I would apprecite some advice from a real person who is making money online doing something that is NOT rocketscience.

Is there a biz I could get into today and within a few weeks be looking at a check ? What are people doing to make money online ?

www.davidjenyns.com Dave Lakhani outlines the most common mistakes people make with their online marketing strategies. Successful online marketing requires careful planning and a solid understanding of social media and how to develop a powerful persona. The most effective online marketing is reflective of a well structured online marketing strategy. Get the facts on the best online marketing strategies at www.davidjenyns.com

1. What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a promotion and income generating system where you, as an affiliate marketer, earn a commission for promoting a product or service.  The most frequently used payment arrangements include pay-per-sale, pay-per-lead, or pay-per-click compensations.  Affiliate marketers generally operate by owning a website where they drive traffic and sales to their represented companies.

For example, if you represent a clothing manufacturer like L.L. Bean you would have a website dedicated to clothing or outdoor wear.  Your website could use a number of tools including content with embedded links, banner advertising, and promotional content to encourage your website visitors to click your designated link through to L.L. Bean.  Depending on how you’re compensated, if the visitor then makes a purchase at L.L. Bean you are compensated a percentage of the sale.

Affiliate marketing is credited to have been developed by CDNow.com and Amazon.com.  Experts were initially critical of the programs however Amazon claims more than 1 million affiliates worldwide.

2. What can I expect to make as an affiliate marketer?

There are many naysayers popping up who say that affiliate marketing is on the decline.  However, many affiliate marketers will tell you this just isn’t the case.  There is still a tremendous amount of money to be made as an affiliate marketer.  How much you make is largely dependent on your compensation agreement, your chosen niche, how much work you put into your business, and your competition.  Experts agree that the key to affiliate marketing is to stick with it.  Profits will increase as your business and website grow.

3. What are expected start-up costs?

One of the benefits of being an affiliate marketer is that there are very few startup costs.  Basic startup costs include a:

• Website
• Domain name
• Computer
• Phone
• Fax/efax

If you already have a computer, then the startup costs are extremely minimal.  Other costs will include writing copy for your website.  You can write your own copy to minimize these costs.  Advertising, including Pay-Per-Click campaigns and placing banner ads in ezines and relevant websites is a great way to send traffic to your websites, however it can be costly.  When placing ads or using PPC, consider starting small to keep costs low and test your campaigns to optimize return on investment.

4. What skills do I need to be successful?

To be a successful, and profitable, affiliate marketer will want to have some basic research skills.  What are you researching?  Plenty!  Obtaining the keywords that will generate the most profit, the products that will sell the best and pay well, which advertising and marketing means will work best for your products, and most importantly…who your target market is and what they want.  

5. How do I choose affiliate marketing programs?

You can find appropriate affiliate marketing programs online via search engines, by visiting companies you’re familiar with and respect, and by searching affiliate directories.  Before you sign up with a company here’s what to look for:

• High quality products and services.  Respect your customers and only endorse products you believe in.  If you endorse an inferior product, you will lose the respect of your customer.  There are thousands of quality companies available, there’s no reason to endorse an inferior product.

• Look at the merchant’s side and make sure ordering and fulfillment processes are handled professionally.

• Ask the merchant about their conversion ratio and investigate their sales copy.  Your time, you’re your customer’s time is valuable.  You want to send customers to merchants who are able to close the deal.

• Commissions.  How will you get paid?  Do you get paid per sale or paid per lead?

• Support.  All affiliate support will be detailed in the company’s affiliate guide.

• Look for companies that provide sales and marketing materials for you to use in your promotions.

• Tiered Commission.  Do you get paid for recruiting affiliates?  Some companies pay you if you send them affiliates.  This is called a two tiered commission and it can generate tremendous profits.

• Cookies.  How long will your cookies last?  Generally, most companies offer cookies that last 30 to 90 days.  A 60 day cookie means that if your customer visits a company website and then comes back 59 days later and makes a purchase, you get the commission.   

6. What is an affiliate network?

An affiliate network is a company that essentially works as the mediator between the company offering the product or service and the affiliate marketer.  An affiliate network company will provide sales tracking, click through rates, conversion statistics, and will often issue checks and handle payments.

7. What are cookies and why are they important?

Cookies are small text files set up on a user’s computer.  How long they stay on the computer is called the cookie life.  If you’re an affiliate marketer, cookies are important because they determine if you are paid for a visitor’s purchase or not.  When a visitor comes to your affiliate website, a cookie is placed on their computer.  If they then visit the merchant site during the life of the cookie you, as the affiliate, get the commission. If they visit the merchant site after the cookie has expired then no commission is paid.  This is why lifetime cookies are valuable to an affiliate marketer.

8. What are text links and why are they important?

Text links are the hyperlinks to the product or service you’re promoting. They only have text in the body of the link, rather than a graphic.  They’re generally embedded in your copy.  I’m sure you’ve read an article and there are several links scattered throughout.  These are text links and they have proven to work significantly better for click through rates and conversions than banner advertisements.  Banner ads, while they are still effective, are not as effective as text links.

9. How do I make more profits?

One of the absolute best tools to make profits as an affiliate marketer is content.  Advertising is important, a niche market is important, quality products are important, tiered affiliate programs are important, and a portfolio of a variety of products is helpful but the number one tool for more affiliate profits is content.  Content drives traffic to your website.  Content provides value to your visitors.  Content helps your website get ranked on the search engines.  Content sells your products and services and drives traffic to the companies you represent.  Content gives you profits!

What kind of content works best?

• Articles
• Blogs
• Reviews
• E-books
• Reports
• E-Zines

10. What are banners and why are they important?

Banners are the graphic advertisements you see on many websites.  Most companies will provide you with banners of a variety of size, design, and with varying copy.  For example, when you join an affiliate program you will often receive an basic affiliate link which may simply advertise the company logo and have the words “Click Here” or “Buy Now.”  You’ll also likely receive a promotional banner which may have a discount off of the product, free shipping, or highlight a new product.

Banner ads are excellent resources as advertisements in e-zines and relevant websites. 

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Everyone has to start somewhere. And, for neophyte Internet marketers, the best place to start may be with affiliate products. Rather than going through the laborious and expensive process of creating your own product (of dubious quality) and then trying to market it to the masses, why not start by finding a product that is well put-together and comes from someone who already has a high degree of credibility? You could save a lot of time, money, frustration, and will power; and you could make money in the process, too—in fact, really, really good money. Many top Internet marketers today still sell affiliate products, even though they make a killing off of their own. Why? Because it’s still fantastic money and little effort is required.

Now, with that said, it’s important to mention that affiliate marketing is no walk in the park, either. It’s certainly easier than pulling off a Jeff Walker-style massive product launch, but, like anything else, there are plenty of pitfalls just waiting to consume you and your money.

What are those Mistakes?

I) Choosing a Bad Product to Promote -

Not all products are created equal. In fact, that is probably the driving motivation behind your decision to sell affiliate products: for the most part, you have accepted that there are plenty of high-quality products already on the market; and, if you create your own, it might not compare favorably. If you decide to pick your product off of a list on Clickbank, select very carefully. Rather than haphazardly selecting the product with the highest commission, look for ones that have the highest popularity and gravity ratings. If a lot of people are buying them often, they must be better than other products for sale within that niche. In addition to picking good products within niches, you will also want to look for good niches. Here’s a stupid tip that will illustrate my point nonetheless: don’t sell garden hoses in the winter. No one will buy. Focus on products that a lot of people want; and if their popularity just surged, now is the best time to get in the market.

II) Picking a Low Converter -

As an affiliate marketer, your goal is to profit from the hard worker others have done; and from the money they have spent on copywriters, product developers, and software. If you select a product that underutilizes these advantages, you are likely to benefit less. Take, for instance, conversion rates. Not all product creators hire a top-notch
copywriter. In fact, many of them just write their own copy. Many also don’t hire someone to do graphs for the sales page. Instead, they try to do their own. The
end result? The page looks hideous, the copy contains major errors, and the product converts poorly. Before you start promoting any particular product, read the sales page carefully and compare it with others. Do you feel compelled to buy? Did the graphics throw you off? Did the copy fail to reel you in for the catch? These can all amount to
fatal errors for both the seller and you. You cannot help the seller at this point, but you can avoid his product and find a better one. Do yourself a favor: choose your products carefully.

III) Selling Lizard Oil for a Lizard Oil Salesman

This pitfall is especially important to avoid if you have a list. All it takes is one erroneous product promotion and you could end up with a mass exodus from your list. Again, don’t make this error.Even though you may be tempted to promote the next “biggest launch,” make sure you don’t buy into just anything. Several marketers have lamented their choices to promote the Rich Jerk’s latest offering after list members complained that his sales page was loaded profanity and sexist comments. Don’t be one of these guys. Make sure you carefully inspect anything before you promote it to your list. Unless you happen to be the Rich Jerk, you probably don’t want people
to think you’re just that—a rich jerk. Additionally, avoid jumping on the affiliate product bandwagon for major promotions. Instead, wait until the buzz dies down slightly; and then release a comprehensive review (something most affiliate marketers do not provide) of the product. This has a much better chance of getting sales for you; and it will also help you to maintain credibility. Last, avoid promoting products that make outrageous and fallacious claims. As Carl Sagan once said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In most cases, these snake oil peddlers cannot provide you with any extraordinary
evidence, but they do make the claims. Avoid promoting them and becoming associated with them.

IV) Picking Products that Offer Meager Commissions -

If you’re marketing to a list of people, they’re only going to consider so many product offers in a given period of time, so select the ones you promote wisely. If
you promote something that only generates a 25% commission for you, then you’re leaving a lot on the time. In reality, you could probably find a similar
product that offers a 50% or 75% commission. In terms of the actual dollar value of the commission – don’t sweat that as much. While many top name Internet marketers now say that they concentrate on promoting high-ticket items (since only a few sales will generate a lot of money), you can still make a killing selling relatively cheap reports. The rising popularity of the $7 report is testament to this fact. So avoid the cheapo sellers, but don’t worry as much about the price.

V) Failing to Collect Leads -

Always, always, always capture leads. Rather than generating traffic through pay per click, search engine optimization, and other methods and then sending that
traffic to your affiliate link, you should make an effort to convert them into list members first. Why? Two reasons: simple mathematical reasoning and the
collective experience of many marketers. The simple mathematical reasoning goes something like this: virtually everyone who would have purchased the product will opt in to your mailing list. And many who definitely would not have purchased the product will opt in to your mailing list. Instead of converting at a rate of around 1-3% (in affiliate sales), you will convert between 15 and 40% of visitors (to your mailing list). From there, you will get the chance to contact the willing buyers and the more reluctant. Additionally, once they’re on a list, this is no longer a one-off effort. You get the chance to market to them again and again for months or even years. As a marketer, one of the best tools you have available is your list. Always, always, always use your list over the one-off sale.

VI) Ignoring the Importance of Timeliness -

In business in general, the quick often outcompete those endowed with greater resources. Today, Google is no longer a small company with meager revenues, but in the past, it emerged from nowhere to outcompete massively well-endowed rivals; and it did so with cunning. How does this apply to you? Successful affiliate product promotion requires you to do more than simply slap an affiliate link in an email and send it out to a couple thousand people. If you expect them to actually buy, your email should be
newsworthy – not promotional.If you can genuinely write your email as if it were a news announcement, you are
far more likely to draw interest than if you send a link to an Internet marketing ebook that was written in 1998 and wasn’t particularly popular then. You need to find product launches that qualify as an “event.” Find something so big that people follow the event and comment on it. If you can find such a product (say, the iPhone of Internet marketing products), it is critical that you engineer your own build-up and release, centered on the build-up and release of the
product. You will want to make sure that your list members purchase from you, rather than from another list owner. To make it short and sweet: pay attention to the clock and the calendar. If there’s a big launch coming up, you need to capitalize on it quickly. There may not be a second window for opportunity. So take it when you have it.

VII) Ignore Important Numbers -

Many affiliate marketers fail to make many of the small—yet important— calculations needed in order to run a business and ensure you are in profit. For instance, many affiliate marketers will completely ignore the portion Clickbank extracts from each sale. Instead, they’ll simply look at the price and the commission. Additionally, many will ignore conversion rates, pay per click bids, and the amount of time they put into projects. They’ll also fail to make realistic estimates of how much promotional efforts will cost; and how much of a risk they’ll be. They’ll glaze over all of these minor details and devote the majority of their time to daydreaming about the riches they will rake in. Unfortunately, affiliate marketing doesn’t work like that. If you’re paying too much for traffic; if your conversion rates are too low; if you put too much time into projects that don’t have high yields – the outcome is bad. Your numbers won’t add up. At the end of the day, month, or year, you may end up in debt, rather than profit. And since you’re a sole proprietor, not a CEO of a corporation, that means you don’t get paid at all. Even worse, you might lose some of your own money that you worked hard to get.

So how does all of this come together? As you read, there are seven common pitfalls in affiliate marketing. If you fall into them, you affiliate marketing will pu  you in debt, rather than making you wealthy.

So how can you avoid these traps, make better decisions, and ultimately become wealthy via affiliate marketing? First, start by selecting products that are actually good. As I mentioned previously, a low demand product will make few sales, no matter how hard you try to promote it. If the demand isn’t there, you can’t create it. Don’t try.

Next, within the niches that are in high demand, look for a product that is actually a winner. Find something that converts very well. You can do this by looking for
high-popularity, high-gravity products on Clickbank. You can also do this by scanning salespages to find ones with extraordinarily compelling copy, good bonuses, and reasonable prices.

In addition to choosing a product that is likely to convert well, you will also want to make sure that the claims are reasonable and that the seller is credible. One
bad product could seriously knock you down a few pegs with your list members. Making a single sale and losing an otherwise repeat-buyer is rarely worth it.

Once you start generating traffic for your affiliate marketing campaigns, remember to drive it to an opt-in form – NOT to your affiliate link. If you send the
person directly to an affiliate link, you are likely to never hear from that person again, whether or not it results in sale. Collecting leads is critically important. If
you fail to do so—as many affiliate marketers do—you are leaving a lot of money on the table relative to the amount you are spending.

Last, do yourself a favor and keep track of conversion rates, bid prices, commission rates, product broker fees, and all the other little numbers that affiliate marketers prefer to ignore. Knowing, understanding, and tweaking these numbers could be the difference between profit and debt. You can ignore them if you want, but doing so will not improve your business.

With all of that said, you’re now ready to take a crack at affiliate marketing. There are a lot of risks involved, but you already know the big seven; avoid these, and you’ll sail through into profit, following the trail of past super affiliates.

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