Affiliate

How to Create Multiple Streams of Income, Part 1

May 18, 2008 – 4:37 pm

You’ve must have read the phrase “multiple streams of income” numerous times on your journey searching for wisdom on the Internet. Regarding to Robert G. Allen, multiple streams of income are the stock market, real estate and the Internet. I prefer to add paycheck to this list as well. Most of us don’t feel comfortable to give up the security of a steady income, at least not in the beginning.
During the next few months I will publish new articles about my very own experiences with building multiple streams of income. Although I just recently started, I have a lot to share and I hope I will inspire someone to avoid the mistakes I made, and still will make.
Please join me on my journey to financial freedom through my home-based business on the Internet. I will cover my experiences and mistakes with the stock market and in the real estate business in separate articles. For now I’m focusing on the Internet business.
I wasted hours and hours searching for the almighty golden key to financial freedom. I spent a lot of money for worthless e-books and signed up to almost every newsletter there is. Until I had to switch email addresses. My inbox couldn’t keep up with the massive stream of useless emails.
What did I learn so far? Somebody else got a little bit closer to financial freedom, certainly not me! I was in desperate need of either giving up or dramatically changing my strategy. I’m not a quitter and whatever strategy I used, if so, it must change or I will find myself in financial hell.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking to make money out of thin air. I actually don’t believe in the get rich with no money schemes. The only person getting rich is the author of the book! Some of these strategies may work in theory, but I’ve never seen substantial results in the long run. I might be wrong on this one, if so, please send me your opinion and experience with this business strategy.
Here’s another advice; it takes time, lots of it. Don’t rush yourself into hasty decisions just because you think it is a hot deal. Do your homework and research the deal as good as possible. If this is the true “hot” deal, it will be around for a while. Otherwise it’s just another rip off scheme and someone else is making the big bucks. If you come across these 30 days to success guides, give yourself at least 60 days to achieve your success. Remember, patience is one of the key factors to success. Read the guide in its entirety and slowly start implementing these suggestions into action. Always keep track on what you did and double check after a few days or weeks, if it’s working. Make changes as necessary.
I really don’t remember how I got started with the idea of building my own home business on the Internet. I believe that I was searching for ways to increase web traffic to my real estate site. During my research I came across all these websites promising thousands of visitors to your site. Most of them are free, but you spend hours after hours to generate enough credits for your own site to be shown. And when the site is shown, guess who’s looking at it? Another sleepless soul, who is looking to increase traffic to their site. This is not exactly the type of customer you’re looking for.
After a while I thought, hmm, if I add a banner from a banner link exchange, then I will be able to trigger more targeted hits to my website. So I continued clicking night after night through these exchange services with little or no success. I wasted countless hours in front of the computer. My advice; stay away from these exchange services. Most of them are pure pyramid marketing schemes anyway. There are no real products or useful services offered by these sites.
At this point I started to discover the power of affiliate programs. And this, my friends, is the real deal! I’m not saying this just to get your attention; I’m speaking from experience. Affiliate programs come in any shape and form. Some are pure product reselling machines, others offer incentives for recruiting new affiliates and many are offering a combination of both. The real value behind this concept is; you get endless training material to sharpen your marketing skills. There are real products to sell and there is real money to make.
The mother of all affiliate programs is SFI. I joined them as soon as I learned the details and the benefits of their program. Later on I read about Stone Evans and his incredible services he offers. In fact, Stone is to blame that I’m writing this article.
So far I got off a good start with SFI and Stone Evans. I will keep you posted, if you like, in my next article.
Sincerely,Peter Dobler(c) 2005
Peter Dobler is a 20+ year veteran in the IT business. He is an active Real Estate Investor and a successful Internet business owner.Get your own personal 24/7 money maker at www.mypluginhomebiz.com (Free setup in 24 hrs) or send a blank email to pdobler@getresponse.com to learn more about viral marketing.

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Working With Affiliate Programs

May 10, 2008 – 2:48 pm

Everywhere you look you see affiliate program offers for every product or service that you can think of. Some have fully automated systems that sell high volumes of hard products all over the world. In case you don’t know, “hard” products are those that you can touch…unlike an ebook or downloadable web template. Many affiliate programs have several thousand affiliates and one or two of the bigger companies have over one million affiliates.
What are the advantages of joining an affiliate program?
They provide a ready-made business. This is a very big plus for those people who want to earn some kind of living off the Internet but lack the knowledge or inclination to set up a business by themselves.
Commissions and rewards are generally good, and the more established programs offer a real chance of advancement to higher and better-paid levels.
Other affiliates are usually on hand to offer practical support.
What are the limitations?
You are restricted in your promotional activities due to the fact that you do not actually own the affiliate site they give you. You won’t be able to put such things as banners, images, links, meta tags, etc. onto your page. The URL of your affiliate page is often either too long or contains such awkward things as question marks, which many Search Engines will not index.
Any promotional ads or articles have probably already been used by thousands of other people and consequently may have lost its impact, making it more difficult to achieve sales or referrals.
If the program you have joined has not yet established itself (or in some cases even if it has), then you may encounter problems with payments owed to you not being honored. You also run the risk of low quality products or sub-standard statistics that do not accurately record how many referrals or sales you have made.
You may be required to purchase a minimum quantity of the product on a regular basis before you start to qualify for commissions or even before you can become an affiliate. You may not get the technical or affiliate support you might expect from the company. This may be due to inadequate staffing, or the company’s negligence.
Other people in your downline do nothing to promote the program.
At least four of the above limitations can be overcome with a little time and effort. You could, for example, come up with fresher ads to promote the program (provided this is allowed).
If the company supplies the email addresses of people in your downline, then you could offer to help the less active members. Very often these people are passive not because they are lazy or apathetic but merely because they don’t know HOW to promote effectively! your guidance could mean the difference between no sales or referrals and healthy downlines and residual incomes.
As regards promoting your actual page, here are a couple of little tricks that should overcome a number of restrictions:
Cloak your Affiliate URL to stop hijackers Affiliate Masker While this will not help you to get listed on the major Search Engines, it will make your web page easier for prospects to remember and type into their browser’s address bar.
Go to your affiliate page. Place your mouse pointer anywhere on the page and right click once. In the drop-down box choose “View Source”. This will display the HTML for the page. Save this to your hard drive as a HTML document using the “Save As” function. Upload the page to your web site. If you don’t have a web site then get some free web space from one of these:
www.tripod.com/
www.fortunecity.com/
www.hypermart.net/index.gsp
www.coolchat.com/
www.crosswinds.net/
www.htmlpublishing.com/
www.freehomepages.com/
www.pageproducer.com/
Submit your ‘new’ page to the Search Engines. You are also now able to place banner codes, links, images, testimonials, in fact anything you want onto these pages, because you are in control of the HTML. A word of caution, though. Don’t change the actual HTML of your original affiliate page. Just put the other stuff, like banners etc, around it.
Making this “mirror page” of your affiliate page will dramatically improve your advertising options.
Contact Email Address: publisher@aboutaffiliates.com
Word Count: 689
Category: Affiliate Marketing
Copyright Date: 8/16/04
Internet Address: aboutaffiliates.com/news/viewarticle.php?id=11
Autoresponder Address: workingaff@aboutaffiliates.com
Special Requirements For Reprint:
You have permission to publish this article in your ezine or on your web site, free of charge, as long as the byline is included and the article is included in it’s entirety. I also ask that you activate any html links found in the article and in the byline.
You may not use this article in any publication that is not-optin (spam). A courtesy copy of the publication or link to the website you use my article on would be appreciated.
Working With Affiliate Programs by Jude Wright (c) 2004
Jude Wright has been an Internet Marketer for three years. She has just created a product that will help other Internet Marketers keep all their marketing information in one database. Check it out at: i-marketingorganizer.com/organizer.htm

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Make 100% Commission on Your Affiliate Sales!

May 10, 2008 – 2:47 pm

If you’ve been involved in making money on the internet, you will no doubt have tried affiliate marketing at some point. For the uninitiated, affiliate marketing is the process of selling another person’s product for a percentage of the product cost. This is a great way to get your internet marketing efforts up and running quickly and generate some instant profits, you can refer prospects to a sales page using Google Adwords within a few hours or by ezine advertising in a couple of days.
But although affiliate marketing is a great opportunity for quick profits it has several disadvantages, the biggest of which is that you don’t get to keep all the money! This article is focusing only on information products so we’ll ignore the measly 10 - 15% of offer for hard goods at online stores like Amazon etc, but even with info products the norm is around the 50% mark.
So ask yourself this - why should you go to all the bother and expense of generating a sale when you only get to keep half of the money? Wouldn’t you rather keep it all?
There is a way to keep 100% of your “affiliate” sales, by securing the resale rights to the product. If you own or have right to resell the product, you get to keep all of the money instead of having a large percentage of it deducted by the vendor.
Now doesn’t that sound better?
There are several ways that you can obtain resale rights to all sorts of information products and packages. Firstly you could just do a search on Google or Yahoo for “resale rights” and “information” or “software”. These will return a lot of results and you could uncover some good products that you can sell using this method. Watch out however for packages that are stuffed with tired old books that everyone’s already read - nobody will buy these.
Then there’s our old friend eBay. Again you may find the odd one or two new titles that you can buy and get resale rights to, but the vast majority of ebooks on sale at online auctions are very low priced products that have become devalued by being undercut by one vendor after another. You will not make very much money on products that are selling for 99 cents on eBay!
The only real way to make money with resale rights is to buy good quality, fresh, exciting products that are in demand. Make it your business to search out high quality top-end material that you can buy the rights for and you will be able to sell it for months and even years to come.
Article by Ian McIntosh, for resale rights to over 20 fresh top quality resale rights information products and FREE lifetime updates take a look at www.resalerightsgold.com.
Please feel free to use this article for any purpose as long as there is a live link to the site.

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How to Create Multiple Streams of Income, Part 2

May 10, 2008 – 2:46 pm

A while back I wrote a little article called “My Vision of Multiple Streams of Income”. After receiving several emails asking for a sequel and sharing more real life experience I decided to give an update on my journey with SFI and Stone Evans’ PIPS system.
As I mentioned in my last article I went off a good start with this system and I honestly can attest it really works. The only negative thing is, if you want to call it this way, that I put a lot of effort into this project. The system is designed to run on autopilot, that’s great. But until you’ve reached a certain level of visibility, you need run your promotions around the clock. I’m almost there.
As an example: I run several Google AdWords campaigns to promote my website and SFI. The reason for this is simple. This is a highly competitive market and achieving high rankings with the major search engines takes a long time and due to the rough competition you won’t be able to reach the top without a few backdoor tricks.
So I took the route of actually spending some advertising money and in return I have a wide spread exposure. Remember the baseball movie with Kevin Kostner “Field of Dreams” with the famous remark “If you build it they will come”? Unfortunately this is no longer true for the internet.
Back to the topic of controlling the advertising cost with Google AdWords. I closely track my expenses and I keep a lit on it if it gets too high.
The tricky part is to decide when it is too high. I don’t have an answer for this. For me it means whatever I’m comfortable with. Because you’re building residual income and you’re not aiming for a single sale. This is hard to gauge. Conversion rates are useless, although my conversion rate so far is over 20%. That is pretty good from what I read about this topic. What this number means in subsequent income has to be determined.
I also tapped into the extensive library of SFI’s partner IAHBE. At first I just joined this organization because it guarantees my position in the SFI network. But after researching their services and utilizing their benefits like free mail leads, I have to say that this is a great institution. It’s worth every penny of your monthly fees.
Speaking about value-added services and benefits. The one thing I’m truly impressed with is the quality and consistency of the marketing material offered by SFI. The wealth of online and offline marketing material can be overwhelming, but if you use it appropriate it is a very effective tool. Of course SFI also offers quality products and services, which makes it easy to sell.
By using Stone Evans’ PIPS (Plugin Profit Site) system I could maximize these efforts. I’m selling all sorts of products and I already received several commission checks through my affiliate program with Clickbank. This is a huge affiliate provider for electronic books and software. My job is to attract customers to the products and then the manufacturer or author of the product does all the selling and credit card processing. As soon as the credit card is processed I receive a commission, which varies between products.
After about 3 months of running this business I would say that I’m still a little bit negative with my finances, but this is due to my extensive Google AdWords campaigns. By not counting this, I’m actually making some money. Nothing to brag about, but maybe in another 3 months my tune might change.
Please send me an email if you like to hear an update more often.
Peter Dobler is a 20+ year veteran in the IT business. He is an active Real Estate Investor and a successful Internet business owner.Get your own personal 24/7 money maker at www.mypluginhomebiz.com (Free setup in 24 hrs) or send a blank email to pdobler@getresponse.com to learn more about viral marketing.

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23 Ways To Use An Ad Tracker

April 27, 2008 – 12:10 pm

The ad tracker was originally developed to provide a record of all hits to a site resulting from ad placements. This article shows a host of different ways to utilise an ad tracker.
FOR AFFILIATES
#1. The Long Url Problem
Have you ever seen an ad where you are asked to click on an affiliate URL so long that it stretches over 2 lines, like this
www/anysite.com/cgi-bin/dir1/dir2/.cgi?code=123RT&type=10235&subid=89715
Do you think your reader will bother to do the necessary cutand paste to put it in a browser?
Probably not.
And that’s probably one lost sale.
And even a one line affiliate link may exceed thepermissible length for some ad posting requirements.
The solution: use a short tracking URL.
#2. Losing Your Affiliate Code
As an affiliate you may have your affiliate code embedded ina link something like this:
www.abc.com/123
Some customers will bypass the affiliate code and just typein the home URL http://www.abc.com (possibly because theythink that they will be paying extra for an agent’scommission)
The solution: use a tracking URL - so that your affiliatecode number is never seen.
#3. Make Your Ad Stand Out
You may have seen search engine results showing nearidentical listings for the same product, differing only inan affiliate code appended to the URL.
Your listing here will be just one of many unless you makeit stand out. So bypass the standard affiliate URL and use atracking URL.
#4. How Effective Are The Links
You can measure and compare the effectiveness of thedifferent banners or text links the affiliate programsprovide you by using a tracking URL.
#5. Changing Links
If an affiliate company change their links then yourexisting ads, wherever they are posted, become worthless.But if you use a tracking URL you simply revise theaffiliate URL at the tracking control centre.
#6. Affiliate Program Discontinued
Similarly if an affiliate program is discontinued you justchange your tracking URL to a new page where you explain thecircumstances and point your visitor to your otherpromotions.
#7. Better Affiliate Stats
Not all affiliate programs provide you with stats about visitors.And if they do are they adequate ?
Compare a basic monthly figure say
- Jan: 39 hits
with a detailed analysis such as
- Jan 12: 10 hits
- Jan 13: 2 hits
- Jan 20: 21 hits
- Jan 21: 6 hits
where you can relate those dates to particular ad campaigns.
Tracking URLs will give you these improved figures.
#8. Checking Affiliate Stats
Even if you do receive good stats from your affiliateprogram it still makes sense to use tracking URLs so thatyou can compare your figures with theirs.
A large discrepancy could mean errors in their software or(hopefully not) fraudulent activity on their part.
An alternative reason is that their measurement takes placewhen their page is fully loaded rather than at the start,indicating that visitors are clicking away because it istaking too long to load.
FOR EZINE PUBLISHERS
#9. Win Advertisers With Tracking Reports
If you sell advertising space in your ezine you can offer toyour advertisers to replace their URLs with your trackingURLs and Email them the results.
Tell your advertisers about these benefits in youradvertising guidelines
- They will know the number of clickthroughs their ad hasgenerated. They can then decide how to improve the ads forbetter performance
- If they use a tracker program with your own domain name inthe tracking URL your ezine subscribers will be moreinclined to click
- They can use your ezine as a test centre, modifying theirads until they are happy, before launching with otherpublishers
#10. Use Tracking Report Results
The tracking reports above will provide you with informationon your subscribers’ interests, influencing your editorialcontent and helping you select which potential advertisersto approach
Also, once your advertisers have seen for themselves thebenefits of an ad tracking program they will be inclined topurchase one. So set yourself up as an affiliate for aprogram and promote it to them.
#11. Measure Your Readership
You may know how many subscribers you have but how manyactually open and read your ezine and which parts of itattract most attention?
Here’s how to find out if you distribute your ezine in HTMLFormat: include an image on your page, e.g a banner or logoor a single pixel GIF. Then reference this image with atracking URL.
For an ezine distributed as plain text it is not possible tosee if it is actually opened or read. But what you can do isinsert tracking URLs at the appropriate points, such asproduct offers or special articles, and get comparativefigures for which items are being read.
AT YOUR WEB SITE
#12. The Problem Of Permanent URLs
Web sites are continually evolving and changing.
You may want to rename a page to make it more consistent andlogical but there’s a huge problem. You have given out theURL in an ebook, or a directory submission, or an article orwherever. There’s no way you can undo this.
The solution ?
Never provide the actual URL, just a tracking URL. You canthen just edit the link at the tracking centre whenever apage is moved or renamed.
The external links, in your ebook for example, stay the samebut they will redirect to your new page.
#13. What Are Your Visitors Doing ?
You have text links all over your site, links to your otherpages and links to recommended sites.
Where are your visitors clicking ?
Where are they leaving your site, why, how can you stop them ?
Which graphic do they click on the most ?
Do they click on the text link more than the graphic link?
Your log files may tell you at best which are the mostpopular pages at your site but it is vital to know how yourvisitors move through your site and what is tempting them.
Use tracking URLs to replace actual links wherever you needto monitor click activity.
#14. Sell Website Advertising Space
You can offer tracking reports to your advertisers in thesame way as for ezine publishers (above).
#15. Stop Piracy
If you have invested man-months of time setting up a vitalresource site involving a directory of links it’s very easyfor a pirate to simply copy your page and provide usefulcontent for his own site.
If you use tracking URLs for those directory links you candetect this copy - because the ad tracking program willrecord the referring URL.
At the same time of course you can measure the popularity ofthe directory links.
USING PAY PER CLICK SEARCH ENGINES
#16. Better Click Activity Reporting
Pay per click search engines will report to you clickactivity on your URL. Engines vary in the frequency andformat of the reporting so you can use tracking URLs insteadto obtain better information.
#17. Prevent Fraudulent Activity
You can compare your figures with the engine’s and shouldquery any large discrepancy.
If click activity is unusually high you may have acompetitor clicking on just to incur costs against you. Youmay be able to detect this by comparing the figures forunique hits and actual hits (several hits per visitor).
OFFLINE MARKETING
#18. Check How Successful
If you have ever wondered whether it was worth advertisingoff line because of the supposed impossibility of measuringthe response then ad tracking URLs will answer that problem.Just include them in your ads in
- newspapers
- magazines
- flyers
- billboards
- press releases
- shop notice boards
- and so on
#19. Use The Time Reports
The date and time when clicks are made will allow you tocheck the progress of your ads, for example
- has your newspaper ad been submitted yet ?
- has your billboard notice been removed ?
- how long does a magazine ad stay around ?
For a long running ad you can study the response and switchthe link midstream if necessary to an improved web page.
EBOOKS
#20. Do Free Books Work ?
The main purpose of a free ebook is to get the reader backto your site. But how successful is it proving ?
Put tracking URLs in the book and you will find out.
#21. Maintain Control After Download
Once your ebook is downloaded it would appear that you nolonger have any control over it. Not so. You can redirectthe reader to other pages of your site by changing thetracking Url links.
OTHER WAYS
#22. Become An Ad Tracking Affiliate
Since ad tracking programs are high demand marketing toolsyou can profit by joining their affiliate program (if theyhave one).
Owning the product that you promote always gives that extraadvantage e.g you can give an example of how you use it or apersonal testimonial as to how it has benefited you.
#23. Privacy
You may want to post an URL somewhere and - for reasons ofyour own - not let it reveal your website. You can do thiswith an ad tracking program where the supplier domain nameis used in the tracking URL.
For more details about the above tips and yet more ways to use an ad tracker see Harvey’s free ebook Ad Tracking SuperTips
www.ad-tracking.com/adbook.html
Publishers can reproduce this article and change the URL to point to their own rebranded version.

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Economic Recession or Not, You Must be Creative to Survive

April 21, 2008 – 2:15 pm

Are we Really in an Economic Recession?
Some US statistics seem to indicate we are heading into one. If we are heading in that direction, what should we online marketers do about it?
Should we panic and give up our web sites, or just accept that we will get less business, and let it go at that. Doesn’t sound like either plan is too brilliant.
If you are online in the Internet Marketing arena, perhaps their is an opportunity here. How about selling products on how to survive, and even expand your business despite the recession. This is a typical survival strategy and could be a big seller.
During the course of a year, there are periods that are slow. So, think a moment, what do we do at that time to get business?
We get creative and come up with plans to deal with the situation!
For example, in December for the last 2 years, we have seen a plethora of free giveaway programs. The purpose they serve is this. If you contribute a product to be given away, then you can gather the email addresses of hundreds or even thousands who want to download your bonus gift. A good way to expand your business in good times or bad.
The latest creation we have seen in the last few months, is the ‘Firesale’phenomon. This is simply an excuse to bring in lots of money by creating a package of goods at discounts of up to 80%. Does it work? Well sure it does!
If you are selling $2,000 to $4,000 worth of product for $37 to $47 people see the value and jump on your offer. Ca-Ching goes the cash register.
Something that might happen if we do get into a real recession is that these vastly overpriced $1,000 products will come down to prices more affordable, thus benefiting more people. Not sure about that one, let me tell you.
If you belong to a few newsletters today, then you are surely being bombast-ed by new products every week, and great offers every day. Instead of just doing a quick delete, why not study the proposal, and learn from it how to be creative.
Marketers today ARE being creative. To get anywhere close to successful, you must do the same thing. Otherwise you will continue to make 3 or 4 sales a month and earn a pittance, along with 95% of all other online marketers.
Niche Markets is the ultimate solution
The trend today is to get away from good old fashioned Internet Marketing, and develop Niche markets. The most recession proof answer to the question of surviving a recession is to have several different Niche web businesses.
What could be better than a series of web sites in a small niche market selling affordable products. If one small niche can bring you just $300 to $500 a month, it is obviously not enough to live on.
But, if you have 3 niche markets each earning $500 per month, that is $1,500. Not bad. What if you have 10 sites each making $500, then the total of $5,000 a month is quite respectable. Now that is a reasonable amount to live on.
The best part of it is this. As trends change, like they do every year if not every few months, you may find one or two of your niches go dry. You may give them up. If you have to, it is not financially life threatening because of the backup position you have with all your other niche sites.
How many niche markets should you have? No easy answer to that one. Every individual case is different. Phil Wiley claims to have over 100 niche sites. In case you’re not sure who Phil Wiley is, he is the author of the most renowned ebook on Niche Marketing called Mine Site Profits. You can read a good review at Best Affiliate Products at www.bestaffiliateproducts.com/minisiteprofits.html
Personally I am working on a couple of niche sites, and my first target is 10 sites. After that, who knows. As long as you find the products people want, recession or not, you will be a winner.
Go for it, build a few niche sites. You can’t go wrong.
Copyright 2005
Fred FarahBest Affiliate Products and Niche Market Strategies for Maximum ProfitsGive yourself the edge, subscribe to Niche Market Strategies Newsletter at:Best Affiliate Products