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…don’t think about affiliate marketing being the key to success. Sounds crazy, but it’s true. If you’re constantly thinking about your many avenues for revenue, you’ll just drive yourself crazy. The key to affiliate marketing is to virtually “set it and forget it,” if I may quote that silly infomercial with the rotisserie oven made by Ronco. The best thing to do is get started with your Amazon affiliate program, or whichever one you prefer, optimize it so people can go straight to it without hassle, and leave it be. Check what you earn after each week just to see if you need to optimize it better, but that should be the only time you’re checking it. People choose affiliate marketing because it yields high reward with moderate to minimal effort. Starting an affiliate marketing site is tough at first, but once the ball is rolling, you just sit back and watch people click your links and buy stuff. When it comes down to what makes you the most money, it is generating traffic and making users want to read your content. How does this help with people buying your affiliate products? Well, it’s simple, really. Since you look like an...

Affiliate marketing is one method of Internet marketing that relies on affiliates (hence the name) in order to make profits. Affiliates who successfully make a sale (or sales) will then be rewarded with cash, check, or other forms of incentives. Affiliate marketing also makes use of other forms of Internet marketing, such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), and others. Affiliate marketing is almost similar to referral marketing, with the only difference being affiliates are driven by personal rewards like cash incentives and the like while referrals are mostly driven by trust and personal experience. Advantages of Affiliate Marketing Cheap (or even no) startup capital. You only need to satisfy one customer, earn their trust, hire them to become an affiliate and they will then tell their other friends about your services. Their friends will then tell their own friends about your service and so on and so forth. More affiliates mean more customers and clients. You no longer need to exert any effort in promoting your business, as your affiliates will do it for you. While you benefit from them, they also benefit from you as well (through compensation). It’s a win-win situation indeed! Disadvantages of Affiliate...

Anyone who works in internet marketing and affiliate sales will have a negative story or too about the Amazon Associates program – how it has never been the same since they ‘adjusted’ the commission structure and changed the length of the cookie, how the current commission rate is unfair and how you need to sell a crazily high number of products to get the top rates. All of these points are true, but when managed correctly, Amazon Associate sites can still offer significant profits to budding internet marketers and they still have their own advantages over other affiliates, despite offering lower rates. The first advantage is that they are easy to set up and that you know the company you are dealing with for your affiliate earnings are secure and reliable. The second is that your customers get the same sense of security, knowing that when they buy from your website they will be getting excellent customer service, full guarantees and the security of buying from the web’s biggest retailer. This knowledge often means that conversion rates will be far higher than if you redirect your customers to unknown but higher paying affiliates. In addition, remember that people will nearly always...

Linkshare is one of the fastest growing affiliate programs on the internet.  They have a lot of big name companies that participate with them, and they seem to be the provider of choice if a company leaves one of the other affiliate programs. When I first signed up with them they didn't have a lot of advertisers. Probably the biggest name they had initially was Skymall, which are the people that have the magazines on airlines with all the cool stuff. Now they boast companies such as Barnes & Noble, Microsoft Store, Buy.com and Fiji Water. They offer advertisers in almost any realm you might search for including airlines, hotels, gifts, jewelry and all sorts of other items. The only problem I have if I have to compare them with Commission Junction is that there's no template associated with them. In other words, you'll have to figure out how you want your advertisements to show. However, most of their advertisers will pay you at a rate that competes well with CJ. However, as full disclosure, I've yet to make enough money to tell you how easy it is to get paid. I can say that I've been credited with every sale...

CJ (Commission Junction) is probably one of the biggest affiliate programs on the internet. They have over 2,400 advertisers that offers a host of options you can select from if you get approved by the company, and it can greatly enhance your marketing. But it's not perfect; let's take a look at them. When you create your account they'll ask you what domain name is the main one you wish to use for them.  They'll take a look at it and you'll be approved based on that, so make sure it's a good and legitimate domain.  After that you can start going through the list of advertisers they have based on type of product you want to promote or just looking through its list in the order they give it to you, which I believe is the order they've signed up advertisers or the amount of money these advertisers will pay you for sales; I've never been able to quite figure it out. With most of the advertisers you have the option of selecting either links or products.  When you select links, if you end up having multiple websites approved later on you'll want to make sure you select the right...