AffiliatesNeeded.Com What's New In Affiliate Marketing

You might of heard the money is in the list. That could not be more true as every company big or small does it. Do you get coupons in the mail,  special discounts in your emails or rewards for being a facebook fan of a business? These are all great examples of companies building their list. It’s a quick way for them to offer a bonus incentive to come buy from them. This gives them access to instant repeat buyers just by taking a few moments to set up a discounted offer.

If your looking to make money online the smartest thing you can do is setting up your own email list. You do this via programs called auto responders. These auto responders once set up require no additional work from you and can bring in sale after sale. The only thing you need to concentrate on then is getting fresh new leads for your opt in email list. This post will go over step by step how to create your very own landing/squeeze page and how to set up your first auto responder.

The first thing you need to do is figure out what niche you want to build your email list around. Do you have your own business? Is there something your passionate about? Or are you looking to be an affiliate and promote others products?

There are honestly thousands of different niches to pick from big or small and what you need to know is having a big list does not matter. Even a small list of just 20 people who are responsive and buy from your list could end up making you thousands of dollars. Once you have figured out what niche you want to build your list around its time to pick up your auto responder. Your auto responder needs to be a reliable company that you can trust to get your emails delivered.  The company I use myself and recommend is called Aweber which you can set up right now for just $1 your first month by clicking here.

After you have your new Aweber account its time to set it up. This is outlined via this PDF file I created which you can view by clicking here.

The only part left to do now is create your landing page or better yet, if you have a blog, adding it to your side menu. A great idea is to offer something of value for free to get your visitor to opt into your mailing list. This free offer can be anything from an ebook, an email series that teaches them something in the niche or special discounts to your store. Be creative and make sure it is something people will find value in.

Is your Klout score up to par?

Klout is a fun site to use when your looking to see your overall influence on the twitter community. It’s a measure of different things such as your list site, retweets, comments, likers and more to give you an overall score out of 100 with 100 being the highest score possible. Lets get into finding out what your klout score is and what it all means. You will need to connect you twitter account to klout by visiting their website at Klout.com Once you have done so you will be on your Klout Summary tab which will give you your overall score and any achievements you have earned.

Possible achievements you can earn…

List Membership – How many other people have created a list on twitter and added you to it. A good idea of how many people filter their tweets into lists. To increase this number tell your followers and friends how to create a list as many do not know it even exists.

Total Retweets – How many times something of yours was retweeted. The best way to increase your achievement here is to create helpful tweets to your followers.

Unique Retweeters – Number of unique people that have retweeted your message. This ones grunt work, you will need to place buttons on you blog posts etc in order to build this number up.

Unique Mentioners – How many people put the @YourTwitterID If you own a site and have a retweet button make sure it has an @YourTwitterID at the end or beginning of it.

Unique Message Retweets – Number of messages retweeted works off your messages section of twitter. Engage people on a personal level here and help them out.

Message retweeted – Number of your messages retweeted on the network. Again talk to people one on one through twitter messages.

Total Likes – How many times one of your tweets have been Favorited.

Total Comments – Number of Replies back to your tweets. Consider engaging people one on one with a @TheirTwitterID

Unique Likers – How many unique people Favored your tweets.

Unique Commenters – Unique people who have commented back to your tweets.

Klout has recently expanded on this to now include Facebook and LinkedIn.

This is going to be a long post as there is much to cover. While the beginning section will be for new comers  to affiliate marketing the other half will be more detailed with tips and tricks I have learned over the years.

Affiliate Marketing Tips for beginners

The first thing you need to know is it takes a good deal of work to be successful in affiliate marketing. While you might have mild success and be happy with that it will take a fair amount of dedication and work day after day to get to the next level of achieving some big numbers and goals. As I always teach all my students, what sets you apart from everyone else is taking action.

The first step you need to take is finding a niche (a topic) something that is of interest to you. By starting in a niche you enjoy you will find writing content and building a site around it much easier plus the information you provide will be of detail and helpful to your readers. I have written a post about how to find a niche here at Finding a profitable niche

Next you need products and services in the niche to promote and recommend. There are a few methods of earning as an affiliate so lets go over them.

Direct sales – Sites such as clickbank and paydotcom offer you a commission for every product you sell. These products are all related to electronic items such as ebooks, software,videos and other such digital related products. It is important to know you only make money if you sell an item with these sites and commissions can range from 25% to 75%. These are normally the highest paying commissions compared to other methods.

Cost Per Action – This deals with the promotion of sites which pay per action. This action can be anything from downloading a game, inputing a zip code or email address to an actual sale. These offers pay a lower amount of money but are much easier then making a sale. The required action from the visitor is simple and often pays 50 cents to a few dollars per new lead. The cost per action model requires high traffic in order to make it profitable. These networks include Neverblue and Maxbounty. *Note if your brand new to affiliate marketing you will want to first create a site in which you can show to the CPA networks. You will be called for a short interview and asked a few questions. Make sure you have a good looking site ready for them to view and marketing methods you have in mind such as email marketing and site creation.

Understanding methods of traffic generation

There are a number of ways to drive traffic to your websites. Some methods are free while others cost money. It’s important to understand both and maximize your profits using both traffic methods.

Free Methods

1. Create a blog and use SEO (search engine optimization) tactics to filter free traffic to your sites.
2. Swap links with other blogs and sites that point back to your page
3. Write articles and in the resource area input a link back to your page
4. Create youtube videos and link back to your page
5. Have a twitter account with followers
6. Comment on other blogs and link to your site
7. Join f0rums in your niche and in your signature have a link back to your site
8. Create a press release article and submit it
9. Bookmark your site with sites such as digg and delicious and ask your friends to as well
10. Create a mini ebook or slide show that presents your site and add it to scribd, slideshare.net and Docstoc

Paid Methods

1. Media buys on sites such as buysellads and projectwonderful
2. Use adwords to buy keywords you can’t rank for
3. Pay for links on others sites with
4. Outsource some of the free methods to free up time
5. PPC (Paid Per Click) or PPV (Paid Per View) Traffic
6. Solo ads

Advanced Affiliate Marketing Tips

Once you have learned the beginning stages of affiliate marketing its time to get into the advanced methods. Many are based off the beginners but get more in depth or take a spin-off of the normal method.

Advanced tip 1 – I work in the making money online niche. While this is a very profitable niche it is highly competitive. I only recommend you get into this if it is something you are interested in. When finding a niche you are interested in you will want to make sure your main keywords generate enough searches each month.

Advanced tip 2 – Start an email list, By having a list you can promote products and offers to you can increase your success and income by untold amounts. The big secret here is to keep your email opt-ins engaged and awaiting your next email. Use a solid auto responder such as Aweber and create a 2-3 month long series that sends out an email weekly or every few days.

Advanced tip 3 - Offer a bonus incentive to join your list, rss feed or other social aspect. Offer something of value that is related to the niche to improve your conversion rates.

Advanced tip 4 – Now that you have researched and written a lot about the niche consider creating your own product and putting it up on clickbank.

Advanced tip 5 - Create a sniper site, I have had a ton of success with this over the last few months. There’s a lot to it and George Brown’s site does an excellent job at explaining it. You can check out the review of Google Sniper 2.0 by clicking here.

Advanced tip 6 – Use sites such as elance, guru, Odesk and Getacoder to help with you repetitive tasks.

Advanced tip 7 – Review my top picks of sites I use to help with my SEO work and tracking. While tons of traffic is great, split testing and conversion tracking can lead to thousands more in income.

Google Analytics – Tracking service which allows you to view where your traffic is coming from. You can even set up goals and track income.

SEMRush –  Quickly find out what keywords you are ranking for and at what position. This list can be used to find keywords you did not know you where ranking for. This allows you to work on these keywords and rank higher for them.

SEOMoz – Huge membership site that has everything seo. Great tools such as the backlink checker I use often to find out if I can beat a competitor. click here to check it out

While this is a quick overview of many affiliate tips I get into more detail on my other posts about new traffic generation methods and programs on my blog. Be sure to subscribe to the rss feed at the top of the page to keep up to date with any new posts I make.

Blogging has become a multi billion dollar a year industry which attracts many to start a blog and tap into this income stream. What you might not know is many bloggers fail to make any decent amount of income from their blog in the first year or more.

Why you ask?

They do it for the money and not for the passion they have for that niche.

Blogging about a topic you have a passion for allows you to easily create content for it day after day or when it’s needed. It also shows in your writing as you end up picking a side and turning nearly everything into a debate which turns into hot topics people will comment about. This is what generates the traffic to your blog which then turns into your income stream. Many big named bloggers out there such as John Chow or Darren Rowse started out with a passion for what they where writing about. They started their blogs not to make money but instead write about the things they love. As their blogs grew they then started tapping into income streams they could make from their blog. I have gained much knowledge from these two and wanted to thank them for starting my passion for blogging last year.

One of the great features of these blogs is allowing guest posters which I am happy to say we are working on right now to allow you the reader to come in and share your unique stories. This is going to be a great addition to my blog. If being a guest poster sounds like something you would be interested in please contact me by clicking on the contact button up above. I am looking for those who are interested in affiliate marketing and have a passion for it.

Facebook now has over 620 million users. This is a huge opportunity to take advantage of and present your product or service to. Many companies do this already by having their own fan page. The value of your fans is just like them being on your email opt in list. It’s a quick way to get in touch with your subscribers and offer them discounts to get them to come buy from you.

Lets talk about all the different methods you can use on facebook to promote your business and tap in to these 620 million users.

1. Create your own fan page with opt in offer

Creating your fan page is step one to building your company on Facebook. However you can customize your fan page to offer an exclusive bonus on it. You can view how I have mine set up at the Sean Supplee fan page you can opt in to grab a copy of my making money online ebook for free. It also highlights the point of liking the page to help spread my name across facebook and gather even more fans and leads from the page.

The best way to create your customized fanpage opt in is by using the facebook app Static FBML learn how to use this app at facebookflow.com This app will only be supported for a limited time after which you will need to start using iframes to create these pages.

2. Add Facebook like buttons and share buttons to your blog,  squeeze pages, main company site and more.  You can set up your own like buttons at Developers Facebook simple and easy to set up for any page you like. You will be surprised at how many people that visit  your site will click the like button and how fast and viral it can spread over the web. In face you should like this post right now haha

3.  Post often to your fan page and engage your fan base. If you are running a blog you can add your blogs RSS feed with RSS Graffiti, however I like to post them myself so I know what time its going out and plus you can customize the post with an image of your choosing. If it’s a static site consider discount codes or news updates of your business such as new partners and future plans for the site. Get people wanting more and waiting for the next big update.

I encourage you to set up your fan page right now and implement these features above. It’s simple and effective and once set up you will see how beneficial it is to your sites overall growth.

What your Google Sniper 2.0 Members Area Will Look Like

Note: This is a honest and tested review of Google Sniper 2.0

I had tested out Google Sniper when it was released last year but with the new FTC rules in place it was something that quickly turned me off and made me venture into new avenues of income. But George Brown came out on top this week with the release of Google Sniper 2.0 which is now FTC compliant, you can check out the product by clicking here.

The core of the program is based around a 104 page ebook that really outlines every detail so even someone new to affiliate marketing can pick up on it. With that said even savy marketers can easily jump over parts they know and get into the guts of the system quickly with how well laid out this membership course is.

While the core of the site is the ebook it is backed up by videos which are great for those who learn in different styles. Within just 8 hours spread out over 4 days I was able to set up my first sniper site which is currently helping to promote my list building ebook.  It took just 2 days to get my sniper site indexed and ranked and immediately I started seeing my ebook downloads up 17% . Thats a huge increase in conversions for my own product with just 8 hours of going over learning the product and 3 hours setting up my first sniper site.

Check out Google Sniper 2.0 by clicking here

The program allows you to promote anything you want and rank for it. Be it CPA (Cost Per Action), Affiliate marketing via Clickbank, PayDotCom or other affiliate networks and even Amazon or physical products. They all can be used on your sniper sites to generate income.

The only real downfall I have seen with this is it does take time to set this system up. The more you do it the better you will get at it, but for someone that is completely new to SEO and rankings its more then likely they will need to review the course 2 or 3 times. As a savy marketer it is still going to take you a few hours at first to set up your sniper sites. It really is a do it yourself and learn as you go, however Google sniper really does a good job at laying out the ground work for you and giving you the details you need.

If you bought Google Sniper last year this really is a must order with the new FTC rules in place now. A key feature which was missing out in the first Google Sniper was being able to watch George Brown set up his own sniper site and be there with him every step of the way. While this did cost a bit of extra money(a one time offer) I have to say it really helped to watch after going over the course to tie it all together. Seeing it in action made all of the difference to motivate me and give me a clear vision of what I needed to do. This is my honest review of testing and using Google Sniper 2.0 which you can learn more about by clicking here.

Do you have a daily to do list when you wake up in the morning?

I am sure many of you do for your day to day activities but what you might not have is a daily to do list written down of what you need to do to further your income from your affiliate marketing. By having this list you can accomplish more every day and get into a routine that goes by quickly. Without this list you could be wasting time trying to figure out what to do next.

I want to share with you my daily routine for my income online. These are the basics, while the more in depth things I do each day are left off this list as they change.

1. Check all support and contact tickets – By doing this I get them out of the way early so I can address them again later on in the day if that person needs additional help.

2. Create 1-3 articles – Depending on my creative juices for the day I may create more but at least one new one a day. I do a number of things with these articles. Submit them to article directories for backlinks, add them as a press release for a new product or service or use it for my own blogs. The key here is to always be creating fresh unique articles. The more unique content you have the more free traffic you can expect from search engines.

3. Check my trackers for website traffic to my pages and affiliate products for clickbank – much of this is tracked via Google Analitics however I do some other tracking for conversions such as my opt in pages with a site called TE Tool Box. Its free to join and allows you to track 10 sites or pay a small monthly free to track 100. The way it works is by adding my url for one of my squeeze pages into it. After doing so I am given a tracker url. This url can have sub domains on it to tell me where that traffic is coming from. Along with that a small 1×1 pixel image is added to my landing page which when loaded will tell me where the traffic is coming from and if its getting me opt ins or not. Tracking is important in telling you what advertising sources are producing results and which ones are not.  I go over this in detail on my other post at ***LINK*** Tracking Your Results.

4. After reviewing my traffic sources and determining which ones are producing and which ones are not, I either close them out or add more funds to maximize the revenue from that traffic stream.

Remember to set yourself up an action plan each and every morning. It will keep you on task and make you a true champion of your business.

When it comes to marketing and making money online as an affiliate or business owner there is one key thing that makes or breaks that company. That one thing is what we call traffic. Any business you see today looks for prime busy spots to place their business. While brick and mortar companies place ads on billboards on major highways and set up their building on heavy traveled roads, its your job to find these busy avenues of traffic online and start funneling it towards your business storefront (your website).

While there are literally thousands of areas to get traffic from most cost money and end up having you track and research to make sure that avenue of traffic is paying for it self and some. The most popular ones online being PPC such as Google adwords and facebook ads, CPA marketing paying per action and buying banner ad spots on other sites such as blogs. While these can be great sources of traffic and income it takes a good deal of start up money and time to manage and figure out what is working and what is not.

To me I like to split these into four basic categories they are… Free Traffic, Cheap Traffic, Risk-Free Traffic, Premium Traffic.

Free Traffic

Deals exclusively with SEO and content management. There is a great deal of time and effort that goes into building free traffic for your business. Creating articles and submitting them to your own blog, others blogs as a guest post and article directories. Instead of spending money you are instead trading off in the time it takes you to create this content. Gearing your content towards popular keywords is a great investment to make. Either spend the time to do some SEO studies of your own or hire someone to make your posts more SEO friendly.

Cheap Traffic

Low cost traffic less then 50 cents a visitor centers around paying for ads on such sites as Google adwords, Facebook and other networks. Instead of creating content to rank for keywords you are now paying a few pennies to have your site listed for that keyword. It is important to track and understand this traffic so you can see what you should be paying per click. Track your conversions to your list and how many sales it is making so you can figure out your average cost per click.

Risk-Free Traffic

This centers around affiliate marketers and CPA networks. By adding an affiliate promotions area to your business model other people will promote and recommend your product or service to their friends and their own lists. On top of that you can use CPA (Cost per action) or CPS (Cost per sale). CPA sets a price you pay per opt in, once you have figured out what you are making off each person that opts in you can find a price to set for your CPA offer. The reason this is risk free is you are paying no up front costs unless an action has been taken. That action can be an opt in to your list or an actual sale made.

Commercial Traffic

This is main stream  traffic that big businesses use. However with new sites like BuySellAds.com and Adbrite.com you can now get in on the action with a low start up cost. This spot covers media buying which is placing your ads on others websites. Some of these sites receive thousands upon millions of visitors every day. You can even place your ad on sites like MSN or Yahoo and even put a commercial on TV via Goolge ads. While these are the highest cost ads they are still very reachable. By following these 4 traffic sources in order you will have a very good understanding on what your target  audience is and what your cost per opt in or cost per sale is. This will greatly aid you when you reach commercial traffic.