Which affiliate programs do i personally recommend

I personally receive over a dozen checks and commission payments every month from various affiliate programs that I promote. Last month, those checks totaled more than $10,000 and some months they have been as high as $25,000. Given my success as an affiliate marketer, I'm often asked what affiliate programs I personally recommend. The answer is easy because it's actually a pretty short list. First, let me explain what an affiliate program is. Affiliate programs are used by monster companies like Amazon, eBay, and many others to recruit resellers (affiliates) to help bring customers to their websites. But the affiliate programs I prefer are those offered by smaller companies that sell digital products online. Those are the programs that pay up to 75% commission, while most larger companies may pay just a few percent. You can join an affiliate program usually by applying online at the company's website. Being accepted into the program gives you the right to market the company's products as an independent reseller and receive commissions when you make a sale. I've looked at hundreds of affiliate programs over the years and have come up with my own personal Top 10 Affiliate Programs that I actively participate in and heartily recommend. Some of these programs require that you pay a membership fee and some do not. The reason some programs charge a fee (including my own affiliate programs) is because you get more value as an affiliate. In most cases you get a full-blown website from which to sell the products and copies of most - if not all - of the products you'll be selling. For example, I charge $124.50 to join my program, but you get access to over $500 in products. To make my list of the Top Affiliate Programs is not an easy task. First of all, I have to personally be an affiliate of the program and must have earned considerable sums to prove its validity. To make my list the program must also: Offer quality products that offer real value, no fluff Offer high commissions (30% minimum, 50% preferred) Offer 2 tier commissions (if the 1st tier payout is substantial, I can live with a single tier) Have a proven track record of success Have a spotless reputation Pay commissions on time, every time Have well-known affiliates who will vouch for the program Be more than 6 months old Have a low rate or returns Be referred to me by someone I trust. That last one's a biggie for me. If one of my peers recommends a program, I know it's going to be good. So, here is my personal Top 10 Affiliate Programs that make me thousands of dollars every month and with a little time and effort, there is no reason they can't do the same for you. These are the programs that I personally participate in and recommend. If you're serious about starting your own affiliate marketing empire, take a close look at these. Internet Marketing Center IMC was founded by the late Corey Rudl and is now headed up by Derek Gehl, Corey's right hand man. IMC racked up $40 million in sales and pays out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to their affiliates. Their products are top notch, as is the support and the commissions. I regularly get checks from IMC that range from $3,000 to $7,000 a month. This program is free to join. Click for details DropshipDesign Turnkey Websites This is the only turnkey dropship website company that I recommend and I have been their affiliate for 2 years now. I regularly earn $500 to $1,000 week as an affiliate and also have my own turnkey dropship product site that brings in revenue from orders placed by customers. You must sign on as a customer first, but doing so gets you your own turnkey website and affiliate marketing rights. Click for details Hot Item Finder Dave Guindon is one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet online. He's also one of the most talented programmers and product creators. His flagship product, Hot Item Finder, helps users identify what's hot and what's not on eBay. It's one of the best eBay related products I've ever seen. Dave's affiliate program is also tops in my book. His product converts like crazy and his support is second to none. Click for details 1stPromotion No one knows affiliate marketing better than Rick Davies and his brother Ron. They are considered "The Masters" at making a six-figure affiliate income from home with affiliate marketing. Using that expertise, the brothers Davies have created 1stPromotion, which is quickly becoming the top Clickbank affiliate site on the planet. Their turnkey system is great for beginners at an extremely low cost. Click for details CBMall (Clickbank Mall) I personally earn several thousand dollars in passive income every month with this system and there's no reason you can't do the same... and the great thing is, you don't even need a website to get started! No monthly charges. Great for beginners. Click for details Automatic Money Machine Howard Mooreland's Automatic Money Machine has proven itself to be one of the top programs. Howard offers big commissions and his sales pages convert like mad. I never fail to generate hundreds of dollars anytime I promote Howard's products, which help users build a web site in just a couple of hours that can literally start generating money instantly. Click for details Emergency Cash Generators James Jones always delivers by providing his affiliates with excellent products that sell like mad. I have done so well promoting James' new book, Emergency Cash Generators, 101 Profit Generating Techniques, that it jumped into my Top 10 after just one month. You can't miss affiliating with James. Click for details MyClickPages MyClickPages is the program I created specifically for Clickbank affiliates. MyClickPages gives you a complete, professionally designed website from which you can sell my Clickbank registered products. I pay 50% commission on all sales. It's free to join, but please only do so if you are serious about affiliate marketing. Click for details DropshipWholesale. net Naturally I have to recommend my own affiliate program. Yes, I charge for the affiliate license, but I also give affiliates a full blown website and copies of all my products and my track record is 2nd to none. I signed checks last year that paid out over several hundred thousand dollars to affiliates in 2004, so I know it works. Click for details Prosperity & Profits My P&P affiliate program is one of the top programs on the web for serious internet marketers. As a P&P member and affiliate you get access to every section of the P&P website, including the wholesale database, the business opportunity and franchise database, the extensive ebook library, and moremissions are 50% of sales and paid monthly by check. Click for details There you go, my personal Top 10 Affiliate Programs, but don't think that is the definitive list. There are tens of thousands of products and companies that you can sign on with as an affiliate and earn commissions. You can find most of them listed at Clickbank or Commission Junction.

Setting up an art affiliate site part 2

Step 4 - Choose a Domain Name This sounds like an easy step, but you may soon find it can be surprisingly difficult. As mentioned before the majority of your traffic will hopefully come from search engines. To rank well in search engines one of the key factors is to obtain a domain name that includes one or more of your keywords. This can be a real problem because YourKeywords is most likely already registered. You can start by going to a domain registrar such as Go Daddy and enter the domain you want on the homepage. If it's not registered already you can register it. If someone else has already registered it you will receive a list of suggestions of available domain names or and go back and try another domain. Depending on the term you chose you may or may not find a domain you want by doing this. The second method I'd recommend is a domain name suggestion tool such as Name Boy. This tool will let you enter your keywords and come up with a large number of suggestions for domains based on those keywords. It will also show you which of those domains are still available. I used this tool to register the sample site TropicalArt. org. I normally do not register. org sites, and if this was a site I was seriously looking putting the effort into making profitable instead of a simple example I would make every effort to obtain tropicalart. For this example it will do though. Finally if you just can't find an acceptable domain using the first two methods you can buy one that is already registered from someone else. This can be much more expensive than the first two options but in some cases it makes sense to do. The two main sites for doing this are Sedo and Afternic. These sites work as a trusted third party to coordinate the sale and transaction between the buyer and seller, and collect a percentage of the sale from the seller for performing this service (much like EBay). I used these services to obtain this domain name, ArtAffiliate. Step 5 - Build Your Website This is a very important step and unfortunately one I can't explain in enough detail in this section. For those of you who are already experienced web developers, you have most likely already decided how you are going to develop your site and can move on to the next section. The rest of this section is for those who do not have any experience in this area. You're going to need to make a choice at this point to do it yourself or hire someone else. Do it Yourself If you choose to do it yourself and have no previous web development experience then you're best bet will be to develop a static site. This means you will manually be creating pages for each product you wish to sell and listing them on your site. It will also require maintenance to make sure you keep the prices up to date and add and remove products as needed. There are several tools available for doing this and you can just search Google to find them, but most likely you already have one on your computer, Microsoft FrontPage. It is included with Microsoft Office and is a great tool for beginners. Hire Somebody Else This may sound like it would be way to expensive for some people, but you'll if you are reasonable about the requirements it's really not that bad and will definitely save you a lot of time of having to manually add products. The biggest benefit is instead of manually creating a page for each product, all the products can be loaded into a database and the pages generated dynamically. Periodically a new datafeed can be downloaded from the affiliate program website and you'll instantly have the updated prices and current list of products. So how do you find someone? You may already know someone who does web development, that will be willing to create a site for you for free or cheap. If so great! But developing the average art affiliate website will take about 15-20 hours worth of work and you may not be so lucky to find a volunteer. On top of that software development is typically a fairly high paying job so hiring someone locally to do it can cost a pretty penny. The method I would suggest is going to a third party website that pairs developers with clients such as RentACoder. RentACoder and sites like it allow clients to list the requirements for their project and developers to bid on the project. You will be able to get your project done for a much better rate here because it's typically individuals doing the work instead of companies and there is competition from overseas developers keeping the prices down. It's very important that you be thorough on what exactly your requirements are. You also need to keep the requirements reasonable in order to keep the price down. Everything you ask for will add hours and cost to the project so if you don't really need it, don't ask for it. To give you a rule of thumb on what you should expect to pay, a no frills site such as the example Tropical Art should cost you somewhere around $300. Step 6 - Find a Host You are going to need a place to host your website. Your ISP may provide some web hosting space but typically this is a very small amount, so you're most likely going to need to find a web host. The first factor to consider when finding a web host is if they support the technology your website uses. For example if your site was created using FrontPage, ASP or ASP. NET you will need a windows host. For static html, php or Java you can go with a Windows or Unix host. If you site requires a database such as MS SQL or MySql you'll need to make sure the host supports that as well. There are several other factors such as price, bandwidth, reliability, etc that you'll need to consider as well. You can simply search Google for "web hosts" and compare the results to get an idea of what's available. I'd personally recommend StartLogic or PowWeb. Step 7 - Optimize for Search Engines It's important that search engines know what your site is about. You want to emphasis the keywords you selected earlier to make sure they know that is the primary subject of your site. To do this you need to make sure those keywords are included as part of the title on every page. Every page should have a different title though. Notice how on Tropical Art the title on each page is different but includes "tropical art" as part of the title. You should do something similar. You also should provide alternate text for all of your images. This not only helps search engines know what the site is about but also helps people with software to assist with vision disabilities to navigate your site. You're keywords should also be contained within parts of the body text on your site, at least on the home page and preferably on sub pages. Just be careful not to overdue it, your page is made for human readers and should be designed as such. Search engines will detect over stuffing of keywords and rank your site lower as a result. It is also very helpful to have static urls such as /1234/subject. htm instead of urls with query string parameters such as /subject. php? subjectId=1234 . You can use url-rewriting to accomplish this with a dynamic site. It's also beneficial to place keywords in the url. There are many other on-site optimizations you can perform. I recommend visiting High Rankings for more advice. Also keep in mind that your primary phrase isn't the only term you should target. If you have a subpage about a more specific topic, optimize that page for that topic not your main one. For example the page about the artist Carl Aagaard is optimized for his name instead of the more generic term "Tropical Art".

Affiliate marketing how to get started in 6 easy steps

: Affiliate marketing is probably the simplest business model you can choose to build a business. Of course the devil is in the details, as they say, but the overall model can really be broken down into six steps. Before we get to the steps, I want you to ask yourself a question. What do you hope to accomplish with affiliate marketing? This is an easier question to answer than it might seem. There are really only two basic choices here. The first is what I call the “quick buck” choice. In other words, you want to make a few dollars quickly, and you are not interested in building a business. If this is you, all you need to do is learn how to write exceptionally good ads, and then use them to promote your affiliate product. Many people will say I am wrong, but there is nothing wrong with doing this, as long as you are honestly not trying to build a long term business this way. On the other hand, if you are looking to build a business with income potential for the long term, then you will have a longer road ahead of you. It will take you longer before you see any profit from your efforts, but it will be worth it when you are able to take a day off, or even a week off, and still have sales in your absence. These steps should be followed in order. If you try to go out of sequence, you will not get the results you are after. 1. Pick a Market Why pick a market and not pick a product? Because you will eventually want to add additional products into your pipeline. You should pick a market that interests you, and maybe something you already know something about. Don't forget that you are building for the long term. 2. Pick a Product Once you have your market chosen, you should pick just one product to begin with. It will be very tempting to try to add all kinds of related products at first, but don't. Having just one product will help you focus on the important tasks. You will want to pick a product that converts well. What this means is that the product sells to a high percentage of visitors. This will help keep your cost per visitor down and increase your profits. 3. Build a follow-up series Also called an autoresponder series, you should build one based on the topic and the contents of the product you are promoting. If it is a physical product you are promoting, you will have to create or locate content that is directly related to the product. As an example, if you are selling golf clubs, you could create a series about how to buy golf clubs that fit, or the benefits of custom clubs, or even something about the club preferences of famous professional golfers. Be as creative as you can, and do not stray off topic. It has been said that most sales are not made in the initial contact, they are made on the seventh. If you are not following up with your prospects, the bottom line is you are losing sales. 4. Build an email capture page This is where you will capture information about your prospects so you can send your follow-up series. If you are building a business, having your own web site is a necessity, if only because you will control the content, and be able to capture email addresses for yourself. You might be able to get by for a while without this, but it just isn't worth it. 5. Drive traffic to your squeeze page Until you are finished with step four, you shouldn't even think about traffic techniques. If you don't have anywhere to send the traffic, why worry about how to generate it in the first place. Depending on the traffic generation techniques you choose, it may take some time for you to start seeing sales in your program. You should spend this time developing one or two streams of traffic, and refining these techniques to help you drive more traffic with less effort. 6. Find additional related products Once your business is making some money, it is time to start adding to your list of products. I don't mean you should go out and sign up for every affiliate program that is even remotely related. What I do mean is that you should carefully choose an additional product or two, and add them into your pipeline. Because you have been building a list of qualified prospects, you will be able to market these new products to them. This is the really long term money maker for your business. As long as you continue to recommend good products to your customer list, you can continue to make money off of them, even the ones who have already bought your last product recommendation. So these six steps are all you need to go from nothing to having a profitable business selling other peoples products. It can be easy to loose focus if you are not seeing immediate results, so keep your sights on the end goal of having a profitable business. You may also find it hard finding your initial market and product. Take your time and choose the best product you can. If the product you choose to promote is not good, your prospects will not continue to listen to your recommendations.