Affiliate Sales and Marketing Info

An interesting site that compiles information from several Internet Marketing sources is ‘Internet Marketing Newswatch.’ Categories include Breaking News, Latest News, Quick News and more.

Up-to-date Internet marketing information is submitted daily from a variety of sources. You can submit your own content and/or products, but only if you are the original creator and owner.

Also included on this site are product downloads and a contest and prizes section.

Many big name Internet marketing guru’s use this site, the information is always timely and best of all, it’s all in one place, which saves lots of time when researching what’s going on in the IM world!

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If you’ve only been an affiliate marketer for a short while, you might not have heard about two tier affiliate programs yet. Or maybe you have, but you’re not sure what they are.

A two tier affiliate program is a way for you to make additional money with affiliate products and programs you promote. Basically, it’s a recruitment program. If you’re an affiliate of a great program and you tell others about it, they might sign up to be an affiliate too. If they sign up using your referral link, they become your sub affiliate. And as your sub affiliate, you can make money each time they make affiliate sales of their own.

Two tier affiliate programs are sometimes confused with MLM, or Multi Level Marketing programs, so let me explain the difference:

With a MLM, big earnings depend on you signing up lots of people. Not only that, the people you sign up must also sign up lots of people. In fact, many MLMs concentrate more on signing up sales people, also referred to as representives, in their downlines than they do actually promoting or selling products. There are some MLMs actually, that make money because everyone who signs up is required to buy a certain amount of products each month themselves.

With two-tier affiliate programs you don’t earn money when your sub affiliates sign up their own sub affiliates. You only make money if you make sales, or if your sub affiliates make sales. Usually the amount you make from your sub affiliates is a pittance compared to what you can make yourself too, so there’s a much greater incentive for you to promote the products or services directly.

Having sub affiliates can add to your bottom line earnings nicely though, particularly over long periods of time. If you make 50% commissions on direct affiliate product sales, and 5% on sales your sub affiliates make, you could try building a large number of active sub affiliates. 1000 people making sales that earn you 5% really adds up nicely.

More often than not, the bulk of people who sign up as sub affiliates with you will never make any money. In fact, usually only about 2% of affiliates make sales on any kind of regular basis, so signing up 1000 affiliates might get you only 20 who make sales on a regular basis. And if those 20 only make small sales regularly, you won’t make much additional money. It’s not usually easy to live off of sub affiliate sales, unless you devote a lot of time and effort into building a very large, active affiliate sales network.

Unfortunately there are not as many two tier affiliate programs around today as there used to be. And those that are left tend to require ongoing monthly membership fees, which affiliates must pay also, so it can be harder to promote the service to begin with.

If you’re looking for good two tier affiliate programs, start with a basic web search and explore what’s out there. Then check in with a few active affiliate marketing forums and see what others have discovered about this type of affiliate marketing model.

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When most people think of affiliate marketing, they think of the traditional method, ie., when a sale is made, you’re paid a commission percentage.

This is generally referred to as pay-per-sale affiliate marketing, but once in awhile you’ll hear it referred to as pay-per-action. I suspect that reference is usually a mistake though, or intentionally meant to mislead inexperienced affiliate marketers, because pay per action usually refers to the pay per lead method instead. For the purposes of this article though, we’ll refer to pay per sale affiliate marketing as “traditional” affiliate marketing.

Traditional affiliate marketing can be one of the most lucrative ways to make money from affiliate programs. This is because affiliate commissions range very drastically. Some sales can generate just 5% commissions for you while others will generate 60%-70%.

At first blush, beginner affiliate marketers automatically assume they should promote the affiliate products which offer the highest commissions. So in the examples above, they’d choose the 60%-70% commissions over the 5%. This isn’t always the best choice though.

If you’re promoting a product - let’s say an ebook - which sells for $100 and you’re paid 60% in commissions, you’ll make $60 each time you generate a sale.

That’s great money for just one ebook sale, right? But if you’re promoting a plasma tv that sells for $10,000 and you’re paid 5%… you earn $500 each time you make a sale. Much better!

And as strange as it might seem, it’s just as easy to generate a $10,000 sale as it is to generate a $100 sale. You just have to target the right audience, and get that targeted audience in front of your affiliate promotions.

A lot of beginner affiliates make wrong assumptions about what people will buy.

In fact, many don’t think an ebook can sell for $100. Most don’t think you can sell plasma TVs, or other expensive products online either. But that’s simply not the case.

People buy what they want, when they want it. And withmore and more people buying onnline, you can earn a decent income from affiliate marketing if you learn the ropes, play by the rules and engage in profitable promotional techniques.

The key to earning a lot of money with traditional affiliate programs is a combination of factors.

First, you must generate targeted traffic to whatever program, product or service you want to offer.

Second, you must offer great products that people are looking for.

It does little good to try and sell expensive exercise equipment to people who are trying to set a couch potato record. And you wouldn’t get anywhere trying to sell fancy high-heeled shoes to rifle enthusiasts.

So the first thing you need to do is figure out what might appeal to YOUR audience.

If you’re just starting a brand new website, you have the luxury of researching and picking a topic that you feel should be lucrative. If you have an existing website, you need to pick affiliate products which will work for that audience.

Don’t put work at home or web design products on a site that is all about hobby sewing. Yes, you might have a few visitors interested in starting a home sewing business, or a sewing website of their own, but the bulk of your visitors will have no interest in those topics. Instead they’ll probably want sewing fabric recommendations, sewing machine books or instructions, sewing patterns and so on.

Figuring out what your audience is willing to spend money on can take some time and patience. In some cases you may have to resort to a trial and error approach. Once you’ve figured that part out though, then you just have to select affiliate programs and programs which offer quality. It doesn’t do you much good to promote sewing patterns for instance, if it will take 10 weeks for an order to arrive. Trust me… your visitors would be extremely unhappy, and they may blame you because you’re the one that recommended the service.

And that’s another piece of the overall puzzle. You can make a heck of a lot more money with traditional affiliate programs, if you write reviews and recommendations. When you have personally bought a product, or had a good experience with an online merchant. You can then review and recommend that product or merchant to your own website visitors. Personal reviews and recommendations have a much bigger influence, and can make you a heck of a lot more money than just putting up a generic link on your website.

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Pay-Per-Lead Affiliate Programs are another type of affiliate marketing that have been around for years. Lately, these types of programs have really started to become popular.

A pay-per-lead affiliate program - sometimes referred to as pay per action or pay per acquisition - pays you when your prospects do something on the site they visit after clicking on the link in your website.

Generally, this involves filling out a form or completing a survey, or fulfilling some other action required by the lead website. The prospect doesn’t usually have to buy anything in order for you to get paid, but you also don’t get paid just because they click on an advertisement. Instead they must do something, and again this usually involves filling out a form of some kind.

The type of form to be filled out will vary from one affiliate program to another. In some cases you might just have the visitors complete a survey. In other cases, you may need to have them request a free information package of some kind, or request a quote. Other times, all you need to do is get them to accept a free trial product of some kind.

As an affiliate marketer, it’s often much easier to convice people to fill out a form, request a free trial product or take a survey than it is to buy something. Since they don’t have to spend money, or they’re getting something for free, customers are often much more willing to complete the required task. And if they do, the affiliate partner then pays you.

In some cases, you can earn a lot of money for each individual you get to fill out the form. It’s not uncommon to find pay per lead affiliate programs which will earn you as much as $40 or $50 for each person you get to fill out a form.

These are most often seen with financial related offers such as getting people to request mortgage quotes or refinancing, or having them request a free health insurance information package. Other common ones involve giving away free satellite tv systems, or having people request free home business start up kits.

Other types of pay per lead affiliate opportunities involve much less money, but it’s money that can quickly add up. You could for instance, just offer quick surveys to your website visitors. And each time they fill out a survey or take an opinion poll, you might earn a dollar.

There are even some surveys and opinion polls you can offer which will pay you $3-$5 or more for each person who completes one. Your visitors are entered into contests where they’ll win prizes or get free gifts for completing the surveys, so this makes promoting them even easier for you.

A much less common offer and much lower paying is to simply generate subscribers for someones website or ezine. You get paid five or ten cents for each confirmed subscriber, so all you have to do is get people to sign up. Again it’s not much money individually, but it can add up quickly, especially if you present it as a back-end offer to your own newsletter, or offer it on a co-registration basis.

In summary, pay per lead marketing is not quite as easy and hands free as pay per click, but you can earn a lot more money from this type of affiliate program.

And on the plus side, this type of program is easier to implement than traditional pay-per-sale commissioned affiliate marketing.

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