Contacting the merchant of your interested program is
an ideal way to increase your sales, which can save
you a lot of time and heartache.  Once you contact
the merchant, be sure to let them know what you are
doing to promote their products, and ask for their
advice when it comes to marketing.

The merchant will know the product the best, and
they will have a good idea of the strategies that are
being used by other affiliates to make sales.  By
contacting the merchant, you’ll also show them that
you are dedicated to succeeding with affiliate
marketing.

Contacting the merchant also shows your enthusiasm
for marketing their products and services.  Any
merchant who knows affiliate marketing also knows
that over 90% of sales are generated by less than
5% of the affiliates.  Good merchants recognize your
efforts and provide you with information and resources
and may even boost your commission rates!

Dealing with merchants
If you email a merchant and they don’t respond, try
again.  If they still aren’t responding, you should
think again about continuing the partnership, as a
lack of communication can indicate other problems
as well – such as payment.

Keep in mind that many merchants make big promises,
and set a high payout rate knowing that very few
affiliates will actually meet it.  This isn’t a
good way to do business, and you should avoid
working with these types of merchants.

Communication
When you communicate with merchants, you should
ensure that you use a professional tone. If you
have suggestions of how a merchant can improve their
offers, you should let them know.  Many merchants
appreciate feedback, and know that any feedback they
receive can improve their programs.

Wise merchants always understand that good affiliates
are hard to find and will treat them with respect,
assist with resources, and be prompt with payments.
Wise affiliates are the same way, and understand
that merchants want quality promotion and sales
performance.

To get the most out of your partnership, you should
always be professional and understanding with your
merchant.  Good merchants are always busy, which may
make them seem like they aren’t that good.  They
will answer your questions and emails, although it
may take them a little bit of time.

The longer you work with a merchant, the more you’ll
understand how they do things.  If you are just
starting out in affiliate marketing, a merchant
can help you understand how things work.  If you
listen to them and show initiative, you’ll be
well on your way to making it to the top.

Too many people out there assume that affiliate
marketing is actually a get rich quick type of
program.  These types of people will throw up a
couple of banners, then wonder why they never make
a single sale or any money at all.

How long you’ll need to do it depends on how much
money you are wanting to make.  If you are a quick
learner and really good at affiliate marketing, you
may high 2,000 in 2 years.  This is based on the
fact that you are starting at 0 and the fact that
you have another full time job, not being able to
devote a lot of time working with your affiliate
marketing program.

If you decide to give it a try, the hardest challenge
will be the first few months.  If you check your
stats and see that you are only making a couple of
bucks, you’ll find yourself wondering if all the
hard work was worth it.  If you get some sales
going and stay committed with your hard work, the
commissions should start growing.

One of the biggest factors with affiliate marketing
is the traffic that goes through your site.  Even
though you’ll get a lot of traffic passing through
your website, only a fraction of the traffic will
be buyers.

The key here is knowing your visitors and then
being able to determine which affiliate programs
you can offer to meet their needs.  There is also
the concept of pre sale, which is the ability
to put your visitors in the required open and
mind set that’s required for them to actually click
on what you are selling.

By sticking with affiliate marketing, you’ll learn
more and more over the years.  You can’t expect to
be the best when you first start, it’ll take a lot
of hard work and dedication.  By putting the time
and effort into your programs, you’ll be well on
your way to making it in the very profitable and
exciting world of affiliate marketing.

To be successful with affiliate marketing, it’s always
best to learn the basics of the affiliate marketing
business, then realize what sacrifices will need
to be made for you to accomplish your goals.  To
get to the top of affiliate marketing, you’ll need
to make the necessary sacrifices.

Before you join any type of program, you should
learn as much as possible about the company.  It’s
actually very easy to research companies, as search
engines are easily the one of the most primary
sources for information.  To be on the safe side,
you should ensure that the program and company has
been operating for several years – which can be
easily and properly verified.

If the company has just started, make sure that
the owner has good credibility.  Although becoming
an affiliate marketer doesn’t have to be a complex
task, you should always use caution.

Many individuals are under the impression that you
can earn a lot of money with affiliate marketing
and not have to invest a penny.  Even though
the majority of these programs are free to join,
you’ll have to invest money at some point in
time during your affiliate marketing career.

More than likely, this money will be used for
advertising and the promotion of web sites.  In
most scenarios however, the amount of money spent
will be earned back with a little bit of time.

Making it as an affiliate marketer will take
time, effort, and a lot of hard work.  The more
of these qualities you put into your business,
the greater the success you’ll achieve.  You
should always be willing and ready to stick with
your program to build up your earnings.

You’ll also need to design a variety of different
strategies and methods, which range from creating
web sites to product promotion.  You’ll also need
to advertise, as well as keep in constant contact
with your affiliates.  You should be ready to
put in the most time during the first few months
of your program, as once your network begins to
get established, your work load will lighten.

Even though the system of affiliate marketing
may seem overwhelming at first, you should realize
that you are surrounded by online support.  A
lot of the individuals who join affilate programs
are new to the business.

Many organizations and companies have around the
clock support forums and customer support for
those affiliates who need advice or assistance.
A lot of web sites are equipped with e-books,
tutorials, articles, and tips that will make your
quest of becoming an affiliate marketer a little
bit easier.

Choosing banners
With most affiliate programs, you are offered a
variety of banners to plan on your website, as very
few of them will be effective.  The problems with
most banners are their size.  If you choose a banner
that is high in size, it will take a long time to
implement and use.  Therefore, it’s recommended that
you use banners no more than 15kb in size.

When you select any types of graphical advertising,
you should try and keep the theme of your website in
mind.  Even though graphical ads are meant to stand
out and catch people’s eye, they shouldn’t be to
the point where everything else on the page is
completely ignored.

Pop ups and unders
A lot of companies will now give their affiliates
the chance of using pop up or pop under ads.  In
most opinions, pop ups aren’t the way to go.  They
can easily annoy visitors and are normally closed
before they even have the chance to load.  You
should instead go for pop unders and those types
that only display once per visit.

Text link ads
Once of the most successful means of advertisting
is text link ads.  They are easy on bandwidth, don’t
use a lot of space, and they easily be implemented
into most types of page layouts.  Good text links
offer some information as to why your visitor
should investigate your offers.

Email advertising
The direct promotion via email has really taken off
over the last several years, although it has
brought tons of spam with it. If you plan to use
email as a method of advertising your products,
you should stand behind what you sell and make
yourself available to answer any questions.

Patience
If you feel confident that your site can generate
great sales for certain company’s, you should
contact them to negotiate an arrangement.  If they
don’t seem to enthused to begin with, you should
remain patient as companies are approaced every
day with affiliates looking to make better deals.

The reality remains that most affiliates can’t
deliver what they promise, and companies are
aware of this.

You should always keep in mind that most forms of
advertising will take time.  No matter what methods
you plan to use, give it some time before you make
any type of decision. Although something may not
happen overnight – it very well could in a few
days or weeks.

Advertising is the means to making a great number
of consumers aware of certain products.  Therefore,
advertising should be both attracting and appealing
to consumers.  If the advertising isn’t appealing
enough, it won’t be effective.  If the advertising
manages to pull the attention of consumers, then
it’s considered to be powerful.

To make advertising powerful and effective, the
affiliate must use smart methods of advertising.
An example of smart advertising is the re-use of
one key concept of affiliate marketing – the
harnessing of human resources.  What this means,
is that an affiliate may tap on the capacities of
others to bring more visitors to the website.

The economics involved of making an affiliate
marketing program beneficial can be simple, yet
unquestionable.  Say for instance, when a visitor
ups a form to the website of the affiliate, the
affiliate may be earning .50 cent from the company
that he’s promoting.  In a single day, he may
refer ten visitors – which is equivalent to 5.00.

Keep in mind, the affiliate may increase his income
by utilizing others as well.  The more people an
affiliate manages to recruit or get to make purchases
or fill out forms, the more money that affiliate
will make.

To have a significant increase in income in
affiliate marketing, an affiliate can actually
do three things.  First of all, the affiliate must
search for a profitable site.  Next, he’ll need to
link with companies that are generous with their
leads.  Last, the affiliate will need to locate
a progressive and rising company online then
recruit affiliates for the company.

Setting up your own affiliate system can be either
easy or overwhelming, all depending on how many
affiliates you want to recruit, as well as your
payment policy and the type of product that you are
offering.

As for your affiliate systems, there are two options
for your business – outsource the entire system or
run your own affiliate system through your own
web host.  Each one boasts its own advantages as
well as disadvantages.

If you have a small amount of affiliates, then you
can run your own affiliate software.  If you plan
to recruit a large number of affiliates, then you
will probably need to outsource.  The reason for
this, is because you’ll find it easy to deal with
a large number of sign ups, track payments, monitor
clicks, etc.

Types of affiliates
There are numerous types of affiliates out there
to choose from.  There’s the pay per sale, there
an individual is paid only if a sale is generated
from the affiliate’s link.  It’s the least attractive
to people, unless the product is in high demand
and the most profitable for business.

Another type is the pay per lead, where you pay
only for traffic.  With this type, the affiliate
is paid only if a visitor is generated from the
site of the affiliate.  It’s attractive to affiliates
although costly to web site owners due to the
possibility of non sale visits.

Considerations
When setting up an affiliate, something to consider
is whether or not you’ll approve affiliates manually
or automatically.  It’s normally recommended to
start affiliate programs with your established
customer sites then progress to new ones.

If you are dealing with pay per clicks, you may
have to control the affiliates as the quality of
visitors will be a huge factor when it comes to the
generation of sales.  By manually reviewing, you’ll
also be able to judge the website or individual
affiliates to see if it’s in the best interest of
your company.

If you decide to use your own affiliate system, one
of your biggest challenges will be how to pay
affiliates a percentage of what you end up receiving
from customers.  To do this, you can rely on software
such as Affiliate shop to help you track and manage
commissions.

You might be running your search engine queries on
a particular search engine, although who is actually
supplying the results – it could be a different
company altogether.

Below, is a list of the search engines that feed your
precious keywords:

Yahoo
Yahoo provides the primary search results for Yahoo
search, Alta Vista, and AllTheWeb, and receives paid
listings from Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly known
as Overture).

Google
Google provides the primary search engine results
to Google AOL Search and also Netscape.  Google also
supplies paid listings to Lycos, Ask, Netscape, AOL
Search, and HotBot.  It also supplies secondary
results to HotBot and receives it’s directory data
from DMOZ.

Lycos
Lycos receives the directory search results from
DMOZ, primary results from Ask, and paid listings
from Google Adwords.

Hotbot
Hotbot receives directory search results from DMOZ,
primary search results from Ask, and paid/secondary
results from Google Adwords.

Ask
Ask provides primary results to Ask, Hotbot, and
Lycos.  It receives secondary search results from
Teoma and the directory results from DMOZ, with
paid listings from Google Adwords.

In relations to marketing, search engines can
provide anything you want to know.  If someone is
looking for something, they normally refer to the
search engines.  When they type it in, the highest
sites on the engines will show – which is normally
where the visitor will go.

By keeping good position on the search engines,
you’ll be near the first for visitors who are looking
for a certain product.  You can make a lot of money
with search engines as well, if you know what you
are doing.

Banner servers
Banner servers not only serve banners, as many of
the more recent servers will also display text
links as well.  The link coding that’s associated
with served ads is normally long, so that the
visitor won’t be able to see on the status bar
where the redirect is heading.

Click tracking software
Click counting software will not show the target
URL as the links point inwards to the software,
which is normally installed on your own website.

Once someone has clicked on the link, the click
tracking application will then redirect the
visitor to the URL that you have specified within
the script.  The click tracking software will also
provide a great way to monitor the usefulness of
your ads and not just relying on the reports
that merchants will provide.

Protecting your commissions is extremely important,
as you want to get paid for what you do.  Even
though fraud is possible with affiliate marketing,
you can protect yourself.  Fraudsters have certain
techniques and tactics they use, which you can
protect yourself from.

If you own your own business, the last thing you
want to experience is either credit card fraud or
affiliate fraud.  They do happen on a regular
basis, simply because those who have it happen
haven’t taken the necessary steps they should
have to protect themselves.

Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing arrangement
between the product developer, known as the affiliate
merchant, and the affiliate marketer who is anyone
that’s willing to promote the sale of product by
advertising the product using any type of legal
means available.

The relationship will allow the affiliate merchant
to grow their revenue by paying only for the
advertising that results in a sale.  The affiliate
marketer will profit by making a percentage on a
sale that he does not have to manage after the
sale.

Getting paid
Getting paid all depends upon how the affiliate
program is set up.  Some merchants will run their
own affiliate program.  They’ll have special types
of software that assigns each affiliate marketer
a special link that’s used in promoting the product.
The software will track sales of every marketer
and the merchant will pay the commission on a
periodic basis using either PayPal or another
method of payment.

Selecting products or services
Your income is directly tied to how well your
selected product or service sells, and the size of
the commission you earn, which makes it very
important that you choose carefully when it comes
to choosing the affiliate merchant you’ll be
partnering with.

Choose programs that you aren’t embarrassed to
promote and programs that you’ll feel comfortable
recommending to your family and friends if they
were to ask you about it.

You’ll do much better if you promote products
that you fully understand and are already familiar
with.  This way, you’ll be able to write better
ads without having to strain yourself coming up
with the right things to say.

You should only promote products and services for
companies who have gone through the trouble to
provide you with training programs and sales aids
such as banners and other marketing materials that
you can either use directly or model the one you
own after.

Be on the lookout for programs with commission
rates no less than 50%.  You should give preference
to programs that pay commission on multiple levels,
which means you’ll also have to earn commissions
on sales made by people who buy the products
through your link then go on and become affiliates
themselves later on.

You’ll have hundreds of affiliates sign up for your
program.  Hobbyists, spammers, webmasters and even
marketers.  It’s very important that you review
each one on a regular basis to ensure the way they
are promoting you is acceptable to your company and
above all – its legal.

Below, you’ll find some tips when screening:
1.  All affiliates must have an active web
site.  If not, they may be spammers.
2.  The affiliate site content must relate
to your products or services.
3.  The site should have appropriate levels
of content.
4.  Misuse of content.  Be very clear with
your affiliates and what content they can use from
your website.

Affiliate fraud
Fraud with affiliates has been increasing over the
last several years, which is another great reason
to screen your affiliates on a regular basis.  With
fraud, there are two main types:

Malware – Some affiliates out there have developed
software that is installed on a machine, normally as
part of a free download.  When someone clicks on the
affiliate link, the true affiliate ID is replaced
with the fraud.

Fake purchase – If you have a product of high value
that returns large commissions for affiliates, you
may notice some bad parties signing up, then using
stolen or fake credit card information to purchase
products via their links.

Communicating with affiliates
Good affiliates are normally busy, as they can
easily forget about your services and products.
As time goes by, your offers can wind up less in
less visited areas or accidentally deleted.

It’s extremely important to stay in contact with
your affiliates, even more so with the high performers.
Do not wait for them to contact you, as if you
do, it normally means they are reporting a problem.
By taking the time to contact them, you are showing
that you are interested in the partnership.

You don’t need a new product as an excuse to
contact your power affiliates.  Even if it’s just
a quick note to ask if they need anything.  You
can also use the opportunity for feedback on your
program as well.

Managing a successful affiliate program is not an
easy task you can fully automate, as you’ll have
to get involved.  Happy affiliates are more
productive, and the more money they make – the
more money your company makes as well.