(PIPS Affiliate’s Profit Tools
)
Copyright © Isusu Alphonsus
http://www.MoneyCashTrace.com
(I’m not going to beat about the bush here. Ask ANY PIPS affiliate and they’ll tell you the following BASIC tools are vital to them making
real money from their affiliate programs.
You see, just as running an offline business where you’ll require an office space, fax machine, telephone lines, etc. – You need certain essential tools for an online BUSINESS (yes, treat it as such) to excel as well.
These are the basic requirements if you want to earn much more profits from your affiliate promotions :
- Your own website and domain name
I don’t care what you’ve heard or what so and so ‘guru’ said :
You need your own website and domain name to make it online,
even if you’re just an affiliate marketer.
This is the first critical step in seperating success from failure online.
Your own domain name and personal website (not those on
freeservers please) are needed to establish your online presence,
build YOUR identity, brand your name and profit from your internet
business in the long run!
It’s easy AND cheap to register domain names now.
If you can get one at $8-$10 (for a 1 year registration fee),
why don’t you?
Here are reputable registrars that charges less than $10 for a domain name!
namecheap.com
registerfly.com
godaddy.com
iPOWER.com
This is the cheapest registrar I could find - at just $5.95 per domain name.
But be careful, registering your domain name there automatically ties you in to a 30 day free trial of their hosting / search engine submission service. So bear in mind to cancel your trial before the 30 day period if you do not want to be billed after that.
You’ll need a good quality hosting company with big features to host
your site next. While they’re too many to name here, I can vouch for the following as I use them personally:
Homestead
Host 4 Profit
eHosting4U.net
Host 4 Profit is hosting company that pays you. It’s such an awesome place to host your website. Hey, this is not to say you MUST use it. Research on others and you’ll find the ones that you may desire more.
- GetResponse Autoresponders
A GetResponse autoresponder is a software or script (web or desktop based) that essentially performs follow up marketing for you with your prospects automatically.
It works this way –> prospect A fills in name and email for more information from your website -> details are sent to your autoresponder -> autoresponder instantly delivers an email to prospect A with the requested information -> autoresponder continues to deliver follow up messages to prospect A over a period of time -> prospect A enjoys the information and decides to order -> you’ve made a sale + an opt-in subscriber!
Now it’s been said that if you’re not utilizing email marketing, you’re not really doing business online. Hey, come to it of it, even spammers use email to spam exclusively : )
Of course I’m not asking you to spam (no way!), but it goes to show just how powerful and essential email marketing is.
If you forget everything here, just remember one thing – you must start building an opt-in list of potential customers no matter what you’re selling!
Put the control into your own hands, not the affiliate site.
All successful internet marketers and PlugInProfitSite (PIPS) affiliates have THEIR OWN opt-in list – that’s how the bulk of their income is made anyway.
Get this right and you’ll be on the right track to internet profits.
Now I won’t recommend you using free autoresponders if you’re serious and want to be professional. But if you need to for some reasons, here are 3 good ones you can use (though you should really upgrade once your situation permits) :
freeautobot.com
sendfree.com
rapidreply.net
- Ad Tracking And Testing
Every successful affiliate marketer have one thing in common – they track and test extensively.
Tracking and testing are keys to building profits in absolutely any business, online or off. This definitely applies to affiliate marketing too.
How else would you know specifically what’s working and what’s not…and wasting you money?
I won’t be going into details here but there are 2 main types of ad tracking programs, CGI Scripts which run at your own website, and Web-based Services.
Here are some examples of such programs :
CGI Scripts :
adtrackz.com
proanalyzer.com
prolinkz.com
Web-based Services :
hypertracker.com
adminder.com
clickalyzer.com
If you want to become a high-earning affiliate, remember the importants of tracking and testing in all areas.
Now thousands of dollars can be made with the above resources
if applied correctly and used together.
Before we move on to link cloaking, I want to highlight a perfect service for your needs. It’s where you get professional webhosting, autoresponders, ad tracking service and more, all in one place.
- Affiliate Link Cloaking
It’s imperative to mask or cloak your naked affiliate link if you do not want to lose commissions for nothing.
Potential buyers can simply switch your affiliate id to theirs and get a discount from their purchase of the affiliate product you’re promoting. For instance, a naked affiliate link from ClickBank :
hop.clickbank.net/?nickname/alphykool
Anyone can insert their own ClickBank nickname in place of yours and get both a commission and discount!
It’s what’s commonly known as commission theft or hijack, and it robs you of your hard work and rewards.
Masking this same link using various cloaking tools helps prevent such theft from occuring. The masked affiliate link will now be displayed as:
turnkeymoney.com/AFFILIATEPROGRAM.htm
(the above is just an example)
This will discourage commission theft, though prevention is not 100% foolproof (nothing really is).
Here are some cloaking tools for you :
1. Tiny Url
A web-based service that’s easy to use and does the job relatively well. Tiny Url also shortens your affiliate link for you.
2. ClickBank Affiliate Link Protection System
Download this toolkit containing two cloaking tools, Affiliate Link Encrypter and Affiliate Link Cloaker.
Remember to cloak your links!
)
About the Author:
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To find the best home based business ideas and
opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.MoneyCashTrace.com
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Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Secrets To The Right Affiliate Program
The internet opportunities abound…and the questions that often come up is…which one is appropriate. Why? Because, there’re thousand of affiliate programs promising you everything on earth but delivers little or nothing. Hey, are you troubled with this? You don’t have to as I’ll show you some of the things you may have to consider before sign up to any affiliate programs.
The first step would be to determine what affiliate products AND which program to promote. This will affect how much money you make as an affiliate at the end of the day!
This step though pretty obvious is important and choosing the wrong programs should and can be avoided. It leads to loss of time, resources and more, so get it right!
Select your affiliate programs carefully. Here are some criteria you must take into consideration:
Your targeted markets
The quality of the affiliate product
The conversion of the product’s sales page
The availability of instant marketing tools
The incentives you’re paid
We’ll now look at each criterion individually. You’ll understand why there’re very important in your selection of the right affiliate programs…
Your targeted markets
Before even deciding to promote affiliate products, decide on the market you want to target at.
It’s best to decide on a market you want to stick with for the major time, as this will enable you to build a business around as you continue offering products and building your list.
As an illustration, there’s not much sense in selling an affiliate product for hair loss to a group of young teenagers!
Or how about choosing to sell watch batteries, you’re gonna cry at the tiny profits (if any) you earn: (
In other words, choose a market based on its relevancy to your business.
Choose a market based on its size and profitability.
It would also help if the target market you chose is aligned with your interest or knowledge; it makes everything all the more enjoyable and motivating.
A good way to select your target market is based on two necessary factors:
1. Demand And Profitability
Here are the basic tools Internet marketers are using for finding profitable markets:
- Good Keywords
goodkeywords.com
Good Keywords is a terrific free software that shows the searches for any keywords (markets) you type in. For example, ‘weight loss’ was searched 400,864 times in a given month. This is a huge market!
- Word Tracker
Another great keyword research tool is wordtracker.com
This will be adequate if you know exactly what you’re targeting at.
Registering for their service also entitles you to a report listing the top 300 most frequently searched words in the last 24 hours, plus the top 200 most frequently searched words for the last 60 days!
So for example if the term ‘auto’ was searched for 200,000+ times in the last 60 days, won’t you want to target this huge demand?
- Keyword Sleuth
marketing-make-money.com
An amazing tool that will list up to 5,000 (yes!) popular search phrases on the topic you want. It’s not free but a demo is provided. This really digs into the keywords and keyword phrases, more so than the above two.
- ClickBank Marketplace
Clickbank is the Internet’s biggest marketplace (more than 10,000 products currently) for digital products such as ebooks, software, digital audio recordings, etc.
Clicking on ‘Shop The Marketplace’, which is the first link from the bottom, takes you into their marketplace. This area provides a good idea as to what’s selling well in terms of digital products. There’re various categories ranging from Business, Entertainment to Sports.
Let me explain, ClickBank ranks the listed products based on their popularity (largely determined by the sales volume done and the number of active affiliates promoting it).
Checking the types of products constantly on the first two pages in a category gives an indication that it’s ‘hot selling’ status. There must be a good demand for them thus!
- Overture.com
Again, you can further research market demand at Overture.com.
It is currently the biggest pay-per-click search engine on the internet.
The simple method of checking the bids for any keyword will give you an idea of just how popular the demand is!
A general guideline would be the higher the bids placed on certain keywords, the greater the demand for them.
- eBay.com
You can also check out eBay for research. This is the world’s busiest and biggest online auction site with millions of sellers – a massive marketplace no doubt.
Looking at the “featured items” listings on the homepage and individual categories provide a general indication of what’s selling.
Sellers are paying $99.95 for these premium listings and short of having excessive spending money; it’s safe to assume their products
to be converting at a high rate and receiving good bids in the first place.
As a warning, huge demand does not always automatically equate to huge profitability.
It does depend on WHO you’re marketing to, and how much money they have to spend.
A very simple illustration would be that working professionals will
have more money than young kids, thus being a more profitable
target group!
2. Market Supply
The lower the market supply for the demand, the more profitable it’d be.
This may seem very obvious, but you’ll be surprise how many people ignore this basic economic principle.
- Search Engines
The easiest way to check the availability of products targeted to your market is through the search engines.
For example, a search for ‘weight loss’ at google.com showed an average of 2.83 MILLION competitors out there!
However, if you just narrow down your market for example, ‘weight loss tip’ has just 300,000+ competitors. This is a huge difference which will play to your advantage.
The bottom line’s to focus on specific, niche markets instead of the overall general industry. You’ll see more sales and money coming in this way.
- Yahoo! Shopping
Another simple trick to check the supply of a given product or market is through the net’s biggest shopping network – Yahoo! Shopping :
Doing a search for say ‘digital camera’ returned the following :
Wow! 1,412 competitors marketing 53,806 products, now that’s an idea of over supply.
You’ve got to balance the demand and supply to decide if the market you want to go after is profitable. This will help you in determining affiliate products to promote.
The quality of the affiliate product
It has often been advocated that one should know and use the products they endorse, and I couldn’t agree more. This is especially critical if you’re planning to run a serious business online.
Recommending a bad product hurts your credibility and destroys trust almost immediately. Only promote products that you feel comfortable with, knowing they’re of good value.
I’ve seen countless ezine publishers, even the famous ones promoting affiliate products that either just plain suck, or does not even seem relevant to their market. What do you think happened next? I hit the unsubscribe button.
Don’t chase after the quick buck – aim long term.
The conversion of the product’s sales page
Before promoting a product, check out the sales page. Does it have
a killer web copy that converts visitors to customers well?
Does it make you want to buy? Does it load fast? Are there many payment options (this may hijack your commission) etc. etc…
You get the point.
It’s NOT your job to sell the products, that’s the affiliate owner’s role. Your responsibility as an effective affiliate would be to send qualified traffic to the main sales page by PRESELLING to your prospects.
This is again why knowing and using the products you promote is essential, it’s only when you’ve experience it that you’ll be able to presell well.
Promoting an affiliate product that just doesn’t sell itself is a major mistake many affiliates are making…don’t fall into this trap!
The availability of marketing tools
Good affiliate programs tend to provide affiliates with a range of marketing tools for their promotion campaigns. These may include cut-and-paste solo ads, classified ads, banners, articles, samples, rebrandible ebooks, ecourses, etc.
It would be advisable to join only those programs that do offer such tools. First of all, creating these tools show a certain sincerity and seriousness of the affiliate program owner. Secondly and ultimately, they save you time and headaches. More importantly, you’ll be able to use them to compile your ebooks.
All affiliate owners should make it EASY for their partners to promote their products.
The incentives you’re paid
Make sure you’ll be paid! That’s the entire point of promoting affiliate programs, or doing anything with effort anyway.
Check the credibility of the owner, the domain name (how long it’s registered for) and other signs that indicate it’s a genuine business. If it smells fishy, you may end up losing all your commissions (trust me, there’re such people around).
Coming back now, look at the overall incentive package, rather than just on the direct commission you receive.
Questions to ponder include…
Does the affiliate program offers extra incentives, contests or benefits to motivate YOU to promote it? Do you get additional rewards upon achieving certain sales volume?
As in offline sales, companies who value their sales person often dangle ‘carrots’ in the form of higher commissions, lump sum bonuses or free holidays simply as motivations to achieve sales targets. It’ll be much more exciting and fulfilling if the online affiliate programs have such incentives too.
In terms of commission, you’ll want at least a 50% cut to make it worth your time and effort. A program that pays out more means higher profits in your pocket! This has to be balanced with the selling price of the product. Promoting a higher end product will be more rewarding than one that sells for just $27.
In an example of these two components of commission rate
and selling price, a program which pays out 70% is high,
but if the product sells at just $10, you’ll only receive $7.00
for all your efforts! On the other hand, promoting a $200
product which pays out 50% means more profit for you, to
the tune of $100 for the same amount of effort you put in!
Another important factor to consider : is this a two (or more) tier affiliate program? Essentially a deeper tiered program rewards you with extra earnings from your personally recruited sub-affiliates. You make money from their sales too. This converts to greater leverage with the same amount of effort!
I would encourage promoting a residual income opportunity.
This can be in the form of service-oriented programs such as web hosting, membership sites. Such programs allow you to continue earning recurring or lifetime commission, which is much more logical and profitable in the long term.
The first step would be to determine what affiliate products AND which program to promote. This will affect how much money you make as an affiliate at the end of the day!
This step though pretty obvious is important and choosing the wrong programs should and can be avoided. It leads to loss of time, resources and more, so get it right!
Select your affiliate programs carefully. Here are some criteria you must take into consideration:
Your targeted markets
The quality of the affiliate product
The conversion of the product’s sales page
The availability of instant marketing tools
The incentives you’re paid
We’ll now look at each criterion individually. You’ll understand why there’re very important in your selection of the right affiliate programs…
Your targeted markets
Before even deciding to promote affiliate products, decide on the market you want to target at.
It’s best to decide on a market you want to stick with for the major time, as this will enable you to build a business around as you continue offering products and building your list.
As an illustration, there’s not much sense in selling an affiliate product for hair loss to a group of young teenagers!
Or how about choosing to sell watch batteries, you’re gonna cry at the tiny profits (if any) you earn: (
In other words, choose a market based on its relevancy to your business.
Choose a market based on its size and profitability.
It would also help if the target market you chose is aligned with your interest or knowledge; it makes everything all the more enjoyable and motivating.
A good way to select your target market is based on two necessary factors:
1. Demand And Profitability
Here are the basic tools Internet marketers are using for finding profitable markets:
- Good Keywords
goodkeywords.com
Good Keywords is a terrific free software that shows the searches for any keywords (markets) you type in. For example, ‘weight loss’ was searched 400,864 times in a given month. This is a huge market!
- Word Tracker
Another great keyword research tool is wordtracker.com
This will be adequate if you know exactly what you’re targeting at.
Registering for their service also entitles you to a report listing the top 300 most frequently searched words in the last 24 hours, plus the top 200 most frequently searched words for the last 60 days!
So for example if the term ‘auto’ was searched for 200,000+ times in the last 60 days, won’t you want to target this huge demand?
- Keyword Sleuth
marketing-make-money.com
An amazing tool that will list up to 5,000 (yes!) popular search phrases on the topic you want. It’s not free but a demo is provided. This really digs into the keywords and keyword phrases, more so than the above two.
- ClickBank Marketplace
Clickbank is the Internet’s biggest marketplace (more than 10,000 products currently) for digital products such as ebooks, software, digital audio recordings, etc.
Clicking on ‘Shop The Marketplace’, which is the first link from the bottom, takes you into their marketplace. This area provides a good idea as to what’s selling well in terms of digital products. There’re various categories ranging from Business, Entertainment to Sports.
Let me explain, ClickBank ranks the listed products based on their popularity (largely determined by the sales volume done and the number of active affiliates promoting it).
Checking the types of products constantly on the first two pages in a category gives an indication that it’s ‘hot selling’ status. There must be a good demand for them thus!
- Overture.com
Again, you can further research market demand at Overture.com.
It is currently the biggest pay-per-click search engine on the internet.
The simple method of checking the bids for any keyword will give you an idea of just how popular the demand is!
A general guideline would be the higher the bids placed on certain keywords, the greater the demand for them.
- eBay.com
You can also check out eBay for research. This is the world’s busiest and biggest online auction site with millions of sellers – a massive marketplace no doubt.
Looking at the “featured items” listings on the homepage and individual categories provide a general indication of what’s selling.
Sellers are paying $99.95 for these premium listings and short of having excessive spending money; it’s safe to assume their products
to be converting at a high rate and receiving good bids in the first place.
As a warning, huge demand does not always automatically equate to huge profitability.
It does depend on WHO you’re marketing to, and how much money they have to spend.
A very simple illustration would be that working professionals will
have more money than young kids, thus being a more profitable
target group!
2. Market Supply
The lower the market supply for the demand, the more profitable it’d be.
This may seem very obvious, but you’ll be surprise how many people ignore this basic economic principle.
- Search Engines
The easiest way to check the availability of products targeted to your market is through the search engines.
For example, a search for ‘weight loss’ at google.com showed an average of 2.83 MILLION competitors out there!
However, if you just narrow down your market for example, ‘weight loss tip’ has just 300,000+ competitors. This is a huge difference which will play to your advantage.
The bottom line’s to focus on specific, niche markets instead of the overall general industry. You’ll see more sales and money coming in this way.
- Yahoo! Shopping
Another simple trick to check the supply of a given product or market is through the net’s biggest shopping network – Yahoo! Shopping :
Doing a search for say ‘digital camera’ returned the following :
Wow! 1,412 competitors marketing 53,806 products, now that’s an idea of over supply.
You’ve got to balance the demand and supply to decide if the market you want to go after is profitable. This will help you in determining affiliate products to promote.
The quality of the affiliate product
It has often been advocated that one should know and use the products they endorse, and I couldn’t agree more. This is especially critical if you’re planning to run a serious business online.
Recommending a bad product hurts your credibility and destroys trust almost immediately. Only promote products that you feel comfortable with, knowing they’re of good value.
I’ve seen countless ezine publishers, even the famous ones promoting affiliate products that either just plain suck, or does not even seem relevant to their market. What do you think happened next? I hit the unsubscribe button.
Don’t chase after the quick buck – aim long term.
The conversion of the product’s sales page
Before promoting a product, check out the sales page. Does it have
a killer web copy that converts visitors to customers well?
Does it make you want to buy? Does it load fast? Are there many payment options (this may hijack your commission) etc. etc…
You get the point.
It’s NOT your job to sell the products, that’s the affiliate owner’s role. Your responsibility as an effective affiliate would be to send qualified traffic to the main sales page by PRESELLING to your prospects.
This is again why knowing and using the products you promote is essential, it’s only when you’ve experience it that you’ll be able to presell well.
Promoting an affiliate product that just doesn’t sell itself is a major mistake many affiliates are making…don’t fall into this trap!
The availability of marketing tools
Good affiliate programs tend to provide affiliates with a range of marketing tools for their promotion campaigns. These may include cut-and-paste solo ads, classified ads, banners, articles, samples, rebrandible ebooks, ecourses, etc.
It would be advisable to join only those programs that do offer such tools. First of all, creating these tools show a certain sincerity and seriousness of the affiliate program owner. Secondly and ultimately, they save you time and headaches. More importantly, you’ll be able to use them to compile your ebooks.
All affiliate owners should make it EASY for their partners to promote their products.
The incentives you’re paid
Make sure you’ll be paid! That’s the entire point of promoting affiliate programs, or doing anything with effort anyway.
Check the credibility of the owner, the domain name (how long it’s registered for) and other signs that indicate it’s a genuine business. If it smells fishy, you may end up losing all your commissions (trust me, there’re such people around).
Coming back now, look at the overall incentive package, rather than just on the direct commission you receive.
Questions to ponder include…
Does the affiliate program offers extra incentives, contests or benefits to motivate YOU to promote it? Do you get additional rewards upon achieving certain sales volume?
As in offline sales, companies who value their sales person often dangle ‘carrots’ in the form of higher commissions, lump sum bonuses or free holidays simply as motivations to achieve sales targets. It’ll be much more exciting and fulfilling if the online affiliate programs have such incentives too.
In terms of commission, you’ll want at least a 50% cut to make it worth your time and effort. A program that pays out more means higher profits in your pocket! This has to be balanced with the selling price of the product. Promoting a higher end product will be more rewarding than one that sells for just $27.
In an example of these two components of commission rate
and selling price, a program which pays out 70% is high,
but if the product sells at just $10, you’ll only receive $7.00
for all your efforts! On the other hand, promoting a $200
product which pays out 50% means more profit for you, to
the tune of $100 for the same amount of effort you put in!
Another important factor to consider : is this a two (or more) tier affiliate program? Essentially a deeper tiered program rewards you with extra earnings from your personally recruited sub-affiliates. You make money from their sales too. This converts to greater leverage with the same amount of effort!
I would encourage promoting a residual income opportunity.
This can be in the form of service-oriented programs such as web hosting, membership sites. Such programs allow you to continue earning recurring or lifetime commission, which is much more logical and profitable in the long term.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Welcome to my blog!
I've just launched my new blog! Stay tuned...
Best regards,
Isusu Alphonsus
http://www.moneycashtrace.com
Best regards,
Isusu Alphonsus
http://www.moneycashtrace.com
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