Make Money With Affiliate Programs

Listen up …

1. Please, co not try to reinvent the wheel. Go and research what your competition’s doing and get to know what’s working for them. Try different keyword tools to get a glimpse how you could build your campaign. This will get you on a competing level with them right from the get go. Copying your competition is not the right way to get your campaigns into making profit from the start even some may tell you that. Try something else, try to beat them not by raising the bid prices but improving your ad copy i.e. Once you start making consistent sales, then you’d get more playful and tweak the things step by step.

2. Try to go go after buyer-type keywords. These are the keywords like “name of product” or “name of product+review” or “buy name of product” etc. This will this make your conversion rates higher than just raising the bid price all the time. There are many other variations, but the point is to make sure you target the buyers, not the lookers.

3. Test and Track. I failed to do this from the start, and I lost a lot of money because of it. Track your keywords, landing/squeeze pages, etc. If you don’t know where your traffic and sales are coming from, you will lose a lot of money.

4. Use opt-in E-Mail. Many people are not in the mood to read in the moment visiting your site but generally interested in the topic you deliver, so they may leave their e-mail address. It’s a small effort to implement aWeber i.e. but great success giving you the key to get them back to your site using a good autoresponder.

Recently I applied for the Shareasale affiliate network and got approved, almost instantly.

I immediately set up a campaign promoting EfficientPPC. A nice gadget for every PPC marketer. You can set up adwords campaigns fast as hell. Well then. After struggling with CJ and Linkshare for years, I was surprised to have sales flowing right away

That’s what I experienced so far:

• Shareasale gives Affiliates/Publishers access to product databases upon a merchant’s acceptance into a program. There’s no surcharge for product databases!

• Direct Deposit is available for Affiliates/Publishers ($50 minimum). But not to all countries, most though!

• They require merchants to have a certain amount of money “on their account” to pay Affiliates, (YOU!) - they periodically take merchants offline having “low funds”. Good to know you get paid end of month.

• Their merchants do provide a lot of banners and codes for your usage

Shareasale is one of the biggest network programs available at the moment. They have some good niche merchants and Brian, the owner, is a really cool guy. Everyone who’s not performing that well with CJ i.e. should definitively check out Shareasale.

The easiest way to earn money with affiliate marketing is by using Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising.
To pay the advertising costs you need some cash at hands, but revenue is only a matter of hard work and time.
Remember: If you want to make money you need to spend money mostly up front you earn some.

1. Create a site. Use an own domain, get a cheap hosting account for it, put up a Wordpress blog and choose a free theme (takes the hassle out of creating a site) and you’re in business.
2. Depending on which niche you choose you have to pick an appropriate domain, one which makes sense the SEO-way. If you don’t have a clue, make the site around an affiliate marketing offer i.e. an ebook reviewed on this site (Have a look at the products listed with images on the right side of this page). It could be a product or a service in just any niche you want. Almost every niche got it’s affiliate program these days. Compare them and pick one. Don’t spend to much time researching, take action. I recommend you pick a niche you have a clue about and maybe can contribute some quality articles or blog posts (Regarding your your future blogs or sales pages)! There are no bad or good picks, everything can work out in it’s own right way if done correctly. If you are lazy super-affiliate like me, then choose a product that is attractive for the end user and serves some type of beneficial purpose. Affiliate networks like Clickbank, Azoogle, MoreNiche (promoting MakeingYouRicher.com) or NeverBlueAds have tons of offers, I’m sure you can find one. Try and keep out of the ringtones and finance/mortgage niches for now. Those are very busy and established niches with many super-affiliates in having years of experience and bringing in lots cash, making it difficult to compete with.
3. Good, having picked your product, make a blog post about it on your blog (You could have set up and own blog on your hosting account or an account on blogpost i.e.). If you don’t know that much about it, do some quick research on Wikipedia or bit G. It’s also a good idea to put a banner up or a full page ad for it if you aren’t going to write a blog post about it. Either way, make sure the theme of the blog is matching the product you are promoting. Using the same color scheme as the page the user will get forwarded to in order to buy something from you is obvious.
4. After you set up the hosting, the domain and blog packed with content, comes the next issue: traffic, the fun part though! You can either use Google Adwords, Yahoo SEM or MSN AdCenter to promote it on the big engines. Take $100 i.e. and deposit it into yahoo SEM. For Adwords you’ll preferably need a CC. With Adwords you can start off right away, but with MSN and Yahoo you may have to wait a few hours until they activate your account and approve your ads.
5. You don’t have to buy  every keyword tool under the sun, use the Google Keyword tool and have a look at Keyword Elite. It’s coty but nevertheless a class of it’s own. But in advance, let’s do a bit of manual work. First have a look at the affiliate publisher’s page and pull keywords off there by hand. You can search with the Google Keyword Tool using them as starting point. Use synonyms and your own mind (What would you type in looking for that certain product?). Primarily we focus on LONG TAIL KEYWORDS. We don’t want the one or two word keywords because they are very competitive and therefore expensive. Many people are using them for research purposes and mostly don’t a “buy now” - mindset.
6. After you successfully grabbed those long tail keywords, is what you should do first is to get a nice long list of longtail keywords of what you think people are using when they are in “buying mode” when searching on the engines for your product. So if the product is some kind of energy drink, your keywords would be: buy energy drinks, best energy drink, recommended energy drinks. Those are pretty good, and sure, they are nowhere near as robust as something like “energy drinks” or “energy drink” but they are more likely to be in buying mode than researching mode.
7. Great, we have our keywords, the site, the domain, the product. Wonderful, now on to getting some traffic finally! Take those groups of keywords and make one primary campaign for them in AdWords and the sub-campaigns for them based on which keyword theme they are.
8. Finally, when you’re done with all of the above steps mentioned it’s time for the next very important step, change the keywords so they are all EXACT and PHRASE matching. You can even go as far as to create a seperate ad group for every mother phrase, but sometimes this is an overkill and may also screw up your other campaigns.
9. Will it make you millions? We doubt that. Be realistic: Try things out and learn them for yourself before you can pass judgement on it or decide it’s “too hard”, it’s actually not hard at all. It’s easy shit compared to any job offline that you may have had to do for a pittance. Stop sitting on your lazy ass finished reading this, go out and do something about it! Luck is in your hands.

The simplest way is to just directly put the affiliate link into an AdWords ad.

First get yourself an AdWords account. (Of course you can use Yahoo SEM as well) then you signup for an affiliate account on clickbank for instance.

After getting the accounts activated you start a campaign and promote your ad with the included affiliate link.

Tips:

Don’t pay more than 0,25/Cents a click in Adwords. If you make higher bids you won’t make a lot of profit.

Concentrate on certain countries. Maybe even translate the ads to other languages.

A good idea would actually if you use a translated landing-page for every country with using the appropriate language used in that country. You can just translate the texts of your affiliate programs website. Yes, you are mostly allowed do use all the texts/images on the website.

Try not to use the common keywords like “buy viagra”. The competition is just to high there. Break them down to countries like “buy viagra in Pakistan” or something like that. Use your imagination.

If you want to get an expert on this I strongly recommend the tactics described in the Rich Jerk EBook.

Always go straight and remember: just do it.