Internet Marketing Strategy Blog By Roy Sencio

You have a product. You want to start an affiliate program for your product to reach more people. You have two choices, either run it on your own and get Affiliate Marketing Software or enroll your product in a program like ClickBank, Commission Junction, etc. In this post we will talk about choosing affiliate marketing software for your product’s affiliate program.

There are several choices when it comes to affiliate management software. It is important that you use software to monitor affiliate sales and commissions. This just cannot be done manually.

All you need to do is set up your affiliate program using web based software. Then, you write the affiliate terms and conditions, as well as the affiliate agreement, and get that posted on the site.

When writing the terms and the conditions, you specify what the commission structure will be for your program, including whether it is a two-tiered or multi-tiered program, and what the commission payout will be for each tier. After this, the next step is to list your program with the various affiliate directories online.

There are many different software brands that can be used to manage your affiliate program. Affiliate Wiz is good software, and so is All Affiliate Pro. There is also web based services that can be used, to run an affiliate program, such as 1ShoppingCart. Again, there are many to choose from, and using a network to manage your program is usually the easiest and fastest way to get an affiliate program up and running.

The important thing is that the network or software used should provide each affiliate, automated sign up, and assign them an affiliate link. The software or service should then track clicks and sales, and record commissions earned by affiliates, based on the information you put into the system at the very beginning.

Ideally, affiliates should have the ability to log into a website to view their affiliate statistics, to retrieve creatives such as banners and ads, and to change their own contact information as needed. You will find that the more automated the affiliate program system you use is the more smoothly the program will run.

Be prudent in selecting software or services for your affiliate program. Some services and software are very high priced, while others are very low priced – but not all affiliate program management services and/or software are created equal, and some are better than others. Read customer reviews and try to contact people who are using the software or service personally for a recommendation before buying one.

One of the most difficult things to do online is list building. In fact testament to how difficult it is, and how any business can potentially benefit greatly from their own mailing list, is the fact that there are today several list building and lead generation solutions. Many of these list building solutions are monthly membership sites that cost hundreds of dollars.

It is without a doubt, that you would greatly benefit from having your own list. The problem is, many people do not know how to build a list and maintain it. Bryan Winters of InfoGoRound and AudioGoRound fame has just launched a solution to list building woes with One Minute Sites.

Affiliate Marketing is the most successful and most popular business model on the internet today. This is the easiest way to make money online, and without the need of having your own product to sell, your own website and even your own advertising or promotional tools.

To get into affiliate marketing, all you have to do is sign up to a product’s affiliate program, then send visitors to that sales page of that product using your own unique affiliate URL, that you receive upon successfully signing up to the program. If any of those visitors buy the product, you get credited for the sale and receive a commission. No more hassle of creating your own product, developing promotional tools, or having a bug free affiliate program software that monitors sales and routinely pays your affiliates.

However, while being an affiliate may be very profitable especially if you are able to drive a lot of targeted “ready to buy” visitors to a product sales page, it is actually the product owner who enjoys greater rewards. Think about it, aside from you, how many other affiliates out there could also be driving traffic to that product?

It does take a little more work though, but let us see if the benefits of having your own product and starting an affiliate marketing program for it are worth the extra effort.

Most successful affiliates, after realizing the profitability of certain products in the niche that they sell in, usually develop their own product, and then start their own affiliate program, where other people sell the product for them, for a commission.

Getting an affiliate program set up for your product is easier than you may realize, and in some cases, there is no cost involved in setting up such a program, if you know where to look and what to do.

Benefit 1 - Reach
An affiliate program for your product allows you to reach people in your market, that you may not have reached any other way. You actually leverage on the established networks of your affiliates, and this can be very profitable especially if your affiliates have huge mailing lists with thousands of subscribers that they send promotional emails to regularly.

While it may seem expensive, as you will have to spend some money to set up your affiliate program, plus you need to pay your affiliates on time, you will find that you profit more by having an affiliate program; and the profit lies in the volume of sales you are able to get by being able to get your product across to more people through your product’s affiliates.

Benefit 2 - Branding and Product Reputation
Have you ever come across some product reviews on the internet, which more often than not, have a link on the review that directs a visitors to the sales page of the product being reviewed?

This is one of many strategies used in affiliate marketing. Create a product review, which of course should be unbiased and objective, then send your interested readers to the product through your affiliate link. While there is a chance that the negative aspects of your product might come out in the review, it does not always actually turn potential buyers off. It actually even helps them make an informed decision, and they appreciate both good and bad comments about the product.

People who are reading the review still tend to click the link to the product to find out more information, and if they eventually decide to make a purchase, the author of the review whose affiliate link sent a visitor to the product sales page. gets the credit for the sale.

Imagine the kind of reputation your product is able to gain from all the exposure it is getting, people writing reviews about, people blogging about it, people talking about what they perceive to be the good and the bad of it. At the end of the day, it simply helps establish your product in your market.

Benefit 3 - Establishes Your Authority As Expert In Your Market
This is basically similar to the second benefit, about establishing reputation, but this time YOURS, as product owner, and not the product.

If you belong to any internet marketers mailing list, I am sure you have received countless emails about them talking about this guy, who they are pals with, and is a really great guy, a results kinda guy, a successful guy, who just happens to be launching a new product.

How often did you get excited about knowing more about the product, or even wanting to know more about the person behind the product, if only to know more of his reputation as part of your wanting to know whether his product could be any good or not?

Benefit 4 - Traffic
With the countless promotional methods your affiliates are using to sell your product, your traffic is going to swell, or flood, depending on how many affiliates are promoting your product, how many people are on their mailing lists, how much traffic their own websites or blogs are getting, etc.

Expect a ton of traffic, if you have a ton of affiliates; this will also translate into search ranking gains for your product’s site.

Conclusion
At the end of the day, running your own affiliate program can be quite draining, but then is that not a worthy effort to have an army of salesmen selling your product?

While affiliate programs are virtually automated, some effort is required on your part not only to start the program, but also to keep it running smoothly so both you and your affiliates continue to profit. Keep your affiliates motivated all the time, provide occasional incentives, provide great support like pre-written reviews, auto responder messages, banners, links and other affiliate tools; and pay affiliate commissions on time.

Keep all that in mind, and you could be on your way to being the next affiliate marketing tycoon.

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In a previous post, we talked about Pay Per Click advertising and how it may not always be effective to promote affiliate products. This post is a bit related to that earlier post and it has something to do with keywords. In this post I will give you another pay per click tip that will help you save a lot of money but increase your sales conversions.

About a year ago, I worked for an internet marketing company that was heavily advertising through Google Adwords, either for own products or for affiliate products. There were times when I’d literally spend the entire day doing keyword research to establish search volumes, analyzing keywords, tweaking and tuning PPC campaigns based on campaign performance.

For those who are still getting started in PPC, I bet you would often go and advertise for the keywords with high search volumes, and most often these are the single words or even two word phrases. Here are some suggestions to truly maximize on your PPC campaign, and not burn a hole in your pocket in the process.

First, you will have big time competition for those common keywords, these are usually the ones with high search volumes. You are going head to head with large companies with equally big advertising budgets. If you are selling an affiliate product, consider how many other affiliates out there are promoting the same product and driving traffic to their affiliate links through PPC.

Don’t waste your time and money competing with those high volume high competition keywords, instead drill down and find longer keyword phrases combinations. These may not have a high search volume, but the keyword phrase will not have a bunch of other advertisers bidding on the phrase. The advantage of long keyword phrases is also that it clarifies what a search engine user is searching for.

For instance, “teen weight loss” or “weight loss for teens” may be more targeted to what you are promoting and would not be as broad, competitive and expensive like simply “weight loss”.

Think about the product you are promoting, and choose keywords that are tightly connected with it. In the weight loss niche, some less common keywords might be weight loss foods, low calorie foods, low carbohydrate foods, or even low carbohydrate food for women, etc.

The key is to narrow your niche as much as possible to choose keywords that relate as closely as possible to what you are trying to promote. You will receive fewer clicks, but your conversion rates will be higher, from the fewer clicks that you do receive, you will find that you make more sales than you might have with the more popular search terms or keywords. This is because the market you targeted was more qualified. The people who find you in this fashion are literally looking to buy exactly what you are selling.

Markets online are defined by keyword searches and viability established through the keyword phrases’ monthly search volumes. That was the pay per click tip for this post.

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Pay Per Click advertising or PPC is probably the fastest way to get traffic to your website from a search engine. It is an effective means of affiliate promotion, if done correctly. As you may well know the word ‘pay’ in PPC means that you will end up paying for each time your ad was clicked and if the technique is not done properly, this could cost you a lot of money and with negligible returns.

Pay per click advertising however doesn’t always work for affiliate marketing. First, you must be aware of the rules at the site where you are getting your PPC. For instance, Google has rules about promoting affiliate programs with the Google AdWords PPC program.

While Google does permit affiliate links in their AdWords, they will only display one affiliate ad per search query, and this includes that of the parent company. They also will not allow links to replicated affiliate websites. So, since there are other affiliates selling the same product you are selling, the chances of your ad actually being seen and clicked are slim. Secondly, if you have a replicated website for your affiliate programs, your ad won’t show at all – ever.

There is a way around this though, and it means you got to put in a little extra work, and get more creative if you hope to profit from your affiliate programs, with pay per click drive traffic. Here are a few useful pay per click tips that are helpful for promoting affiliate products or programs.

Pay Per Click Tip 1
Don’t use an affiliate link. Use your own link for your own domain, and send the visitor to your website first. You should also have them pass through a squeeze page first to collect their name and email address which would prove useful to you in the long run. Remember, the money is in the list.

Pay Per Click Tip 2
Always start small with your PPC campaigns, usually doing small tests which are incremental. Do your keyword research, and set yourself a budget. Work within that budget to test different ads. Also, avoid using long affiliate links. These links are obvious to people, and many people avoid them. People do not like to be sold to.

Pay Per Click Tip 3
Instead of using PPC to sell a product, use PPC to get qualified leads and to build a list. You will find that this is a much more economical and effective use of PPC in the long run. It may take just a little longer to make the sale, but if you are patient, you will earn more money than you would have otherwise.

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