Affiliate Marketing is the easiest way to start making money on the internet and is your first step towards the long and intriguing journey as an Internet Marketer. The key to your success in affiliate marketing is a perpetual flow of highly targeted traffic. The higher and more targeted the traffic to your blog, the more profits you make.

But, before getting your feet wet into the “wild-whacky” world of affiliate marketing there are certain crucial factors that you must consider; which will not only help you leverage your sales but also secure your hard earned commissions from commission thieves.

In this post I am going to share some of those affiliate marketing tips that will benefit both newbies and seasoned affiliate marketers alike in making maximum profits out of their ventures

What is affiliate marketing anyway?

I thought I will start off with these 2 easy definitions that I found on the internet that will make it crystal clear what affiliate marketing is all about.

“Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. … ” (Source – wikipedia.org)

“A popular way to make money online where you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (affiliates) sell his own products or services, in exchange for a commission. Commissions can be fixed or variable, and based on clicks, leads or sales.” (Source www.dailyblogtips.com)

Crucial Factors to Consider Before You Start

Consider It As Real Business – Affiliate marketing must be treated as a real business which requires a lot of planning, discipline and consistent hard work to be successful.

There is a myth amongst some first time affiliate marketers and internet users that affiliate marketing doesn’t require any discipline, hard work or ethics and is all about spamming on various platforms like forums, websites, emails or social networking sites. It’s totally baseless and utter nonsense. The marketers who have adopted the path of spamming had to pay a heavy price by risking their business and reputation.

Thorough Market Research – This is the most critical step before promoting an affiliate product and highly crucial for the success of your business.

You must carry out an in-depth research of the niche market that you are planning to enter and ensure that there is enough buyer traffic that converts well to make your business profitable.

Some of the free tools and sites for performing market research,

• Google Insights
• Google Trends
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• eBay.com
• Amazon.com
• Dummies.com

All the 3 Google tools are a must for the success of any online business owner and will give you a wealth of insightful information about your market. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool will tell you how competitive a keyword is and whether it is easy to rank for that keyword on the search engines or not. So you must definitely make the maximum out of these amazing tools by Google.

My recommendation is to infiltrate into a market that has a moderate competition. You can easily find that out by typing  your targeted keyword into Google and hitting the “search” button. The higher the number of results (about XXXXX results), the harder it will be to rank for that keyword in the first pages of the search engines.

You can also visit online shopping websites like ebay.com, dummies.com and amazon.com and check whether similar products exist. If they do, you can be dead sure that there is a demand for such products and can definitely make some profit promoting them.

By the way, Amazon.com has a great feature called customer reviews, which will help you study the customer’s perception about similar products.

Try Out Before Promoting – It is always good practice to try out a product before promoting it.

This will help you write reviews that sound more authentic to the readers and there is a greater chance that they will buy it from your affiliate link. If it’s an eBook that you are promoting, you can ask for a review copy from the author, he will be more than happy to offer you one, and if it’s an online service you can ask the vendor to give access to the site for a few days.

Knowing Clickbank Marketplace – If you are an affiliate marketer you must have heard about Clickbank at least once.

Clickbank.com is the best place to start your affiliate marketing journey especially if you are a newbie. You can sign up for free and start promoting from over thousands of digital products under various categories. But while choosing a product, make sure you pick one with gravity of at least 7 and a low refund rate. Gravity indicates the number of affiliates who have successfully made sales in the past week and a half or so.

You can use this free online refund calculator to find out the refund rates of a particular Clickbank product.

Protecting Your Affiliate links – It’s very important to protect your affiliate links from those online thugs prying around to steal your hard earned commissions.

Protecting your affiliate links can be called cloaking. Cloaking doesn’t just prevent commission thefts but also hides those weird looking affiliate links from your readers.

Well, how can someone steal your commissions? It’s easy! When a potential thief finds a Clickbank affiliate link with a “hop=YOURID” at the end, they might sign up as an affiliate with Clickbank.com and buy that product using their affiliate link instead of yours, saving them money and depriving you of your precious commissions.

I personally use these 2 methods to protect my affiliate link.

1. You can cloak your affiliate links by using this free tool called profit protector that you can download and use as a desktop application. I personally recommend this tool for protecting Clickbank affiliate links.
2. You can also use a PHP 301 “moved permanently” redirection for your affiliate links for making it SEO friendly. All you need to do is put the code in a notepad, replace the location address with your affiliate link, save it as a (SOMENAME.PHP) *.PHP file and upload it to your server (preferably under a directory that’s named “goto” or “recommends”). Now, if you want to send your visitor to the vendor site through your affiliate link you can just use this PHP file. (eg. http://www[dot]yourdomain[dot]com/goto/SOMENAME.php). Please click on the link on point no. 2 to learn more about how to use a PHP 301 redirection on your affiliate link.

Review Sites Are The Best – Review sites work very well for promoting affiliate products.

In a review site you can compare, dissect and rate similar products and give your unbiased views about them to your readers. While reviewing affiliate products, you must never sound overly promotional like a snake-oil salesman hard-selling their products. Your reviews must sound un-biased and neutral to your readers. Nevertheless, there must be an easy to spot, strong “call-to-action” link (affiliate link) at the end of each review (eg “click on this link to visit the vendor’s site”) that takes them to the vendor’s sales page.

There are a variety of other promotional methods like article marketing, PPC ads, Social Media Marketing, video marketing and email marketing and so on that you can use to double or triple your sales. Interestingly, you will discover even smarter ways to promote your business if you are a person who always likes to explore new things, a keen learner who can think out of the box and can use a bit of creativity.

Conclusion

I think I have covered some of the most crucial factors to consider before starting with affiliate marketing. I hope these points will help you transform your business into a more streamlined and profitable one! You will surely start picking things up and learn the intricacies of this business as you go. Remember, Affiliate marketing is pretty exciting and lucrative – if done the right way. So all the best and wishing you all the success!

Please do leave your valuable feedback about this post as a comment!

Image © Tomasz Trojanowski – Fotolia.com

Almost every internet marketer that I know is using a plugin or a service to manage links. If you are not using any plugin to manage your affiliate links, then you should do.

The reason I’ve written this post is that I’ve got a question from Jens P. Berget of The Smart Marketing Mix blog asking:

I have been using Ninja Affiliate by MaxBlogPress for a while. What’s the difference between ThirstyAffiliates and Ninja Affiliates? To me, it seems very similar.

So, I am going to reply to this question in this post and try to put some between the ThirstyAffiliates VS MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate

I’ve done a review of ThirstyAffiliates plugin recently on the blog, so you might be interested in reading it.

ThirstyAffiliates VS MBP Ninja Affiliate Plugins

Let’s put this into a table to make it more clear and readable:

Treat Your Affiliate Links

Your Affiliate links should be treated as valuable assets, it’s one of the great tools that makes you money and gives you information about what’s going on on your blog via its stats, if those links went down for any reason, then simply there is no money, you won’t make any!

My issue with MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plugin

What I’ve written below is only my personal experience with the plugin, it doesn’t mean it will apply to every blog. It’s not my attention to post a negative review about the Ninja Affiliate plugin, and I am thankful to Pawan Agrawal -the founder of the plugin- because they’ve contacted me a year a go and offered me a free review copy of the plugin, and that’s what I did, I reviewed the plugin, and I was recommending it to everyone I know.

But since the blog is growing, getting more content, and traffic, I had to look into this in a different way, I can not recommend the plugin 100% like I did before, keep reading to know why!

Something wrong is going on!

I am getting a random warning almost everyday caused by the Ninja, however Warning doesn’t harm, but whenever my blog breaks it display the Warning messages, and it’s like telling to the whole world that this plugin is causing issues!

And, because we talk here about Money! I am afraid I am losing the trust! I am afraid that I am losing opportunities of making a sales!

The warning I am getting is:

I’ve opened a thread in MaxBlogPress forum a while ago, but I didn’t get a clear answer! So, I decided to live with the problem till I find a solution, especially that I am not the only one who is getting this warning, there are 100s of results in Google using the  file name as a keywords “mbp-ninja-affiliate.cls.php” to see by yourself!

It’s embarrassing!

Based on my little experience, it looks like there is a variable with no default value! But what drives me crazy is that my other blogs works perfectly with no issues, those blogs has only a few blog posts and pages. So, it seems that blogs with larger amount of content are more likely to suffer.

The Ninja Affiliate Increases Database Size!

You see, it’s really odd to find out that a single plugin increases your database size this way, the Ninja Affiliate plugin makes a copy of posts and comments data and save it on another table of its own, I guess the developer of the plugin made these extra tables to cache all posts and comments to enable automatically convert keywords into affiliate links (which is a feature that I am not interested in).

To explain this, let’s imagine that you published a post, and you want to auto link some keywords in that post, the Ninja will save that post into the database (into it’s own table) after adding the links using the keywords you’ve chosen, so whenever someone visits your blog, the Ninja will take over and display the other copy of your post. This means the original post won’t be displayed this time!

See by yourself (this is a screenshot of my database):

I can not hide the truth of me getting desperate many times!

Right now.. I have this:

And this:

I am planning to grow this blog, but I don’t know what will happen in the next couple of years, what could happen if I have 5000 blog posts and 100.000 comments?

I mean who would accept the huge increase in database size caused by a plugin?

My guess is that the guys over MaxBlogPress haven’t thought about the future, maybe they couldn’t test the plugin on a live blog with over 1000 posts and several thousands of comments because it’s really hard to find this testing environment or model that re-generates the same exact Warnings in real life, so I really don’t blame them, they’ve tried to help affiliate marketers, and their plugins it works for a lot of people, but I have my own doubts about the future.

However, I still recommend the MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plugin for small size blogs, or to be more specific, blogs that has a few posts and pages, and they do not have plans to grow rapidly (have another opinion? please share it).

I think that after a year from now, I won’t be able to use the plugin, and another important thing… I won’t be able to remove it from my setup (I hate it when a plugin force me to use it), it’s really hard -near to impossible- to edit 1000+ posts to change the links I’ve added manually to these posts!

I was looking for a solution to end this issue, but it’s not my problem to try fix a premium plugin developed by someone else! And to be honest I don’t have enough experience to debug it! So, I’ve tested a few other plugins, but I didn’t like them at all, till I’ve got a copy of  ThirstyAffiliates plugin, which got my full attention!

Why I am switching to ThirstyAffiliates plugin

The ThirstyAffiliates plugin uses the custom post types, this means it’s almost pure functionality of WordPress, which also means less problems, this plugin is the most stable tool for managing affiliate links on a WordPress site, period.

I’ve checked the code of ThirstyAffiliates plugin, really simple coding that do a lot, also I liked the idea of planning the future of the plugin to have additional addons that adds more features and functionality to the plugin. This simply will open the doors for other developers to contribute to ThirstyAffiliates and produce new addons, this means more opportunity, and probably more profits from the plugin if someone decided to develop a premium addon.

So far, there are two addons that are available for ThirstyAffiliates as a bonus:

1. The Statistics Addon (this addon allows you to track clicks on your links)
2. And the Importer Addon. (to import your aff links from Nina affiliate)

However, I don’t like the dark backgrounds in the admin pages, I feel it’s too much, I’ve told Josh Kohlbach -the developer of the plugin- about it, and he’ve told me it will be removed in the coming releases.

Conclusion

As I said before, there are great plugins for WordPress CMS out there, but some of them do the job perfectly, some are not that good, many do nothing. The problem is when you count on a plugin and you build your business model based on that particular plugin, then it turns to give you issues, there is no simple way to avoid it! However, you won’t know if a plugin will cause an issue in the future so that you avoid using it! You won’t even think of it this way when you first started your business blog.

Lessons I’ve learned

• When it’s about coding, web hosting.. etc. There no certainty in the world we live in!
• Some times things work great for others, but it just don’t work for you!
• There is no good and bad plugins, there are plugins that works for me!
• Not every recommended plugin is a must have.
• Should I use this plugin? (You are the only one who can answer it by testing it out!)
• The only one to blame is you!

I know that Ninja Affiliate plugin is used by 1000s of internet marketers and bloggers, but there is always a room for another plugin, the competition is what makes the end user a winner, and anyways I am recommending the ThirstyAffiliates plugin because I believe it will solve a future problem for me as I grow my blog.

I appreciate your thoughts!

Simply put, WordPress is the next generation in blogging with as many as 22 million users, billions of websites dedicated to WordPress and related products, and gazillions of free and paid by-products such as WordPress themes, plugins, multi-user elements, php scripts, ebooks, money-making products, WordPress tutorials, wordpress tips and tricks and much more. My thoughts about wordpress are only limited by my imagination. Quite sure, Matt Mullenweg surely finds WordPress an interesting world to live in!

When it comes to publishing using WordPress, all you need is a cheap webhost, a domain name, and a free theme to get started. Yes, I meant “to get started”.

But, WordPress surely needs some juice to make it the ultimate blogging machine. There are thousands of products that claim to make WordPress better than it already is – some claiming to rank your site in the search engines, while others just claim to make it more user-friendly. However, not all of them give what they promise!

WordPress Related Products that Worked for Me

Here is a list of the products that I personally use and recommend, to make your WordPress blog, the perfect affiliate marketer’s weapon:

Good Web host

I use Blue Host, and I am quite happy with it, hosting unlimited websites at a time with a very easy-to-use cPanel and integrated simplescripts, hardly any downtime and an excellent 24×7 support team. Others that equally provide a good deal are GoDaddy, HostGator and MediaTemplate, all with their own perks. Cloud and Grid Hosting is the craze of the hour and a good investment for bigger players.

Theme or Theme Framework

When it comes to choosing a WordPress Theme, there are numerous free and paid ones, each with their unique capabilities and possibilities. Of the free themes, the default theme is a decent one. But hey, who doesn’t want to be unique. To cater to that need, there are thousands of free premium themes that draw many away from the paid themes.

The concept of theme framework, has in fact revolutionized the WordPress Theme Marketplace. Free ones like Thematic, Carrington, and Hybrid are in stiff competition with paid heavy-weights like Headway, Genesis and Thesis Theme Framework. I might be biased, but I feel that Thesis Theme has matured quite well, but with fewer updates its fan-base has been swayed by the likes of Genesis with numerous child themes and Headway Theme with its easy drag-and-drop functionality. Catalyst Theme is slowly but steadily showing its engaging head to the world.

My choice for the perfect theme is Thesis Theme with skins from the likes of Kolakube.com, ThesisThemes.com, or ThesisAwesome.com. I love ThesisAwesome Skins with its professional look and well-optimized setup for social marketing. Marketers Delight from Kolakube is simply awesome too.

WordPress Plugins

The little add-on scripts that make wordpress click are called plugins, and if used in the right measure simply and surely blows away the competition. According to Thesis Developer, Chris Pearson, the only plugin that you ever need is a Google Sitemap, and I concur.

But, here is a list of other plugins that make my blogs click-worthy.

• 1. Google Sitemap: A sitemap plugin gives the search engines an overview about the whole website.
• 2. Contact Form: Gravity Forms sure do a marvelous job when it comes to forms.
• 3. Akismet: Well, who doesn’t hate spam? Matt Mullenweg does too. This free plugin is a gem.
• 4. 125×125 ads: This sure is a good way to put your affiliate products in the limelight.

SEO products

Scribe SEO by Brian Clark and the geniuses at Copyblogger Media surely needs a mention here. Another product which lets the blogger discern the frequency and relevance of keywords in the article or review is SEOPressor.

The SEO features of WordPress Themes like Thesis, Genesis, and Headway are definitely the key to getting your wordpress affiliate-marketing blog or website noticed by the search engines.

Marketing Plan

Just like the battle plan in a war zone, your ready-to-rock blog needs a marketing plan. I like the ideas put forth by Craig Beckta of Secret Affiliate Code Fame. However, there is no harm in trying out one’s own ideas.

Capturing e-mail IDs through a contact form or sign-up form is key to affiliate marketing, and should be one of the prime intents in your marketing plan. Email marketing tools like Aweber and MailChimp are feature-rich and ever-ready to satisfy your marketing needs.

Affiliate Networks

When it comes to affiliate marketing, I like my money in one place. This means affiliate networks rule the roost for me.

I recommend Share a Sale, and Click Bank.

Commission Junction needs a little getting used to, but has big names that will surely interest many. Another interesting mention is Lifetime Commissions, where you keep earning residual income.

WordPress products with their own affiliate programs have a thriving marketplace and a 33-50 per cent commission to the affiliates does the trick. One such example is Kolakube.com

My Last Secret

Creating the affiliate marketer’s secret weapon by customizing your wordpress blog couldn’t be simpler. Just blog or promote products that belong to your niche or products that interest you. Keep it simple, silly!

Give your product reviews the zing with a mix of the sweet and the bitter. That will give your reader the objective outlook urging him/her to consider buying the product with much more conviction and hence, lesser fallout.

My last secret is No secret – WordPress sells (even though it is free!).

One Last Request

Thanks for reading my article. I hope it was useful. And if it was, share it – Tweet, Google+, Facebook it, and help me win this contest!

If not, still comment, criticize or supplement my article by adding your thoughts below.

Regards,
Dr. Lawrence Kindo

So what is Niche Profit Classroom all about?

NPC is an Internet Marketing online course that focuses on teaching how to build a passive income online business. The good thing is that, NPC evolves three times from its original 2.0 version to 4.0 version. And they will still be evolving in the future to fit their make money online strategies to that current technology.

Note: As you notice in the image above, it was marked as NPC 3.0. The fact is that, since the NPC 3.0 was updated, their website navigation has changed including the page of the videos. Though the course still has the same concept.

Try their 14-day trial for only a penny

What is NPC 2.0?

Niche Profit Classroom 2.0 focuses on teaching how to build an online business by creating and selling your own product. The course will guide you how to create your own product, give you the right sales tools, teach you how to construct a website, affiliate program, how to boost your profit and beyond.

Niche Profit Classroom 3.0

Meanwhile, the NPC 3.0 version focuses on teaching how to build an online business generating passive income as an affiliate. The course is more on teaching niche marketing techniques where it mostly focuses on finding a low niche market competition having an acceptable amount of demand.

This way, you will stand a chance of dominating Google SERPS and earn the most targeted free traffic that will lead you  onwards to other niche site projects because your first website is now generating an income.

 Niche Profit Classroom 4.0 – NPS.

NPC 4.0 is called the Niche Profit Shortcut that focuses on building a niche site that generates passive income through Google Adsense. In this version, you will learn how to find niches base on products having low competition and an acceptable amount of monthly search volume using Google Keyword Tool.

If you have been using Google Adsense as a way to monetize your blog or niche sites, and are wondering why you haven’t earned as much as you expected,  there are many factors and reasons behind your experience. I will explain it on this link.

To Sum it Up

You see, most of the courses are made up of videos so that you can follow the exact pattern that they are using. On the other hand, there are some video tutorials inside having a downloadable document for you to use in applying the technique they teach you.

Try their 14-day trial for only a penny

Not only that, they also have some FREE to use software that is really useful on your online business journey. Some of the tools inside are the following;

1. Market Profiler: Create A Profile For Your Million Dollar Market.
2. Keyword Advantage Tool: Find The Most Lucrative Keywords In Your Market.
3. Niche Profit Press Ultimate: Easily Install Everything You Need in Seconds.
4. Niche Profit Press Automator: Install a Pre-configured Website in Seconds.
5. Sales Letter Wizard: Create Converting Sales Letters In Minutes.
6. Mini-Course Creator: High-converting Hard-Sell and Soft-Sell Emails.
7. Download Page Generator: Create Your Download Page In Just 5 Minutes.

See the image list below.

On top of that, they also have a package of hosting the niche websites you’ve built inside NPC under your account. So you don’t need to purchase a hosting plan just for you to apply the techniques you have learned from them. But the domain name is yours.

They also have a Niche Profit Media center that contains all internet marketing related techniques that you can learn. Another thing is their Niche Packs – the done for you niches, Link Tracks -a  list of websites that can build backlinks, and Hot Market – a trended hot niche market where you can try to tap that certain market. This feature is under the Download tab which you can access immediately.

To learn more about this course, I suggest that you watch the video below!

 My Experience Inside NPC.

When I first learned about NPC, I didn’t hesitate to give it a try to promote the coaching product over my previous blog. Though I haven’t been inside before, I rely on the videos and banners that help me to promote the product. As a newbie blogger I was an unknown person in the saturated blogging niche. So what I did was just keep on updating my blog and promoting it through social media.

But after 6-8 months of blogging, I still had not earned a penny from my blog. That made me almost quit blogging. But suddenly a credit appeared in my paypal account. The credit was my first earnings as an affiliate marketer. Please see the image below.

And then in June 2010, I was able to get inside Niche Profit Classroom for the first time because I recommended the course to my employers ( I was hired as a full-time Virtual Assistant in that time for a period of almost 5 months).

The most important thing that I learned inside NPC is this qoute.

Success is the Repetition and Action of the Fundamentals.

Just recently, I was able to get inside NPC and learn their latest version – the Niche Profit Shortcut which I am going to apply in the near future.

My Words About Promoting Affiliate Products.

I’ve learned in my internet marketing journey that there are various techniques on how to promote affiliate products. The first one is promote it to your blog, the second one is taught inside NPC 3.0 which was building a niche site, the third one is by building review sites, and the fourth one is by promoting it through social media like twitter and facebook. There may be other techniques that were not mentioned above but those things works in my affiliate marketing journey.

In the end, I am hoping that by sharing my experience about affiliate marketing, you learn something from me, even if you say it’s a little bit. Lol! Anyway, the Niche Profit Classroom is really worth an investment.

Try their 14-day trial for only a penny

Cheers!

- Felix

For all that you have read, I will place my bet that 80% of those who has written about Affiliate Marketing is either not an affiliate marketer themselves or has never succeeded in making much as an affiliate marketer.

Transforming Yourself Into An Affiliate Marketer

One usually does not start their lives in the Internet as an Affiliate Marketer. Nobody can claim that they are born Affiliate Marketers. Affiliate Marketers are made or transformed and not born. Most start their lives on the Internet as a blogger and slowly transform into an affiliate marketer.

Even if you were never a blogger and your first attempt to join the Internet Kingdom was with an identity of an affiliate marketer, you would have been prowling around the Net for years doing your research, getting to know the ins and outs before you took that first step. In that essence, you too were not born as an affiliate marketer. You only successfully transformed yourself into one. Whether you succeed in becoming a successful one is another story to be told on another day.

Affiliate Marketing Is A Different Ball Game

If you are a blogger, eager to go into affiliate marketing because whatever monetization methods you have attempted did not bear much fruit, you have to change ball games. The basic rules may be similar, but the playing field is different. The players will be different and the spectators too will be different.

With the assumption that that you already know the basics of keyword research and getting traffic, you will now have to change your target. When before, if you are using Adsense and you are targeting traffic that searches for specified information, the target now is traffic that is looking to buy certain products.

Trust me, getting people to fork out money to buy rather than depending on them to click freely for more info is much, much more difficult.

Heed these Rules.

Rule Number One – Do Not Be Apologetic About Becoming An Affiliate Marketer

The first and foremost rule in becoming an affiliate marketer is, DO NOT be apologetic about it. Especially those who have been blogging for sometime and has built up a community or a legion of fans.

I see many writing post apologizing to their readers that they will be selling affiliate products from here on. They warn their readers about all the affiliate links appearing in their sites and they will be making money if their readers happen to buy through their links.

I mean, WHAT THE HELL? Where is the logic behind this behaviour? Don’t you want to sell? Are you selling some crap so you want to tell your loyal readers that you do not want to cheat them? If you are indeed selling crap, then is it okay if  those who are not your loyal followers buys it? Does that make you more ethical?

If you are going to be so sorry about your readers buying, then JUST DON”T SELL! Just stick to blogging about whatever. Why apologize?

Get Real.

Rule Number Two – Know The Products You Are Marketing

You can never sell anything if you do not know what that thing is all about. The most ideal situation will of course be you buying and using the product first before you join that affiliate program. Of course, that is quite impossible if you are trying to promote every product under the sun, so stick to the few that you have tried and used.

I only stick to marketing Premium WordPress Themes in my blog.

The best selling ones (For example: Genesis Framework) are the ones that I am using because I am able to write very comprehensive and thorough reviews about them.

Of course I do promote many other Themes. Sometimes just to help add a slight nudge to those new WordPress Theme developers who are just starting out and sometimes out of goodwill because they emailed me asking me to review their Themes.

I usually do those for free and my only compensation are from the affiliate commissions, if I can get them.

These comes in negligible trickles because I can only recommend them through what I have read and I cannot provide any further details.

Rule Number Three – Rank For The Right Keywords

Now that you have gotten rid of that silly mindset about being apologetic and you have in-depth knowledge of the products you intend to promote as an affiliate, the next step will be working to get your keywords ranked.

This is especially important if you are not into email marketing and do not or have not built up an email list. If you are practising Affiliate Marketing within your blog alone, getting search traffic is your only hope. Your existing followers might give you a kickstart and give you your first commissions, but after that initial phase, sales will dry up if you do not get organic traffic flowing in daily.

Be reminded that conversion rates in Affiliate Marketing is very low. You might get a high click-through if you have written an awesome review about the product, but out of 500 clicks, only one or two will convert into sales. So it is a numbers game. The higher the numbers, the better are your chances.

To get that high number coming in daily, get your keywords right. Not what you think is right, but what those who are searching thinks is right.

What Are The Right Keywords

Contrary to what many might think, the right keywords to sell a product is not always the product’s name. Especially if it is a new product that no one has heard of. Just like working your butt off to rank for your personal name, ranking for the name of an unheard product will not get you any hits.

Let say you have just bought a script that can automate link building and the name of the script is “Super Duper Link Builder“. You liked the script very much and it is an awesome tool so you decide to promote it as an affiliate. What Keyword term would you want to rank for in the Search Results in order to get the first sale?

Many would go for the term Super Duper Link Builder because it is the product’s name and those many will not be getting any traffic or sales for at least 6 months to a year ranking for that keyword term. Why? Simply because NO ONE knows or has heard about “Super Duper Link Builder” so who the hell is going to search for it?

Getting The Keywords Terms By Piggy Backing On Popular Products

Lets say again that there is another script of the same nature that is hugely popular and everyone in the whole wide world knows about it. Everyone who wants to buy a link building software will search for that name. The name of the script is called “Link Builder King“.

Compared to this “Link Builder King“, “Super Duper Link Builder” is virtually nothing. However, you can make things happen for this new and rising star. You can do so by piggy backing on the popularity of Link Builder King.

You go and work your behinds off to rank for the terms like “Links Building Program That Works Better Then Link Builder King” or “More Awesome Link Builder Than Link Builder King” or “Build Backlinks Faster Than Link Builder King” or whatever you can think of, but make sure Link Builder King is included in the Phrase. Never include Super Duper Link Builder.

Long Tails like these are easy to rank and then, if your landing page or your post is convincing enough, you will get some sales.

Maintain your rankings for the term Super Duper Link Builder though. It will be worth something when one day that product really overtakes Link Builder King as the most popular link building software. It might be one or two years, but when it happens, you will be in for a big payday.

That is what affiliate marketing is all about anyway. Time. And of course lots of effort.

First of all, not all the products I review I actually end up recommending and more importantly, I try to be as honest as possible in my reviews. I add some live case studies to go along with the actual review so that my readers will be able to see if and how that product or service actually works for me, and understand why I decided to recommend it.

With that said, I decided to share with you a blog network that I have been using as a member for quite some time now and also promoting as an affiliate with great success, Unique Article Wizard (UAW).

How Did I Discover Unique Article Wizard

When I started my online endeavors back in the summer of 2010 my main focus was search engine optimization (SEO). I was playing around with it doing stuff manually at first but than I started looking for services that could help me get more done in less time.

Unique Article Wizard was one of the first blog networks I signed up for mainly because it has been around since 2006 and that alone is a great testament to how successful it is.

I can’t really recall exactly how I found out about it, whether it was on Google, on some blog or on the WarriorForum, but I did hear about it and decided to give it a try.

Why Did I Decide To Promote Unique Article Wizard

The short answer is the results I got. I think that it is the most important aspect of a service such as Unique Article Wizard. It exists in order to help your SEO efforts and assist in getting higher search engine rankings and it did just that. So, I figured I should share my experiences with the world on my blog and let them know about how great Unique Article Wizard is and why they should consider using it.

I am not going to lie to you and say that I only wrote the review in order to provide value for people. I also wanted to make money in the process and with the search volume and popularity of this service (as can be seen in the image below), it seemed that I could do quite well if I was able to rank high enough and offer some added value for those that will signup using my affiliate link.

I wrote my Unique Article Wizard Review and really made it the best I could providing as much information as possible. I included a video showing how the interface looks and how the article submission process goes, and also created a case study in which I only promoted that specific review using only Unique Article Wizard submissions and that got me to the bottom of the first page of Google.

Whenever I sit down to write a review I do some research first. I check out all of the other reviews for that product and I try to find what is missing in them so that I can have something different in my reviews. To be honest, this is quite easy as very few really put the effort into writing their reviews. Most only focus on writing how great the product or service is (without even testing it first) and that you must get it.

Most affiliates only focus their efforts on getting their reviews to the top of Google. They fail to understand that it might bring in some sales but not as many as they could get if they just put in some effort into the review itself, and make sure they provide some added value  not just being a middle man between their visitors and the product they are promoting.

These affiliates are the main reason product reviews have a “bad name” and most people don’t believe anyone that is reviewing a product and recommending it.

The Questions

After figuring out that I am going to write about Unique Article Wizard I started to construct my post in my head as I always do. I try to find some key points to focus on and use as sub headlines inside my posts and reviews.

I found that it makes it much easier for me to write and also makes it easy for most to read.

So while I did this research process I tried to focus on what you, the reader, will want to know most out of my promotion of Unique Article Wizard and I figured that most of you will have 2 questions that you will want to get answers to.

1. How Did You Do?

This question is the less important one so I decided to answer it first. For those of you that don’t yet have a second question in mind I assume that my answer to this first one will get something going inside your head

I am very happy to say that currently my review of Unique Article Wizard is probably the page that is making me the most money on my blog. With some additional link building methods (that I will explain later) I am now siting on the 2nd position for the main keyword (below the official site) which was my initial goal and I was thrilled once I got there a few months after publishing my review.

I am also ranking number one for the secondary keywords I targeted (unique article wizard review and unique article wizard discount).

The bottom line is that with the review I wrote, the discount and bonus I am offering and my Google rankings I am making a very nice income that keeps increasing every month and recently has grown to 4 figures.

And now for the more important question.

2. How Did You Do It?

As you probably figured it out by now, my promotion plan was SEO. Getting my Unique Article Wizard Review to the top of Google and hopefully making some sales. As you can learn from my answer to the first question, it worked and it is working now better than ever.

Getting to the first page of Google wasn’t too hard and didn’t take a lot of time as I managed to land there after 3-4 months. That might sound like a lot but considering the level of competition and that my blog authority wasn’t as high as it is today I think 3-4 months was OK especially since I only focused on one type of link at the beginning.

As I mentioned earlier, I got to the first page by making sure my on page SEO factors are optimized and with links I got by submitting articles to Unique Article Wizard only.

After I started making a few sales I contacted Unique Article Wizard support and asked them for some kind of discount that I could offer my readers and I was willing to give up my commissions in order to make that happen. They agreed and I started offering a $20 discount (that comes out of my end) for the first month of service which of course improved conversations.

If you take something from this post, then take this part. Always ask for discount offers or bonuses that you will be able to offer your readers when you are promoting a product or service as an affiliate. The worst case scenario no one will reply to your request but the best case scenario could make a huge difference for you and end up making you a lot of money. It is as simple as sending an email so there is no real excuse not to do it other than laziness.

Offering a valuable bonus and/or a discount is simply providing more value to your readers and that should be your main focus when you really want to kill it as an affiliate writing product reviews.

Another promotion method I used was with my WSO (warrior special offer) which I launched back in July 2011 on the WarriorForum. It is called the Product Launch Domination Blueprint and in it I showed how me and my partner, Jack Partain, dominated product launches in the internet marketing niche. Part of the product was our advanced link building blueprint which included the products and services we used in our SEO promotion and of course, Unique Article Wizard was a big part of it.

Getting my review post to where it sits today in Google took some additional link building work and included the use of various methods and tools. To be honest, I really can’t recall the exact methods I used but blog networks had a crucial part in my link building efforts as did SENuke.

If you would ask me today how to move a fairly competitive keyword from the bottom of page one to the top, I would say use BuildMyRank. It is considered to be one of the best link building services and for good reason as you can learn from my BuildMyRank review and case studies.

A Side Note

Using Unique Article Wizard also led me to the creation of my WordPress plugin, Pingback Power, and I will explain how that happened.

After I started using UAW I was getting hundreds of pingbacks to my blog and I never really took the time to learn and understand what they mean. I thought that each pingback is a live link and I was thrilled to see so many of them being created every day.

Only after I took the time to test things I learned that only 20% are actually indexed and live. That led to my decision to start building links to these pingbacks in order to get more of them indexed.

The problem was that I needed the URLs of the pingbacks and going one by one copy and pasting them wasn’t a real option as I had several thousands pingbacks at that time.

That led to the creation of my Pingback Power WordPress plugin which I really created for my own personal use. It allowed me to harvest all of the pingback URLs from any blog I owned and than use those URLs to build links to them and get as many of them indexed.

I never planned on sharing the plugin with the world but I soon realized that it is the only plugin that does what it does and I figured others might find it useful so I released it to the world for free.

Am I cool or what?

The reason I am sharing this little plugin story is to show you that by using and/or promoting a service as an affiliate can lead to much more than commissions. In my case it lead to the creation of a little WordPress plugin that helped me build an email list, get more traffic and get noticed by other webmasters in my niche.

I guess what I am trying to say is that you should always look and think long term rather than focus on the immediate return you will get for your efforts.

The Bottom Line

Whenever you are going to write a review I would recommend you only write about products and/or services you used yourself and that you have personal experience with.

Having that personal experience makes your review more honest, real and will allow you to write a much better review as it will include your own story and if you don’t know it yet, stories sell, or as Seth Godin said it in his great book;

“All Marketers Are Liars Tell Stories”

If you already have a product review in place and you want to get better conversions than take the time to create a unique and valuable bonus that would work great with the product you are promoting. You should also contact the product vendor and see if they can arrange some kind of special discount just for you. All it takes is one email.

Understand that every piece of content you write and especially reviews might be worth a lot of money down the line. I really had no idea how much money some of the posts on my blog were going to bring when I wrote them and now that I know, I am definitely doing things differently and I put in a lot more work into the research and writing process.

Take the time to write something that will be more than just good. Put in the effort and write something GREAT that will add value to those who choose to read it.

If you achieve that, it will also bring you money and that is a win win situation. Put in the extra effort in every review you write and I guarantee that it will make a huge difference down the line.

Thanks For Reading!

If you have any questions, remarks, feedback and/or criticism I would love to read about it so feel free to comment below and let me know!

Also, don’t forget to tweet and like this post so all your friends will get a chance to read it. You never know who might find this information useful and I would greatly appreciate it (and it would help me win this contest ).

Thanks again.

I am making thousands of dollars every month just with very few sites. What I am doing is creating blogs that would make passive income instead of creating 3-4 pages niche sites.

In this post I am going to share 5 tips to make money with affiliate marketing.

1. Trust

Building trust with your audience is very crucial step in making money with affiliate products. People are more likely to buy from bloggers/marketers – they know and trust.  To build trust with your blog readers, you’d need to provide them real value.

 “Whether you like to hear this or not, there is no secret to gaining people’s trust. It doesn’t matter how many things you know or how good you are at manipulating, you can never manipulate people to trust you, you can only earn it, and the best way to earn it is by giving true value.” – Onibalusi Bamidele

If want to build trust than promote the products that would be useful to them, not the ones that will make good YOU commission.

2. Planting Seeds

I learned this tip from the awesome affiliate marketer & blogger, Pat Flynn. In his latest income report he wrote about planting seeds and how he was able to make $17000 (in a month) from BlueHost Affiliates.

3. Create a Resource Page

It was very recently I put the resource page on my blog and it is converting very well. It is the page where you can put the affiliate recommendations to products that will be helpful to your blog readers. The page should be a mix of Free & paid products. Only include the products that you have used and working well for you.

It can be linked from the numerous blog posts, newsletter, pages and social networks. You can also put a banner – & link to resource page in sidebar, to promote it.

4. Only Promote Good Products

I’ve seen many Internet marketers & bloggers promoting all type of products just to make good commissions. One of the keys to become successful in affiliate marketing – is to only promote the good products and the ones that you have used.

What if hesham start promoting products about music or how to learn guitar, it would make no sense because FamousBloggers is all about Blogging & making money online!

Never promote just any product just to make quick cash; it will quickly destroy your credibility as a blogger or marketer.

5. Quality Traffic

All it takes to have few quality visitors to make your first sale. Making money with affiliate marketing requires quality visitors. One of the best strategy to get quality traffic is by doing guest posting like I’m doing here. Here are few more strategies that can drive quality traffic to your blog:

• Collaborating with other bloggers in your niche – A sure fire way to skyrocket your blog traffic. Learn how you can collaborate with other bloggers.
• Submit your blog posts to Blokube – It is a social blogging community for bloggers & online marketers. Submitting to Blokube takes less than a minute (or may be half).
• Join the Forums – There still hundreds of bloggers/marketer that have not started using Forum Boards. You can generate hundreds of visitors with Forums like DigitalPoint, Warrior Forums, etc.
• Creating Infographics – This is something that very less bloggers are utilizing. Infographics are very powerful and you can end up getting featured on big blogs.

Still looking to how to get quality traffic? – Go & get the Blog Post Promotion guide now.

Do you have any useful tips to share? Please let us know in the comments below.

This contest meant to share the best selling affiliate products in the market, but as you see, not every one has the know how of promoting products online, not everyone in our network are actually making money from affiliate marketing, so it seems to be hard job! This is why we are responding to our community by changing the contest rules to make things more easier!

Basically the changes are in the topics!

To make thins more easier for you, we’ve expanded the topic to include general affiliate marketing tips for bloggers and new internet marketers!

Affiliate marketing is a quite wide topic, so you don’t have to write a particular review for a product, if you prefer to share general affiliate marketing tips, then you are welcome to do so!

Here are some ideas for topics that you could write about…

Topic ideas:

• How to find products to market them online!
• Best affiliate networks
• Best affiliate marketing tools
• Growing and driving more sales from email lists
• Conversion tips
• How to create a niche site
• Best practices for ranking a niche site
• How to drive (free/paid) traffic to niche sites
• Landing pages best practices
• Using Social Media for affiliate marketing
• Marketing and selling your own product
• What you’ve learned from affiliate marketers
• Review of your best selling affiliate product
• What else? (if you have a cool idea to share, please add it in the comments)

You see, affiliate marketing is a quite open topic!

Your Cash Prize is waiting for you!

Yes! We have $2000 of cash prizes that is waiting for you to just grab it!

1. First place : $1000
2. Second place : $500
3. Third place : $250
4. Fourth place : $150
5. Fifth place : $100

Participate now in our → Blog Contest

If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments, and I will get back to you with a reply.

In fact there are a lot of marketers who are fearful and doubtful because they have tried in the past and invested all of their time and money into losing products.

I am here to tell you that this can be easily avoided. All you have to do is know how to choose products that will put money in your pocket and avoid those that will only be a waste of your time.

This is quite easy to do, and in this article I am going to give you some tips on how to do this and what you should look for if you want to promote someone else’s product.

Think: What Relates To Your Content?

Most of your affiliate marketing efforts are going to revolve around the type of content you are able to create. The very first thing your visitors will see is the type of content you have created and this will be what leaves a lasting impression on them.

If you want to be successful at affiliate marketing and pick winning products then the best thing you could do would be to find a product that you were passionate about, and one that also had the ability to make you high commissions. Seeing as how you would be passionate about the product you created it would be easy for you to write good content around it.

You would not believe how powerful this one step is.

A product that is based on something you are passionate about is so powerful because you will be able to write content convincingly.

Have you ever come across a product on the Internet and felt like the writer was not really passionate about what they were talking about?

How are they going to convince you to buy a product or talk about the virtues of a product if they cannot convince themselves?

I am sure you have bought products that you may not have even wanted just because the web page you landed on had content that was so solid and convincing that you could just feel the passion bursting from the page.

Don’t Forget: The Market Needs

Besides from picking a product that you are passionate about so you can write about it convincingly, and being able to pick one that will make you high commissions you must be able to research just how much of a market there is for a given product.

I know a lot of people have told you that you need to find products that do not have that much competition. But those low competition products sometimes do not have any for a reason. It may be hard for you to sell those products because there simply is not enough of a market for them.

So I would advise you to research your market first and try to determine the size of it. You want the perfect combination to be a moderate sized market that is under served.

What To Do? : If There Is TOO MUCH Competition…

Products that have a lot of competition, meaning products that a lot of people are promoting don’t always have to be seen as bad things. Many times a lot of people are promoting these products because they are having an easy time converting them. But if a lot of people are already selling a given affiliate product you will have to figure out a way to stand out from the crowd.

How do you do this?

One of the best ways would be to have the best presell content, or to offer the right bonus to push them over the edge. You want to be able to get those high conversions, but you must not do what the rest of your competition is doing.

Avoid The LOSERS…Or, Ahh..YOU Will be a LOSER!

In order for you to avoid losing affiliate products not only must you have a good product that you are passionate about, not only must you be able to write good content around it in a market that is large enough to ensure you make a good amount of sales, but you must also avoid losing merchants. I should have said loser merchants.

Loser merchants are those who will have credibility that you cannot trust because of the complaints of past affiliates. Some of these merchants may also create crappy products. The last thing you want to do is promote a product that is bad, because it will make you look bad as well. Avoid this by looking into the credibility of the merchant you will be promoting for before you take the plunge, you’ll be glad you did.

What do I mean when I say stand behind?

I mean you want a merchant that will answer any and all questions their customers might have about their products and not try to hide behind their sales page. You want a merchant who will issue refunds without questions, and guarantee the quality of their products because they have put a lot of work into it. After all you will be putting in a lot of work for them when it comes to promoting their product.

I am very confident that you enjoyed this guest post. Do drop your comments below as I’m eagerly waiting to know what’s going on in your mind after scrolling till this line (considering that you didn’t cheat and read the whole post ).

This is not the first time, Amazon has actually terminated the associates program in Hawaii, Connecticut, Illinois,  and North Carolina because of the passing of similar legal issues.

Amazon May Terminate All California Associates Affiliate Program

Below are more details from the email I’ve received today:

“For well over a decade, the Amazon Associates Program has worked with thousands of California residents. Unfortunately, a potential new law that may be signed by Governor Brown compels us to terminate this program for California-based participants. It specifically imposes the collection of taxes from consumers on sales by online retailers – including but not limited to those referred by California-based marketing affiliates like you – even if those retailers have no physical presence in the state.

We oppose this bill because it is unconstitutional and counterproductive. It is supported by big-box retailers, most of which are based outside California, that seek to harm the affiliate advertising programs of their competitors. Similar legislation in other states has led to job and income losses, and little, if any, new tax revenue. We deeply regret that we must take this action.

As a result, we will terminate contracts with all California residents that are participants in the Amazon Associates Program as of the date (if any) that the California law becomes effective. We will send a follow-up notice to you confirming the termination date if the California law is enacted. In the event that the California law does not become effective before September 30, 2011, we withdraw this notice. As of the termination date, California residents will no longer receive advertising fees for sales referred to Amazon.com , Endless.com , MYHABIT.COM or SmallParts.com . Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned on or before the termination date will be processed and paid in full in accordance with the regular payment schedule.

You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you are a resident of California. If you are not currently a resident of California, or if you are relocating to another state in the near future, you can manage the details of your Associates account here . And if you relocate to another state in the near future please contact us for reinstatement into the Amazon Associates Program.
To avoid confusion, we would like to clarify that this development will only impact our ability to offer the Associates Program to California residents and will not affect their ability to purchase from Amazon.com , Endless.com , MYHABIT.COM or SmallParts.com .

We have enjoyed working with you and other California-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program and, if this situation is rectified, would very much welcome the opportunity to re-open our Associates Program to California residents. We are also working on alternative ways to help California residents monetize their websites and we will be sure to contact you when these become available.

Regards,
The Amazon Associates Team

What a bummer!