Affiliate Marketing

 

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate'), and the customer.

There are a number of forms of these types of promotions but in most cases they involve you as a publisher earning a commission when someone follows a link on your blog to another site where they then buy something. Other variations on this are where you earn an amount for referring a visitor who takes some kind of action – for example when they sign up for something and give an email address, where they complete a survey, where they leave a name and address etc. Commissions are often a percentage of a sale but can also be a fixed amount per conversion. Conversions are generally tracked when the publisher (you) uses a link with a code only being used by you embedded into it that enables the advertiser to track where conversions come from (usually by cookies). Other times an advertiser might give a publisher a ‘coupon code’ for their readers to use that helps to track conversions.

 

Finding the Right Affiliate Product

This is the most Important Step (literally). If you get wrong here, you will definitely fail in this business. You will have to choose a product which will help your audience. If you have a Weight Loss Blog, then promoting a  product will be completely useless as it will not get you any sales. Moreover, If you promote a low quality product (lets say,on your blog) , you could be hurting your brand as well.

Only Choose a Handful of Good Products : The first mistake a lot of affiliate marketers make is that they register with too many different affiliate programs and try to promote everything. Pursuing affiliate marketing down this path can become very overwhelming and you won’t be able to promote any product properly. All you need in order to be successful is a handful of good products to promote. Try to understand the market needs and look for products that align correctly with the topic of your site.

Use Several Traffic Sources to Promote Products: Most affiliate marketers put up the ads only on their sites. There is nothing wrong with this approach but know that there are many other traffic sources that you can tap into and promote the products simultaneously. The more targeted traffic you can send to the sales page the more your chances are of making money.

Research the Demand of the Product: If you try to sell a product that is in low demand then chances are that you are not going to get many sales no matter how hard you try. So it is a good idea to spend a bit of time researching and finding out if a product that you are thinking of promoting is a product that your audience needs. If your site gets decent traffic then you can conduct an online survey and easily get input from your visitors.

Choose the Right Merchant : When you promote a product you also promote the person or the company who is behind the product so try to choose wisely. You don’t want your visitors to go and buy a product following your advice then come back unhappy. Do you think that this visitor will come back to your site and take your advice again? Most likely no; this can hurt your credibility in the long run.

Promoting Your Product.

Use your Blog: If you have a blog with good following, you can simply put a banner of the affiliate product on your sidebar with your affiliate link, or you can write a review post for that product with your affiliate link in the end of the post. This is a very effective way but make sure the products you promote are self tested by you or which you are confident about. This is because, your blog acts as your brand. Promote useless stuff and you will be destroying your brand.

Use Social Networks :  As you all know, social networks are growing at a rapid rate and will continue to grow. Facebook, for example, has nearly 600 million users and twitter has 200 million. And that is what you can make use of.

Write and Submit Articles : Article Marketing is the most exploited way of getting affiliate sales and Guess what ? It works every time. You just need to write an article related to your niche and then submit it to various article directories. You are given a chance to add a resource box in your article where you can add hyperlinks of your choice.

Amazon.com affiliate program.

Amazon.com is the biggest and the best of all the affiliate programs. It will cost you nothing and they have almost every type of product imaginable. You will be offering these products to your web visitors and if they buy anything you will be making a percentage of the sale.

Amazon Affiliate-Program

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

This service was initially invented for Amazon's in-house use by Peter Cohen, to find duplicates among its web pages describing products. Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is one of the suites of Amazon Web Services. The Requesters are able to post tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a store-front, writing product descriptions

According to a survey conducted through one MTurk HIT, Turkers are primarily located in the United States with demographics generally similar to the overall Internet population in the US

In March 2007, there were reportedly more than 100,000 workers in over 100 countries.. This increased to over 500,000 workers from over 190 countries in January 2011. In the same year, techlist published an interactive map pinpointing the locations of 50,000 of their MTurk workers around the world

Amazon keeps track of how much you earn with Mechanical Turk, and it’s important to know that some requesters will not pay you immediately.  Mechanical Turk earnings will appear in your Amazon back office, and you will also be able to see your total if you click on the heading Amazon payments.  You can convert the money to Amazon gift cards for purchases on the Amazon website, or if you prefer to be paid in cash, simply add your bank account information to your Amazon profile

Criticism

Because HITs are typically simple, repetitive tasks and users are paid often only a few cents to complete them, some have criticized Mechanical Turk as a "virtual sweatshop". At the same time, workers set their own hours and are not under any obligation to accept any work they do not wish to do. Because workers are paid as contractors rather than employees, requesters do not have to file forms for, nor pay payroll taxes, and they avoid laws regarding minimum wage, overtime, and workers compensation. Workers, though, must report their income as self-employment income. In addition, some requesters have taken advantage of workers by having them do the tasks, then rejecting their submissions in order to avoid paying. However, at least some workers on Mechanical Turk are people who do the work for fun

Turkopticon

Turkopticon adds functionality to Amazon Mechanical Turk as you browse for HITs and review status of work you've done. As you browse HITs, Turkopticon places a button next to each requester and highlights requesters for whom there are reviews from other workers. Bad reviews let you avoid shady employers and good reviews help you find fair ones. You can view reports made against requesters with a quick click.

      For Mozilla                                         For Chrome

Is it worthwhile?

If you have the ability to throw down readable writing very quickly, you can earn minimum wage with the Turk – more than I ever expected. Given the short timeframe and the wide variety of tasks available, it’s something that you can sit down and do in short little bits when it’s convenient for you. Turk earns well enough that you might be able to fill in spare moments with it – or use it as a stopgap when you’re job hunting – but approximating minimum wage isn’t a good reason to just sit at your computer and click all day. If you have the abilities to earn minimum wage at Turk over an eight hour period, you’d be much better served using that mental energy building something for yourself – a blog on a topic you’re passionate about, a healthy network of people in your field, or something similar.

InfoLinks

This is for the people who are really thrilled in writing.  There are N number of people around the world, who  are happy to write and even happier that their writing reaches to people around the world since it is online – in one word Bloggers. As we all knows for most of them the content reaches to so many people is because it is free. Yes you are spending your valuable time in writing and people are enjoying it. I know what are you thinking in your mind  you can add banners or text adds in you website which will bring you money or count every time you some one visit your blog.  Did you ever think how these adds are affecting he look of your site. Which is really important since that changes the impression about you website.
Yes there is a way to keep your website a money making machine without adding the banners which are not at all related to your website that is called infolinks.
Infolinks is an online Advertising network, enabling publishers and bloggers to overcome banner blindness and generate new revenue with Infolinks in - intent based advertising platform. Infolinks supports a varied suite of ad products, including: InSearch, InTag, InText and InFrame
Infolinks is probably the highest paying option for your in-text advertising. On DLM, you will see underlined links scattered throughout articles. Those are a function of Infolinks and without disclosing too much, it's been a great source of income. Best is that they accept all sizes of websites and blogs.
.Infolinks is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with an R&D Center in Tel Aviv, Israel. Infolinks network of publishers includes over 100,000 worldwide, located in 128 countries and generating over 1 trillion impressions per month. In-text advertising and Information services.
Here  what you need to do is sign up with www.infolinks.com and  add the script into your website which will bring  you money. Can’t you hear the sound of pennies pouring into your website .  What are you waiting for Just sign up and begin.

Swag Bucks

Swagbucks.com is a Los Angeles based online rewards program. It is the web's premier rewards site. Powered by Prodege LLC, Swagbucks.com allows web users to earn virtual currency by doing the things they do every day - search the web, shopping at their favourite retailers, and by engaging in other activities such as phone recycling, submitting polls, and completing special offers. Swagbucks.com is the only place on the web to get what you want without ever having to spend a dime.

How do you Earn?

Members of the program are able to earn and spend Swag Bucks in a variety of ways.

Ø  Searching- Swagbucks hosts a custom search engine that will periodically reward registered users with random amounts of Swag Bucks

Ø  Special Offers- this allows the user to complete offers made by various companies to receive Swag Bucks. The payouts can be virtually any number of Swag Bucks. It should be noted, however, that this is a particularly risky way to earn- most offers require the user to pay actual money, and certain offers are scams or do not pay. Special offers vary greatly, and the user is advised to exercise discretion when using this feature.

Ø  Swagbucks TV- here the user can watch videos, in a similar fashion to YouTube. Watching 10 videos (or a large portion of each) will earn the user 3 Swag Bucks. There is a limit to the number of Swag Bucks that can be earned each day- 75. There is a mobile app available for Android that replicates the TV function, which has its separate daily limit.

Ø  Surveys- through the Trusted Surveys portal, or through various special offers, the user can complete surveys from third parties to receive Swag Bucks. Generally, surveys take longer to complete than other activities, and consequently the payouts are generally larger.

Ø  Shopping- includes Coupons, Daily Deals, and Shop and Earn. Coupons allows the user to clip coupons (hosted by coupons.com) and upon their usage earn Swag Bucks. Daily Deals lets the user purchase certain products and receive Swag Bucks in return. Finally, Shop and Earn lets the user browser online shops (ex. Walmart, Apple, Kmart, etc.) and receive a set amount of Swag Bucks per dollar spent.

Ø  Tasks- this gives the user an opportunity to perform simple tasks, such as collecting data, for various companies in exchange for Swag Bucks. 

Ø  Games- 2 Swag Bucks periodically for playing Flash games. Tournaments, featuring large amounts of Swag Bucks in rewards, were once a feature of this section, but they have been taken down and possibly permanently removed due to rampant cheating.

Ø  Trade-in- the user can trade in video games and consoles or books for Swag Bucks.

Ø  Swag Codes- strings of text can be periodically found on the Swag Bucks network, and can be entered into a box on the main page to earn Swag Bucks. These can appear anytime, and can expire anytime.

Ø  Referral program- a current user can invite another person to use Swagbucks. If the other person signs up under the current user, the current user will earn matching Swag Bucks for every search win the new user receives, up to a maximum of 1000.

How Do you Spend?

Ø  Swag Store- users redeem their Swag Bucks for a variety of products. Notably, the Store offers many gift cards that can be delivered in an electronic format. These gift cards can then be spent on other vendors (Amazon, iTunes, Papal, etc.) to receive a wider variety of rewards. There is a limit of 5 gift cards purchasable per month. The user can set up notifications as to when a product's availability changes or it goes on sale. 

Ø Swagstakes- sweepstakes that require the user to pay for entries in Swag Bucks. Depending on the usual price of the item being offered, the entry amounts change. Some of the rewards are Swag Buck giveaways, which if won, simply credit the user's account with more Swag Bucks.

So what are you waiting for ? Click here www.Swagbucks.com and start earning for everything you do online.