The Affiliate Newbie Launchpad

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Lucas Hampton
5 years ago
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1 The Affiliate Newbie Launchpad 1

2 What Is Affiliate Marketing? Those of us already engaged in affiliate marketing are aware of what it means, how it makes money and what to do about increasing profits through it. But, how can you define affiliate marketing to someone who doesn't know? The answer is, there are two ways. The first is to define it in basic terms, much as you would explain a general business concept. One person is the salesman (affiliate), who promotes, markets and sells another person's (seller's) products or services for a specified commission per sale. The second is a more in-depth and involved answer, where you define it as a full-scale business, which requires time, effort and knowledge to truly grasp in its entirety. Considering the big picture, affiliate marketing is all about how you manage to bring in customers to buy the products or services offered by someone else. Clickbank: The Most Popular Affiliate Network If you've being doing your research, you most probably came across references to Clickbank quite often. Clickbank is the most popular, best rated 2

3 and highly profitable affiliate marketing network available in today's online world. It's for buying and selling products and services which don't require endless inventory maintenance with Clickbank, everything is transacted digitally. The continued round-the-clock availability, user friendliness and its super reputation has attracted millions of affiliates from global destinations to Clickbank. For sellers, Clickbank is a place to find over 100,000 eager affiliates to promote and sell what they offer. Affiliates are allowed to pick and choose whatever products or services they wish to offer through their own websites, whether relevant to their particular field or not. Setting up an account with Clickbank is free and quick. Some of the commissions offered to affiliates are as high as 75%. A fast, accurate and dependable tracking system is the backbone of Clickbank. The success stories associated with Clickbank are many and it's one of the best places to start getting in to the game and earn big bucks online. Affiliate Marketing Techniques Hoplinks The basic principle of affiliate marketing is to refer a potential customer to the seller's products or services and ensure they make a purchase. Any 3

4 commissions earned by the affiliate are reflected through several databases containing the tracking and accounting systems. The biggest problem with affiliate marketing commission tracking is the fact that web visitors don't leave their personal identity when they browse the web. When they follow an affiliate link and buy a product or service from a seller, the affiliate network involved must know which affiliate sent the customer to what specific seller and to buy which particular product/service. While using web browser cookies can be done to gather a small section of information on a web visitor, it's not a complete solution for constant tracking and data maintenance. To solve this problem in a practical and convenient way, Clickbank takes a step further by using their own mechanism, known as hoplinking. The hoplink system works to record cookies on a potential customer and store multiple affiliate referral relationships in one cookie. So, essentially, what happens is, every time a prospect follows a link to a new merchant and buys something, the affiliate referral relationship data is updated to show the association between the customer, new merchant, relevant affiliate and purchase. The hoplink system is activated automatically each time a potential customer 4

5 is referred to a Clickbank seller through an affiliate link. The prospect is first redirected to Clickbank's hoplink server and then redirected once more, to the merchant's website via the affiliate's personal referral cookie. The merchant's website is really a landing page, which usually contains the sales pitch and purchase order form. A landing page is capable of accepting incoming affiliate referrals and guiding the customer through the complete purchase process. The original hoplinking system is rather ordinary, with many limitations, including inflexibility and possibility for commission stealing. Since October 2003, the enhanced hoplink system has being in activation, with better security, more efficiency and new features. Detailed reporting on affiliate referral statistics, merchant conversion rates and multiple landing pages for a single referral link are all supported with the enhanced hoplinking version. The new functionality comes at a price, although the ordinary Clickbank hoplinking format is free for all affiliates to use. Creating a hoplink is very easy and Clickbank even offers an automated process for giving you the hoplinks within seconds of choosing the products you wish to promote. 5

6 Once you've signed up for a Clickbank account, you must visit the Marketplace (topmost menu option) and choose whatever you would like to affiliate with. The create hoplink option is available immediately below each product description, so all you have to do is click on it, type in your Clickbank Nickname and click on create to get your hoplink. The complete hoplink will be displayed and you just have to copy the link code and paste it on your web page to start sending referrals. What Is PayDotCom and Is It Different To Clickbank? Just like Clickbank, PayDotCom is a free marketplace for affiliates and publishers, with affiliate commissions reaching as much as 80% per referred sale. The most distinguishing features in PayDotCom, which makes it stand out from Clickbank, are the communication platform for both affiliates and publishers and the commission payments done through PayPal, which is much more convenient for the majority. Almost every first-time marketer has a dilemma when it comes to choosing between Clickbank and PayDotCom. Clickbank is undoubtedly the most popular, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the best. Like with everything else, both Clickbank and PayDotCom have advantages and disadvantages, and choosing between the two is entirely up to the person who's considering 6

7 joining an affiliate network. The biggest advantages and disadvantage on both networks are related to the publisher's platform, rather than the affiliate's. As a publisher, you will need to do more work on the PayDotCom profile, because they don't pay your affiliates, you do. In comparison, Clickbank tracks and pays all your affiliate commissions on your behalf, and what you have to do as the merchant is very little. Also, because Clickbank is most popular, there are many affiliates on Clickbank, and your chances of finding several thousand affiliates eagerly waiting to promote your products is very high. PayDotCom lacks in this area, as their affiliate network is simply not as big as in Clickbank. PayDotCom is not all bad though, because Clickbank has its own set of drawbacks too. One very prominent problem with Clickbank is related to its refund policy. There's none. So, anyone can ask for a refund any time and there's nothing an affiliate or publisher can do about it. Also, Clickbank allows affiliates to purchase through their own referrals, which is an unfair advantage over other affiliate commission earners. 7

8 One other advantage of choosing PayDotCom is its integration with your payment processor accounts, mostly PayPal. Because of this integration, PayDotCom sends your payment instantly with each sale, unlike Clickbank, where they send the commission check on every 15th day. The bottom line is, there's no right or wrong when you choose your affiliate network. All you need to do is analyze what you need from your affiliation with any marketplace and see who gives you the best deal. What Is A Keyword? A keyword is among what makes a website more prominent on search engines, gets more noticed on blogs and articles and generally what describes the website's purpose for its visitors. Defining a keyword is broken down in to several aspects, depending on your own perspective. In general, a keyword is a word, phrase or concept which occurs often in relation to a specific subject matter. Keywords are mostly used with internetbased marketing, especially for search engine rankings. If you take the Google search engine, using the phrase affiliate marketing to search for the best affiliate marketing networks is a classic way to display the use of keyword searches. 8

9 Keywords can either be directly related to the topic, associated with the topic (synonym or conceptually related), a single word or a string of words (phrase). For example, if you take the topic The Best Affiliate Marketing Strategies your topic keywords would be best affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing strategies and best affiliate marketing strategies. The synonym and related keywords would be those such as expert affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing tips and skillful affiliate marketing tips etc. Finding the correct keyword for each topic is essential in search engine marketing. There are many keyword search tools and analyzers freely available to help online marketing professionals to use the best keywords for maximum prominence in the internet. Aweber: Personalized Autoresponder Software For Your Marketing Needs Marketing your products to your opt-in mailing list members is one of the most effective ways to ensure an eventual sale. If you are not already an affiliate marketing professional, you will definitely question this statement with huh, what's all that about? It's not a complicated concept and even if 9

10 you don't want to get involved in affiliate marketing any time soon, you can use the method to bring in interested people to your website, increasing your chances of making a sale at some point. To make the most of your affiliate marketing efforts, you should collect your site visitors' information in a legitimate way. The best way to do this is to add an opt-in facility to your website. This means, you give the visitor the option of signing up to receive newsletters, promotions and offers from you from time to time. Here, the advantage lies in the fact that the customers who signed up are genuinely interested in what you offer them. So, what does Aweber have to with all this? Aweber is a customizable autoresponder software, an essential tool for affiliate marketing. When you collect website visitor names, addresses and preferred content material, Aweber will take over the routine and timeconsuming tasks of keeping track of new and updated subscriptions, each person's preferences and sending out periodical material automatically. The advantages in Aweber include its many unlimited features, including subscriptions, broadcasts and newsletters. 10

11 This means you can send out any number of s to multiple consumers at any given time. You can set specific dates for delivery and let the software handle everything else. The Aweber autoresponder system has been around for over a decade now and it's still going strong with its simple, yet robust functionality. GetAFreelancer Affiliate Marketing GetAFreelancer is a popular, project-based outsourcing website, where service buyers and providers can register free of charge. Free members are required to pay commissions on their won, fully-paid projects, but these commissions are low and reasonable. Gold membership is available for $12 per month, without any other charges and project commissions are waived too. Considered as an all-inclusive, safe and profitable place for freelancers to offer their services and companies/individual buyers to outsource their work, GetAFreelancer is a platform with over 650,000 members at present. On the GetAFreelancer website, they have offered members the opportunity to become their affiliates. Successful referrals will be tracked and when a referred member gets involved in a project, the affiliate receives 100% of the project fee as commission. The affiliate marketing aspects of this virtually 11

12 untapped opportunity has great potential. The money earned through the GetAFreelancer Affiliate Program is remitted to the affiliate's profile account, and can be withdrawn anytime through any of the usual withdrawal procedures. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is an online advertising model that works to attract visitors to your website through keyword-targeted ads. As its name indicates, the advertiser must only pay for those ads which are clicked on by the visitors. The advertisements created for PPC campaigns are based on specific keywords related to what the advertiser is selling. Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN display PPC ads as sponsored links above or on the side of natural/organic search engine results pages. PPC ads are always displayed according to the relevant keywords on the content web pages. The ultimate idea behind pay-per-click advertising is that the advertiser gets massive traffic sent to their website via the ads they have placed. The ad placement will vary according to the specified budget the more you spend on your campaign, the higher your traffic will be, because your ads will be displayed more often. 12

13 There's a minimum price per click and the lowest available pay out per click rate is $0.01. Ads related to highly popular keywords will require a higher budget, as the competition is very high. Affiliate marketing is a lucrative business, and when you take the time to do your research before beginning and continuing to update your knowledge throughout, you will be able to make a big profit out of your time and effort. Resources Getafreelancer.com --- Access to some of the best workers to outsource a variety of different tasks Namecheap.com --- Register domain names on the cheap Keyword Elite --- Provides in context one way backlinks on high page rank blogs Directory Submission service --- submission to 400ish directories 13

14 Article Post Robot --- Post your articles automatically to hundreds of article sites with the push of a button. Clickbank.com --- Affiliate marketplace MarketHealth --- Affiliate marketplace Hostgator --- This is where I get my hosting. Good prices. 14

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

How To Make Money With Affiliate Marketing So how do you make money with affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets you refer customers to other people's products around the internet. You make money by sending qualified