How to earn money online (part-3)

 Affiliate Programs Which To Join

A dilemma for many affiliate marketers is whether to go for quality or quantity in signing up for affiliate programs. On one hand, the more products you promote, the more potential income streams you have. On the other, signing up for just a few good programs allows you to concentrate more effort on promoting them.

For most affiliates, it's best to find a happy medium. Signing up for every program coming and going will just leave you terribly confused. But it is good to have several different things to promote. It keeps you from sounding like a broken record, trying to sell the same products over and over again (especially if you're promoting on a niche site or blog). And as long as you keep the numbers manageable, you'll be able to get to know your products well enough to recommend them with confidence.

Even if you're going the pay per click route, it's best not to sign up for too many programs. You'll have to spend some time writing ads and tracking your results for each one, and that's more time consuming than you might think. But you'll probably be able to handle more programs this way than you would if you were focusing exclusively on content-based promotion methods.

Getting Paid The Highest Rates

The commission rate determines how much money you make from each sale you generate. As stated before, it's not a good idea to select programs based solely on commission rate. But there's no denying that a high commission rate is more attractive than a low one.

The easiest way to get a high commission rate is to join an affiliate program that offers a high percentage to everyone who joins. But that's not the only way to do it. Here are some tips for getting as much money as possible out of each sale.

Read the affiliate agreement carefully. You might just find an easy way to get bumped up to a higher commission rate, such as using a certain promotion method or selling a specific product. It's certainly worth looking into.

Make as many sales as possible. You'll make money from volume, and many merchants will also raise your commission rate if you reach a certain level of sales in a given amount of time. Some lay out the terms for such increases in their agreements, while others make adjustments on a case-by-case basis.

Recruit new affiliates. Some affiliate programs will pay you a commission for each sale your recruits make. And some will also raise commissions for your sales if you meet certain recruiting goals.

Pay attention to affiliate newsletters. They often announce affiliate contests in which the winners receive higher commissions or bonuses.

Email or call the affiliate manager and ask how you can get higher commissions. If you're generating a fair amount of sales, he might offer to raise your commission just to keep you happy. Or he might be able to tell you ways to get higher commissions that you weren't aware of. It never hurts to ask, as long as you do it nicely.

Do some comparison shopping. Look for programs similar to the ones you're promoting and see if they offer higher commissions. If they do, you could use this to help negotiate higher commissions with the merchant. And if he doesn't bite, you could consider switching to the other program. (Note: In order for this to work, you should already be generating a decent sales volume for the merchant you're negotiating with.)

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that commission rates are set in stone. Quite often, they are not. Most merchants recognize the benefits of keeping productive affiliates happy, so by working hard to generate sales, you increase your chances of getting a higher rate.

Pay per Lead Programs:

Not every affiliate program requires you to generate sales for the merchant. Pay per lead programs, which pay out every time a referral signs up for something free, are growing in popularity. Companies are willing to pay for leads because it gives them the opportunity to make repeated contact with the potential customer.

Commissions in pay per lead programs are usually a set amount for each action. In most cases it's a rather small amount since the merchant is not making money directly from it. But if you find a good pay per lead program that converts well, you can get enough conversions to add up to a significant amount of money.

There are several varieties of pay per lead programs. Insurance companies often pay out for each referral that requests a quote. Some companies will pay you to recruit newsletter subscribers. Service providers often set up programs through which they pay affiliates to get people to sign up for free trials. You can also get paid for persuading people to request free stuff, such as product samples, eBooks, and software and information packets.

Pay per lead programs are great, but it's important to be selective with them. A company could feasibly pay affiliates to get them newsletter subscribers, then spam them or sell their addresses to spammers. Don't be lax on checking the background of the company just because you're not asking customers to buy anything. If something bad happens, it will damage their trust in you.

PPC: Get Paid for Sending Visitors to a Website

There is another type of affiliate program that allows you to make money without selling anything, and that's the pay per click program. Many affiliates purchase pay per click (PPC) ads to promote their own websites, and we'll cover that in more detail later.

Many beginning Internet marketers run pay per click ads such as Google AdSense on their websites. They reason that getting someone to click on a link is easier than getting someone to click on a link and buy something, and that's certainly true. The tradeoff is (in most cases) a lower payout for clicks than for actual sales. But if you can generate enough clicks, you can get a significant amount of passive income rolling in.

One thing that often trips affiliates up when it comes to running PPC ads is the assumption that they can just place the code on a page and forget about it. Then when they don't get the results that they've heard were possible, they figure it was all some sort of hoax and give up on it. But just like every other aspect of your website, pay per click ads often requires some tweaking and patience in order to get it right.

The first step to success with pay per click ads is making sure that the ones that appear on your site will appeal to your target market. In most cases, the ads are selected by an algorithm that examines your site's content and displays ads that relate well to it. If you find that you're frequently getting irrelevant ads, it's a good idea to examine your content and make sure that it's properly optimized for your targeted keywords. If you're just getting ads from certain advertisers that appear to not be going over well with your audience, you can usually block those ads.

Once you've got the right kinds of ads showing up, you need to test the ad blocks in various positions on the page. There's no one spot that's best for every website, so this is something that it pays to experiment with. Some sites find that ads in the sidebar do best, while others have better luck with them in the header or within the content of the page. You could also try out ad blocks of different sizes to see which ones generate the most clicks.

There are sites out there that generate huge amounts of income using only Google AdSense and other types of PPC ads. But they are also good to use on sites where you promote pay per lead or pay per sale programs. As long as you take care to ensure that your site doesn't look like one big advertisement, pursuing multiple streams of income can work to your advantage.

Recurring Income , How To Get Paid for the Same Sale
Over and Over Again

With most affiliate programs, you promote a product, and if you make a sale, you get a commission on it. That's a good thing. But what if you could get paid over and over for the same sale? Wouldn't that be even better?

This is why many affiliates focus their efforts on programs that offer residual income. When they promote things like web hosting, membership sites and the like, they get a commission each month for as long as the customer keeps the service or remains a member. After they've made a few sales, it adds up to a nice monthly income.

Of course, not everyone will be a lifelong customer. But if you're promoting good products and services to the right people, a great many of them will stick with those products and services for months or years. In a year's time, you'll make twelve times more money from the sale as you would have with a one-off sale.

There's some sort of membership or ongoing service that will appeal to just about any niche. And if you can't find one for yours, consumables are the next best thing. Vitamins, pet food and other things that we have to buy again when we run out of them offer the potential for regular income if the customers are loyal. But it's important to seek out high quality products if you plan to go this route. Otherwise, you'll probably end up making one-time sales anyway.

Adding some programs that offer residual income into your affiliate marketing mix will allow you to earn more money with the same amount of effort. If you need ideas, most affiliate networks offer a search function that will help you find the right products to promote. If not, drop them an email. They are usually happy to help, because their affiliates' success is their success, too.

Domains and Affiliate Marketing

Most affiliate marketers are no stranger to the domain name market. At the very least, they probably have a domain name for their website or blog. And some have dozens of domains in their possession.

There are a few ways that domains can be used in affiliate marketing. Many affiliates create niche sites or blogs for the sole purpose of promoting affiliate programs. Some also purchase domains to redirect to their affiliate links. This makes the URL shorter, easier to remember and more appealing.

If you're serious about affiliate marketing, you'll probably end up with several domains. But it is possible to go overboard with them. Some affiliates feel the need to buy a domain for every affiliate program they join. Not only is that expensive, it can also get extremely confusing.

Even if you are buying domains to redirect to your affiliate links, you don't necessarily have to buy one for each and every program. If you belong to several programs in the same niche, you could use a general domain name and create sub domains for each program. For example, if your niche is herb gardening, you might be an affiliate for a seed company and the author of a book on herb gardening. But instead of buying a domain for each program, you could get a domain like herbgardening.com and create the sub domains seeds.herbgardening.com and book.herbgardening.com to redirect to your affiliate links.

It's also possible to be too conservative when it comes to buying domains. In general, it's best to have a domain for each niche you're in. And in some cases, you might find that you need two or three for the same niche. There are no hard and fast rules. Just do what's most comfortable (or most profitable) for you.

Selecting Domains

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, it wasn't too difficult to get any domain name you wanted. Today, it's a different story. It's pretty much impossible to get a good one-word .com domain name, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to get good names with other extensions.

But if you're choosing targeted niches, one-word domain names probably aren't your best bet anyway. They don't have much SEO value, because Internet users don't often do searches for just one word. They are more likely to search for phrases, so domain names that contain those phrases are better choices. If you can snag a domain name that contains your targeted keywords, you'll have an easier time getting good search engine rankings.

A domain name shouldn't be too long, though. If it is, it will be hard to remember. It's true that most visitors will click on a link from another site or bookmark your site if they're interested, but if someone hears your domain name and wants to visit, wouldn't you want him to be able to do so? If he can't remember it, you miss out on a potential sale. For the same reason, it's wise to avoid using abbreviations, numbers in place of words (“4u” instead of “for you,” etc.), and words that are difficult to spell.

There is some debate as to whether you should use hyphens in domain names. At one time, it appeared that search engines favored domains with hyphens between the words when ranking for the keyword phrase appearing in the domain name. But today, it doesn't really appear to make a difference. Now the most common reason for using hyphenated domains is to get a name that is already taken in the non-hyphenated form. As long as you don't use more than one or two hyphens, it shouldn't have too much of an impact on your type-in traffic.

As far as extensions go, it's a good idea to try for a .com domain first. Even today, it's the most familiar extension to the average Internet user. But if you absolutely can't get a good .com for your niche, try another extension. .net is a good one, and .org gives the impression that your site is trustworthy (even though anyone can get an .org domain). If you're promoting products that are seen on TV, a .tv extension is perfectly acceptable.

If you get a really good domain, it might be to your advantage to get several forms of it. Hyphenated, non-hyphenated, .com, and .NET are good variations to have. You might even consider purchasing common misspellings of your domain. There's no need to do this for every domain, but if you're lucky enough to get your hands on one that contains a frequently searched keyword phrase, it could be worth the cost.

A good domain name can certainly have a positive impact on your traffic. The pool of available domains is constantly shrinking, but with a little creativity you can come up with something that's both memorable and appealing to the search engines.

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