Home Business into Online

This move can be one of the best marketing strategies to pursue as it can build Business clientele and increase potential sales. Improved visibility creates greater brand recognition and provides website visitors with important information about the company and what it offers.

Company websites can cost thousands of dollars when utilizing the services of a professional website designer, but there are other options open to the home Business owner. With simple, affordable web design options, Web hosting providers today offer business owners the tools to create and maintain their websites from the comfort of their home offices. The best strategy is to begin with a list of features required for you to communicate the business online—photo galleries, customizable website templates, technical support, and domain-specific email accounts may be on the list for some home businesses. Specifying the company’s needs will save time and money when exploring web hosting options and the type of hosting package necessary to help run the business. In today’s market, website design is no longer exclusive to just tech savvy users. With little to no experience necessary, any level of user can create their own website by following a few simple steps.


A website is the perfect opportunity for a business to share its story. Research shows that consumers seek to learn about a company’s history and mission from its website, which provides businesses the opportunity to emphasize why customers can put their trust and confidence in them. Some Web hosts provide pre-filled sector-specific text in the design template which helps to inspire appropriate content for the site. However, this text is best used as a guideline to formulate professional, yet personal, website text and images. By including lots of high quality, unique content, and investing time into making the site look professional, a business can convey their dedication to high-quality service.

Just as important as maintaining a website, keeping up with online marketing methods is essential. An appropriate presence in social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, will help build relationships between the company and its customers. This is also a great technique to use in order to publicize positive customer reviews and increase website traffic by incorporating links.

Creating and maintaining a presence on the Internet has become a highly effective method of growing a customer base. However, there is clearly no benefit to creating an attractive website if it cannot be found.  It is essential that the website is submitted to Search Engines and its rankings optimized.  Large web hosting providers can help with this element.  If the company has low visibility on the Web, customers may be diverted to its competitors. The ideal way to build up an online strategy is to gradually explore the various solutions on offer by Web hosting providers.


Web Host Checklist

Domain Name – a domain name registration is perhaps the most important aspect of your online presence. Keep the name concise and relevant to your business name or sector to enhance visibility on the web.

24/7 Technical Support – with support always available, customers can get answers as soon as they encounter issues or a question arises.

Web Space – the amount of space required for a website depends on how much you expect the website to grow. Music and videos require more space than text alone so perhaps look for an option that provides flexibility to increase or decrease web space as needed.

Bandwidth – Check that a provider doesn’t limit the amount of bandwidth you can use.  Some providers cap how much you are allotted and charge for additional traffic, which effectively penalizes your online success

Price – Use your requirement list to compare similar web products, and pick the one that includes all the elements needed with no hidden extra charges

Search Engine Optimization – by exploring search engine optimization (SEO) tools provided by web hosts, businesses will be able to capitalize on the ability to stay on top of the search engine lists.

Email – Not only will an email address specific to your company be better perceived than one from a common email provider, it can also be cost-effective.

E-Marketing – with email design templates, newsletters for customers can help build awareness and relationships by providing company updates, advice, promotions, and industry news.

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Forex Trading

There is the stock market and there is the foreign exchange market. The latter is considered the bigger opportunity-if you know how it works and if you have the money to invest. There are a lot of reasons nowadays why people are flocking to learn the in and outs of forex trading.

But why get into forex Trading anyway? Are there any truths behind the big profit boon we all keep hearing about? These points are the prime reasons why the forex market is so huge right now:

Boundless Activity

The foreign exchange market is open 24 hours on weekdays. Compared to other markets that operate at specific hours and days, the forex market is a buzz of activity and opportunities in the week. Investors can react to specific changes and trends that happen within the week, anytime.

Freedom

This also means freedom from normal office hours; traders can operate whatever time they wish. Naturally, this attracts people from different lifestyles, locales and classes. If you have a laptop, then you can trade no matter where you are.

Less Cost

Add the purely liquid nature of the market and the electronic way of transacting in it then you would have a feature that will definitely attract people: the lesser Trading costs. We can do away with the traditional costs that add up to your bill and concentrate on only the spreads. The spreads here are usually smaller than the spreads in other markets, and that would mean better profits.


Leverage

Unlike other markets where leverages are small, forex Trading allows for bigger leverages, giving you the chances to trade up to a hundred times your investment. Brokers have features where they can give you a lot of leverage depending on the account. Of course, this also means a bigger risk of losing money. Risk management protects you from this.

Stable Price

Since your trade is done immediately, chances are the prices you saw are what you are going to get. Compared this to other markets, where your transaction often ends in a span of a day or two thus giving a chance for the price to slip and change. The stability and speed attracts a lot of traders in this market. Your assets are not tied up for long periods, giving you more control.

Transparency

Being electronic in transactions and having liquid, movable assets is easier to analyze and manage. Everything can be accessed by your platform and laptop. Your deals can be executed as per your viewpoint and strategy. This gives you a better feel of the market cycle, making your predictions more accurate each time you trade.


Stable Profit Chances

Since your trading involves two currencies and not other markets and trends, one always has the opportunity for profit. There is no bulldog watching of rising or falling of markets, goods and industries.  Whether the market is bullish or bearish does not really need to worry you. What really matters is that you pick the right currency to trade.

Forex trading is considered the perfect competition for logical reasons. Everybody is presented with an equal playing field. Even if the currency is falling, it just means that there is currency rising somewhere and the opportunity of profit exists. An unlimited earning potential, the freedom, and the even opportunity makes the foreign exchange market an exciting opportunity for anyone.

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You’re Trading Plan and You

Entering the stock market can be daunting and new traders are often advised to have a trading plan. An oft-repeated saying is that ninety percent of all stock traders fail and the remaining ten percent all have trading plans. It’s not exactly provable but this should show you how highly regarded trading plans are. A good Trading Plan can help you through the rough spots when you’re trading on the stock market and this means you should try your best to formulate a good one and to stick to it consistently.

So how do we formulate this almighty Trading Plan then? Well, you should start by assessing yourself. This is simple because a Trading Plan is more than just any vague idea of how you should behave in the market – it’s pretty much a program of how you will behave in the market. There’s a very thin difference but that difference can mean the loss of thousands of your dollars or you hitting the mother lode. Knowing exactly what you can do and what your mental state is imperative. A trading plan sets the risk level that you want to go and it can be nerve-shattering sometimes when you see a deal that your trading plan won’t let you take. Knowing how you will respond and how fast you can respond to the sudden changes in the stock market is important. This will determine how you should shape your trading plan. If your personality is that of a natural risk-taker and you have the deep pockets to back this up in the market, your trading plan should reflect this. However, if you have a more conservative outlook and don’t have much money, a less daredevil trading plan  would probably be more appropriate

Another thing that a trading plan should contain is your short-term and long-term goals. I mean, what is the profit target that you’re aiming for? How high a risk-to-reward ratio are you willing to go? Having a set profit target for your trading plan is a very good idea and would help keep you on track. Doing it in weekly, monthly, and yearly increments also provide you with a simple way to determine your performance.


You should also set up some rules for how you get in and into the market. This is pretty simple, actually: you just set a target number when you start buying and another target number, whether in stocks or profit or loss, when you start getting out of it. This is pretty important. The difference of a dollar when you’re dealing in thousands of shares can mean riches or ruin. Be sure to strictly to follow the rules that you make for yourself.

Next, regularly update yourself on what’s happening in the market. Doing market research is a great way to make sure that you don’t get caught with your pants down. Knowing which markets and products are gaining or losing ground will definitely help you avoid any unnecessary risks when you are trading stocks. It also defines your strategy for any upcoming trading day.


However, all of this formulation is of no use, if you won’t stick to your trading plan. Remember that a defined trading plan is just a set of instructions and it is still up to you for you to implement it. A good trading plan reflects what you are comfortable with and hopefully a way for you to profit.

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Getting a Plan Together

A trading Plan is a definite requirement for becoming a successful stock trader. It can help you over the usual pitfalls that a trader may encounter in his career. But let’s be clear here: perusing a few books about stock trading and drawing up a few simple rules on a note pad does not a trading Plan make. That’s pretty much a picture-perfect example of a bankruptcy waiting to happen. Trading plans require a lot of work and they need to be more detailed than having saying “buy low and sell high”.

To set it all up, first you have to sit down and take stock of what you have. This is more than in the monetary sense. You should know what you’re knowledgeable about and what you’re capable of handling. Your trading plan should match you and shaped by your quirks. If you don’t take into account your personal temperament when coming up with trading plan, it would feel artificial when you’re putting it into action and you would sometimes have the urge to not follow it. A natural-feeling trading plan is much easier to follow. You should also set your boundaries: just how much money are you willing to risk? How much loss are you willing to absorb? Knowing your limits is one of the important parts of making a business plan.

After you’ve done your self-reflection and have realized your limits, you should now concentrate on what you’re aiming at. Specifying a particular profit target for a specific time periods is one way of doing this. Aiming for a hundred dollars a day when trading helps you focus on gaining that amount of money. While you’re doing this, you should also look into what markets you’re targeting. You should choose market or a commodity you have knowledge about or are interested in. Interest will help keep you attentive to market conditions and knowing which way the wind is blowing can definitely help you be on top of changes in the market.


When you’ve picked out your market then it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty details of things. This means you have to hit the books and look at the performance of the several stocks found in your selected market. You should look at them all and see how they’ll fit in with your projected trading strategy. Stocks that have shown consistent but slow growth would be good for conservative trading plans while more volatile stocks can find their place in a more risky strategy.

After picking out the stocks, it’s time to decide about your entry and exit strategies. Knowing when to jump in and start buying stocks isn’t just a matter of buy low and sell high. Experienced traders look for a particular price point to hit where they are sure to get a profit. They also time their buys to particular time, knowing when the market has reached a particular limit. Good research should be able to give you this information. Your exit from the market is equally important. The price of shares may continually rise but your plan should indicate where you should start selling it off, even at the loss of potential profit. This is the same for when the price is going down. Your exit strategy outlines how low you want to go before actually selling the stock, even at a loss. It sounds strange to follow your plan while taking a loss, but if you made a good trading plan, it should take the chance of potential loss into the equation.


All of it may sound easy but, trust me on this, it will take a lot of work to create a trading plan that you’ll be comfortable with. So what are you waiting for? Go on and make a start with your life as a trader.

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Trading Plans

If you talk to successful stock traders, you’ll find one thing in common wigth all of them. All of them have good, workable Trading plans that they’re comfortable with. When you’re planning to go into the stock market, you could do worse by emulating these success stories and having a plan. Let’s be clear though, Trading plans are more than just rules for trading, when to buy and sell all of those stocks on the open market. Those rules are actually Trading strategies and are a subset of a trading plan. Let me run you through to what’s essentially a simple trading plan.

Every trading plan starts with a goal. Some trading plans have nebulous goals like: “I want to be rich before retirement,” but you quickly find out that plans with such far-reaching goals usually fail. Realistic, measurable goals are what you find in good plans. What do I mean by realistic and measurable? First, the goal is reachable and possible for the trader and also gives a definite gauge for a person’s level of success. Experienced traders usually define this goals by setting a profit/loss margin for a particular span of time. Trust me, you’ll know if you’re a success if you have a definite profit target at the end of the week. Even if you don’t reach it, you can see how much you have to go and you’ll strive for it.

Another part of a trading plan is having a definite market or field to target. This actually gets even more specific with particular stocks chosen for how they will help a trader achieve a goal. A good trader chooses a field that he’s interested in or has easy access to information about. This is because the stock market is a fluid thing and the only way to make sure you don’t get any nasty surprises is to always have your ear to the ground for any developments or trends that may affect the price of company stocks. Being interested in a field also translates well into this and most traders have a preferred field or commodity that they focus on. Information is money in the field of stocks and when you’re interested, you’re more attentive to something.

Finally, entry and exit strategies into a market are formulated to reflect a trader’s personality. A daring trader can wish to make his margins of acceptable higher or a more conservative trader would lower his negative sell price a bit higher, so as to avoid a larger loss. All of this is mostly done to assist a trader to accept a trading plan’s instructions for them. Going against personal instinct is a hard thing, that’s why traders tailor-make their strategies to match their temperament. Any disagreement between a trader’s “feelings” and the trading strategy selected can cause a moment of indecision. With the lightning speed of the rise and fall of stocks on the market, that moment may be the difference between thousand dollars of profit or a thousand dollars of loss. \par

There you go, a simple guide to how trading plans work and how to make one. If you’re interested into going into the stock market, you better try your best to make a good one and to follow it well. A good plan always succeeds after all.

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Can email marketing Help Your B2B Succeed?

Timely, direct and effective communication is essential to the success of any startup. email marketing fits the bill unlike any other marketing tool. The email channel has evolved beyond the typical e-newsletter. Now campaigns with videos, surveys and other rich media content give burgeoning companies the edge they need. It is also relatively inexpensive—something that is always important to a new company.

If you’re launching a new venture or just looking to make the most of the email channel, use these five tips to make the most of your email marketing efforts.

1. Devote time to your email marketing. Email allows you to create messages quickly, distribute them for pennies and see a possible return of $43 for every $1 dollar spent (that’s the industry average, according to the DMA.) I say possible because effective email marketing takes forethought. Be prepared to invest some time in planning and executing campaigns. Sit down and draw up a calendar to plot your first few months—and keep an eye on the stats. You can always adjust as needed. Then, plan for a more thorough review of your program after six months or so. Dig into the response numbers to see what’s working, what needs to be adjusted and what should be kicked to the curb.
2. Build an engaged audience. Since no business wants to be stuck with a big announcement and no one to tell, you’ll need to build a permission-based email list. You might think it would be easier to buy a list, but this can lead to complaints, poor delivery and even blacklisting—something a startup definitely wants to avoid. Create a strong signup form and link it to all your customer touch points (website, transactional emails, social media, sales counter, email signature, etc.). Tie your form to an automatic welcome email, and thank new subscribers right away. Studies have shown that these can net four times the average open rate and five times the normal click-through rate. Plus, you’ll immediately cement a new relationship.
3. Showcase your brand. Don’t skimp on design. Maintain consistency with your branding components, including logo, brand colors and font. You want recipients to recognize your brand at a glance. Keep things simple. Inboxes are crowded so your email needs to make an impact right away. Lead with an enticing subject line, followed by eye-catching brand graphics and well-edited copy.

1. Tell your story. As a startup, you likely have a lot to say, but have you put much thought into how to say it? Before you launch an email program, think about what information you want to get out there. More important, figure out what information your audience actually wants to receive. Take time to figure out the tone, voice and style that you want to use in your communications. Strategize ways to intentionally tell your brand’s story to the right people at the right time and place. Don’t abuse the inbox. Relevant, timely emails will perform much better than a hodgepodge of content sent haphazardly.
2. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Startups are notoriously strapped for time. Once you’ve developed your main story lines, figure out what content you’ve already got and reuse it. Email is a great way to share video, recycle blog posts and highlight product descriptions—all things that might have been created for other platforms. Conversely, consider posting email content to your social media sites to get more mileage. Plus, your casual social followers can read, click and become engaged email subscribers as well.

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Fan Pages To Market Your Business

Fan pages is one of the features of Facebook that allows Local Businesses, organizations, artists and local figures to create a separate Facebook page for fans to connect and get the latest updates, information and news from the page.

This useful social media marketing tool has taken to internet marketing world by storm and many internet marketers are trying to tap into the power of social media to grow their businesses.

Here’s how you can use fan pages to effectively market your business:

First, start a fan page and add a complete description of your business. Include relevant photos of your logo, your Business establishment, and add in contact details of your business, whether offline or online – The whole shebang.

Next up, start adding friends or invite your existing customers and prospects to become a fan of your page by “liking” your Facebook fan page. Once you have successfully built a large fan base, you must engage your customers by posting information of value on the “wall” of the page.

You can also ask questions or survey your fans to find out what is on their mind in regards to your Business – It’s free market survey essentially! From there you can use their input to innovate new products or come up with exciting ideas to grow your Business further.

You can also use Facebook Ads to draw targeted traffic to your Facebook Fan Page. Remember, the goal is to get them to “like” your Fan page, so the more “Likes” your page get, the more exposure it has and this can further create a viral flow of traffic.

All in all, you’ll have to constantly update your Fan page and keep your fans in the know of the latest happenings in your business and also encourage them to participate in events, competitions and other quirky activities related to your business.

All the steps you can look in this ebook

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The Best Way to Promote A Clickbank Product

Have you thought about making money with Clickbank? The technique for making money with Clickbank isn,t materially different from what you need to make money with any other affiliate-based marketing model. But it’s good to narrow our discussion down to Clickbank.

They happen to be one of the most popular internet-based affiliate marketing platforms. Moreover, when you have no products of your own to promote, Clickbank is about the best place to go to.

A lot of marketers currently make a lifetime income promoting products with Clickbank. A lot of these people work from home, choose the hours that suit their lifestyle and personal schedule, and make more money working 15 or so hours each week than most who toil 60 hours per week on “real world” jobs.

The idea of working less and earning more surely appeals to everyone. And many folks who hear about Clickbank and similar platforms quickly rush home, hurriedly read through some recommended stuff and begin to give this business model a shot.

But so very often, the vast majority of people forget the idea almost as hurriedly as they had embraced it. If truth be told, many never really understood the techniques of making money with Clickbank let alone follow these techniques.

If you truly want to make money with Clickbank or any other affiliate arrangement, there are tried and tested approach to it that guarantees success – IF STRICTLY FOLLOWED! Are you determined to learn and abide by this strategy? Then come along!


Let,s begin with what you should avoid, namely, one-off sales. Resist the temptation to make quick, one-time sales. Another name for this approach is the “hit-and-run” strategy.

Marketers who employ this method simply select one or two affiliate products to promote, spend massive cash on advertising (mostly PPC/PPV) to send floods of traffic to landing pages, then make quick sales, take some profit and repeat the process all over again.

The problem with this approach is that it does not guarantee long-term success in affiliate marketing. For one thing, you can bet that there won’t always be sufficient funds to constantly pay for expensive adverts on Google PPC.

In fact, Google themselves may sooner or later slam the door on your landing page due to low quality of traffic (yes, purchased traffic has lower rating than organic traffic). Stiff competition in that online advert segment may also drive up keyword bids to the point where you cannot profitably purchase traffic and still make a profit from the resulting sales.

All this suggests that you should explore a more stable and more reliable method of promoting your affiliate products on Clickbank.

Below is my tested and proven composite method of winning with Clickbank: Choose a few products on the Clickbank platform. The products should preferably fall within the same market niche.

Create a landing page, and offer free e-books about your chosen niche. Send traffic to this landing page. But use a variety of ways to generate your traffic: lots of article marketing, a bit of pay per click, etc. Capture the leads that are flowing into your landing page (if you prefer, use email auto-responders to maximize the process of lead capturing). Finally, market your affiliate products to this warm list, and watch your Clickbank sales and profits rack up!

The major difference between this approach and the one we described earlier is that you now have (and will continue to generate!) a large list of customers you can continue to market to for months or even years to come! Isn’t that how businesses grow?


Repeat patronage – that’s basically the model I’m teaching you to adopt. Yes, this method may require more work from you. It may also take longer to perfect. But it is the only method that guarantees long-term success in affiliate marketing, especially with Clickbank.

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Affiliate Marketing And Making Money Online

Firstly, know that this article is not a comprehensive “welcome to affiliate marketing” guide. I will not spend much time going over the basics, but will spotlight the actual methods you need to make money – with a bit of pertinent background to help you understand the reasons behind these methods. You beginners will find this information invaluable and stimulating. You practiced marketers will find this information accurate and refreshing, while also discovering some astonishing new ideas to employ in your everyday endeavors. So, let’s continue.

Almost everyone that makes money on the internet (even the millionaires) do so through affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing is a means of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. Compensation or commission may be made based on a certain value for each Impression (CPM), click (Pay-per- click), registrant or new customer (Pay-per-lead) or (Cost-per-Acquisition / CPA), sale (usually a percentage, Pay per sale or revenue share), or any combination of them.

In very short English; there are literally hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs on the web featuring tens of millions of products ranging from magazine subscriptions to life insurance and every conceivable thing in between. An affiliate is essentially a salesperson whose job is to send people to a merchant’s website. When a predetermined “action” or sale is made, the affiliate is paid a commission. It’s the same as being a salesperson in retail, only online. I will teach you more about the actual application of Affiliate Marketing later in this chapter.


Compensation Models

Another important attribute of an affiliate program is its’ compensation model. This may have an impact on which advertisers you decide to join and how you go about promoting them. It will surely have an impact on how much money you will make. Here is a breakdown of the various compensation models that affiliate advertisers utilize.

Pay-per-impression (PPI) / Cost-per-thousand (CPM)

Cost-per-mil (mil/mille/M = Latin/Roman numeral for thousand) impressions. Publisher gets from Advertiser $x.xx amount of money for every 1000 impressions (page views/displays) of the ad. The Ad can be text , rich media, but in most cases, the ad is a banner running across the top, or down the side of a website.

Pay-per-click (PPC) / Cost-per-click (CPC)

Cost-per-click. Advertiser pays publisher $X.XX amount of money, every time a visitor (potential prospect) clicks on the advertiser’s ad; it is irrelevant (for the compensation) how often an Ad is displayed. Commission is only due when the Ad is clicked. The PPC model is used by Google AdWords, Miva and other providers. These are the ads that you see running along-side search results and many web-pages out there.

Pay-per-lead (PPL) / Cost-per-action/acquisition (CPA) / Cost-per-lead CPL)

Cost-per-action (CPA). Cost-per-Lead (CPL). Advertiser pays publisher $X.XX in commission for every visitor that was referred by the publisher to the advertiser (web site) and performs a desired action, such as filling out a form, creating an account or signing up for a newsletter. This compensation model is very popular with online services from internet service providers, cell phone providers, banks (loans, mortgages, credit cards) and subscription services.

Pay-per-sale (PPS) / Cost-per-sale (CPS)

Cost-per-sale (CPS). Advertiser pays the publisher a percentage (%) of the order amount (sale) that was created by a customer who was referred by the publisher. This model is by far the most common compensation model used by online retailers that have an affiliate program. This form of compensation is also referred to as Revenue sharing.

Pay-per-call (no abbreviation exists yet)

This is a new compensation model. No official abbreviation exists yet. Advertiser pays publisher a $X.XX commission for phone calls received from potential prospects as response to a specific publishers’ ad. Recently developed call-tracking technology allows to create a bridge between online and offline advertising. Pay-per-call advertising is still new and in its infancy.

Choosing a Model:

As you can see, there are advantages and disadvantages to the various compensation models. This can (and should) be decisive in your selection of which affiliate program to join, but depends largely on what you are promoting and how you decide to go about promoting it. For example, the paid surveys program Survey Adventure, pays out an extremely high $4.50 per double opt-in lead (CPA). The action; signing up with the company is free, so obviously, the program converts very well, but you must provide many leads in order to make a substantial amount of money. The real money is in pay per sale programs (PPS). If you have a good product and a sound marketing plan, the money will come.

Affiliate Marketing & You

There are many other aspects, facts, advice and information that I could share with you on the subject of affiliate marketing, but we don’t want to get too far into it. So I will briefly cover a couple of subjects quickly that apply to what I feel you will actually need to know and what you will be employing in your money-making endeavors.

Web 2.0

The rise of blogging, interactive online communities, article directories, simple web sites and other new technologies and are forming the new Web 2.0. These new technologies have impacted the Affiliate Marketing world in a very big way. Creating a presence online used to take months as well as a number of trained professionals. Nowadays, it is quite possible for newcomers to (by themselves) “set up shop” literally overnight and with very little experience. Also, this new media allows merchants to get closer to their affiliates and improved communication between each other. What this means to you, is that you can be on your way to becoming a super affiliate master as soon as you finish this guide!


Trademark Bidding / SEO

Affiliates were among the earliest to adopt Pay-per-click advertising when the first PPC search engines. In 2000 Google launched their PPC service AdWords which is responsible for the wide spread use and acceptance of PPC as an advertising channel. Since then, a large number of advertisers have adjusted their affiliate program terms to prohibit their affiliates from bidding on those types of keywords. Though we will not go into PPC Marketing, you must understand that some trademarks, such as the term “eBay” are heavily restricted because of this.

One area that has not been hit by new restrictions is SEO or “Search Engine Optimization”. Later, I will be teaching you how to create profiles that will trick Google and other search engines into indexing them as relevant websites and list them in top search results. Sign up for AdWords and Miva. I will show how to use these later in the guide.

Why Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is driven by entrepreneurs who are working at the forefront of internet marketing. Affiliates are the first to take advantage of new emerging trends and technologies where established advertisers do not dare to be active. Affiliates take risks and “trial and error” is probably the best way to describe how affiliate marketers are operating. This is also one of the reasons why most affiliates fail and give up before they “make it” and become “super affiliates” who generate $10,000 and more in commission (not sales) per month.

You will not earn the right to call yourself an affiliate marketer overnight. You will have to work (relatively) hard and innovatively to make the kind of money that you want, but know that if you do, the rewards are very large and there for your taking. Never give up!

Affiliate Networks

Very few publishers handle their affiliate programs in house. Most affiliate programs are set up and managed by large affiliate networks. Most of my affiliate programs are set up and maintained by the affiliate network ClickBank, which is the largest affiliate network on the web. Some networks do not have qualification criteria, but most do.

The majority of this online guide will focus on marketing strategies for ClickBank affiliates, but here is a short list of the top affiliate networks that all of the professionals belong to and you should apply to.

The “Big 4″ Affiliate Networks

ClickBank connects over a hundred thousand affiliates with thousands of information product vendors offering a huge array of downloadable products, mainly eBooks. Because it is cheap and easy for merchants to join, the quality of the products provided can vary. ClickBank is also a great place to search for unexploited niches.

Commission Junction (or “CJ”) is another very popular affiliate network. CJ brings together affiliates and product vendors, but also offers physical products for its affiliates to promote. CJ has many large brand names on its site, and is very well established. It is free to sign up, but most vendors are selective of who represents them.

by liewcf under CC BY-SA  with wpseopix.com

Making Money Online

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LinkShare features more than 600 merchants. You’ll find mostly big name and well established companies, such as Wal-Mart, Foot Locker, and Apple iTunes. Merchants are selective in representation!

Performics is a highly professional site with very well known brands. Performics’ clients include: Orchard Bank, Office Max, Activa Sports, Barnes&Noble, Fossil, and more than 200 other big name, big business advertisers. Performics is owned by DoubleClick. Armatures need not apply, but may try.

Getting Paid By The Networks

Most affiliate networks require that you reach a “payment threshold” before they will release your first payment. While the amount usually varies from network to network, exactly how they pay you is pretty much your choice. Your three choices that you have are Check via mail, Direct Deposit and PayPal. I do not like to wait for checks so I set most of my accounts to direct deposit on payday. You may set your affiliate accounts to deposit your earnings directly to the card. This saves you the week of delivery time on the checks and the two week waits for the out of state checks to clear.

PayPal is also a great option, but not all affiliate networks offer payment via PayPal. It works exactly like direct deposit. Just check your account on payday to find the money there. You may also set up a merchant (business) account like I did so that you can get a PayPal Debit card. Again, it works just like a bank. Oddly enough, when I applied for my card the interest that I was (and still do to this day) earning on my money was higher than any bank I have ever heard of. Almost up there with CDs, but that’s another story.

I like to set up my finances this way so that I always have affiliate earnings separate from the other earnings that I associate with my normal bank accounts. Also, when Uncle Sam asks me about my income at the end of the year, I don’t have to worry about gathering paystubs or the like. I can just print out my account history for two accounts. Really, how you get paid is up to you, but as far as I know, fast and free is always better.

ClickBank & CJ

ClickBank connects over a hundred thousand affiliates with thousands of information product vendors offering a huge array of downloadable products, mainly informational eBooks. Because it is cheap and easy for merchants to join, the quality of the products provided can vary. ClickBank is also a great place to search for unexploited niches.

Why ClickBank

If you are wondering what an “information product” is, you have one in your hands (or at your fingertips) right now. Information products include e-books, video tutorials, audio teleconferences, software, etc. – fundamentally anything that comes in a digital form.

To keep it simple; the first thing that you will do is sign up with ClickBank, get a free affiliate account and look for products you want to promote. Whenever you get a sale, your account is credited with your affiliate commission and checks are mailed out every two weeks (once you break the small minimum sale threshold).

The reason that ClickBank is so popular is the large commissions. Since ClickBank specializes in information products, the product vendor’s costs are minuscule and large commissions are passed on to affiliates – often as much as 50-75%. In most cases, it is far easier to make a lot of money online earning 50% of a sale than 5% of one (which is what you will get with many products on other networks such as Commission Junction and LinkShare). For these reasons, the majority of this guide will be focused on strategies for ClickBank affiliates.

ClickBank Marketplace

One section of ClickBank that you will be visiting frequently during your time as a marketer is the ClickBank Marketplace. The ClickBank marketplace lists the products that are currently being sold by publishers. Once you have found a product that you would like to promote, you simply enter your ClickBank name to receive your hop-link. This will track your sales.

When looking for a product to promote, you are going to base your decision on results of your target market criteria. You may for example, click on “money and employment” and search for “Make Money Online”, in which you will find too many results to count, but of course you can narrow that down to your target market by being more specific. Search for something like “Affiliate Marketing Beginners”. Once you have a list of potential products you will be searching for products by the following important factors:

$/Sale: The amount of money (minus refunds) that network affiliates have earned per sale in the past.

%/Sale: The percentage of profit that is paid to affiliates per sale. Most product vendors at ClickBank pay 25% to 50%. Most vendors looking to sell a lot of their products pay 75%, regardless of quality or other factors.

% Referred: The percentage of product sales that were generated by affiliates rather than the vendors own promotions.

Gravity: Gravity in short represents the popularity of a product – (the amount of affiliate sales have been made recently). Just because a product may be more popular than the other does not necessarily mean that the product is making more money for its affiliates.

The products are arranged by their popularity. You may review the above factors as well, so you can click on the product title to have a look at the “pitch page”. You may find something you like and decide to promote it as an affiliate.

What To Sell

There are a many “gurus” out there that will all tell you how to promote the most popular products on ClickBank, but the truth is that not too many of them have anything great to share. They will tell you about AdWords, article writing and scamming people into buying the highest priced products you can find, all of which will cost you quite a bit of money to get started. AdWords alone these days costs a fortune to “play” in.

Here is what I say you need to do. Don’t try to go onto ClickBank and find the highest selling products to promote. Find something that appeal to your target market. Believe me when I tell you, that you can find products on ClickBank related to anything and everything, all offering affiliates great commissions.

A great example would be the World of Warcraft player’s niche. This game has got to be the most massively multiplayer game in the world and one of the most popular. Personally; I think that it is for geeks, but many of my college friends enjoy playing it, ahem, “living it”.

When you search ClickBank for “Warcraft”, you will find quite a few good products and about four that I would consider “great”. (Update: What was a “few” products are now a few pages of them. These things must be selling.) When you search Google for “Warcraft”, you get 10,610,000 results. On the popular social network Myspace, there are more than 3124 Warcraft groups, with the top group featuring 40,000 members.

This goes to show that with a minimal amount of research into a niche with ClickBank, you cannot go wrong. I was quite literally going to save this niche for myself and use a different example for this, but then I started to feel greedy and I want this method of marketing to work for you. So, if you are the first one reading this guide, you already have a head start, but don’t be surprised to find this niche swamped soon after.

Commission Junction

Commission Junction (or “CJ”) is another very popular affiliate network. CJ brings together affiliates and product vendors, but also offers services and physical products for its affiliates to promote. CJ has many large brand names on its site, and is extremely well established. It is free to sign up with the network, but most vendors are selective of who represents them. Most often, a website with substantial targeted traffic is a requirement of vendors.

Instead of a “marketplace”, Commission Junction arranges its advertisers in its “Advertiser List” and you may only promote advertisers once you have been approved to be one of their “publishers” which is what CJ calls its affiliates. Below is a list of the paid survey advertisers that I work with. Notice how there is a “date accepted” column? This goes to show that I grew my business relationships over time.

Network Earnings: which is like ClickBank’s $/sale feature and represents the amount of money (minus refunds) that network affiliates have earned per sale in the past.

$/Action: Like ClickBank, many products on CJ offer a percentage or dollar amount that you earn per sale of a product, but with CJ you may also sort by the amount earned per lead and click (CPC and CPA).

EPC: Commission Junction also has a few different ways of representing the popularity of an advertiser. The most important of these is done by showing the “EPC” or “earnings per click” ratio which is represented by how much money is earned on average per 100 clicks. So a 7 day EPC of 24.69 which is the case of Greenfield Online means that in the last 7 days of 8.9 of the last 100 visitors to the site, have signed up with Greenfield and the referring affiliates have made money. That may not sound “great”, but in the world of affiliate marketing, it’s ok.

What To Sell

Just about all of the advertisers that I work with via Commission Junction employ the CPA compensation model. One of the most popular markets both on Commission Junction and among web-surfers right now is paid surveys. Because CJ offers the option of CPA, a great number of survey companies have signed up with them.

Commission Junction has some of the best converting free to join CPA programs on the net such as the paid surveys program Survey Adventure. It pays out an extremely high $4.50 per lead (CPA). Once again, this is a high converting program because sign up with the company is free. It may seem that $4.50 is not a very high payout. That’s true to an extent. You may have to send a good amount of traffic to this company to see great results. With CPA the desired action that you want your visitors to complete is free for them, so the profits should come quickly.

But Remember Your Target Market

At first glance, it may look like the Network Earnings should be the deciding factor in what you will promote, but I assure you, it is not. Your target market should always be the deciding factor in what you decide to promote. Because paid surveys are so popular among college students, such programs convert very well.

Once again, you really need to do just a bit of research to find out what will appeal most to your target market.

For Newbies: The Easy Way To Get Into Affiliate Marketing

I am not going to get into this on an in-depth level. I am just going to say it; and you had better remember it. The best way to make money selling ANY product or service of someone else’s is to pre-sell it and the best way to do this on the web is by creating a simple website that may consist of no more than a presales page. It is probably the simplest and most effective one webpage in any webmasters arsenal. Often in a “product review” format which has become wildly popular ever since the release of a number of short and sweet eBooks. The presales page can often take on many other formats such as customer testimonial, anti-scam and programs database page just to name a few. In the end, all of these are simply teasers of a product or products that are so effective, a visitor cannot wait to purchase the product(s) that you are promoting. I am not claiming this to be the only method of selling, just the most effective for you.

Now a great many “gurus” would like to take credit for the key components of an effective sales-page, but the methods and theories of pre-selling have been around longer than computers. It’s just a matter of bringing them to the attention of potential webmasters while teaching how to easily implement them, so, here they are, the key components of an effective website:

The Attributes of A Successful Website

Give Visitors Hope: Every single day, people buy things. If what they buy is not meant to simply keep them alive, such as food, the product that they buy is meant to improve their life in some way. They hope that buying “the next best thing” will lead them to “the next best stage” in their lives. Take you for example. You are reading this in the hopes that you may apply the methods I am showing you to make money on the internet; and this money would undoubtedly improve your life. Here’s a shocker: Why do you think I wrote it? Because I want to make money and build a name for myself by helping others make money online, thus, improving my life.

I have found “how to make money” informational products to be the best selling on the web, but there are many products that this can apply to. Even in a not so life altering sense. I recently saw a offer where users can “download a vast array of media and games ready to be played on the iPhone” and it was selling like crazy. I don’t care for the “locked” iPhone or Apple for that matter, but the thing insanely popular among the techies and status seekers. Anyway, these people are hoping that this product will give them an entertainment on the go, thus improving their commutes or whatever, and in some small way, their lives. When you create your presales page you will feed on this need for hope. If you decide to take the product review approach, tell visitors how “your” product is so much better than the others. If you go with the customer testimonial format; (which I suggest if you decide to market ProfilesToProfits), tell them how this product has changed your life and how it will do the very same for them.

Create Urgency: In my experience, both personal and professional, the average web browser has the attention span of a goldfish. To combat this problem, a great presales page must create a sense of urgency in the visitor. Let it be known that for whatever reason, the visitor must continue to stay on your page, read the entire thing and when they finish, they must buy your product because if they don’t than they are missing out on the one thing that could have changed their life forever. Did you see that? I just tied in this urgency with the first component of a successful presales page and in doing so; I have both created more hope and a more effective sense of urgency.

Many people try to do this by putting discount deadlines on their products. “Buy in the next ten minutes and blah blah….” this coming from the supposed “pros” and “gurus”. Click the back button, and then the forward button to see the same deadline. People see right through this these days. It is content that creates urgency. It is the manner in which you present your product and how you play on the many factors of an effective presales page. Once again, you must create the impression that they must buy your product because if they don’t than they are missing out on the one thing that could have changed their life forever.

Be an Authority: Appearance is everything. Whether you know anything about your product or not, you must appear to the visitor as the most informed, educated and trustworthy person regarding this product on the face of the earth. You will NEVER sell a product using the presales page format if the user feels that you do not know what you are talking about. Study up on your product, use this product yourself. Turn yourself into the one person to talk to regarding this product. If that is too much work, find somebody who knows what you ought to and pay them to help you appear as an expert. I cannot stress this enough. This may be the most important piece of the presales page puzzle. If the visitor thinks that you are and idiot or that you don’t know what you are talking about, they will not buy from you, unless of course, they are an idiot!

Optional Components

The first three components of an effective sales page/website are not optional. If you decide to build a website and you do not factor these components in, you will not make it online. You will fail. Below are a few optional components that you can add to your website. Sometimes these components will work for you, other times they will not, so think hard on whether or not implementing them will ultimately benefit your cause, or hurt it.

Appear Unbiased: This is the most effective way of gaining a visitor’s trust second only to your being an authority on the given topic. Most of the time, appearing unbiased is a tactic used by database sites. I recall a site that I went to when I first became interested in affiliate marketing (I was 16). It was a database of products to sell online. At the time, it just looked like a database. I later found that just about all of the programs listed were multi-level-marketing schemes, which means that if I signed up with one of the programs that was on this site and made a sale, the owner of the site would make money as well. No, there is nothing wrong with this. MLM is far from a scam as many like to slander. The ones who give it a bad name just suck at it.

Back to the point; If a visitor comes to your site and becomes under the impression that you “just want to help”, they are far more likely to buy from you than if have a sales pitch at every turn. Review a product or products. Set up a product database. Help people avoid internet scams (you will read more on that next). Do whatever you must to make it look like you are their helpful friend. They don’t have to know that you will be making a commission from a purchase that they make.

Strike Fear: This is another tactic that has gone mainstream since the release of “The Rich Jerk” and works best when used to promote products that belong to a saturated market, such as the “how to make money in real estate” eBook market and I have found it to be terribly overdone lately, especially by users of Google AdWords and other pay-per-click methods of promotion.

The idea here is that you are out to convince people that there will be tribulation down the road for them if they decide to go with any product besides yours. Most people who endeavor this plan have simple anti-scam websites that consist of no more than a page or two describing the horrors of a particular market. They tell visitors that there are so many scams out there that they should not sign up for any program, unless of course, the visitor signs up for the one(s) that they are promoting (which pay the largest commissions).

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WordPress Plugins for Marketing

WordPress is arguably the most popular blogging platform today, thanks to its ease of use and its multi-functionality. In fact, the content management system is also a popular choice for online marketers as well, owing to its numerous WordPress marketing features, including the numerous WordPress Plugins that have been devised specifically for online marketers. This article gives some information about the WordPress Plugins that you can use to help you in your marketing efforts, as well as how to maximize the use of these plugins to increase the number of hits to your blog.

What you may not know is that there are so many WordPress Plugins that you, as an online marketer, can choose. There are those that can be installed in order to make your blog more easily found by search engines, some that work as traffic generators, and others that automatically install a site map to your website. There are also those that easily connect your website to social networking sites to get you more traffic, some that show which countries your visitors are coming from, and those that can automatically add links to your content for SEO purposes. Some are free while the others need to be purchased. Be sure to read the details carefully to make sure that you get the plugins that you really want.


In order to look for WordPress plugins for marketing purposes, you will need to log in to your account and then go to your dashboard. From there, click on the plugin tab. You should be seeing a search field there. Type in the keywords of the plugin that you’re looking for, or the features that you want installed on your site (ex. search engine optimization, creating a site map, etc.) The content management system should then give you several options of WordPress marketing plugins to choose from.  From there, all you will need to do is to install these plugins to have these features installed to your website. If you’re not sure which of these WordPress plugins to install, it’s always a great idea to ask around or do some research in order to find out which of these work best for your purposes.


There are so many WordPress plugins that you can choose from, some better at helping online marketers than others. As such, be sure to make the right choice in which plugins to download and install in order to improve your chances of getting the traffic and the sales in order to make the most of your website.

by s9011514 under CC BY-ND  with wpseopix.com

WordPress Plugins

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