got involved with affiliate marketing, I was baffled by the number of new terms and acronyms in the industry. The jargon was overwhelming, but my boss, who had a lot more experience with affiliations and revenue share programs, was patient enough to define terms for me as they came up. Now I'm passing on some of those definitions to you. Enjoy.

eBay Affiliate Program Review
The eBay affiliate program is one of the biggest and most popular programs online. eBay will pay you between $12 and $30 per active registration you send them. You get a higher dollar amount per active registration based on your monthly volume, which is not unusual with a lot of programs.

Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs
Pay per lead affiliate programs are a big hit with affiliate marketers and getting bigger. The way a pay-per-lead partner model works is that the referring webmaster gets a bounty every time a customer takes an action that turns him into a lead.

Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs
A pay per click program is a program where you get paid every time someone clicks on an ad on your website. It's not as common an affiliate model as pay per lead, pay per sale, or rev share.

James Martell's Manual for Affiliate Marketers
James Martell's guide to affiliate marketing is the masterpiece on the subject.

Increase Your Google Adsense Revenue
When I think about improving the earnings I get through Google's Adsense program, I think of something I read that Jay Abraham had written: there are only three ways to make more money in any business. You can talk to more potential customers, close a higher percentage of those leads, and you can sell a bigger ticket to those people who do buy from you.

Share This Site With Others

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Here's the preferred title text: "Affiliate Marketing"

or "Affiliate Programs" or "Affiliate Marketing Programs"

And here's the URL to the main page of the site: http://affiliatemarketingprograms.blogspot.com/

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Frontpage Templates for Affiliate Webmasters

Home :: Frontpage Templates for Affiliate Webmasters

Frontpage templates make being an affiliate webmaster SO much easier. These templates eliminate the need for you to know how to design a website, and using Frontpage to edit them eliminates the need for you to know a lot of complicated html. Affiliate webmasters who aren't using templates are probably much better html programmers and web designers than I am, and that's a fact. If you've read James Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook, then you'll know that he agrees with me on the importance of this.

If you don't already know, Frontpage is what they call a WYSIWIG editor for websites and webpages. WYSIWIG stands for "what you see is what you get". It works very similarly to Microsoft Word, only you're able to publish the finished product to the web. But unless you're a lot better at design than I am, anything you try to create will fall short of what a professional template designer is going to be able to produce for you.

A template is basically a blank "shell" or "design" for a website. You'll still write the content (or have someone else write it for you, which I'm a big fan of by the way.) But you'll only need to cut and paste the content into the template, and make some minor modifications to some of the fields in the template, and your design work is finished.

You can find free templates by doing a search on Google, but often you get what you pay for. And I've yet to see a single free Frontpage template that was specifically designed for affiliate marketing purposes. The resulting additional amount of work involved in customizing these free templates isn't worth the minor amount of money you'll end up saving by not purchasing a professionally designed template that's specifically designed to promote affiliate products.

Some Recommended Frontpage Template Resources

• Golden Pinecone - This is the Frontpage template design company that James Martell currently recommends, and I can definitely see why. Their templates are beautiful, affordable, and they offer a tremendous variety of templates to choose from.
• Colligan Web Store - These guys offer everything you can imagine that's related to Frontpage, including templates and tutorials. And if you're a Dreamweaver user, they also offer templates for you. They offer so many different web-related products that it's almost confusing--definitely worth checking out.

Work from Home and Make Money with Affiliate Programs

Home :: Work from Home and Make Money with Affiliate Programs

You can work from home and make enormous amounts of money with affiliate marketing programs. I believe this because I've done it. I currently make over $5000 a month promoting affiliate marketing programs, and you can make money the same way. Working from home is fun, relaxing, and it beats all hell out of the rat race.

There are literally hundreds of very real opportunities to generate enormous amounts of cash online promoting brand name products to people who are searching for those products. You can earn your current income or more marketing these products, and you can make those dollars in half the time you spend in your current rat race job. Like I said, I know, because I've done it. All it takes is a little bit of education, a little bit of research, and a little bit of work.

Online shopping is big and getting bigger all the time. Take advantage of it. Affiliate programs will pay you a percentage of all the sales you refer to them, just for getting the traffic to their doorstep. Some affiliate programs will pay you just for the traffic, while others will only pay you if the traffic actually takes an action, or they might pay you a percentage of what they make when the customer buys. Either way, if you can get the search engine traffic to the merchant's site, you're in business.

I got started by investing in some ebooks on the subject, and learned an 8 step process that James Martell teaches. I also learned how to drive traffic directly to a merchant through Google Adwords by reading Chris Carpenter's Google Cash. And I haven't taken advantage of all of the information contained inside it yet, but Strike It Niche! is packed with 70 blueprints for online businesses in niches that have little competition and big earning potential.

Affiliate Marketing eBooks I Recommend

• Affiliate Marketer's Handbook by James Martell - Learn James Martell's 8-step blueprint for success with affiliate programs! (This is a complete "game plan" for affiliate marketers, and it's the best resource on the subject. It's worth every penny of the price.)
• Strike It Niche! by Michael Holland - Michael spent six months doing research and the result is a book comprised of 70 niche markets in 13 categories that get tons of targeted traffic, but have unbelievably low competition. Michael took this information and organized it into 70 easy-to-use blueprints that give you the complete details on how to start your affiliate marketing business easily and confidently.
• Google Cash by Chris Carpenter - This is the definitive guide to making $1000's promoting affiliate programs through Google Adwords. This is the first ebook I read on affiliate marketing, and I've continued to use the lessons I learned in this book throughout my affiliate career.

James Martell's Methods and Yahoo

Home :: James Martell's Methods and Yahoo

In James Martell's Affiliate Handbook, he mentions that he focuses on optimizing almost exclusively for Google, since they get the bulk of search engine traffic. But there's been a little bit of controversy lately about some of James's sites being penalized by Google. My personal suspicion is that his sites were excessively cross-linked, and some of them might have had duplicated content. But one of the things I have noticed is that the Martell sites are doing very well in Yahoo.

A good friend of mine is an expert at SEO. He explained to me a few days ago that Yahoo's current algorithm is very similar to Google's old algorithm, before Google started trying really hard to thwart SEO's and affiliate marketers. This would explain why Martell's sites are still doing very well in Yahoo. And while Google might still get a lot of searches, Yahoo is no slouch. If Yahoo gets half the searches done on it that Google does, then it's still sending a terrific amount of traffic.

Yahoo is more sensitive to on-page optimization than Google. One of the only flaws (and it's a minor flaw) with James's materials is his focus on keyword density and on-page optimization. Off page factors matter much more than on page factors right now, and that situation won't change anytime soon, as far as I'm concerned. It's just so much easier to manipulate your on-page factors than it is to manipulate your offpage factors. Yahoo's a big fan of having your keyword in the URL, but Yahoo's results are heavily related to your backlink structure too.

I recommend James Martell's book and his methods, but I encourage everyone to do some independent thinking too. I disagree with a cookie-cutter approach to webmastering, and to business as a whole. Pay attention to what's going on, and experiment with different things. Learn what's working for you, both in Yahoo, and in Google, and don't be afraid to try something different now and then.

Search Engine Affiliate Programs - An Overview

Affiliate Marketing Home :: Search Engine Affiliate Programs

A lot of pay per click search engines offer affiliate programs, and websearch is definitely one of the growing trends on the internet, so this sector is worth a look at. In this article I'm going to look at a couple of different pay per click search engine affiliate programs and describe how their payouts to affiliates work. They're listed in the order in which I recommend the programs.

Overture

Overture is probably the most well-known ppc search site, and they have one of the top affiliate offers. Overture offers two ways to generate commissions, Overture Precision Match and Overture Local Match. Overture Precision Match product displays businesses in search results on major website brands like Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista, and CNN. These sites reach over 80% of active web surfers. Overture's commission program pays $80 for every Precision Match Fast Track sign up and $20 for every Precision Match Self Serve advertiser sign up.

Referred advertisers to Overture also get special bonuses from Overture. New Precision Match customers get a $25 credit to their Self Serve account, or a discount of $50 on their Fast Track service fee.

Google Adsense

This is one of my favorite affiliate programs. Instead of getting paid for signing up people in their advertising program, I'm able to run Adsense ads on my site and get a percentage of the pay per click that Google gets from the advertiser. Google does a fantastic job of spidering my websites and displaying appropriate and targeted advertising, so my click through rates and earnings are very satisfying. It's expressly forbidden by Google's terms and conditions to discuss how much money you're earning through their program, so be careful what you say in the webmaster forums about their program. It's also against the rules to click on any of the ads being displayed on your own site, and you'll get kicked out of the program very quickly for doing so.

Ask Jeeves

They're the #3 search engine in the world, right after Google and Yahoo, and they pay you a penny every time you send someone to their search engine to complete a search. I've been following Ask.com closely now for a couple of years, and I think their results are easily as relevant as Google's or Yahoo's, and they have a unique approach to how they find those results. A penny a search doesn't sound like a lot, but if you have a lot of traffic, and you think they'll do some searching, this might be a program worth checking out. Their affiliate program is available through Commission Junctions.

Other PPC Engines

There are a number of other PPC search engines who offer affiliate programs, but I hesitate to recommend many of them because they often have poor reputations with users and/or with advertisers. Click fraud is rampant among some of them. If you're interested in working with other search engine affiliate programs, just search the appropriate category at Commission Junction--they list several. Experiment with them and see what works with your traffic.

My Goals as an Affiliate Marketer in 2005

Home :: My Goals as an Affiliate Marketer - 2005

I've taken a cue from James Martell and decided to launch 100 websites this year (this blog counts as one of them) and have between 50 and 200 pages of unique, quality content on each site. My goal is to imitate the master and average $500 each month in revenue from each site.

I've broken this goal down into steps. Or at least I've started to. In order to launch 100 websites in a year, I need to launch 2 websites each week. I have about a dozen sites already, so really I've got some fudge factor already built in, so if I fall behind, I should still come pretty close to hitting my goal.

I've been working really hard over the last few days to make sure there's plenty of content on this site in particular. Last time I checked I have about 25 articles posted here, all of which are completely original, and all of which were written by me. I hope you'll find something useful here on this site, and I hope that you will share this site with others by adding a link to your website.

If you have any feedback, or any questions, or suggestions for topics here, please email me and let me know, and I'll do my best to accommodate you.

Domain Maniac - Domain Registration, Web Hosting, Email & E-commerce

Home :: Domain Maniac - Domain registraion, web hosting

One of the first tasks you'll have as an affiliate marketer is to register a domain name. I recommend Domain-Maniac for this. They offer $15 domain registrations with free re-directs, free domain parking, free domain locking, free ownerships changes, and professional support. Their customer friendly interface allows you to register, transfer and renew domains with ease. They also offer web hosting, email service, and a great affiliate program. Their web hosting starts at $7.95/month, and they accept payment by Paypal or by any major credit card too.

One of the most important features that any domain registration service must offer is a friendly, easy-to-use interface, and Domain Maniac's interface is one of the best I've seen. I know my way around a computer keyboard a little bit, but I'm not a tech genius by any means. So any time I can get a user-friendly interface to work with, I'm going to go for it.

The Domain Maniac affiliate program is top notch too. They pay $40 every time a customer buys a web hosting package, $40 each time a customer buys an e-commerce package, and they pay 10% on each domain registration or domain transfer. Definitely check out Domain-maniac.

Two Tier Affiliate Programs - 2 Tiered Associate Programs

Home :: Two Tiered Affiliate Programs

A two tiered affiliate program is one that pays commissions on your sub-affiliates' sales as well as your own. Which means you can become an active recruiter for an affiliate program, and eventually make a full time living from your 2nd tier affiliate webmasters, provided your recruite enough of them, and provided that they perform well for the merchant. Sometimes the second level commission will be a percentage of sales, and sometimes the second level payout will be a percentage of the sub-affiliate's commission. The percentage of your sub-affiliates' sales is usually the better arrangement.

Some affiliate programs offer multiple tiers. The Casinoblasters program pays 10 levels deep, and the deeper you go, the lower your percentage is on the subaffiliate's sales. Theoretically there could be a program that went infinite layers deep, but that's not a practical possibility, since eventually the original affiliate's percentage would become too small to matter.

Gambling and dating programs commonly offer multi-tier affiliate programs, and some information products offer additional tiers. I've personally never made much money promoting info products like ebooks, but I can confirm that a webmaster really can make money recruiting sub-affiliates in both the gambling and the dating webmaster sectors. Since 1% of all affiliates make up 90% or more of all affiliate sales, you pretty much won't make any significant money from your sub-affiliates until you've signed up at least 100 of them. And I do know one casino webmaster who has signed up over 1000 sub-affiliates with one program, and still only makes a few $100 each month from his downline. So it's not nearly as profitable as becoming a super-affiliate yourself.

Recommended Two Tiered Affiliate Programs

Friend Finder
One of the premier dating affiliate networks online, they pay 10% of your referred webmasters' commissions back to you in exchanging for signing up sub-affiliates.

CasinoBlasters
The top shelf gambling affiliate program pays you 10% on your sub-affiliates' customers' revenue, and 5% of any of their sub-affiliates' revenue. This is the best multi-tiered affiliate program that I have found.

Related Articles

Casinoblasters Affiliate Program Review

Party Poker Affiliate Program Review

Top Ten Affiliate Programs

Casino & Gambling Affiliate Programs

Casino & Gambling Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Marketing :: Casino Gambling Affiliate Programs

Gambling affiliate programs and online casinos are incredibly profitable for the rare webmaster who can keep up in such a competitive industry. Poker is one of the hottest and most-searched for terms on the internet, and the online gambling industry is growing incredibly rapidly in all niches, in spite of the Department of Justice's attempts to discourage advertisers for that market in the USA. The online casino gambling market worldwide will generate more than $10 billion in revenue. You don't have to tap into a big percentage of that revenue to make a good living.

Most casinos associate programs pay the affiliate a percentage of player losses, but they often pay on a CPA basis also. Most gambling webmasters prefer the revenue share model though, because the occasional casino whale will sign up and spend $10,000 or more per month wagering. With an average payout of 35% or so, that means you can have customer values of $3500 or more. It's hard to justify even a $250 CPA when you have the potential to make that kind of money from a single customer.

I know casino and gambling affiliates who make over $100k+ a month in commisions, so the money's good in this industry. Super affiliates in this sector get perks like trips and gifts like cars from their merchant partners. But it's also an industry with risks, not the least of which is a zealous American justice department who interpret the Wire Act as applying to the internet. It's also extremely competitive--in fact, probably the only more competitive industries an affiliate could promote would be adult affiliate programs or pharmacy affiliate programs. (It's your responsibility to consult with your legal advisor and analyze the legal risks for yourself before embarking on this or any other internet business venture. I encourage everyone to obey applicable laws in their jurisdiction.)

The casino webmaster industry is very active online, and have a number of associations and communities. The most active forum for gambling webmasters is at Casino Affiliate Programs. The Gambling Portal Webmaster Association also carries on discussion of the industry, and the Association of Professional Casino Webmasters keeps any eye on their member casinos. The Casino Affiliate Convention is always well-attended and a lot of fun, although I haven't been to the Amsterdam show, just the Vegas one. If you do decide that this sector is the one for you, these are good places to get support from other webmasters in the industry.

Recommended Casino and Gambling Affiliate Programs

Casinoblasters
This is the top notch top shelf best casino gambling affiliate program I've found. Definitely go with the revenue share opportunity over the CPA. Be sure to tell Fred I said hi.

Party Poker
Party Poker is the most popular poker room on the net, and I think it has one of the best affiliate programs to go with it. Definitely check it out.

An Affiliate Dictionary - Common Web Marketing Terms & Their Definitions

Affiliate Programs :: Affiliate Marketing Terms and Definitions

When I first got involved with affiliate marketing, I was baffled by the number of new terms and acronyms in the industry. The jargon was overwhelming, but my boss, who had a lot more experience with affiliations and revenue share programs, was patient enough to define terms for me as they came up. Now I'm passing on some of those definitions to you. Enjoy.

• Above the fold - Originally a newspaper term, being above the fold means that the ad or text is visible without having to scroll down the page. (The bottom of the screen is the fold.)
• Affiliate - A website publisher who promotes a product in exchange for some type of pay for performance model.
• Affiliate agreement - A contract between a merchant and an affiliate that outlines the terms of the arrangement, including the compensation arrangement.
• Affiliate arbitrage - Buying advertising through one model and sending it to an affiliate program with a different compensation model, and profiting from the difference. An example would be buying clicks for a nickel each, and sending them to an affiliate program that pays $17 per action. If 1 person in 100 takes the $17 action, the profit from the arbitrage would be $17 - $5, or $12 per 100 clicks.
• Afiliate link - Usually a unique URL that an affiliate links to. The unique URL tracks the traffic and the sale so that the affiliate gets paid for the customer.
• Affiliate manager - Sometimes the person who runs the affiliate program for the merchant, but also sometimes your account representative if the merchant has a large affiliate department.
• Affiliate program - An advertising program that pays website publishers on a performance basis.
• Associate - Synonym for "affiliate".
• Associate program - Synonym for "affiliate program".
• Autoresponder - An email address that sends an automated response to the person who emails it.
• Banner - A graphic advertisement on a website.
• CPC - Cost per click. An advertising model that is most often used by search engines, but is also sometimes used by merchants running affiliate programs. Buying traffic on a cost per click basis is a typical tactic used in affiliate arbitrage.
• CPM - Cost per 1000 impressions. Based on television advertising, this advertising model pays based on how many people view the ad, or how many times the ad is displayed. Unusual in an affiliate arrangement, but common in terms of buying advertising.
• CTR - Click through ratio. A ratio of the number of clicks generated by an ad divided by the number of impressions the ad has seen. Usually expressed as a percentage.
• Chargeback - A chargeback occures when an affiliate has received a commision on a sale, but the sale falls through because of fraud or refund issues.
• Clicks per sale - One way to measure the performance of an affiliate program.
• Co-branding - Displaying the affiliate's logo along with the merchant's logo, which strengthens the brand of the affiliate website.
• Commission - A percentage of the sell price of an item. A very common affiliate payment model.
• Commission structure - The amount of commission a merchant pays its affiliates.
• Compensation plan - The agreement that outlines how much an affiliate gets paid.
• Conversion rate - The percentage of visitors who buy, or take a specified action, like filling out a request for additional information.
• Cookie - A code stored on your computer by a web server when you visit a site. Cookies help affiliate programs track commission for their affiliates.
• Doorway page - A page which has been specifically designed to do well in the search engines for a search term, which usually leads to the actual website or advertiser.
• Downline - A multi-level marketing term for the people who are sub-affiliates of an affiliate.
• EPC - A Commission Junction term that stands for earnings per 100 clicks.
• Ezine - An email newsletter, often used to serve affiliate advertising.
• FAQ - Frequently asked questions. A popular web page theme.
• Hit - A visit to a website.
• Hybrid model - A combination of two different payment types. A hybrid model might pay a dollar amount per lead plus an additional dollar amount for a certain amount of traffic delivered.
• Impression - A display of an ad.
• Lifetime commissions - A commission arrangement that pays on additional purchases from a customer. (Once a customer buys something from the merchant, they become your customer forever, and you continue to receive commission payments on any of that customer's subsequent purchases.)
• Link popularity - One of the main methods most search engines currently use to rank sites. The idea is that if a lot of websites are linking to your site, it must be important, which will make it relevant.
• MLM - Multi level marketing. An arrangement where a salesperson or organization makes commisions not only on their own sales, but also on the sales of anyone they recruit.
• Merchant - The advertiser who pays the affilaite.
• Multi level marketing - See "MLM".
• Opt-in - Agreeing to receive regular email communication from a website owner.
• Opt-out - Asking to no longer receive email communications from a website owner.
• Pay per click - An advertising model used largely by search engines, where the advertiser pays an agreed upon amount every time a surfer clicks on his listing. Usually, the more the advertiser is willing to pay per click, the higher they rank in the search results.
• Pay per click arbitrage - See "affiliate arbitrage".
• Pay per impression - An advertising model which pays based on the number of times an ad is displayed.
• Pay per lead - A payment arrangement where the merchant pays a dollar amount for every lead they receive. Usually these leads are generated when a potential customer fills out a request for more information.
• Pay per sale - A payment arrangement where the merchant pays a flat dollar amount per each sale made.
• Private label - An affiliate program where the merchant displays the affiliate's logo and branding on the destination site. This allows the affiliate to build their own brand and use the merchant as their back-end supplier.
• ROI - Return on investment. If you invest $100 on clicks and hosting, and you make $110, your profit is $10. $10 is 10% of your $100 investment, so your ROI is 10%.
• Recurring commissions - See "lifetime commissions".
• Spam - Email that wasn't opted in to.
• Sub-affiliate - An affiliate who signs up using another affiliate's link to the program. The referring affiliate usually receives a percentage of his sub-affiliates' sales.
• Super affiliate - The 1% of affiliates who generate most of the income in the affiliate marketing industry. Super affiliates generally command a better compensation structure than a standard affiliate.
• Targeted traffic - Traffic to a website that is actually looking for information that is presented there.
• Text link - A non-graphic link. CTR's on text links are generally much higher than CTR's on banner advertising.
• Tracking - How the merchant keeps up with the number of sales/clicks/impressions etc. that the affiliate generates.
• Traffic - Visitors to a website.
• Two-tier program - An affiliate program that pays commissions on sub-affiliate sales.
• Unique clicks - A visitor to a website. If one person clicks on an ad multiple times, or visits a site multiple times, he or she is still only one unique visitor, even though the site has recorded multiple visits.
• Unique hit - See "unique clicks".
• Unique visitors - See "unique clicks".
• Viral marketing - Marketing that replicates itself, like a clever email, or a funny game that people forward to each other via email.
• White label - See "private label".

eBay Affiliate Program Review

home :: ebay affiliate program review

The eBay affiliate program is one of the biggest and most popular programs online. eBay will pay you between $12 and $30 per active registration you send them. You get a higher dollar amount per active registration based on your monthly volume, which is not unusual with a lot of programs. To get to $30 per registration, you have to send over 10,000 or more registrations each month. (Wow!)

Affiliates also earn between 10 cents and 25 cents for qualified bids and buy it nows. This is in addition to the revenue generated from the active registrations that you send over.

eBay boasts that they have quite a few affiliates making over $100,000 a month with their program, and it's easy to see why when you do a search for just about anything nostalgic on Google. Google Adwords are rife with ads for eBay, although Google's new policy regarding ads with the same URL only displaying one ad per URL is going to slow down quite a bit of eBay's business.

One of the most attractive things to me about the eBay affiliate program is that there is literally something at eBay for everyone. So finding obscure keyword phrases that don't have a lot of competition becomes profitable almost no matter how obscure the keyword is. You could easily put together a 200 page website devoted to cult classic tv shows, get #1 listings for phrases like "Knight Rider" and "The Six Million Dollar Man", run eBay affiliate ads, and clean up. And that's only one example.

eBay has a page for their affiliates where they list the most popular searches in about a dozen different categories: dvd's, cd's, digital cameras, video games, cell phones, video game systems, audiobooks, PDA's, and camcorders. Any one of those categories could be the jumping off point for a 50 to 200 page website, and eBay could be a very profitable partner for you.

Pay Per Lead Programs - Affiliate Arrangements that Pay-Per-Lead

Home :: Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs

Pay per lead affiliate programs are a big hit with affiliate marketers and getting bigger. The way a pay-per-lead partner model works is that the referring webmaster gets a bounty every time a customer takes an action that turns him into a lead. These types of programs often convert at much higher percentages than revenue share programs or pay per sale program do, simply because the customer doesn't usually have to spend any money for you to get your commission. (Anytime someone has to pay for something, the lower the percentage of actions compared to clicks.)

One of my favorite examples of this kind of program is the University of Phoenix. They pay $17 every time someone fills out the form on their website asking for more information about their online degree programs. If you're able to get some targeted traffic to your website who are interested in online education and getting their degree over the internet, then you can probably convert almost 10% of the clicks you send over to the University of Phoenix, and maybe even more.

I know some webmasters who promote pay per lead programs exclusively. They love the high conversions, and they make good money at it. Having talked with them about how much money they're making, I'm tempted to promote those types of program exclusively myself too, but I still haven't taken the plunge.

Commission Junction offers a lot of pay per lead programs. I definitely recommend checking them out there. Just sort the listings in the "Get Links" section by cost per lead, and try to promote something that:

1. Is appropriate for your traffic.
2. Pays a high dollar amount per lead.
3. Has a high EPC for both the last 3 months and the last 7 days.

Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs

Home :: Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs

A pay per click program is a program where you get paid every time someone clicks on an ad on your website. It's not as common an affiliate model as pay per lead, pay per sale, or rev share. But it's one of my favorite models to make money online, and there are a lot of options available to affiliate webmasters who are interested in this kind of revenue stream. (Google Adsense is a great example of a pay per click affiliate program.)

There are a couple of advantage to this pay-per-click model. One advantage is that you get paid whether or not the person who clicks on the ad buys something. That perk by itself makes it tempting to promote nothing but pay per click (PPC) affiliate programs. Another advantage is that these types of affiliate deals are usually pretty easy to set up.

One disadvantage that promoting a PPC program might have is that it might make less money for you than a rev share or cost per acquisition type campaign might make for you, especially if you're targeting a really tight niche. My advice is to test both models at the same time, and measure how much you make per click with each model.

To calculate your cost per click with a revenue sharing program, you need to have enough data to get a good idea of conversions and what those conversions are worth. You can make a judgement based on 500 clicks, but 1000 clicks or more would give you a more accurate number. To get what you made per click, you just divide the commission you've earned by the number of clicks you've sent. And if you've made more money with the revenue share program than you're averaging with your PPC affiliate program, you'll know which program to promote exclusively or to give premium placement too.

James Martell Manual for Affiliate Marketers - Affiliate Marketers Handbook

Home :: James Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook

James Martell's guide to affiliate marketing is the masterpiece on the subject. I wrote an article a couple of days ago about how James stacks up to Rosalind Gardner, and I decided that his Affiliate Marketers Handbook, and the affiliate program promoting it, are both such high quality offerings that they warrant their own article. Yes, his book is $167, and yes, it's worth every penny.

I've seen nothing but praise for Martell's manual on generating income from advertising affiliate products on forums and websites across the internet. The closes thing to a criticism that I have seen is from people who are already pretty web-savvy and are possibly already making a full time living on the web. They say that the material in James's handbook is basic stuff that professional webmasters already know.

First of all--the material in this affiliate manual does cover the fundamentals. It outlines an 8 step action plan that works. This is the work's strength; you can follow the step by step process in the book, and if you're willing to do the work, you will make money with this system. Second, many of the distinctions and subtleties in James's work are subtle, and even though they might seem basic, there's really more there between the lines.

I recommend two courses of action in this article:

1. If you haven't already done so, buy a copy of James Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook and read it.
2. Sign up for the affiliate program and start recommending the handbook to your website visitors.

The affiliate program for James's book pays a $35 commission for every copy of his book that you sell. And if you sign up sub-affiliates, you can make $15 for every copy of his book that your sub-affiliates sell.

Increase Your Google Adsense Revenue in 3 Steps

Home :: 3 Steps to Increase Your Google Adsense Revenue

When I think about improving the earnings I get through Google's Adsense program, I think of something I read that Jay Abraham had written: there are only three ways to make more money in any business. You can talk to more potential customers, close a higher percentage of those leads, and you can sell a bigger ticket to those people who do buy from you. If you increase all three factors, you can increase your profits not just arithmetically but exponentially. And this applies to Google Adsense just like it applies to all your other marketing efforts.

#1 - Get More Traffic to your Website

Get the Google Ads in front of more people, which means getting more traffic to your website. How do you do that? The answer is kind of like how to lose weight (eat less and exercise more). Build more pages and get more links. Those are the only two ways to get more traffic. I'm not going into any more detail about that in this article, because entire websites have been written about how to build pages and about how to get links. Suffice it to say that this is how you get more traffic, and getting more traffic means more clicks and more money.

#2 - Increase Your Click Through Percentage

Increase the number of click-through's you get to your Google Adsense units. Here you have to be careful, because you do NOT want to violate their terms and conditions and encourage people to click on the ads. But there are a few things you can do to improve your click-through ratios. One is to place your ads in the best spot on your site--upper left hand corner. People read a website the same way they do a newspaper, from left to right, from top to bottom. So if you're on the upper left, you're going to be seen first. The other tip is to test test test. Test different colors and sizes on your ads, and track the results. You'll be amazed at the difference in clickthrough ratio you'll see from simple steps like changing the color of the link you're displaying.

#3 - Make More Money per Click

To do this, you have to build pages about high-paying keywords. You can write the best articles and pages in the world about cd's and dvd's, but the margins on these types of products are pretty small, so advertisers don't generally pay much per click for them. And if they're not paying much per click, then you're not making as much money as you would be if you'd chosen a high paying niche. To get an idea of what are high paying niches and expensive keywords, take a look at http://www.searching.net . It's a pay per click search engine, but they're displaying keywords that make them money. Brainstorm variations of these keywords, and take a look at Overture and Google Adwords to see what kind of cost per click those terms are commanding. Then write content and pages about the high paying ones.

Some good terms in the financial arena include:

• mortgages
• debt consolidation
• payday loans
• credit cards
• car loans

All of these command good money per click.

So there's your quick, 3 step plan to increasing the amount of money you're making with Google's Adsense program. Good luck!

Rosalind Gardner vs. James Martell

Affiliate Marketing Programs :: Rosalind Gardner vs. James Martell

Rosalind Gardner is the author of an ebook called the Super Affiliate Handbook, and James Martell is the author of another ebook called the Affiliate Marketers Handbook. Both ebooks are pretty good, but there's a significant difference in price. Gardner's book costs $47 and Martell's book costs $167. My opinion is that Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook is well worth the extra money.

The Super Affiliate Handbook is not a bad book at all. But Rosalind Gardner is a big fan of the PPC search engine approach to getting traffic to her affiliate sites. And that's not necessarily a bad way to get traffic to your sites, and it can be very profitable indeed if you're really good at it. But for the most part, it's very hard to make money in affiliate marketing buying traffic on a pay per click basis. It can be expensive, time consuming, and requires a lot of work to manage effectively. There was not a lot of great information on getting free traffic from the search engines.

Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook is all about free search engine traffic. James doesn't advocate using pay per click marketing for a simple reason: the profit margin is much higher when you're not buying the traffic. And James provides a specific map, an easy to follow gameplan/checklist to actually launching an affiliate site that's going to make money fairly quickly.

One of my favorite aspects of James Martell's ebook is that he doesn't promise a get-rich scheme. He explains exactly what work you need to do to actually make a living in this kind of business. And he doesn't overpromise how much money you can expect to make; after six months, if you build a site per his instructions, you should be earning $500 a month or more from the site. That doesn't sound like a tremendous amount of money, but say you build 10 sites making $500 a month--now you're making a full-time living. But make no mistake, there is work involved in generating that many sites that make that kind of revenue.

The other great thing about Martell's book is that he offers a couple of updates every month and good user support through his Affiliate Buzz newsletter and his updates page. He's very specific in his handbook about how to optimize for search engine traffic, but everyone who understands about search engine algorithms realize that this kind of information becomes dated fairly quickly. With James's updates, you're able to receive the latest information from James about how he's optimizing sites. And he's demonstrated that his techniques work.

I'll be honest--I'm glad I bought Rosalind Gardner's book, but I'm a lot more glad that I bought James Martell's book.

Work at Home Ploys

Affiliate Marketing Programs :: Work at Home Ploys

You've probably seen work at home advertising: Take online surveys and make $150/hour. Earn $9000/per month from home working only ten minutes a day. Etc, etc, ad nauseam. And most of these schemes aren't legitimate ways to make a living.

Most of these ads leave out or lie about how many hours you'll have to work. There are often big costs involved with some of these work at home schemes, but of course, they don't tell you about the investment in the sales pitch. A lot of times you have to spend significant amounts of cash buying newspaper ads, making photocopies, or buying postal supplies that you'll need to work from home. The worst tactic is when the company who placed the ad expects you to pay for some kind of tutorial software. Don't waste your money or your energy on most of these scams.

Affiliate marketing is a real work at home opportunity for someone who's willing to do the work. And if you're clever and willing, you can learn to make money online without having to invest a lot of money into it. You can get a free blog from blogspot, write content, run affiliate ads, and get links to your site until you've got good positioning in the SERP's. None of this costs money; all of it requires effort. And a lot of times you won't see rewards for months.

But if you can build a good 100 page website, get some good quality backlinks, and do some intelligent keyword research, then you can pretty well count on making at least $500 a month on that website. And once you have 10 websites that size, you're making $5000 a month. That's not a get rich quick scheme though. Having 10 websites with 100 pages each means you've written 1000 pages of content for the internet. And THAT's a lot of work no matter how you slice it.

But achievable? You bet. In fact, if you work 5 days a week for 50 weeks out of the year, you only have to write 4 pages of content a day to get your 1000 pages done. And then, after a year, you've got a $5000 or more stream of income each month that requires very little maintenance on your part. So if you want to work from home, managing affiliate websites is the way to go, but don't think it's a get rich scheme.

Top Ten Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Marketing Programs :: Top Ten Affiliate Programs

Top ten lists are pretty popular on the internet these days, and I'm going to participate in the trend by listing what I think are the top ten affiliate programs. I might change my mind about some of the programs listed here, but right now, I think every single one of these programs is top notch and worth promoting.

1. Casinoblasters - I reviewed them at great length, but they are IMO one of the top moneymaking opportunities on the internet, and they're very well-run. I recommend the rev share rather than the CPA deal.
2. Party Poker - Another program I've reviewed, and another extremely profitable, well-run program. The poker industry is very competitive right now, so it's not for the faint of heart. But if you're willing to do the work, you can make some outstanding money promoting Party Poker. I recommend the rev share rather than the CPA deal.
3. Leading Edge Cash - Another subject of a review on this blog, this outfit is top notch. Great commision percentages and good management here. Lots of support available, including a forum for webmasters promoting their products.
4. Google Adsense - What can I say about Google Adsense? It's a no-brainer: get paid per click when someone sees an appropriate ad and decides to check it out. And guess what? They're all appropriate ads.
5. eBay - I didn't believe the stories about the eBay super affiliates making six figures in a month until I decided to try promoting their program via PPC on Google Adwords. Now I'm a believer. eBay is one of the most interesting things to happen on the internet, and their commission program and revenue sharing opportunity is fascinating and more importantly profitable.
6. Big Church - This is a niche dating site targeting Christians. It's not extremely competitive yet, and you can probably rank pretty high for 'big church', 'bigchurch', and 'big church.com' since there aren't a lot of people targeting those phrases. But my experience with them was that they converted their traffic VERY well.
7. University of Phoenix - Who hasn't heard of the University of Phoenix online degree program? Their associates program is one of those great programs that offer to pay you even though your customer hasn't spent any money--you get $17 every time someone fills out a form requesting additional information about their online degree programs. If someone only partially fills out the form, you still get $11. Not a bad deal at all.
8. VMC Satellite - The satellite industry is competitive and tough to get traffic for, but man the commissions are great when you land a sale. VMC Satellite was recommended to me by a good friend of mine, and since it's a two tier program, I'm now in his downline.
9. Household Finance Corporation - Mortgages are big money. These guys are one of the top programs in Commission Junction, based on their EPC figures.
10. Match.com - The largest dating program on the net. This is such a big niche that if you could tap into 1/10 of 1% of the niche, you'd never have to work again.

The problem with top ten lists is that they're so subjective. I've seen dozens of affiliate marketing websites listing what they think are their top ten associate programs, and almost all of them offer a completely different list than the others. Not that this is a bad thing. The point is that depending on what you're interested in, and depending on what kind of product you're interested in selling, almost any marketing program can make you money.

The Hypertracker Affiliate Program

Affiliate Marketing Programs :: Hypertracker Affiliate Program

Testing and measuring are the two keys to success on the internet when it comes to marketing. (Those are actually the two keys to success to offline marketing too.) Hypertracker is a software that simplifies and enhances your ability to track and measure the results of your ad campaigns. You can learn from the Hypertracker software exactly which ads on which places are productive for you. And once you know this, you can make the important adjustments that are necessary to profit on the internet. But it's not just a cool product; it's also a cool affiliate program to promote.

The Hypertracker affiliate program is a two tiered program that pays lifetime commissions on the customers you refer. The top tier pays 30% and the 2nd tier pays 10%, for as long as your referral continues to pay the monthly fee for the service. Their average payout at the 30% level is about $39, and the average 2nd tier payout is $13 per sale. Their minimum payout requirement is that you've earned no less than $50. The product is marketed through a slightly larger affiliate network called Implix.

Implix offers several other products besides Hypertracker that you can promote. These products include:

• GetResponse.com - An autoresponder program that's very well known and has been around since 1998.
• WebsiteWizard - An online website builder for people who are just beginners and are looking to get started on the internet.
• EbookGold - Ebook creation software for people who want to create and promote their own ebooks.
• Bizmint - Expired domain software program. People love to get their hands on great priced expired domains, which are often worth a fortune.
• DynamiteCovers - Allows you to add three dimensional virtual covers to the items on your website.

The 30%/10% plan applies to all the programs above, as well as to the Hypertracker associate program. The best part of the program is that you get paid commissions for the life of the customer. That's true residual income right there. Most of their products rebill periodically, either monthly, quarterly, twice a year, or annually, and as long as they keep billing the customer, you keep receiving your commission.

Top 7 Commission Junction Programs

Affiliate Marketing Programs :: Top 7 Commission Junction Programs

Commission Junction has a search function that affiliates can use to order the available merchants by EPC for the last 3 months, and by EPC for the last 7 days. I ran a search for the last 3 months, because I think 3 months' worth of data is better, and I came up with the following list of what I think are probably the best money-making programs on CJ:

1. Household Finance Corporation. $329 EPC. They pay $12 per lead. A lead is someone who fills out a loan or rental application online.
2. Money Search. $221 EPC. They pay between $4 and $20 per lead. A lead is someone who fills out a loan application. Depending on whether or not the client is refinancing a mortgage or consolidating debt, you get a specific dollar amount based on the type of loan that's being applied for.
3. Ameriquest Mortage. $195 EPC. They pay $20 per lead. A lead is someone who fills out a mortgage application.
4. Jevene. $171 EPC. They are a cosmetics company who pay a flat $12 per order.
5. NetMoneyWizard. $170 EPC. They pay $21 for a refinance application and $6 for a new home loan application.
6. marbles loans. $165 EPC. They pay 10 pounds for a lead. They're a British loan company.
7. Zurich $159 EPC. They pay 50 pounds for customers who buy insurance from them.

EPC stands for earnings per 100 clicks. All of the programs above average above $1.50 per click. This makes them very competitive indeed. If that average held true for Household Finance for example, $3.20 per click, then to make $100,000 a year with their program, you would only need to send them 90 clicks a day. And looking over the list, it's clear to me that looking at the loan and the insurance sectors might be a good idea for me over the next few months.