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Follow your passion

Affiliate marketing can be a highly lucrative way to make money off your blog, but how do you find the best products to promote? That’s what we’re talking about today…

Now that you’ve learned how to start a blog and found a reliable web hosting, you probably want to start reaping the benefits of affiliate marketing. Follow your passion. Doing something just for the money never works, so why not promote something you actually believe in. Start by choosing products you actually use yourself. That way you can confident write about its benefits.

People are most successful at promoting products that they have a passion for and that they can get excited about. So, the first thing to do when you are taking your first step in affiliate marketing is to choose your niche. It means you have to choose in which industry you want to grow your affiliate business (e.g. health, finance etc).

You can choose a category based on your own passions and pick those areas where in which you can perform well and give most of your effort to. Potential customers feel your passion for a product or service can when they read the marketing copy. So, the best products to sell online are the things you enjoy and have the most interest in.

Play to the room

If you have a pet care blog, and you try and sell computer products or services in your affiliate program, how do you think that’s going to work? Not so well. Tailor your product offerings to things that people who read and enjoy your blog would actually be interested in.

But before you do anything else, survey your target market first. One of the biggest mistakes people make is to judge their potential success on what someone else did. You need to talk to your own target customer base.

If you don’t have one, aren’t established as an expert in your field, then you need to tackle these things first, before you even think about online product offerings.

One of the most important things as an affiliate is to build a list of potential customers. Regardless of what products you decide to promote, you want to make sure you feel comfortable recommending it so that you don’t destroy your reputation.

There is a great tool you can use, it’s called Google Trends and it helps you analyze the potential products you want to promote. It also allows you to monitor the search volume of keywords over time, which is a great way to check how well the products in your niche sell.

Stick to virtual products

Next, you must decide whether you start selling digital or physical products. Which is best? Physical products like cosmetics and gadgets or virtual products like e-books, music or software? Which products are more profitable and can get you fast and guaranteed profits?

We believe that digital products in almost all cases are more beneficial to promote. Why? Well, to start with, you have nothing to ship, there is no postage or handling and once the payment is made, your client gets a download link and simply downloads the product.

So, less hassle, worries and best of all, you never run out of stock. What we mean by that is avoid anything that requires you to purchase stock, and stick to things like software, ebooks, or things that don’t require any initial inventory or cash outlay on your part.

You could sell 1,000 copies and you do no more work than if you sold just one. But what if you sold 1,000 physical products? Well, that’s a lot of work… Think of all the postage and handling and if you need to make each product, it gets even harder.

Start with ClickBank

The fastest way to find profitable products to promote online is to sign up for an affiliate marketing site, such as ClickBank. You gain access to a database with thousands of products to promote in almost any niche. The commissions are usually between 50-75%, with a higher price tag.

They have a huge selection of electronically downloadable products to choose from and they handle all of the payment processing so you know you’ll get paid on time. Plus they provide real time reporting of all of your products. The site also provides good feedback on products that are selling well and have high commission rates.

A special feature you should consider when choosing your Clickbank products is Gravity. This is an indicator of how many affiliates are making sales with a specific product. The higher the number, the more people are selling it. However, you may want to stay away from products with 100+ Gravity, because this is a very competitive field.

Final thoughts…

Choose products that at least 20 other people are already promoting. This proves that the product has a sales letter that converts well and also it’s also trusted by other marketers.

Also, pick a product that’s not very expensive or very cheap. Low cost may lower down the product value, while higher price may result in fewer sales. It’s always a good idea to start your affiliate journey with no more than one product.

Stick with one, research and learn different strategies to become successful. Use whatever strategies work best in your 2nd and 3rd campaign and grow your online affiliate business gradually.

One last thing… Always try to find products that really serve people and solve their problems creatively. You’ll find that it doesn’t really matter about the product’s price or if your product is really unique. All you need to do is show your target prospects how your product is a key to their success.

These are just a few tips to consider when looking for the best products to promote online. Your ultimate success in creating a successful affiliate business will rest on each product you choose to promote and the way you turn its features into lifesaving benefits.

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Now here’s one more thing about Clickbank Affiliate Marketing , they actually pay you on time! You can sign up to 20 affiliate program and hope that at least some will pay, or you can use Clickbank and have a single source that reliability pays you once you’ve made sales. So it’s a great platform. You know that the money is coming.

Be Selective

As we mentioned earlier, there are a LOT of products out there. Because they are very easy to create, many product owners figure that they just throw a bunch of information together and someone will sell it. This result in tons of crap! It’s basically a bell curve like just about everything in life. A lot of them a going to crappy or at best average.

So choose very carefully. Look at the product. Look at the website , the landing page, the sales copy. Does it make you want to buy? Does the product really solve an actual problem? If the product sucks, then the conversation to sales will be poor too. You’re going to be associated with this product, so don’t ruin your reputation! Maintain a concept of quality. Do things well will be much better for your than be branded together with something crappy. Think of Apple. Their products rock, so other people want to be associate them. By promoting quality products, you’re also more likely to make sales in the converting funnel.

How do you Pick?

Well you can simply pick by category, and select one that’s similar to your niche, but by itself, it isn’t really the best way. So here’re some additional steps to help you. Go to Clickbank.com. Login to your account. Well technically you don’t even need to login, but it’s nice thing to do especially if you’re going to create an affiliate link later. Click on “Marketplace.” Use the “Advance Search” option. Select the category that most closely matches your blog, and then sort by gravity.

Grav, short for Gravity is a numerical representation of how likely people are making with that product, so usually the higher the gravity the better. But don’t be turned off entirely by low gravity scores. Some could be “Diamonds in the Rough” waiting to be discovered. There are fewer competition in promoting these products, but the risk is higher. You’d have to use your gut feeling instead of raw number to decide whether each particuar product would sell well.

So to play on the safe side, you might want to pick a Grav of at least 60+. It gives you an idea what products are best sellers, but you also want to pay attention to the percentage that you get from each sale, and how much that it. You can get that information by paying attention to the “Avg %/Sale” and “Initial $/Sale.”

While some product has a really high gravity number, you might make very little per sale. Instead, set a minimum payout amount, such as $30 for example. There are some products that pay hundreds of dollars, but often the conversion and gravity score could be low.

For affiliates who wish to expand into non-English speaking markets, you have the option to filter by language with French, Spanish, and German,.
Additionally with Advanced search, you could be searching by keyword, by title, gravity, average rebill total, average rebill percentage. Rebill is really interesting because it allows a subscription model, which means you make money both on the initial sale and also h ongoing revenue. It’s kind of like insurance really. The recurring commission makes it really attractive and lucrative.

The Avg %/rebill is a good statistic to inspect since the average commission rate on rebills might be lower than the initial sale.

Other Tips

Promote high quality products that you would personally enjoy and buy. When you actually like the products, you come across as more authentic when you’re preaching its merits to others. You will share a similar understanding and passion of other potential customers. It adds to your credibility.

Be sure to review the tools and tips that the product owners offer on the Affiliates descriptions of their programs web page. Many offer helpful advice on how to best promote their product, and also banners and marketing collateral that you could use.

Test the affiliate links (Hoplinks) periodically to make sure that they are still working correctly. Obviously if something is wrong, you won’t be making any money, and should contact Clickbank and the product owner immediately.

Also check out your competition. Are there other affiliates who are already promoting these products. How are they doing it? The Goldilocks Principle actually applies nicely here. There shouldn’t be too many or too little.

Review the seller’s landing page. You can do this by clicking on the Hoplink also known as the affiliate link. That’s when the rubber meets the road. If you’re diverting your traffic to their site, they should be able to convert. Read their sales copy, and ask yourself whether it’s convincing, true, and believable.

Watch out for hype and exaggerated promises, for example, “lose 50lbs in 1 week.” If for any reason you’re not comfortable, move on, there are plenty of others who have their acts together. Don’t waste your time with someone who has a sloppy affiliate program!

You can also filter by how the vendor have had their products by using the “Vendor Activation Field.” Working with new vendor carry the risk that they’re using you to test any rough spots in their online selling process.

So how do you find the best digital product for your blog? Leave a comment and let us know.

Many people have found that having the right idea is even more important than having the right traffic. If you work hard enough you will inevitably find yourself with a lot of traffic. The search engines take care of it as long as you are putting the right content on your site.

But what about getting people to actually give you money once they are on your site? You need to make sure you have the right business model in place before you get started. Here are five ideas that you may not have been aware of before but could get started on today.

Sniper Sites

These sites require a significant amount of research, but after that they are easy to run. They take advantage of any sort of monetization strategy that relies on heavy traffic, including Google Adwords and affiliate programs. So how do they work?

Start with a product (affiliate product or keyword) that has a decent pay out. Then start looking for search terms that have a high amount of traffic without a significant amount of competition. If you are curious about doing this efficiently, search the Internet to find more ways in which you can get started.

Once you have the right terms a site of five or six pieces of content, all focused on the right keywords, can get you into first place on Google. This requires no back linking or other processes and can start leading to money immediately. Since they are fast, you can easily make one per week and generate thousands of dollars per month.

Affiliate Sales Sites

By making a site that focuses solely on reviews of products through sites like Amazon.com you can sell their products. You can make a hefty commission, especially if you can make a lot of sales. This business takes practice, but once it is set up you can easily make hundreds of dollars (or more) per month.

Most people focus on selling high item electronics. But one trick that is really important to note is that if you sell a lot of smaller products you can make a lot more money. Your commission rate is determined by your total number (not volume) of sales.

Reseller Sites

If you find that you are good at keyword research then you could easily start a website where you are reselling someone else product. There are many products out there that offer affiliate or reseller options. It’s important that you inform the readers of your affiliation, though, as this is required by the FCC.

Once you get started with the process of creating your site and putting it together you can provide a number of options to those who are purchasing from you. By presenting them with many options and encouraging them to purchase the product, they are more likely to buy.
ClickBank.com

This is a site that could give you the opportunity to create your own products and sell them through Click Bank. You could easily put together a special report or an e-book and put it on Click Bank and have others sell it for you. This will allow you to relax while you make some cash.

It’s important that you focus on the products that are currently selling on Clickbank.com. The thing most people don’t understand is that Click Bank is not only marketed through sales pages and websites, but also on mailing lists. For most people who put together a mailing list, they are going to quickly find that they need to sell different products on a regular basis.

Offer a Service

The world of Internet marketing is one that relies heavily on outsourcing. While many people prefer to work with websites like Elance.com and Scriptlance.com there are many more who prefer to have a regular connection with someone that is able to provide their service on a regular basis.

Providing a service to Internet marketers will require that you have a good grasp of the types of services that they need. Here are three that they regularly use to build up their own online business. You are going to need to master all of these skills and more in order to take advantage of any of the ideas listed before, anyway.

1. Content Writing. This is a skill that many Internet marketers lack. If you find that you have a knack for putting together words, you can make a fortune writing articles for others.

2. Article submissions. Many people make money by submitting articles to article directories. The process can be tedious, but can pay well if you learn to do it fast and cheap.

3. Back link building. Whether you are providing comments on other blogs or links from websites you own, you can easily provide back links to a number of sites and make a good amount of money doing so.

4. Keyword Research: A lot of Internet marketers want to simply set it and forget it. If you have found that you are good at keyword research but don’t have the stomach to take a chance, then this might be a good spot for you.

Regardless of what type of business you start on the Internet, you are going to need to spend a lot of time working on it. You can easily find yourself immersed more than full time, so don’t get into these ideas if your goal is to slack off.

You want to make sure that, in the beginning, you allot at least 40 hours per week to these tasks. As time goes on, you may find that your business runs with only a few hours each week. But in the beginning hard work will pay off.

For those who can make a product, Clickbank gives you plenty of opportunities to get your product sold. It provides a great platform for you to identify the niches that are currently selling big time. It also gives you exposure to those who are good at selling as affiliates.

But for those who are able to market, but just can’t put together a product, click bank comes to the rescue. If you have developed a large following of readers, you have the perfect platform to sell some of these products and make huge affiliate commissions. And the best part is – it’s simple.

Setting up your mailing list

First of all, you need to make sure that you have a mailing list of people that will actually be interested in buying your products. There are a couple of ways you can do this, but the most popular is using the Aweber platform. The platform is far too involved for us to provide a detailed explanation in this article.

Once you are set up with Aweber, start driving people to your list. Entice people who are interested in extra special information by offering a free report or special content only for those on your list. From there, it becomes pretty easy.

Provide value to your list

Make sure you constantly provide solid value to those people on your list. You can do this by creating free information rich reports and sending them to your list. Heck you don’t even need to write the report yourself. Either get a ghostwriter, and establish partnerships with bloggers to provide these reports. Get creative and make sure that you are providing these valuable things regularly.

It’s also important to make sure that you communicate with the people on your list in an effective manner. Never refer to it as “my list” or anything like that. Instead, whenever you are referring to the members of your list, call it “the community” or something similar (think about Seth Godin’s Tribes).

Selling Products

Once you have established your list and a regular pattern of providing extra special bonus content, you can offer them products for sale occasionally. This is totally acceptable. If you are regularly providing great content and you decide that there is a product that will really blow them away, then you should offer it to them.

If the product is really worth it, then you will easily be able to show the value to the members on your list and make a pretty decent percentage of sales. You can typically expect that between 1% and 10% of the members on your list will purchase the product. It doesn’t matter if your list has a few hundred people or a few thousand – that equates to a lot of cash.

Selling your own products through Clickbank

Here is the biggest secret to making a ton of money with your blog and Clickbank. Take a look at all of the content that you have created. You no doubt have thousands upon thousands of words on your blog. Some bloggers literally write more words in a month than a novelist writes in a year.

Buried within all of that content are dozens and dozens of special reports and ebooks that others could sell to members of their lists. You just need to setup your account at Clickbank, scour your content, create a products, and go.

It’s really that simple. Remember earlier, when you sold a product to your list, and you had a few people purchase it? That was assuming your list only had 100 people. If your list had 1000 or more your sales would have been far more impressive.

Since it’s going to take a long time to increase your list by multiples, you can harness the lists of everyone in the affiliate community to make a lot of cash in no time at all.

If you aren’t sure what kind of product you want to make, then you can browse the Clickbank product list to determine what the hottest products are right now, and which are going to work the best for your existing content. Once you know, it doesn’t take long to make a product.

Creating your product – what’s the best kind

Understand that most people don’t want to waste their time reading tons and tons of content. The best products are those that sell for $20 to $30 and are no more than 20 to 25 pages. These are known as special reports and contain rich pieces of information that are culled from tons of research.

That’s exactly what you have on your blog. Go back and look through the comments on your site and all of the posts over the years. Grab a notebook and start writing down all of the ideas that come to mind. Once you have a good idea for a special report in mind, you can easily start collecting the information that you need to piece it together.

Your product can then be put on Clickbank and you will be able to start selling tons and tons of products. But it’s better to take it to the next level by looking for individuals who are already in your same niche with a mailing list.

Start going around to all of your “competitors” and look around to see who has a mailing list. You want to contact them and let them know that you also have a mailing list and wanted to know if they were interested in doing some cross site promotions.

You show them your product and give them a sneak preview, and they will review it on their blog and to their list. Get creative here, as this is one of the best ways to maximize exposure AND make yourself a ton of cash.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is essentially when you as a blogger sell other people’s products on your blog and receive a commission for each sale made. The commission rates vary depending on the product and are based on wherever the product owner chooses to set them.

Finding Affiliate Offers

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different sites out there that allow product owners to set up their information products and promote them to affiliates who can, in turn, pick which ones they want. These types of sites are a good place to start when looking for products.

A few of the largest sites out there that offer these types of affiliate products include ClickBank, Commission Junction, the Google Affiliate Network, and Amazon Associates.

ClickBank

ClickBank is made up mostly of information products – ebooks, online courses, video series, and the like. It has been around for a long time and has several great metrics and resources that you can use to decide what is the best selling product and what is the most likely to do well on your site. You can also track how many times your link has been posted and how many sales were made.

Of course, as mentioned above, ClickBank does have its limitations. There are no physical products sold there, so you can only promote online products. If you want to join ClickBank, just head over to their site and follow their approval process. It usually takes a few days to get in.

Commission Junction

Commission Junction is a huge marketplace that many of the larger retailers use to get affiliates for their products. Most of what is on Commission Junction is physical products, so you have a bit more choice in what you can make a commission on.

Signing up to Commission Junction requires a website plus a fairly rigorous application process, but once you are in, you have all kinds of retailers to choose from. The only downside is that you must get approval from each retailer to be able to promote their products for a percentage. However, many of the retailers in the system auto-approve everyone who applies, so it is not that hard to find something that you would like on your blog.

Google Affiliate Network

The Google Affiliate Network is very similar to Commission Junction. In fact, the entire setup and process is almost exactly the same as above.

Amazon Associates

This is one of oldest on the Internet. The Amazon Associates program allows you use basically anything that is sold on Amazon plus items sold on the other sites that they manage.

Think about all the products out there on Amazon.com! There is bound to be something related to your niche that you could blog about and sell! Amazon, also has a fairly rigorous approval process, so you will want a site with some good content on it, and maybe even some decent traffic, before you apply.

Once you are in, this program does not need you to get approval for every company or product that you want, so you can get right to it!

What Items You Should Choose

When you are trying to decide what type of affiliate marketing products you should promote on your blog, you need to consider very carefully your readers. Do not ever choose anything that is not a high-value, high-trust product. You do not necessarily need to own the product yourself, but you should certainly do your homework and make sure that the product is legitimate.

Also, think about what will really be pertinent to your readers. If your site is about bunk beds, find some bunk beds or something related to bunk beds. Do not choose to use say, an ebook about making money online. You probably will not get any sales on a product that is not relevant to your blog.

How You Can Do It

Once you have found a few products, now you obviously need to promote them! The first thing you will need to do is make sure you get the correct links so that any sales that are made are registered to your account. Each affiliate network has a different way of doing this, but in general, they will give you a link with some data in the URL, so that when someone clicks on the product from your blog, that visitor is registered as someone you sent, giving you the credit if that click turns into a sale. Most of these systems also register the click, and even if the person leaves and comes back, if they buy within a certain time period, you can still get the sale.

Most of these product owners and retailers also have marketing materials that you can use, especially ad banners that you can put on your site. These can make the process of selling a product much easier on you.

Once you have your unique links, there are several ways to promote the products. You could just put a link or a banner in your advertising space or in the sidebar of your site. This might get you a few clicks and sales, but you are going to want to do more than that to get even better sales numbers.

One of the best ways to promote these products is to write a review of them on your site. Write an honest review in a blog post specifically for a product that you are promoting and put it on your site. This way, people feel more comfortable about buying product having gotten their information from a third-party source.

If you will follow the steps outlined above and get signed up to one or all of the networks mentioned, you are bound to find something that you can promote!

Once you have your blog running, you will begin to accumulate affiliate marketing partners. Not counting any potential drama, there’s a logistical downside of having a lot of affiliate partners, you’re going to have many extremely long, terribly looking URL’s that might make you barf. It can be a nightmare trying to manage (and test) all of the different URLs to the affiliate products you’re promting.

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Why Long Affiliate URL’s Won’t Work For You

We appreciate finesse, and obviously don’t like messy URL’s. Your readers are less likely to click on them. So how do you promote these long URLs effectively in different platform like email and social media? Many won’t fit in a Twitter stream which only allows 140 characters! On a quick side note, you do use Twitter & Facebook to promote your blog, don’t you?

Here’s another common scenario. You meet an attractive affiliate marketing partner who offers products that would be fantastic for your readers (kind of sound like dating, doesn’t it?) You start promoting their products. After some initial success, you expand the relationship and place their URL’s on more and more pages.

Then one day all of a sudden, the partner stops responding to your email, and you no longer get that commission check. It turns out the partner has gone out of business. What happens then? Would you want to change a bunch of their URL’s to a variety of products that are coded in dozens of different places? Do you have to change them all individually?

How You Can Manage Your Affiliate Links Quickly And Easily – All In One Place!

If you’re like us with hundreds or even thousands of affiliate marketing URL’s on your website, while testing different ads and campaigns, it’d be a freaking nightmare, and just not feasible to do it one by one! This is what we’ll discuss today. Not the bad dream part, but how to make your life easier!

Drum roll please, ladies and gentlemen, we present to you, Pretty Link! So what exactly is Pretty Link? The short answer: it’s a simple tool that allows you to manage your URL’s in a simple easy way. You can just make a single change at a central location and update all the places where you had that particular link.

Here’s a longer answer. Pretty Link is a WordPress plugin that allows you to manage and shorten those big, huge, confusing and nasty URL’s into a small, pretty link that is easy tweetable, sharable, etc. You input the long affiliate marketing link, and get a much shorter one in return that points you to the same page that you want to go. This could essentially replace tinyurl.com, bit.ly, or any other link shrinking service.

There are other link management tools like LinkTrackr, which is a hosted service. But we’re not yet 100% confident of their reliability. It needs to be as steady as a rock for us to incorporate it in our business, in part because we’re fanatical about perfect uptime for our websites. At the end of the day, if something goes wrong, it would mean real money down the drain. Many internet marketers do recommend LinkTrackr so it’s definitely worth checking out however.

You can also use Pretty Link to mask affiliate marketing on your site. For example, if you have a site about car parts, and you have an affiliate marketing deal with an auto supply store, you can use it to mask the URL.

So the original long link might look like:

http://www.auto_supply_store.com?product_id=52kkdoijaadsfjwekjlkj3ejv9997u32wi342

Pretty Link might shorten it to:

http://www.YourDomain.com/Cool_Product

Why Should You Mask Affiliate Links?

Why would you want to mask your affiliate marketing URL’s? Well other than the purely aesthetic reason of making the links look better, for some reason some people think that you should NOT make money online because it’s somehow wrong.

Going to a soul draining job and getting paid a meager wage is fine, but earning a profit from publishing information products on the web is bad! They believe that the information on Internet should be free and won’t click on a link if it “looks like” an affiliate link.

Shocking isn’t it? We know! In our opinion if you provide quality content, there’s no reason why you should not profit from our recommendation. To paraphrase from The Godfather movie – the scene where the five crime families got together to discuss business – “we’re not communists after all”! Shoot, did we just compare ourselves to the mob?

So to get around the unfair perception of being greedy capitalist pigs (now we kind of sound like a communist propaganda), Pretty Link can make the affiliate marketing link look like another page on your site. That person would then click on the link, go to the product page, and ideally find what they’re looking for, and buy something. You’d then get a referral commission from the merchant. Everyone is happy.

On a darker note, there are those who try to profit from other people’s efforts and attempt to steal your affiliate marketing commissions by hijacking your link. For example hacking into your website and changing the link code to theirs. When the sale occurs, they’d get paid, instead of you! Pretty Link essentially makes it a lot harder for this to happen.

Should You Go Pro?

If you’re looking for more features, the pro version gives you a centralized place to manage and track all your affiliate marketing URL’s over your website, your twitter, etc. This is what we use. You can see all of your URL’s from within your WordPress admin panel. It also allows you to automatically tweet your new blog posts, saving you time, and eliminating steps.

You also get a ‘social button’ which will allow your users to spread your posts across all social networks. This can be a very effective way to get the word of mouth traffic coming to your site.

It also has the “Pretty Bar” which keeps your iframe (and logo) on top of page when you refer visitors away from your site. The reason for is so that they know how to easily get back to your site. It’s also more convenient for them to share that affiliate marketing link. The only gotcha with that Pretty Bar is that some merchanges (primarily ClickBank) as of this writing frown on any intercept of their website order page, which is technically what this is.

The pricing is very reason at $37 for a single web site, or $97 for unlimited websites, but in our opinion the best way to start is with the Lite version which is free and allows you to try the basic link management features right away.

And alternatively give LinkTrackr a try for yourself, there are some definite benefits to a fully hosted service, where someone else worries about managing the software and you focus just on managing your links and promotions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

So where did affiliate marketing come from? Back in the pioneer days of the online commerce – also known as the mid 90’s – Amazon came up with a program where they paid people to refer clients to them.

For example, if you went to a blog and clicked on the Amazon link and bought something, the owners of said blog got paid a commission. Today, there are tons of affiliate programs out there for everything under the sun, no matter what your niche is. Companies will happily split the profit with you for referring customers to them.

Affiliate marketing is a win-win situation and a great way to make money online. They have the products and you have the audience that might be interested in what they offer. They’re basically giving you a cut of their profit that otherwise would have gone to advertisement. A lot of them have back end products as well, so you’re likely to get a high commission percentage of sales.

Choosing The Right Affiliate Program For You

So you’ve built up your blog, email list, and gained an audience. Now you need to decide which way you want to go in terms of monetization. There are many different types of affiliate programs that can help you make money online.

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a popular option because it’s an easy program to apply for and it is simple to set up on your blog. All you need to do is apply for the AdSense program, then insert a snippet of code into your blog. Google will then display contextual ads, or ads that are related to your blog’s niche. They usually have decent click through rates. This is an amazing way to earn completely passive income!

However, the bar for getting paid is lower – it’s based on every click instead of a sale. Just don’t violate the program’s terms and start clicking on your own ads. That will get you banned from Google! You may think you won’t get caught, but Google has some very sophisticated programs and smart people with degrees in statistics checking for potential fraud.

Or perhaps you want to sign up some other affiliate network? They basically match merchants with affiliates. Instead of getting paid from like 100 different merchants, you get the money consistently and timely from just one source.

ClickBank

ClickBank connects digital product owners with website owners. We strongly recommend them over traditional affiliate networks Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network and Share Sale which typically cater to traditional physical products that they’d then have to ship.

Digital products tend to result in faster transaction, thus resulting in more commissions and less potential headaches.  Physical products are often hinder by logistics that are beyond your control.  Web hosting companies and online software companies also enjoy the benefit of instant gratification on the part of the user.

Individual Affiliate Programs

Finally, you can also sign up to individual affiliate programs which often pays more than the networks, but the downside is that it might take longer to get paid. You’d have to be a lot more organized to track each merchant, and the corresponding logins and passwords.

Do your homework and pick the partner that’s right for you and who will help you make money online and meet your goals. Don’t just signup every affiliate program in sight. The product owners should be hooking your followers up with products or services they are actually interested in.

To avoid seeming “spammy,” make sure the products are related to your niche. Stay on topic. It has to fit in with your branding – or you’ll lose customers. You don’t want to have ads for sports cars on your dog food blog!

Promote, Promote, Promote

The more people you send to your partner products, the more you can make money online. It’s simply the law of probabilities. Use links, banners, directory listings and written article product reviews to promote your affiliate partnership.

If you don’t feel comfortable promoting your partners then you’ve picked the wrong partners. We never promote a product or service that we cannot truly recommend it to our friends and families! Basically, only promote products that you believe in. Otherwise, you’re going to feel bad and not really able to sell them well. Who needs the guilt when there are so many options out there?

Monitor Your Blog

When you start your own blog, you need to optimize it and constantly improve your numbers. We watch the whole sales funnel very closely from the impressions to clicks, and finally conversions. Make sure you’re getting good conversions from clicks to sales – you don’t want to promote a product that doesn’t convert. If your affiliate partner isn’t working out for you, find a new one! That’s why we like to have a few partners in each sub-niche of our site, then work closely with them to improve their sales funnels, because the more money they make, the more you will make. But if any of them doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal.

Your affiliate partner should provide you with accurate metrics. That’s the other thing we love about ClickBank which has all the detailed stats.

When you find something that works, try to make it work better. As an affiliate you can ask the merchant for higher commission percentages, money on back end sales, custom promotions, even white labeling their product. That’s where you re-brand it and sell it as your own.

In the age of uncertain economy and massive corporate layoffs, many people are looking for alternatives to support themselves and their families. Making money with affiliate marketing might just be that flexible option to help you make a few extra dollar, build a passive income, and perhaps even one day become financially independent! So take those steps.

Learn how to start a blog, then build an audience of dedicated readers, and join some affiliate programs. Remember to be creative and never be satisfied!

On one hand the ClickBank network offers some of the best converting affiliate products anywhere. So, we all work with them. They also reliably make payouts every 2 weeks, yet another strong point in their favor.

But the major problem until just recently – they refused to show you how much traffic you’ve sent them, so you could never accurately figure out which affiliate products are converting better than others. AAAhhhhh!

So what’s the problem?

While this may not matter much to someone who’s happy to get a $50 ClickBank check every few months, for those of us who bring in several thousand dollars a month from affiliate revenue (from sales of many different affiliate products), optimizing your conversion funnel matters.  It matters A LOT.

Can’t you track affiliate conversions yourself?

In short, no. The best you could do was to use OpenAds to track your outgoing clicks for each affiliate product, and then compare that with the actual sales at the end of the month. But that’s error prone.

What you want is to see a per-product breakdown of how many clicks you’ve sent and how many sales you made. THEN you can see what’s actually making you money, so you know where to focus your energy the most. Read: do more of whatever works the best.

So how can you see product conversion stats from ClickBank?

Well, this is a new feature, and it’s buried down deep. But, if you look deep within their reporting tools, and select just the right combination of options (see the image), you’ll get… drumroll please… conversion stats broken down by product! Yeah!!!

Note that currently this is only available for the “by publishers” report, and only for the past 30 days.

And this is what you’ll be seeing… Note how neatly the crucial numbers are computing for you. You see “clicks per order” and how much money you actually made per click. Looking at this graph, can YOU pick out the obvious winner?

While we found it quite by accident while reviewing our top money makers for the past several months, we’re very happy and grateful to see this new feature.

Any great tips to optimize affiliate conversions?

Absolutely. More on this in a future article, but here are some big ones…

• Use OpenAds to split-test ad headlines, and see which attract more clicks to each affiliate products. Every couple of weeks, choose a winner, and add a new contender to “beat the control”.
• Use “goals” in Google Analytics to track how well your pre-sale review of the affiliate product is performing. You can see how many clicks to the product sales page you generate, and what your abandonment rate is. You DO pre-sell your affiliate products, don’t you?

Ah, the mysterious and sometimes black art of affiliate marketing… the well kept secret of the most successful Internet marketers.

Many people have tried and failed to make any money online with affiliate marketing… usually because they give up way too quickly. Fact is, affiliate marketing takes some up front effort to get optimized and working right, but when it’s working, life is very, very good.

Most bloggers only use Google AdSense to monetize their sites. AdSense is a great revenue option, but affiliate marketing can easily bring in double your AdSense revenue, WITHOUT impacting your AdSense earnings.

What’s more, the work you put into developing a good affiliate marketing strategy will pay off for months and years to come. You only do the work once,  and it keeps on giving! Now that’s working smarter, not harder.

Passive income, and Blog Monetization Zen.

The best kept secret of affiliate marketing…. Shhhhh!

The biggest secret to successful affiliate marketing is this… It’s all about the pre-sale.

Putting up banners and links will get you some conversions – if you’re lucky. But if that’s your main attempt at affiliate marketing, then it’s a big waste of your time and effort.

People visiting your site (your readers, web visitors) are looking for information. And if you’re doing your job well and putting together great information, then your articles and reviews will be indexed and well ranked by the search engines – making it THAT much easier for these searchers to find your site instead of someone else’s. The more search engine traffic you’re getting, the better.

This is because people WHO ARE MOSTLY READY TO BUY search for reviews and articles about their products of choice. Sometimes they want to see their options for a product category, but often times they just want to justify to themselves why it’s OK to buy that product they really want.

So – they want to see an honest, objective review of a product before they buy it. They want your personal seal of approval. So find great products, provide and honest review with benefits and weaknesses, recommend the product, and offer affiliate links to purchase them.

But what if you don’t like the product you’re recommending? Is that dishonest? Will it still work?

A question plaguing most beginners with affiliate marketing… “Isn’t it dishonest to recommend something you don’t like?”

Of course it’s dishonest to recommend something you don’t actually believe in. And here’s a little secret. If you write a dishonest review, your readers will pick up on that, and they’ll probably move on and NOT buy using your affiliate links.

So here’s a radical solution. Focus on doing reviews and writing articles for products that you LIKE and can actually RECOMMEND.

Where to find the BEST affiliate products to promote

You know your niche inside and out, don’t you? If not, go back to the drawing board and learn it!

To make thousands of dollars every month in passive income from your blog, your information must be top notch, and for that you have to be an authority on your topic. It’s that simple.

OK, so now that you have an idea about what types of products MIGHT be interesting to your niche, you set out to find the best performing products. No, not just any products… you want to find the ones that are performing well for others, and you start there. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

ClickBank tips and tricks – how to start making money today

ClickBank is a huge marketplace for selling digital products. And it has the easiest to use affiliate program out there. You literally just sign up, search for products to promote by keyword, and get the code to promote them on your site.

You can also see how much you’ll get for every sale, and what percentage of the sale amount that is. Hint – - don’t look for the larger total price, but rather the program that offers you the highest percentage of each sale.

The downside: ClickBank has the worst stats tracking of any affiliate network out there. They don’t show you how many clicks you’ve sent to a product, which can be really frustrating. They only tell you when you’ve made a sale, and how much you made. This approach also doesn’t allow for testing to make sure your links are good. But alas, it’s basically a must for any serious affiliate marketer. So go sign up for ClickBank and find some products to promote.

Commission Junction

Comission Junction is another top affiliate network. It provides great stats for clicks sent, and also gives you great comparative numbers on how much others are really earning for sales across all merchants.

But their products are generally not as juicy as those on ClickBank. Nevertheless, sign up for Comission Junction as well to round out your list of affiliate products, and find yourself some well converting products to try out.

Other affiliate marketing networks and programs

There are some other affiliate networks out there that are worth paying attention to, but it’s very important to not spread yourself too thin. Do your research and find the programs you’ll be focusing on, and go from there.

SharePayNow vs. Clickbank

Another affiliate network similar to ClickBank that’s starting to gain some ground is SharePayNow.

This network is very similar to ClickBank, but unlike ClickBank, it DOES show you how many clicks you’ve sent to a campaign – which is always nice. However, unlike ClickBank, it doesn’t show you which programs in their marketplace are converting and how well. But SharePayNow is definitely worth checking out when you’re choosing products to promote on your site.

AzoogleAds vs. LinkShare – alternate affiliate networks

If you’re looking for some banner ads to check out, you’ll need to find an affiliate program that provides those. AzoogleAds and LinkShare are both large affiliate networks that are worth checking out.

But there’s a big difference, and having dealt with both we’ll be avoiding LinkShare in the future. LinkShare feels like a large, sluggish company, while AzoogleAds is young and on the ball. The AzoogleAds support is great, and you get your own very responsive dedicated account manager that’s actually eager to work with you and help you find well converting campaigns for your site. Wow, imagine that.

Here’s a major difference though – AzoogleAds tends to offer well paying promotions for affiliates, which pay out significantly better than their counterparts on LinkShare.

Check out AzoogleAds and see which of their promotions could work for you.

The Amazon affiliate program

And of course, the most popular affiliate program of all time, the Amazon affiliate program.

For some truly bizarre reason, the Amazon affiliate program is one of the most popular and successful affiliate programs in the history of Internet marketing.

Maybe it’s because it’s downright easy to set up Amazon affiliate links for your site, and start making a little money. More likely, it’s because we all BUY books and other products from Amazon regularly, so we’re comfortable with it. And we know that others buy from Amazon as well.

Here’s the catch though. Amazon pays you roughly 5% of the revenues you generate for them. That is lower than just about ANY website and blog monetization scheme out there.

While it is another monetization option, there are just too many other better options with much higher payouts.

Knowing this, should you still sign up for the Amazon affiliate program?

Yes, you should definitely still sign up for this program. You will eventually either refer to or actually review various books on your website. These books will likely not have direct affiliate options, so the only way to monetize these referrals will be through a quick link to the Amazon product page.

Also, that Amazon affiliate link is a great way to provide your reader more information on the book you’re talking about, and make it easy for your readers to purchase the book.

Amazon also has a really neat feature for affiliates, which creates a dynamic preview of the book when your readers hover their mouse cursor over the book link on your site. All it takes is a tiny JavaScript snippet you’ll get from Amazon.

For an example of the Amazon product preview pop-up, check out this post on AskDanAndJennifer.com answering a reader question about steamy date night DVDs – hover over the DVD titles.

So go ahead and sign up to the Amazon affiliate program as well, but don’t spend a lot of time putting up their banners and other sales tools. Instead, us this as a laser focused way to monetize reviews and references to popular books that you include in your articles.

And suddenly you have ONE MORE revenue source paying you every month…

The eBay affiliate program and AuctionAds

Yeah, the whole “make money with eBay” thing was and still is a great opportunity for some, but it’s become more of a fad. Starting a blog is a solid way to make long term income – just for doing some writing on stuff you actually like and care about. Imagine that!

Unlike Amazon, eBay shows some serious lovin’ for it’s affiliates. In fact, in June 2007, eBay nearly doubled it’s affiliate payout amounts. That’s some serious affiliate lovin’.

eBay pays you both a flat reward for each referral you send them (a customer who creates an eBay account and eventually buys something) and also a percentage of the sales generated from the referrals you send them. Now that’s pretty cool.

What’s the best way to add eBay listings to your site and make money?

Until recently, it’s been a challenge to add eBay listings to your site in a visually appealing way, so as to really get your visitors engaged. But AuctionAds makes it very easy to do this, with their easy to customize widgets. You can customize the ad unit on their site, copy the little code snippet, and add it to your site. Done – you’ve got eBay auction ads.

Can you make more money with eBay by using AuctionAds?

YES! The eBay affiliate program is tiered to pay you a lot more money as a high traffic affiliate. So if you have a lot of sales and referrals every month, you make much more PER REFERRAL than someone with just a few sales / referrals per month.

By joining AuctionAds, your commissions are based on the entire AuctionAds member base, not just your own sales. So each referral and sale you generate are compensated as a very high traffic affiliate. Again, this is working smarter, not harder. Sign up for AuctionAds to add eBay auctions to your site – and make money as a high traffic eBay affiliate.

Adult affiliate programs – web cam girls, kinky adult personals, and more… Oh, my!

Wait a minute – is there really money to be made in the adult industry?

Where’ve YOU been? Oh yeah, most definitely. Where there’s demand (as in 50% of all the web traffic today), there’s money to be made.

OK kids, everyone who’s going to be offended here please cover your eyes and skip this section like good boys and girls.

What’s the best adult affiliate program to get started with?

One of the most successful and best paying affiliate programs in “the business” is ClickCash. They’ve been around since the mid 1990′s. Their iFriends site connects people with webcams (a.k.a. cam girls, or “content producers”) with web surfers (a.k.a. “consumers”). They provide web cam streams for every possible sexual interest that might have enough consumers who posses credit cards. And they provide a way for many content producers to make a LOT of money from the privacy of their own homes.

And get this… you actually make $40 for every FREE signup you send them. These referrals only have to sign up with them and provide a valid credit card, but they’re not charged anything. This person is signing up for a free membership, and they’re asked for their credit card to “verify their age”.

Admittedly, getting a credit card is indeed a more accurate way of verifying adulthood than asking your visitors to “click here if you’re over 18″.

Anyway, their profit margins are so high, that they will pay you $40 or more (up to $80) per sign-up you send them. And the pay scale is graduated – for more than 5 referrals in a week, you get $45 each, and it goes up to $80 per FREE referral.

Downline referrals

Oh, and if you get other affiliates to sign up, you’ll receive an extra 10% for all the money THEY make. So, you refer your friend who gets 10 conversions next month. That’s $400 for him and $40 for you more than you’re making now. Think of it as a gift for referring your friend to such a successful affiliate program.

So if you’re a little adventurous and open minded, sign up with ClickCash and start making cash for sending FREE signups to ClickCash and iFriends.

But what about adult personals sites, like Adult Friend Finder?

An adult personals site is an excellent complement to promoting ClickCash streaming video sites. Providing more options for your visitors is Always a good thing.

Adult Friend Finder is the most popular adult personals site on the Internet today. What many people don’t realize is that AdultFriendFinder gets more web visitors every day than Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo Personals put together. Hmmmm… perhaps there’s money to be made in this niche anyway.

Adult Friend Finder pays between $30 and $85 for EACH paid membership you send them, depending on the promotion they’re running at any given time.

But remember – unlike ClickCash, these visitors need to actually buy something. Regardless, the conversions here are much better than traditional non-adult online dating sites.

Must have affiliate marketing tools

Don’t waste your time and money fumbling around in the dark. You can so easily waste too much of your already scarce time and energy. You should be spending that time laser-focused on doing the things that will MAKE YOU MONEY!

Don’t re-invent the wheel. Find successful affiliate marketers and do what they’re doing!