All About My First List

To help increase the flow of traffic to your website, nothing beats an autoresponder.  These programs can save you a lot of time by answering most of your emails automatically.  They can handle customer support questions, product related questions, or provide information about your company and services.  If you own an online business – an autoresponder is something you should definitely invest in.

Autoresponders can also be used to track your promotions and how effective they are.  These days, autoresponders are one of the best tools that you can get for your online business.  They are used by some of the biggest and most popular online companies, and for good reason.  They simplify your life with your business – and give you more time to dedicate to other things.

If you are planning to submit your website to search engines like Google or Yahoo, you should know that most search engines use autoresponders themselves.  Therefore, if you attempt to contact search engines using your autoresponder, theirs will contact yours and you’ll have a never ending reply of emails that will eventually flood both of your email boxes.

Under no circumstances, should you ever use your autoresponder to subscribe to forums or other discussion type subscriptions.  A majority of the time, these discussion groups and such will email you updates regarding new information.  If you joined with an autoresponder address, your autoresponder will send a response each and every time.  This can get very annoying very fast, and a majority of the time you will end up being unsubscribed.  In this event, it can be very hard for the administrator or webmaster to determine who is using the autoresponder.  Therefore, to make things easier, you should never use your autoresponder with any subscription.

There are some companies out there that completely take advantage of autoresponders.  They will use their autoresponder to respond to automated messages, which will automatically subscribe the “from” address in their mailing list.  This is totally the wrong way to use and autoresponder, and those who use it in this manner are displaying a very negative image.  Using your auto responder this way will send a negative image rather than positive.  Instead of spreading good word about you and your company, people will become upset and spread the word that you should be avoided.

Whenever you use your autoresponder, you should always use courtesy towards your customers and your visitors.  Autoresponders are meant to help your company grow, and help you spread information about your services, products, and your company.  There are many creative and innovative ways that you can use this tool, providing you do it the right way.  Most customers know when they are receiving an autoresponder message, and if you don’t use it the right way they will know it.  Although you can always change or add to the preset messages; most contain a unique signature and address that will always be associated with autoresponders.

The Internet is one of the best ways to conduct business and promote your products.  Autoresponders can help you save a lot of time, although when you use them in the wrong ways, they will eventually get you a negative image.  If you know you are using it the wrong way and continue to do so, you will eventually lose a lot of business and your company will suffer a great deal.  On the other hand, if you always think in terms of courtesy towards your customers, your autoresponder can help you obtain a lot of business and establish relationships with customers who will always spread the word about your company.

If you are an affiliate marketer who wants to make a comfortable living from referring your prospects to other people’s product or service for decent commissions, then you must consider building your own mailing list.

Building your mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best investments you will ever make, as it is time and effort worth spending on. When you strike on a Joint Venture and have a new product or service to endorse, you can look no further than your own mailing list.

Granted, that most affiliates, as in more than 90 percent of them, are not making money from affiliate programs, but this often results from the same amount of effort focused on least effective methods.

While having your own mailing list is, by a long mile, not the only effective affiliate marketing method, you can make affiliate sales very quickly even in the next few hours after sending a sales message, provided that your mailing list is huge and responsive.

This is often true, because owning your own mailing list for you to endorse products and services to is one of the fastest-producing results, beating other affiliate marketing methods imaginable.

In a nutshell, the affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who owns a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.

I’ve been receiving emails from people asking for my advice on which affiliate programs are the best, who pays the most and most often, and many other basic questions. I’d like to answer those questions on this forum, but I can only type so fast.

I went out this weekend looking for content that I could publish here temporarily while I got down to writing. I had a hard time finding unbiased content. Most of the so-called reviews out there are infomercials, and that’s not what I was looking for with this blog. So you’re going to have to bear with me. I’ve been looking and learning and reading and talking, and I’ve got a lot to say. I just need the time to write it down, and I will, starting tomorrow. No, really I will.

In the meantime, you need to ask yourself this — are you ready for an affiliate program, or Internet Advertising in general? I put together four questions you should ask before you embark on your affiliate program or any Internet advertising.

Before I get to the four questions you should ask before you enbark on your affiliate program, I am going to review two concepts that I use often here on Affiliateblog. The first is what I call the macro view of your Internet presence:

Incoming visitors -> Internet Presence < – Sales or Actions

You are really running two campaigns with your Internet presence — the first campaign is concerned with getting visitors to the site, and the campaign is ongoing. The second campaign is to get those visitors to do something. That something may be just to spend more time at your site, or it may be to sign up for something or buy something.

The other represents the process of Internet advertising:

Impression -> Click -> Action

Most affiliate programs pay publishers in the last part of the process, the Action. I’ll be using both of these concepts in my questions. So here we go…

1. Do you know enough about your visitors?

There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there. While some affiliate marketing hubs are experimenting with context-sensitive serving of affiliate banners and banner rotation on affiliate sites, YOU will be the one to decide what kind of products and services you want to offer your visitors. This seems like a minor detail, but it is a major factor in your success.

If you haven’t already, take a look at the stats for your web site over the past month or so. Where do your visitors come from? Have you paid for Google, Yahoo or other search engine traffic? What are the keywords that people used to get to you? More complex and specific search terms tend to result in more immediate conversions, while broader search terms may result in sales later. If people get to your site using what you believe to be broad search terms, you need to be sure that the cookie life (the amount of time that passes between someone from your site visiting the affiliate merchant’s site and the sale) is long.

Do you have textlinks or other advertising on other sites? Do you know the demographics of the visitors from those sites? Have you spoken to the webmaster, owner or manager of the sites on which you advertise and asked him or her about their visitors? Do you know the websites? Have you visited the sites that advertise on the same sites as you? When you investigate all of these things a profile of the visitors to your site should begin to emerge.

Which search engine brings you the most traffic? If it’s Google, the user is slightly more apt to be male, and in the middle (of MSN, Yahoo and Google) as far as propensity toward buying something (42% more likely than the average user). There’s a terrific article on marketingvox.com if you want to see more details. You can also find some interesting demographic info on the major search engines from AQABA.

You should pay particular attention to the domains of your visitors. If you have a lot of AOL traffic for example, you should consider that the profile of the average AOL user is 35 or older (77%) and married (62%).

If you have trouble with textual representation vs. graphical representation (as I do), there is a terrific product called VisitorVille that takes your web logs and animates them. The text is represented as pictures (buildings, people, buses for the search engines, etc). You can see it here. Disclaimer: I am a VisitorVille affiliate.

After all this you should be able to sit down and come up with the profile of a typical visitor. This profile should hopefully include estimates of age, country of origin, education and income.

Try to think like your visitors. Try to anticipate their interests and the products and services they might want to purchase. Affiliate programs raise the bar from PPC — your payment comes at the end of the Internet marketing process (the Action) rather than at the beginning (Impression or Click) like Google Adsense or Doubleclick. You need to apply more brainpower to the process, and you’ll make more money if you do it right.

2. Is your site perfect?

You’re asking someone to buy something from your site. If the pages have sloppy html code, broken links or instability from a bad Cascading Stylesheet, it makes you look cheesy. We’ve all been uncomfortable buying something off a cheesy website. You don’t want to be that website.

Let’s start with the html code. Are you sure there are no errors in it? Have you used an html checker like the one at W3C? I find mistakes in my code all the time. Unless you check your code on several browsers in several resolutions you might not catch an error. The validator will. If you use Cascading Stylesheets you should also visit the CSS Checker.

Speaking of validators, you should check your links often. W3.org also has a link validator.

The site should also be optimized for search engines, be easy to understand and navigate, and should have a sitemap for people (and spiders) to find their way around. You should have had ten of your closest friends take a look at the site and give you their feedback, and you should always listen to unsolicited comments from users with an open mind and place value on them. If someone takes the time from their busy day to send you an email about your site, they feel strongly about it and you should take a close look at what they’re talking about.

Understand that if your Incoming Visitors campaign is not working right, you’re wasting your time with your Sales or Action program.

3. Do you know what kind of ads you’re going to use, and where the ads are going to go?

People have been ignoring banners for ten years. That’s why they shake and make sounds (someday I’ll tell you about the screaming match I had with a creative director the day we put out the first talking banner ad) to try to get your attention. Where you put it on the page is going to make a huge difference. Briefly — banners need to go somewhere the eye naturally rests (next to the masthead, near the navigation, at the bottom of the page).

Placement of any ads is a huge part of getting them noticed or clicked.

A lot of people (including me) believe that text ads should be placed at natural breaks and be close to the same in text size and color as the text. You need to surf around and look at where people place their ads, and you need to figure out where you think they would work on your site.

If you plan to create pages for some of the products you endorse (a great idea), you need to figure out how prominently you want to place the advertising. Most people won’t buy something if they believe you’re shilling for a particular company. They will buy from someone they believe honestly endorses the product or service. You need to figure out how to keep the distinction.

4. What’s your hunch on the right kind of offers for your site?

I ask this question a lot. Now that you have a better idea of the demographics of your visitors, try to decide on which action you think they would be more apt to take — pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale or even pay-per-click (hard to come by) on your site.

If you have a general interest website that gives away free stuff it’s probably going to be difficult to sell people products from that website. It might be smarter to try to get them to sign up for a free products newsletter from one of the affiliate programs, or you may want to look for offers that target the age group of your site rather than offers that target a specific interest. You might be looking for smaller-ticket sales or only leads. Leads get the user to the end of the advertising process chain, but require less of a commitment.

Try to come up with the four, five, six or fifty ways to slice this all up, by type of action, by type of sale or lead, or any other way you can come up with. Then you can go out and find the different offers that might appeal to your visitors. When it comes time to place the ads, try to put different ads in similar spaces on the same pages, and see how they do.

Get your questions answered and you’re ready to take the plunge into affiliate marketing.

No matter what you may have heard about affiliate marketing, it’s impossible for everyone to make 5,000 – 10,000 dollars a month, as there is simply too much competition.  There is also no money that will fall into your hands without you doing anything for it.

With that in mind, you’ll find some high level tips below that will help you make money with affiliate marketing programs on the internet.

1.  Google and Overture
Even though the days of free traffic aren’t completely over, they are surely fading away quickly.  You can choose to work hard creating web pages that score well in the search engines, although it’s very hard to do.

By paying for clicks with Google and Overture, you’ll have the top three positions on the search engines that matter the most.  If you hope to generate web traffic from Yahoo, all you need to do is be at the top of Google.

2.  Your own email list
Sending offers to your very own email list is the ideal way to build freedom and residual income.  Instead of sending traffic away then hoping for the best, you should instead have your own email
list to which you are able to send multiple offers.

3.  Your own affiliate program
If you knew that each filled out form on your site generated .50 cent in revenue, would you still be willing to pay someone else .25 cents to generate that same traffic?

The most overlooked ways of generating traffic is having others generate it for you.  There are many advantages to this method, including the fact that others will be getting your traffic for you.

When it all comes down to it, everything involves paying for traffic in one way or another.  To make more income, you’ll need to invest very wisely in advertising.

Many factors have to be considered when making an advertising plan. Like the type of message to be delivered, the audience to be targeted, how they should be targeted, budget, etc. all of which depends on the nature of the advertisement.

Regarding the type of message to be delivered, try thinking from the point of the customer. What will impress him and catch his fancy. Note down points what the customer expects from the company and what advantage will he have when dealing with the company. Effort should be made to retain viewer or listener’s or reader’s interest in the advertisement until the end. This procedure is known as message selection.

After creating the outline of the picture, pick lines that will actually attract the customer. The message shouldn’t be long enough to bore the customer. Some advertisers are under the illusion that more the matter written, the better the message delivered. Usually they fear that they don’t miss out any information. This does nothing but decreases the effectiveness of the ad and customer is left unsatisfied.

For example, the heading of the advertisement shouldn’t be just “We Sell Clothes”, which is too precise. The liking of the people should be studied and the headline should be designed such that the customer feels that his needs are met. It should also take into consideration seasonal changes like If the season at that time is summer and there are lots of beaches around that area, the heading of the ad should be something like “Summer Clothes for Sale” or “Get the heat off – Buy Swimwear”. The body of the advertisement should talk of the necessities to switch to summer clothes like cotton clothing. It should discuss the health point of view too, like cotton cannot be used as swimwear as it will cause contamination, therefore the swimwear is made of synthetic material. Also include lines about swimwear for overweight people.

Ads are either traffic builder or relationship builders or reputation builder. Suppose the budget involved is less, the target should be relationship builder. Because once the customers are established, they will start trusting the company and won’t switch to other companies. According to a research it takes ten percent less resources to retain existing customers than attracting new customer. If the focus is on brand recognition, the advertisement should be traffic building.

The next point is whether the advertiser wants quick results or long lasting results. If quick result is desired, then a time limit should be levied. Like in case of seasonal sales, the customer hurries to get advantage before the offer is over. So quick results are expected in this case. But the disadvantage with advertisement with time limit is that the customer are bound to forget about the product or the company within a short period and it doesn’t creates a deep impact on the minds of the customer.

Competing against rival company’s ad also contributes to a successful advertising plan. The power of the message should be compared to that of the competitors’. It doesn’t mean that the advertiser should use the same plan like his competitor, it would look like imitation and effectiveness will be decreased. But the advertisement should be planned smartly via a different and effective path, to out-do the competitor’s advertisement.

The description of the product is also very vital like suppose an advertisement is made for a restaurant, it will get customers immediately, if it is attractive. But if the advertisement is for a computer, it won’t yield immediate results, as it’s not every day that someone buys a computer. This is called analysis of the purchase cycle.

If targeting for a higher impact, newsletter is the best bet. But if the newsletters are sent to the real potential customers, then this approach should be adopted for message delivery. It should only be opted be after thorough analysis, no matter what the budget is. Another important point is to always hire a professional advertiser or an ad writer because not hiring one will sometimes be more expensive and results in more losses.

An opt-in list can be quite crucial to any site or internet based company. Even for a small venture such as a niche profit site an opt-in list can make a world of difference and also add some extra income for your pocket. Rarely would you see an e-commerce site, big or small, that is without an opt-in list.

An opt-in list allows for a company to market their wares and site via an e-mail. With an opt-in list, a site and a subscriber consents to sending and receiving a newsletter from your company. Through this, you can keep your subscribers abreast of what is currently available in your site as well as whatever is coming out.

And because there is mutual consent between the two parties, any mail sent to the list is not considered as spam mail. There is a great number of successfully read promotional materials such as catalogs, newsletters and such that are sent because the subscribers themselves have signed up for them, meaning, they do want to be sent those items.

Building a list is crucial, only a small percentage actually subscribes for an opt-in list. Many people find promotional mails annoying but of you provide a good newsletter or promotional material, you will see your list build up and grow. You can also achieve this by having good content on your site. If people like what they see and read on your site, then they surely would want more. Newsletters would be a way to attract them back to your site. A little teaser or appetizer if you will.

But other than marketing your wares and your services, an opt-in list can also be used to earn extra profit. Not all lists can be used though. It would be good to first build a successful list with a huge number of subscribers. The more subscribers you have, the more money you can get. Here are seven ways to make money using nothing more than your list.

1) Place advertisements. There are many corporations who will be willing to pay to put their banners and ads on a list with many subscribers. Selling or renting out lists is not a good idea so rather than doing that, many companies would just rather place ads with lists that have a huge subscriber base. Your newsletter could be placed with many ads and each one spells money.

2) Have affiliations with other companies that have at least a semblance or relation to what your site is about. Here other companies will provide links and brief descriptions of what they offer, products and services. With every click made on the link that directs or leads a subscriber from your list to their site, the company will pay you. This P4P or pay for performance.

3) Make deals with other companies by asking for a small percentage of sales done through your list. With every sale done by customers that have come from your list and have gone there because of your newsletter, the other company will pay you a small percentage of your sales. The more people who buys from them, the more earnings you get.

4) You may also get products from other sites on a consignment basis and sell them to your list via your newsletter. Place descriptions, articles and photos of the product in your newsletter. There will be those who will buy from you and when that happens, you can order the product from the other site and sell it to your buyer.

5) Sell e-books or a compilation of your articles on your list. Manuals and how-to articles are in great demand. Many people will be willing to shell out money to gain knowledge about a certain topic and subject. With your existing list trusting your expertise in that area, an e-book could be offered and sold or used as an incentive.

6) Create a network out of your list. Get people to invite more people to view your site and subscribe to your list. The larger your list is, the more people will be able to click on your links and affiliate links as well as make your advertisement rates higher.

7) Subscribers are willing to pay for information if they know that it can be trusted and relied upon. Use your list to get more and more people to subscribe to you as well as browse your site. Lastly, you can use your list to earn money by making them your partners. Your list will be the bloodline of your growth and increase.

Home business owners are usually involved with affiliate marketing.  Some produce their own products, some sell products for other companies, and others do a combination of both.  If you’re running a small business from home, or are at least considering it, here are some tips that will help you succeed.
1.    First, you need to decide whether or not you want to develop and sell your own product(s).  If so, then you will need to sign up for an affiliate program as a vendor.  If you don’t have your own product(s) to sell, you can sign up as an affiliate and promote products on behalf of other companies.
2.    Next, you need to be an expert on whatever product you wish to promote.  If you decide to become an affiliate, make sure you choose to promote products that you are familiar with.  Don’t make the mistake of trying to sell something that you know nothing about just because it’s popular and/or pays out a high commission.
3.    Build your own website.  Yes, even if you don’t have your own products, you’ll still need a website for promoting others.  The affiliate program will assign you a “hoplink” that you can put on your site that will track all your sales.  Choose a catchy domain name that is easy to remember.
4.    You can promote your website in a variety of different ways, including:  article marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), advertising through Google AdWords, participating in social networking sites, such as popular forums.  Whatever you do, though, don’t spam!  Spamming will only be counterproductive, which will hurt your web business and lower your chances of success.
5.    Offer the visitors of your site a free Ezine.  Starting a mailing list is essential where internet business is concerned.  Make sure you give them the option to “opt in” and verify their registration so that you won’t ever get accused of spam.  Send out regular emails filled with informative content that is relative to their interests.  Don’t fill your Ezines up with useless junk and ads.
6.    Always remember to thank your customers.  If you’re selling another company’s products, make sure that the vendor treats customers with respect.  After all, if you want consumers to buy the products through your site, you should at least ensure that the vendors you’re working with are reputable and trustworthy.
Making a living by working on the internet isn’t hard—you just need to make sure that you know what you’re doing and that you have a good, solid plan.  Keep in mind that the majority of new affiliate marketers fail because they don’t want to spend time doing research and lack the motivation for seeing their plans through.  Just take your time, follow the aforementioned tips, and put some effort into your site and marketing, and you will do just fine!

If you’ve been trying to make money on the Internet for some time and you’re just not as successful as you know you can be, or if you’re brand new to it and don’t have the slightest idea what to do, having a mentor or coach can be an answer to your prayers.  A mentor or coach can show you shortcuts and really speed up the process for a new internet marketer to get from beginner to PayPal frequent check casher.   Even if you’d been modestly successful online, an experienced and uber successful marketer can show you what you’ve missed or fine tune your business model to increase your income.

Mentor
A mentor is usually a more informal relationship.  Perhaps you’ve gotten to know a marketer you respect and consider an expert in your field.  You’ve become friends and you can bounce some questions off him.

You might have mentors in different fields – one who knows WordPress inside and out, another who rocks at Pay Per Click.  You can approach any of these mentors with questions.  You might have strengths they don’t have and can offer to help them out when they need it.

You can also consider mastermind groups as a group of mentors. You bounce ideas off them, get their feedback and guidance, and learn how to overcome obstacles.  They also hold you accountable and expect you to follow through.

Coach
If you prefer a more formal relationship, you’ll want a coach.  A coach gets paid to show you, step by step, what to do.  Some marketers have a coaching program with a lot of material to help you, but you don’t have access to them. This isn’t coaching in the true sense of the word.  Other marketers will give you the information and allow you a limited chance to talk to them.  For example, Jimmy D. Brown’s coaching program allows you to ask him one question a day, Monday through Thursday and he will answer your questions in depth.  The price goes up according to how often you get to communicate with the coach one on one.

A private coach will work with you directly.  You can really ramp up your business quickly this way, but the price may be too high for many new marketers.

There are many marketers who offer coaching services.  The trick is to find the best one for you.  First, you must feel you can trust them and what they say should resonate with you.  Also, consider the business model they follow – is it one you want to use?  If you want to learn how to have success with article marketing, then don’t pick a coach that only does PPC marketing.

Price is another factor.  Generally, the more successful and known marketers charge the most money.  You might find a lesser known, but successful marketer who might have better prices and will be more accessible.

Having a mentor or coach can really help you move forward with your internet marketing business.  They’ve been there, have experience with what works, and can show you what to do.  Commit yourself to learning what they teach you and follow the steps to reach your goals.

Do you know what does it takes to become a successful Affiliate Marketer? Could you tell me the essential ingredients of an affiliate marketing success story? Is there a shortcut to Affiliate Marketing glory? . All these of these questions play around in the minds of affiliate marketers who want to make it big in this business.

If you are anything like I was when I started out; excited and all set to make my fortune as an affiliate marketer and yet not knowing where to start you may have to say what I said, “I don’t have a clue!” If you are new to affiliate marketing can I tell you something? There are some essentials that you must know or you will waste an incredible amount of time and money.

Although affiliate marketing is touted as one of the easiest and most effective ways to earn money online, it is not as easy as it sounds. The wise affiliate marketer plans every action and executes it the best way he can. He should also maximize the potential to earn by utilizing the right tools necessary for a successful Affiliate Marketing business. We have consulted some of the most successful affiliate marketers in the business and below are the top three necessary tools for a successful affiliate marketing business.

Important Tool #1: Your Own Website

The most important and indispensable tool in Affiliate Marketing is your own website. The first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Therefore, you must first concentrate your efforts in building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.

Important Tool #2: Quality Content

One of the most powerful tools for building quality content for your website is writing relevant and informative articles. Consider this, almost all web users go online to look for information, not necessarily to go and buy something. Above all else, make your website full of original, relevant and useful content. People will love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, on the Internet, content is still king and good quality content will not only build your credibility, it can also help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible expert in the field, making you a more-trustworthy endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation on the net is a good step in building loyal customers and articles help establish credibility.

Important Tool #3: Incentives

Competition is extremely tight in the Internet world. You must always be one-step ahead of your rivals to ensure that you capture a significant share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every possible means to encourage people not only to visit your site but also to click and proceed to the websites of the products and services you are promoting. Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can present free software, access to exclusive services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.

Important Tool #4: Link Popularity

The importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. The all-important web traffic is at the top of the list of the most important success vehicles in the affiliate marketing world. Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do what is necessary to achieve a high search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings. Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you must have an aggressive link building campaign.

One of the best ways to do this – at no cost at all – is by submitting articles as mentioned above, with your website’s link in the resource box. Submit to related e-zines and free article sites. You will not only gain exposure, you will also have the opportunity to advertise for free, just include a link back to your site. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Make your articles original, relevant and useful so that more websites will pick them up and post them.

These are but four of the many tools that an affiliate marketer can use to maximize earning potential. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination, creativity, resourcefulness and determination. You can always explore other ideas and adapt other strategies, which you think might help you become an affiliate marketing success.

Are you a webmaster in need of additional income?  Or are you planning to set up an online business but you still don’t have any product to sell?  If so, affiliate marketing may be the best solution for your problems.  With affiliate marketing, you won’t need to worry about the products you have to sell.  All you need to have is a website with sufficient contents that are related to the products of a certain online company offering affiliate programs.  By becoming a member of the program, or by becoming an affiliate, you can start earning a certain amount of money right away!

Affiliate marketing is some sort of business relationship established between a merchant and his affiliates.  In affiliate marketing, an affiliate agrees to direct some traffic to a merchant’s website.  If that traffic is converted into some kind of action, like a visitor purchasing a product on the merchant’s website or a visitor becoming a lead for the company, the affiliate who directed the traffic will be compensated.  Compensation may take the form of either a percentage sales commission for the sales generated or a fixed fee predetermined upon the application of the affiliate on the merchant’s affiliate program.

Promising a lot of benefits both for the merchants and the affiliates, affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular online marketing methods today.  In fact, almost every merchant or retailer site today offers an affiliate program that any one can join into.  Most retailers would entice people to become affiliates or members of their program by promising great benefits like large commissions, lifetime commissions, click through incomes and a lot of other benefits.  But would all these affiliate programs bring off the same benefits?

Most affiliate programs would pay you, as an affiliate, a one-time commission for every sale or lead you brought to the merchant’s website.  Commissions for this kind of affiliate programs are usually large, ranging from 15% to a high of about 60%.  Other affiliate programs would pay you a fixed fee for every click through or traffic you send to the merchant’s site.  Programs like this often pay a smaller fee for every click through, usually not getting any larger than half a dollar.  The good thing about this kind of program, however, is that the visitor won’t have to purchase anything in order for the affiliate to get compensated.

Another type of affiliate program is the residual income affiliate program.  Residual affiliate programs usually pay only a small percentage of sales commission for every sale directed by the affiliate to the merchant’s site.  This commission often comes only in the range of 10% to 20% sales commission.  Because of this, many people ignore residual affiliate program and would rather opt for the high paying one-time commission affiliate program.  Are these people making a mistake, or are they making the right decision?

We can’t tell, for sure, if people are making a mistake by choosing a high paying one-time commission affiliate program.  But we can definitely say that they are making a large mistake if they ignore residual affiliate programs.  Residual affiliate programs would indeed pay at a lower rate, but merchants offering such kind of programs would generally pay you regular and ongoing commissions for a single affiliate initiated sale!  That means, for the same effort you made in promoting a particular affiliate program, you get paid only once in a one-time commission program, and a regular and ongoing commission for a residual program!

So, are the benefits of promoting residual affiliate programs clearer to you now?  Or are they still vague?  If they are still vague, then let’s make them a bit clearer with this example.

Suppose there are two online merchants both offering web hosting services on their sites.  The first merchant offers a one-time commission type of affiliate program that pays $80 for every single affiliate initiated sale.  The second merchant also offers an affiliate program, but this time a residual affiliate program that pays only $10 for every single affiliate initiated sale.  As an affiliate, we may get attracted at once at what the first merchant is offering, as $80 is definitely a lot larger than $10.  But by thinking things over before actually getting into them, one may be able to see that the second merchant is offering us more opportunity to earn a larger amount of money.

Supposed you have directed traffic to the merchant and it converted into a sale, you’ll get paid once by the first merchant for the sale you have initiated.  But with the second merchant, you’ll get paid monthly for as long as the customer you have referred to the merchant continues to avail of the web hosting service.  That means that for the same effort of getting one customer to avail of the merchant’s service, you get paid monthly in residual affiliate programs while you only get paid once in a one-time commission type of affiliate programs.

So, are residual affiliate programs worth promoting?  Definitely yes, because you virtually get more money from these types of affiliate programs in the long run!  And would residual affiliate programs work best for you?  Probably not, probably yes.  It is not really for me to tell.  But with the benefits that residual affiliate marketing can provide, it would really be unwise to ignore such programs.