Starting your own affiliate program can be a very worthwhile exercise, and if you can organise yourself with the right tools and get motivated affiliates, then you have a golden opportunity to take your earnings to the next level.

A lot of you will be very familiar with the power of exponential traffic that is generated by affiliate marketers, so with this in mind let’s look at some of the big players who expertly manage this resource to explode their earnings. I have often thought about getting into this lucrative area of marketing, it stands to reason that having an army of affiliates promoting your product is going to drive traffic and pay out big time. Now assuming that your product is the next big hot potato on the market, I just can’t see how you can lose. But of course even if you have the next best thing since waffles, if you can’t generate interest or setup a solid marketing campaign then you might as well go home.

Part of The Solution the tools of the trade

JV & Affiliate Management System (video)  or go to  http://www.fantasos.com/

This being a very popular subject you can find plenty of examples of affiliate systems that offer an easy shortcut to solve your woes. These so called turnkey affiliate systems can be up and running in literally minutes. To give you an idea of a good affiliate program just check out any of the top Internet marketer’s offers, I’m pretty sure most of you will have used some of the more popular scripts that proliferate the web; these scripts allow affiliates to logon and gather promotional materials for their websites, emails, forum signatures and many other tools.

Next Step; Finding Affiliates to promote your product

Finding affiliates to promote your site isn’t easy. In fact, unless you’re already an established ‘name’ in your market, it can be almost impossible. So, what to do! Well even if you do everything in your power to get affiliates motivated, only a small percentage will ever take any action! So it’s critical for any successful affiliate program to continually recruit motivated affiliates.

Where do you look for motivated affiliates?

To get the best results you have to look at the affiliate directories, and unless you have a bottomless pocket then this is the most cost effective method. You can of course spend your hard earned through advertising which could run into thousands of dollars. If you have a big list then you can promote your affiliate program by email. So get yourself listed in the affiliate directories, as many as you can submit to. Getting listed in directories is an essential component to any successful affiliate program.  It’s a very effective way for top affiliates to find you.

There’s also another point you should consider, there are dozens of top directories out there and submitting to all of them can be long and tedious! You can find it literally takes you an entire day to submit a single product. If you have more, then it could take over a week! You can outsource it, which will cost you again but there is a better solution. Start using custom auto submit software to take all the agro and stress away from this task. Here’s a link for you to check out “Instant Affiliate Submitter” and no, it’s not an affiliate link. I’m sure there is lots of other submitters out there, just Google it.

Another example for affiliates to use

JV scripts or Joint Venture scripts are used by all the top IMs, and the list building stats can be very impressive and are well founded. This is also a great place to recruit fresh affiliates although the turnover will be determined by the popularity of the event.

What is a JV Giveaway Event?

The term JV stands for Joint Venture which means that 2 or more marketers join up with the goal to increase their return of investment. In terms of internet marketing this means that many marketers come together and each of them gives a downloadable product away for free. These can be ebooks, software, graphics or whatever benefits the visitors of the giveaway event.

At a giveaway event marketers, also called contributors, signup for free to list their free ebook inside the member’s area. This mostly happens when the event is in the pre-launch phase. Once the event launches, members can signup and download the different free offers… but not instantly… they have to signup for each product that they want to access. This way the contributor gets the name and email address from a member and has the person on his opt-in list.

I hope this article has given you food for thought, perhaps some of you may allready have your own affiliate program. Let me know of your experience with any tips that you may have for the readers.  Thanks’ for reading

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Instant Affiliate’s Dream

Forum Marketing is for a lot of marketers a very happy hunting ground for prospects, but more importantly to tap into the rich feedback from newbie’s. So with this in mind I will start off with an introduction into Forum marketing and expand and explore this medium in the coming weeks.

If you are serious about promoting your website or blog on the Internet, then you could do no worse than forums, a great option for you. These forums are easy to join and require no upfront cash deposit to be a member. Forums are a storehouse of information and accessible to anyone, these forums are an ideal way to go about advertising your wares, whether it’s your site or an affiliate product.

Depending on your choice of forum they can act as social networking centers, where topics are discussed and information exchanged. So if one can find a forum where discussions are relevant to your own product or field, then the chances of getting your website noticed and popularized are far greater. If you are new to promoting then this should be one of the first steps towards establishing your identity on the Internet.

The thing to remember though, as it is with all kinds of marketing…finesse and decorum is everything. In your rush to get noticed do not over do the charm offensive, just slowly get a feel and settle in. It’s probably wiser to act calm and not seem like you are desperate to market your product. Over eagerness like this is often more likely to offend customer sensibility, leading to possible bans against your website with allegations of spamming.

It is better to leave frequent yet understated messages informing about what’s on offer. Or rather go to forums, which have questions put up regarding matters close to your product and then respond to them. So go and read the threads posted on the forum, figure out how best you can respond to the queries.

Over time this is will help you build a customer base, as people on the forum trust you to be helpful and genuine. Once you have achieved this, all you have to do is subtly lead your prospect to your product.

Overall forum marketing is an easy and profitable option to add to your promotion because it is absolutely free, and you can target a certain niche clientele very easily. Things to avoid… try and avoid promoting your website on irrelevant threads as it might hamper your reputation. Do your promotion in a friendly manner and always follow up enquiries about whether the directed person found your website or blog helpful or not.

Forums are a great way to get feedback, which will help you to improve your product or service, build client rapport, and get new customers. You can tune into their attentiveness, their likes and dislikes. And finally the most important thing to keep in mind, that though beneficial for marketing, these forums are for discussion not sales. So keep this in mind and you will succeed in gathering new friends and more importantly, respect.

Next week: “Why is Forum Marketing so effective?”

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Introduction to Forum Marketing

Find out more >>>

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Banner Cloaker

Part 5:  Q & A on Resell Rights

When you purchase resell rights, you will need to do some research to find out whether purchasing the resell rights will be profitable for you. Not all resell rights products are worth having, believe me there is a lot of junk out there.

First off, take a look at the product itself. Is it a quality product? Even though your name is not on the product itself, your name will be associated with selling the product, and you don’t want to sell junk. So, make sure that the product does what it promises, and that it is indeed of value and worthy of your attention, put yourself in your customers shoes, would you buy it?

Next step, you need to research the market. Is there a market for the product? An easy way to find out is to do a search in Google using keywords that potential customers would use to search for the product. Look at the sites that are advertising similar products. Some key factors to look out for…

The sponsored ads are the ones you are interested in. People and companies do not continually spend money advertising products that are not selling. If money is being spent on advertising, then there is a market for the product. Also look at related magazines to see if money is being spent on advertising.

Read the license agreement before buying the product. If it is not available to you without purchasing first, then walk away. You will want to check the license to make sure that you can market the product effectively, using methods that you know work.

You want to know if the sales letter converts, ask the vendor for conversion rates. Also you will want to make sure that you are allowed to change the sales letter as you see fit. At the end of the day it’s to your advantage to leverage as much control over the sales copy as you can for maximum sales potential.

Also see if you can find out how many people are currently reselling the product. Is the market flooded? Remember that 90% of the people with resell rights either won’t be reselling the product, or they don’t know how to effectively market the product. This is your chance to utilize a missed opportunity by other marketers.

After you’ve looked at all of these issues, and answered all of these questions, you will know whether you should purchase the resell rights product or not. If the product has profit potential, it’s worth buying. So with a bit of number crunching and research on your part you can profit.

Thanks’ for reading, please feel free to leave a comment

Next Week:  Finding the Best Places to Search for Quality Products to Resell

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What to Look for in a Product before Buying the Rights?

If you want to have a unique WordPress theme, then I highly recommend that you give Flexibility a try. I was quite amazed at the whole setup, you can change practically every aspect of your theme, including colours, fonts, backgrounds, headers, logos; the list is endless. You can have a Home Featured Box which i haven’t yet implemented to show off anything you want including widgets HTML images and so on. The best part of this theme is that you don’t need to know any code, so no more messing around in the theme editor. All your theme editing gets done on one page with an easy to use interface; you can even place your Google analytics code and Adsense code all from the same page.

Check it out for yourself you’ll be glad you did!

Quick update; I have decided to remove the footer links in favour of my own. This was done by Donating to Ryan over at Flexibility. Well worth it! Please pay his site a visit and you will see just how good the setup is.

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Flexibility Rock’s

How much traffic do you reckon you lose through the preverbal back door, you know, the visitors that come to your blog only to click away within seconds? Wouldn’t it be nice to get some feedback and gain traffic at the same time, well it is possible.

I hate paying for things on the Internet. I know, as an Internet marketer I should practice what I preach and buy things, but I just can’t bring myself to parting with the cash unless of course it’s an unbeatable offer.

Maybe I’m like this out in the real world too. If given the option of paying for something or getting something not nearly as good for free, I’ll almost always go for the free version. Thinking of the present economic climate I’m sure a lot of people have the same goals in mind.

Anyways, if I hate buying things in the real world, just think how much I hate buying things online. I scour the Web for products similar to the ones that I need and I make do with whatever I find. One thing’s for sure over time you get pretty good at it. It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it.

The thing that I hate paying for on the web the most is advertising. Why should I pay someone else to run my ad if it’s just as easy to trade one of my ads and get the traffic for free. There’s a method to my madness. People swap links and use advertising platforms like Entrecard every day.

The only negative with swapping ads instead of paying for ads is that I’m giving up prime ad space in the exchange. Space that I could stuff with an AdSense is unfortunately clogged up with an ad I gave away in a trade. But wait a minute, this makes sense if your visitors are going to click away, why not give them an option to leave some feedback and at the same time let them see other options to click on.

In my eternal quest for the cheapest options that service my needs, I’ve been on the lookout recently for a better ad exchange program, one that wouldn’t require me to sell my most valuable ad space.

I searched around and I’ve finally found the perfect way to fix my problem. I came across a site called ExitPollAds which is a free membership site that functions like a normal ad exchange, but with one very important difference. ExitPollAds trades ad space on an exit poll that my customers see only after they’ve left my site. It’s quite a simple solution really, with just a few lines of JavaScript you can be up and running in literally minutes.

It’s a great combination between driving traffic to my site and showing my own ads throughout the network for free. There is an option to upgrade which gives you double the credits and a bumper bundle of I.M products. I guess you could try it out and see what your stats bring back. If you want to see the script in action then visit Niche Central, then pop back and let me know what you think

If only everything on the internet was this straight forward. If you want to join in this free ad exchange, just click on the link below. Free stuff on the net just doesn’t get any better than this.

http://www.ExitPollAds.com/187

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Tap into Your Lost Traffic

Welcome to Web-WorkAtHome.com It’s Holiday Time Folks, time to take a Break!

For everybody who has visited my BLOG a big HEARTY THANK YOU. As you will know if you have read my about page, this has been my introduction into the Blogosphere with a few hiccups along the way. It’s certainly been an interesting journey and I think i will stay on track and keep building on my experience. In 2009 I hope to have a brand new THEME to accommodate my ever expanding foray into Internet Marketing with a truckload of helpful tips and advice. Don’t forget! you still have time to enter into Dennis Edell’s Blog contest which is gathering a lot of interest, the contest is open right up to the 12th of January 2009. I will be back again in the New Year probably around the 2nd or 3rd of January once all the cobwebs and hangovers have cleared up and gone. Until then …..

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year from Edinburgh

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Stay Tuned

One constant theme that will find throughout these free applications is 8 minutes! Could it be something to do with productivity?

Read the rest of this article and find out for yourself.

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Free Tools To Promote Your Products

Tools to help you decide

First off we need to gather some information about your chosen niche like how competitive this particular niche is. There are many analytical tools available for you to use, one of my favourites is the Firefox add-on called   Search Status: A Search Extension for Firefox and Mozilla this is a great tool for analysing your competition. Search Status is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any website is performing. Designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar. The list of stats that this extension spits out is very impressive, there are just too many to list, so click through to find out more.

Building your niche site

So now that you have done all your research and are satisfied that you’re chosen niche is a feasible one you will want to start building your site. Choosing niche content builder software is your next important decision. For this article I will be using Content Builder Pro and I will explain why,   Read the rest of this article >>>

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How To Build Your Niche

NOW UNDERWAY

Check out the Blog Contest Page for all of Dennis Edell’s Sponsors which show the  PRIZES on offer!

Dennis Edell from DirectSalesWebMarketing launches his review contest for two of his blogs and invites you to participate. Remember folks there are some great prizes to be had with many cash contributors as well as free memberships with a generous sprinkling of traffic pulling offers for your blog. Be involved and may the best blogger win.  This is my own personal review of Dennis’s two blogs; let me know what you think, thanks.

A bare boned honest opinion from Bill Masson

It will be interesting to see how many non bloggers participate in his competition. That being said there are plenty of blog enthusiasts who love a good challenge, Dennis has the ability to create a buzz and gather interest so I applaud his efforts.    So without further ado

www.DennisEdell.com

First impressions: This is what Dennis calls his Hub blog

Easy on the eye, I like the colours which are fairly neutral but not bland, the opening header clearly shows you what and who this blog is about. The short message in the header breaks the ice and chills you out. He has a well placed and recognisable logo which catches your eye. As I scan the page the first elements that I notice are the top 3 Boxes showing from left to right all the important parts that every blog should include; namely most popular articles Subscribe to our full feed RSS and last but not least Other sites and social networks This tells me quite a lot about other sites and social networks that are linked or owned by this Author.

The blog has a simple and easy navigation of the pages, for the main blog posts there is the usual recent posts and comments. For me this needs to be extended to include more highlighted and targeted previous posts (archived tab goes some way to addressing this issue). There is no monetization other than a swap offer for 125 ad blocks, but never the less this is always a good tactic to bring in advertisers. The blog articles themselves for me are not in depth enough and are too short; it’s more of a micro blogging platform feel about it (suggest a mobile version, Google has info on this)

Badges included tell me that you like to share your links with your readers; these popular badges seem to be on a lot of blogs in the network. There’s no harm in using these badges as long as you don’t over do it.

The pages:

Archives: I don’t see the point in including this page on a new blog; you have your default plugins from WordPress for this. I would add a featured page focusing on popular posts that give value and feedback with plenty of pillar articles.

Contact: You describe your contact details perfectly with different options for the visitors to choose from which in turn puts’ you at ease and invites you to participate. The only other element I would add are some personal social network badges like twitter and a MyBlogLog signature.

About Does the job and tells you about the one and only Dennis Edell,find out yourself.

Finishing off with the footer, disappointed I always look for something more, perhaps some recommended links; this is an often forgotten resource box that needs your attention, why waste the space!

Overall the blog still has that new look, with way too much white space and a lot of developing needed to spruce it up. But remember the blog is new and time will fill in the blank spaces.

www.EasyCashContests.com

Win Cash Online

Since this is very early in development there’s not much to report, same template, which is obvious right away; what make this blog different?  The header and the 125 ad blocks, not much else; I like the “A small branch of DennisEdell.com” strip on the top left corner; your tagline needs to change, too boring and the Font. The colours for me need to be more vibrant to convey the nature of the cash contest theme, show some happy faces, bring some kick ass graphics in to play.

I would introduce more dynamic and interactive elements. Bearing in mind that this is a new and undeveloped site; first off your call to action (more Cool Contest Blogs!) needs to be more inviting for instance “Contact Me For Free Inclusion) with terms for the competition rules (you have some pointers on your about page) but a more dedicated page is required, make it more professional looking.

At the bottom section where you have the Soon to be displayed messages would be a good place to remind visitors of up and coming contests and a recent winners bio box, highlight the winners blog or interests ect’.

Your about Page is excellent I wouldn’t change a thing, you convey your message in a clear and concise way. For a visitors point of view you explain the rules for inclusion perfectly.

Contact Form does its job for both the contest enquiries and general queries.

Footer: again the same problem, not utilising this space with more recommended links and resources. A feedback form for the readers and more bio info about future developments would go some way to addressing this.

Comments Page (both blogs)

Dennis makes use of the comment luv plug-in in both of the blogs and the internal WordPress thread, for me I like to use WordPress Comment Plug-in; for those visitors that are not familiar with the WordPress platform this encourages commenter’s to start a conversation.

So to wrap up; overall I do like both the concept and layout of both blogs and I would stick around for the long term. Its’ not always about looks, Dennis does a very good job connecting with his readers, so for me this is the main reason that I would come back. No doubt over time Dennis will add more elements to compliment these two blog additions and I wish him all the best for the coming new year.

Just remember folks this is only my personal opinion and review I’m’ sure that you have your own ideas about Dennis’s contribution to the blogosphere, so why not have a go The contest is up and running, it closes on the 12^th of January 2009,

Here is a reminder again of the two Blogs under Review and a list of PRIZES,

www.DennisEdell.com

www.EasyCashContests.com

Sponsors & Prizes:

CASH VIA PAYPAL:

Dennis Edell @ Beginner Marketing Tips - $25

Dennis Edell @ Win Cash Online - $25

Dennis Edell @ DennisEdell.com - $25

Yep, I’m personally putting up $75 .

Mirjam @ MeMyselfAndIBlog - $10

Wei Liang @ ABloggerBlog - $10

Rodel @ Lagahit.com - $25

Suzanne Franco @ SuzanneFranco.com - $30

BANNER ADS (1 month ea. w/value if available):

Sherry @ SherrysShopping - 125×125

Sherry @ PinkyPosh - 125×125

Sherry @ AnotherContest - 125×125

Wei Liang @ ABloggerBlog - 125 x 125 ($10)

Superman Joe @ PostBlogger - 300 x 250

Sharmin @ ContestSpot - 125×125

Erwin Tan @ ErwinTan.com -  125×125 ($20)

Jonathan @ How To Blog - 125×125 ($15)

Garry Conn @ GarryConn.com - 468×60 ($70)

ZK @ WebTrafficROI - 125×125 ($20)

Yan @ Blog Setup - 125×125 ($20)

Archie Pennies @ SomeExtraPennies - 125 x 125 for 4 months

TEXT LINKS:

Collin @ FeedFlare - life time blog roll link

Harish @ BloggingKid - 1 month text link ad

Archie Pennies @ SomeExtraPennies - site wide blog roll link for 4 months

EBOOKS:

Peter Lee @ Make Money Blogging - New Home Study Course,”Quit Being a Wage Slave in 10 Easy Steps” ($47)

Ben Pei - @ Make Money Online -  Instant Blog Traffic ($47)

Kathy Hendershot-Hurd @ VirtualImpax - 8 Week Power Blog Launch product ($77)

BLOG REVIEWS:

Mirjam @ MeMyselfAndIBlog - Blog Review ($25)

Superman Joe @ PostBlogger - Blog Review

Nishadha @ rumblinglankan - Blog Review ($20)

ENTRECARD CREDITS:

Sherry @ Heart Random - 500 EC
Sherry @ Name Sherry - 500 EC
Sherry @ SherryGo - 500 EC

Rodel @ Cebupacificairphilippines - 1000 EC

Nishadha @ rumblinglankan - 1000 EC
Nishadha @ YeastInfectionInDogs - 1000 EC

Wiehanne @ Wiehanne Lounge - 500 EC
Wiehanne @ Medan Daily - 500 EC
Wiehanne @ SimplyWP - 500 EC

OTHER:

David R Young Jr @ Niche-It - custom squeeze page template package ($7)

Brian D. Hawkins @ ExtremeEzine - one year Pro membership to YourAdTracker ($39.95)

—-

Good Luck and Be Lucky

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Juicy Contest from Dennis