Exponentially Compound Your Squidoo Earnings With Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing-definition: Revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a hybrid model.

The advertisers/merchants are typically referred to as affiliate merchants and the publishers/salespeople are referred to as affiliates.

Benefits of affiliate marketing include the potential for automating much of the advertising process (accepting & approving applications, generating unique sales links, tracking & reporting of results) and payment only for desired results (sales, registrations, clicks).

Paying only for performance shifts much of the advertising risk from the merchants to the affiliates, although merchants still assume some risk of fraud from partner sites.

Affiliate marketing has contributed to the rise of many leading online companies. Amazon.com, one of the first significant adopters, now has hundreds of thousands of affiliate relationships. It is not uncommon to see industries where the major players have affiliate programs--often structured in a similar manner and making similar competitive changes over time.

A lot of fancy words, but what does it really mean?

Let's say I am a medium sized company like Jelly Belly. I have a great product. I may sell it in stores and also directly to customers online. However, I would like to reach a larger group of customers without spending a lot of advertising dollars.

So what do I do? I look for people to sell my product for me, and when they do, I give them a small percentage of the sale as a thank you. When you sign on to become an affiliate marketer, you become a salesperson for the company you have agreed to represent. Every time you make a sale for them, they give you a thank you in the form of a royalty.

Some companies will allow you to sign up with them directly, but most companies work through an affiliate service. The affiliate service will recruit salespeople and help screen them. Then the product or service company has the final approval over each salesperson (affiliate marketer).

Technically, affiliate marketing is a term that could be used for any company's sales force, but in today's world it specifically points to a relationship that is conducted online and involving online sales.

In most cases, there is no monetary cost involved in affiliate marketing to the affiliate marketer. It is almost always free to sign up, and some programs even give you a reward just for signing. The real price is in the time it takes to build your marketing program, which for the purpose of this lens, we will assume is on Squidoo writing lenses. Of course, you can also market on your blog, your website, or any other article writing site that allows you to place html links.

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Pepperjam Network is one of the newest affiliate networks. PJN is attracting a lot of new more hip companies that appeal to a younger market. In order to attract new affiliate marketers, PJN is offering an incentive to sign up with them. You get $10 just for trying them out. $10 Sign On Bonus for All New Pepperjam Network Affiliates. Pepperjam Network has some great companies in it's network and is growing rapidly.

Here is what they say about themselves:

PJN is designed to make the experience of affiliate marketing profitable and educational for both merchants and affiliates. Unlike most other traditional networks PJN uses Web 2.0 technology to provide affiliates and merchants with an easy-to-use, clean interface. In addition, PJN offers industry leading SID-level tracking and reporting - this robust technology is especially beneficial to search marketing and sophisticated super affiliates that want to take advantage of the most up-to-date technology available to track at the keyword level.

ATTN BLOGGERS: The Pepperjam Network Referral Program is a great opportunity for you to make money by referring your readers to join Pepperjam Network. Write a review of the entire Network or simply talk about pepperjamADS, Pepperjam Chat, or one of the other cool features of Pepperjam. Our top affiliates are blogging about Pepperjam Network and making money on every referral they send!

Shareasale is another affiliate network with a longer history. They do not give sign on bonuses, but they do offer referral bonuses. You can also get referral bonuses for referring new merchant clients to them.

Shareasale has a long list of merchants to choose from in just about every category. You do have to check to make sure that merchants allow you to link directly to products or only to banners and general text links. Not all merchants allow that.

Also, some merchants interact much more with the affiliates offering higher commission percentages or extra bonuses if you will agree to do extra specific tasks for them. Some examples are writing a lens to promote a specific merchant or adding a specific banner to your lens or blog. One example of this is my lens Asian Weddings. Exotic. Mysterious. Beautiful. That lens was written to promote MyWeddingFavors.com. MyWeddingFavors offered their affiliates a small bonus of $2 to write a lens featuring them. Then, they had to approve the lens.

I like Shareasale, but I find this network a little more cumbersome to work with. However, on the positive side, Shareasale has companies that I would like to market that I cannot find on any other network. To learn more about Shareasale, click the box below.

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Click here to posters!

Allposters is a great affiliate to have to add wonderful free images to your lens. If anyone clicks on the pictures, and buys an item, you will earn a royalty. It solves much of the problem about using pictures without copyright permission for many subjects, and you can earn a commission at the same time. Allposters' database of images is quite extensive. I have used the pictures in several of my lenses. One example is this lens The Nile River - Interesting History. In this lens, the pictures are interspersed throughout the lens and are clickable, but they are not displayed as for sale. With Allposters, you have several html choices as to how much verbiage you want to accompany your pictures. I make my choices depending on what I want the pictures to do in the lens. All the pictures in this lens are from Allposters.

Allposters is a great asset to have in your back pocket. Here is the Allposters says:

Lensmasters! - Add hundreds of thousands of images to your site - Free!

Join the AllPosters.com Affiliates Program and get access to hundred of thousands of images for your site. AllPosters.com has images from popular movies, music groups, sports teams, fine art, and much more. Adding these images to your site will enhance your content.

Furthermore, you get paid for improving your site with poster/print images! All of the images you use will link to AllPosters.com where your site visitors can make purchases. When they buy something, AllPosters.com pays you 25% - 30% of the sale. If the visitor decides to purchase within 10 days of their last visit from your website, you'll still earn commission on the sale! It's easy to sign-up, build links, and track your sales.

Sign up today!

Make Money While You Sleep!
Build Your Business Online With Affiliates and Joint Ventures

Commission Junction happens to be my personal favorite of all of the affiliate networks I am part of. Now it is interesting that CJ does not give affiliates any kind of incentive to help sign up other affiliates. I am sure that is because they don't need any help.

Commission Junction has what I believe are the most user friendly systems in place for the affiliate to use. Just about all of the merchants have product links for you to use in your marketing. They also seem to have many more choices in banners and text links. They have many more companies that you probably have heard of before, and they just have many more companies.

Now that is not to say that other networks are worthless. I think it is beneficial to have at least two available to you. After all, it does not cost you anything but time to try them out.

Some of the features I like:

Search system works easily
Good list of companies
Searchable product feature
Ability to choose encrypting and how the page will open
Easy to understand instructions
Easy to add and delete merchants

I am learning that putting in links to products seems to catch readers attention better than just banner ads. Here is an example of a lens where I used product links--The Top 10 Reasons that I Love to Work With PMC.

Here is the link to check into Commission Junction.

Captain Squid has created some terrific videos about how to use Commission Junction in conjunction with Squidoo. To view the videos, Click here!.

Another large affiliate network is LinkShare. I have used LinkShare the least of all the networks, however they have some really cool companies on their list that I love.

One of the think about affiliate marketing is that you can track your success fairly easily by the reports on each affiliate site. They will tell you how many times someone loaded the page, clicked on your link, how many sales you have, what they purchased, and some sites will tell you even more details.

By adding some additional data, you can find out which page the link was on (SID-site id), and which advertiser's link was clicked (MID-merchant id). Your affiliate id is called the AID. Below are the links to both LinkShare US and UK.

For LinkShare US:



For LinkShare UK:

Amazon was one of the first companies to get started with affiliate marketing. You can sell just about everything from Amazon. That is because Amazon does not just sell books. No indeed, Amazon has joined with many other companies to sell their merchandise as well.

Be aware that not all of Amazon's products will earn you a commission, however. That is because they either don't have much of a margin in the sale or they are sharing the margin with the end seller of the product.

If you go to Amazon's site, it will tell you when a product is not available for commission. You also don't get the same royalty on all products.

With Squidoo, you don't have to sign up to be an Amazon affiliate to sell products from Amazon. You can just go to one of the Amazon modules and sell products that way. If you do, you will earn a commission, but you will share the commission with Squidoo.

For more information on Squidoo's Amazon modules, read Amazon Module Basics.

Dremel 761-03 7,000/14,000 RPM Cordless Pet Nail Grooming Rotary Tool

You can also sign up to be an Amazon affiliate directly. If you do, you will not have to share the commission with Squidoo. You will, however, have to build the link yourself and configure it the way you want in a module. Amazon does have several tools available to help you do so. To the right is a sample link directly to an Amazon product that is using the tools from SquidUtils.

For UK readers--Dremel Cordless Pet Nail Grooming Rotary Tool (761-030; 7,000/14,000 RPM)

Clickbank is another affiliate network that many people use. Clickbank is a seller of electronic books also called e-books. There are books on about every topic you can think of on Clickbank, including dieting, sales techniques, and several Squidoo related e-books.

There is somewhat of a back and forth controversy about Clickbank as an affiliate network because of the way they generally sell products. Clickbank uses what they call a hoplink to draw people in, and some of the hoplinks are hard sell.

A hoplink is a promotional page created to sell the customer the product and convince them to buy them. It is up to you whether you like the style of selling that Clickbank uses.

And of course, you can pick and choose which products that you choose to sell.

Here is the link to Clickbank:
Find out more about Clickbank.

I have not listed all of the affiliate networks out there. And there are always new ones coming along, but now I am going to go on to what you do after signing up for an affiliate or two.

Okay, so you have chosen an affiliate program. Now what is the next step?

In most cases, you will need to pick a few companies that you would like to market.

You can go about this two ways:

1. You can find companies that resonate with the topics on your lenses. Remember that experienced lensmasters all agree that we write our best lenses about topics that we are passionate about. Therefore, pick companies that work well with topics you have already picked.

2. You can find companies that you are passionate about and write passionate lenses about their products or services.

Unless you are an experienced writer, any other choice will net you a less than stellar result.

Do not think that just because you have created a good to great lens with products to sell that people will automatically start buying them.

Don't forget some cardinal rules about traffic and sales.

Your best bet is to determine who your target market is--in other words, what kind of people would be interested in your topic.

I have a series of lenses on maternity clothes. The main lens in that cluster is Announce Your Pregnancy in Style. I bet you can guess who the target market is for this lens. You guessed it--mothers to be.

Since I have determined my target market, I will market this lens to places where I think mothers to be might look. This is very important to find the right traffic for your lens.

Don't think too much about marketing your lens to Squidoo members. It doesn't hurt to get ratings and blessings along the way. However, your long lasting traffic will be coming from searchers on the rest of the internet who are looking for information on your topic. Those are the ones to spend your time marketing to.

Then when those qualified readers get to your lens, they will be primed to buy your products. For my lens, pregnant women will be the ones who will want to buy products that I am offering.

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The most successful lensmasters write their lenses in groups on a tightly focused topic. This is not a new idea, but I am going to repeat it anyway.

If you are writing about living green as a main topic, choose several subtopics to write your lenses around. Then your lenses can be interwoven through various links--featured lenses, link plexos, link lists, and so on.

When you add in your affiliate products, they will be products that are also on the same topic. On your lens, for instance on green baby gifts, you will sell green baby gifts. On your lens about green household improvements, you will sell green household improvement items. These items will appeal to mostly the same target market of people who want to live a green life.

Captain Squid explains this concept well in his blog post What is a Lens Cloud?

You may have your own image to help you with this concept. I see it as a cluster, Captain Squid as a cloud. But the idea is to get people to one of your lenses, and then from that one to at least one more. That gives you a higher potential of selling them a product.

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