The Pros And Cons Of Affiliate Marketing

If you are an affiliate marketer or are looking to become and affiliate chances are then you probably heard of clickbank, or maybe even commission junction? These are two of the top places where you can go to, and join if you want to become an affiliate and sell products online.

So how can you go about making money online using clickbank? Well first you most open an account and get a username and password. This username will become your clickbank affiliate id, and it will be used for every signal product you wish to sell online. Once you are a member you may sell any clickbank product.

Now that you are and affiliate you will be joining a market that is growing faster and faster each day, and good affiliates can earn a lot of money online. The truth is though not all affiliates will earn that much money. You will see people make different amounts of money because they do not put in the time or effort as some others might.

The best way to go about marketing any clickbank affiliate product would be search engines like google, yahoo, and msn. You could also try things such as article marketing, and using a lead capture page and sending all of your leads emails. All of these are great ways to market any type of affiliate program you might be in.

You may ask yourself which product should you promote. Which one sells the best? The truth is that all of the clickbank products will sell. You just have to market them correctly in order to see any profits. Maybe you could try to market a product that has less competition so you could see high conversion rates, and make more money.

Most of your top affiliate markets will also usually try to promote more then one product or business program. This is how they make their passive income and residual income over time. Working with one program is fine, but you may want to branch out and promote two or even three to make sure you have a steady stream of income coming in.

Always remember when promoting any type of business opportunity that what you put into it is what you will get out of it. Time after time people will fail, because they lack the effort and time to put into promoting something. You must always remember that you are working from the ground up, and that it will take time.

Turn Your Lenses Into Cash! SQUIDOO DESTRUCTION.

There are few things more annoying than those moments when you've put in a considerable amount of effort, sweat, mental anguish and pain in promoting an affiliate program product just to get cheated out of your hard-earned commission by of all things the affiliate program itself! Sure who doesn't know that there are and will always be wily marketers ready to pounce on your affiliate Id and swap it with theirs if you haven't disguised or cloaked it (and no this is not an article promoting affiliate cloaking software...all the ones I have ever bought never ever worked! If you truly want to mask your links for free go to tinyurl.com) But back to the problem on hand...getting conned by the affiliate program itself? OUCH! Now that's a low blow indeed!

So let's break it down and see how this can happen. Let me add here that just occasionally by the way, such scenarios are the results of a mistake, but more often than not it is done intentionally. The real kicker though is that those websites offering affiliate programs designed to enrich the merchant yet leave you, the affiliate, out in the cold are legally well within their rights; i.e., you can't go blabbing to the web police crying foul play and expect any retribution or justice so the onus is on you to sniff out those sneaky merchants.

Case Of The 7-Day Affiliate Cookie Versus The 15-Day Free Trial!

Huh? A 7-Day cookie yet the merchant is offering a 15-day free trial! Can you see what's wrong with this picture? But just in case you don't, let me clarify things by explaining what cookies are. Simply put, a cookie is a harmless piece of computer code or script that captures harmless information (such as identifying a computer through current and subsequent visits, websites visited and date of visit). This is of importance to you because this is how a merchant can tell that a particular customer who purchased from them was referred by you, thus ensuring you get your commission. The importance of cookies does not stop there.

There're cookies and there are cookies! Cookies are coded to expire after a set period of time. So if a merchant supplies you (the affiliate) with cookies programmed to expire after 120 days, this means that if one of your referrals makes a purchase anytime within those 120 days, you'll get credited for that sale and get paid your commission. Remember, it generally takes at least several instances of exposure to a product before a person is ready to buy! So the longer lasting the cookie, the better...at least from your point of view as an affiliate.

Right, so let's take a closer look at the merchant website that offered a 7-day cookie for its affiliate program yet at the same time offers its visitors a 15-day free trial period of the product. I'm sure you've caught on to the scam now...there's no way that you are going to get any commission because by the time the prospective buyer (who originated from your website through your affiliate link) is ready to purchase once their 15-day free trial is up, the cookie encoded with your affiliate link would have already expired!

So what can you do in such a case? If you really like the product and feel quite strongly about promoting it, you could contact the merchant and inform them that you'd love to promote their product but you happened to notice that they also offered a co-existent 15-day free trial period. Politely point out to them that that 15-day free trial effectively nullifies any possibility of you being able to generate any commissions with a 7-day affiliate-link cookie in place. Then graciously ask if they could extend the cookie duration to a 30-day period which should at least make it possible for you to actually get awarded your rightful commissions.

Nine times out of ten the reply (if you get any at all) is going to be NO unless you are a heavy hitter with an impressive volume of traffic or an extensive subscriber list...and if you also have evidence to backup your claims of heavy-hitter stardom . If, however, you still get a negative response or no response at all then don't waste any more time and simply move on and forget all about promoting that program, unless you are a natural born altruist (a selfless person dedicated to help others at no personal gain).

The Multi-Pay Option Game

This is another sneaky way in which you can be duped out of your rightful commissions, although this is not as deadly effective as the free-trial-period scam. Okay let's consider a scenario in which you're promoting an affiliate product listed at Click Bank (probably the largest online directory listing of digital marketing products available for affiliate promotion). A scenario such as this would have you send visitors from your site to the merchant's website via a link encoded with your Click Bank affiliate Id (the Click Bank Id is part of the cookie encoded with your affiliate information enabling them to distinguish that it was indeed you who referred the purchaser.)

In an ideal situation, the prospect who you referred would then purchase the product and hey you just got commission! But what if the sneaky merchant gives that prospective buyer another payment option on their landing page, such as payment through PayPal? Your referral might decide hmmmm, lemme use the funds in my PayPal account instead...and just like that your commission is gone! As I pointed out earlier, this method does not cheat you out of your commissions as effectively as the free-trial one above, because in this case you have a 50/50 chance of getting your commission but in the other case you basically have none!

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One method that works great to promote affiliate programs is viral marketing by means of articles. There are always new websites going up, and they need content, when you submit articles to free directories, you are actually employing a couple of different marketing techniques that will help your affiliate marketing efforts.

The first advantage you get from writing articles, and submitting them to article directories, is that for each directory listing your article, you will be getting a link back to your affiliate marketing site. Getting back links to your website should be one of your priorities, as the more links that you have to your site, the higher you will rank with the search engines.

The next advantage to writing articles, and submitting them to article directories is that these articles are free for other webmasters to use as content, as long as they keep your link and information in place. This leads to even more back links to your site; as well as more exposure for your site.

This is why it is so important to actually supply some useful information in your articles, and to ensure that you employ SEO marketing strategy when the articles are created. You want to entice readers to learn more about what you know, which in turn, will lead them to click on you affiliate network links. Ensuring that your articles are search engine optimized will mean that, no matter which site the article is on, the search engines will list it higher in search results; this equals more exposure for your site. The more articles you have out there, the more exposure you'll have for your site, and the more opportunities you'll have to make sales.

Another way in which writing articles can help your affiliate marketing strategy is to provide your own site or blog with useful content. You need great content in order to be successful in affiliate marketing programs, and the best way to do this is to write your own original content.

Sure, posting articles from article directories will help provide you with some content, but it will not be original content. Articles that provide original content are very important, for one it is information that your visitors won't be able to find anywhere else on the internet, and for another, it will result in you having more links going to your site, that away from it.

Google often ranks websites on how many back links that site has; as compared to how many links the site has to others. If you have more links to other sites than you have to your site, it will influence your search engine ranking.

Using SEO marketing with your site's articles can also help to increase your position with the search engines.

There are several good reasons to use articles in your affiliate marketing strategies, you'll definitely increase your site's exposure with articles, and these will likely increase sales for you're the affiliate programs you are promoting, which will equal commissions.