You need to ask questions first before you join an affiliate program. Do a little research about the choices of program that you intend to join into. Get some answers because they will be the deciding point of what you will be achieving later on.
Will it cost you anything to join? Most affiliate programs being offered today are absolutely free of charge. So why settle for those that charge you some dollars before joining.
When do they issue the commission checks? Every program is different. Some issue their checks once a month, every quarter, etc. Select the one that is suited to your payment time choice. Many affiliate programs are setting a minimum earned commission amount that an affiliate must meet or exceed in order for their checks to be issued.
What is the hit per sale ratio? This is the average number of hits to a banner or text link it takes to generate a sale based on all affiliate statistics. This factor is extremely important because this will tell you how much traffic you must generate before you can earn a commission from the sale.
How are referrals from an affiliate’s site tracked and for how long do they remain in the system? You need to be confident on the program enough to track those people you refer from your site. This is the only way that you can credit for a sale. The period of time that those people stay in the system is also important. This is because some visitors do not buy initially but may want to return later to make the purchase. Know if you will still get credit for the sale if it is done some months from a certain day.
What are the kinds of affiliate stats available? Your choice of affiliate program should be capable of offering detailed stats. They should be available online anytime you decide to check them out. Constantly checking your individual stats is important to know how many impressions, hits and sales are already generated from your site. Impressions are the number of times the banner or text link was viewed by a visitor of your site. A hit is the one clicking on the banner or text links.
Does the affiliate program also pay for the hits and impressions besides the commissions on sales? It is important that impressions and hits are also paid, as this will add to the earnings you get from the sales commission. This is especially important if the program you are in offers low sales to be able to hit ratio.
Who is the online retailer? Find out whom you are doing business with to know if it is really a solid company. Know the products they are selling and the average amount they are achieving. The more you know about the retailer offering you the affiliate program, the easier it will be for you to know if that program is really for you and your site.
Is the affiliate a one tier or two tier program? A single tier program pays you only for the business you yourself have generated. A two tier program pays you for the business, plus it also pays you a commission on the on the sales generated by any affiliate you sponsor in your program. Some two-tier programs are even paying small fees on each new affiliate you sponsor. More like a recruitment fee.
Lastly, what is the amount of commission paid? 5% - 20% is the commission paid by most programs. .01% - .05% is the amount paid for each hit. If you find a program that also pays for impressions, the amount paid is not much at all. As you can see from the figures, you will now understand why the average sales amount and hit to sale ratio is important.
These are just some of the questions that needed answering first before you enter into an affiliate program. You should be familiar with the many important aspects that your chosen program should have before incorporating them into your website. Try to ask your affiliate program choices these questions. These can help you select the right program for you site from among the many available.
If you would like to see some of the Affiliate Programs that answer the above Questions
go to http://www.work-home-profits.com
and have a look.
Warmest Regards,
Greg LLoyd
Make Money Online Fast
Affiliate Program Marketing
Friday, January 15, 2010
Redirect Affiliate Program Links for Maximum Effectiveness
If you promote an affiliate program and are not redirecting your affiliate links, you may be missing out on traffic and commissions opportunities. Redirecting your affiliate program links helps to minimize spam filtering of your email campaigns, increase the acceptance of article submissions, build backlinks to your site, and reduce "click fear".
Minimize Spam Filtering
If you are promoting an affiliate program through email, other (unscrupulous) affiliates of the same company may be indirectly hurting the delivery rate of your messages. Email filters will block messages that contain content or links associated with spam. Even if you send your message only to subscribers who have double opted-in to your list, your messages may still be blocked if it contains a URL used by spammers.
Search Engine Optimization
Most affiliate program URLs look something like http://www.example.com/?id=123. Unfortunately, most search engines have limited or no ability to read these links.
Google(TM) warns, "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." Google goes on to tell us "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."
Furthermore, if you are publishing your affiliate link on other sites such as blogs, forums, etc., you are missing out on the opportunity to build valuable backlinks that could increase your search engine rankings.
Article Submissions
Submitting articles to web publishers and article directories is a powerful way to build backlinks to your site. Unfortunately, many publishers and directories do not accept articles that include affiliate links. However, virtually all will accept links to your own site. By replacing your affiliate link with a link to your own site, even one that redirects to your affiliate link, you will increase the number of article submissions accepted by publishers and directories.
Reduce "Click Fear"
Thanks to those few sites on the Web that distribute adware, spyware, viruses, etc., many web users are fearful of clicking on links, especially those that look "suspicious". To the average user who has no special knowledge of the internal workings of the Web, a link that has "unusual" characters such as those in dynamic URLs (e.g. http://www.example.com/?id=123&sub=456) will appear less trustworthy than a static link.
How to Redirect Your Affiliate Program URL
There are several ways to redirect your affiliate program links. The most "search engine friendly" method is the 301 Permanent redirect with the .htaccess file. You can use this method if your site is hosted on an Apache (Linux, Unix) based server.
To create a permanent redirect, open (or create) the .htaccess file. On a single line add the following code to the file:
redirect 301 /example.html http://www.example.com/?id=123&sub=456
This code tells the server to redirect "http://www.yoursite.com/example.html" to your affiliate link "http://www.example.com/?id=123&sub=456".
Other methods of redirecting include using PHP's header() function and HTML's meta refresh.
No matter what affiliate program you're promoting, you will benefit by redirecting your links. Redirecting your affiliate links can improve the delivery rate of your email campaigns as well as increase CTR. Your articles may be more readily accepted by article directories and web publishers. Furthermore, redirecting replaces links to your merchant with valuable backlinks to your own site.
Make Money Online Fast
Affiliate Program Marketing
Minimize Spam Filtering
If you are promoting an affiliate program through email, other (unscrupulous) affiliates of the same company may be indirectly hurting the delivery rate of your messages. Email filters will block messages that contain content or links associated with spam. Even if you send your message only to subscribers who have double opted-in to your list, your messages may still be blocked if it contains a URL used by spammers.
Search Engine Optimization
Most affiliate program URLs look something like http://www.example.com/?id=123. Unfortunately, most search engines have limited or no ability to read these links.
Google(TM) warns, "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." Google goes on to tell us "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."
Furthermore, if you are publishing your affiliate link on other sites such as blogs, forums, etc., you are missing out on the opportunity to build valuable backlinks that could increase your search engine rankings.
Article Submissions
Submitting articles to web publishers and article directories is a powerful way to build backlinks to your site. Unfortunately, many publishers and directories do not accept articles that include affiliate links. However, virtually all will accept links to your own site. By replacing your affiliate link with a link to your own site, even one that redirects to your affiliate link, you will increase the number of article submissions accepted by publishers and directories.
Reduce "Click Fear"
Thanks to those few sites on the Web that distribute adware, spyware, viruses, etc., many web users are fearful of clicking on links, especially those that look "suspicious". To the average user who has no special knowledge of the internal workings of the Web, a link that has "unusual" characters such as those in dynamic URLs (e.g. http://www.example.com/?id=123&sub=456) will appear less trustworthy than a static link.
How to Redirect Your Affiliate Program URL
There are several ways to redirect your affiliate program links. The most "search engine friendly" method is the 301 Permanent redirect with the .htaccess file. You can use this method if your site is hosted on an Apache (Linux, Unix) based server.
To create a permanent redirect, open (or create) the .htaccess file. On a single line add the following code to the file:
redirect 301 /example.html http://www.example.com/?id=123&sub=456
This code tells the server to redirect "http://www.yoursite.com/example.html" to your affiliate link "http://www.example.com/?id=123&sub=456".
Other methods of redirecting include using PHP's header() function and HTML's meta refresh.
No matter what affiliate program you're promoting, you will benefit by redirecting your links. Redirecting your affiliate links can improve the delivery rate of your email campaigns as well as increase CTR. Your articles may be more readily accepted by article directories and web publishers. Furthermore, redirecting replaces links to your merchant with valuable backlinks to your own site.
Make Money Online Fast
Affiliate Program Marketing
Promoting your Affiliate Programs with Articles
If you are not creating articles for your website and your affiliate programs, you should. Why? Even though it may seem like a lot of work, and it may take you time to build -- articles add a valuable commodity to your site -- content. And my friend, the search engines and people alike are always on the lookout for good content.
If you are creating articles, you are always looking to find ways to get your article out to the masses – and the more exposure your article has the greater the opportunity that people will read your article and want to visit your website. Should you submit your articles manually or should you use an article marketer submission service that will choose for you -- where your article goes? Is an article submission service a good option for you when submitting articles? I hope to show you both the pros and cons of this service and let you be the judge.
Pro to Article Submission Service
Article Submission Service can be a great help when your time is limited and you want to get your articles to all the article sites and groups. However, when the service is tiered, based on what you pay and don’t pay – you have to be aware of what you are getting..
All services give you a sampling with a free service – and I did find the free service to be on the, well, expected side. After submitting to the free service of an article submission service I received the following:
1. I received several emails that stated my article had been received by a site and would be looked at. This is usual, and a good sign.
2. I received emails from the yahoo groups, which is a good sign but I didn’t partake because I knew that I would be receiving articles from other authors on a regular basis and did not want to overwhelm my private email address. Thus, be aware, use a yahoo email address and keep your private email address separate.
The article submission to the article sites such as Ezine Articles (Which, by the way, is one of my favorite sites) and Go Articles will require a small outlay of money for each article on a monthly basis. Thus, I would use a submission service if:
1. I had a separate email address to catch the other authors’ articles that I would be receiving from the yahoo groups.
2. I wanted to part with my money to take advantage of the service.
3. Needed more time.
4. I have a desire for a wider exposure of my articles and thus, more traffic to my site.
Cons of Using an Article Admission Service
When looking at anything new, you must determine when it is to your advantage to use a service or to do it yourself. These are some of the issues I would have to overcome:
1. If I do the submission myself, I know that the article or articles have reached it expected destination or destinations – but the exposure my article gets will be limited by the sites that I know.
2. If I’m restricted by General Titles will the article sites kick my article out because of not possibly abiding by the rules.
3. If I do it myself, I can target my article to the specific, intended audience.
For me, I will use the paid submission service when I am low on time and I have the money in hand. However, I will not waste my time on the free service because the return is very limited and from what I have seen offers little benefit to my site.
To conclude, you need to try different methods of getting your articles out to the masses. And the success of these different methods is dependent on your own satisfaction or lack there of, of the results rendered by such services. My advise, experiment and determine for yourself what services will help your business, who knows, that one service may be the punch in the arm your business needs to grow.
To your success.
Make Money Online Fast
Affiliate Program Marketing
If you are creating articles, you are always looking to find ways to get your article out to the masses – and the more exposure your article has the greater the opportunity that people will read your article and want to visit your website. Should you submit your articles manually or should you use an article marketer submission service that will choose for you -- where your article goes? Is an article submission service a good option for you when submitting articles? I hope to show you both the pros and cons of this service and let you be the judge.
Pro to Article Submission Service
Article Submission Service can be a great help when your time is limited and you want to get your articles to all the article sites and groups. However, when the service is tiered, based on what you pay and don’t pay – you have to be aware of what you are getting..
All services give you a sampling with a free service – and I did find the free service to be on the, well, expected side. After submitting to the free service of an article submission service I received the following:
1. I received several emails that stated my article had been received by a site and would be looked at. This is usual, and a good sign.
2. I received emails from the yahoo groups, which is a good sign but I didn’t partake because I knew that I would be receiving articles from other authors on a regular basis and did not want to overwhelm my private email address. Thus, be aware, use a yahoo email address and keep your private email address separate.
The article submission to the article sites such as Ezine Articles (Which, by the way, is one of my favorite sites) and Go Articles will require a small outlay of money for each article on a monthly basis. Thus, I would use a submission service if:
1. I had a separate email address to catch the other authors’ articles that I would be receiving from the yahoo groups.
2. I wanted to part with my money to take advantage of the service.
3. Needed more time.
4. I have a desire for a wider exposure of my articles and thus, more traffic to my site.
Cons of Using an Article Admission Service
When looking at anything new, you must determine when it is to your advantage to use a service or to do it yourself. These are some of the issues I would have to overcome:
1. If I do the submission myself, I know that the article or articles have reached it expected destination or destinations – but the exposure my article gets will be limited by the sites that I know.
2. If I’m restricted by General Titles will the article sites kick my article out because of not possibly abiding by the rules.
3. If I do it myself, I can target my article to the specific, intended audience.
For me, I will use the paid submission service when I am low on time and I have the money in hand. However, I will not waste my time on the free service because the return is very limited and from what I have seen offers little benefit to my site.
To conclude, you need to try different methods of getting your articles out to the masses. And the success of these different methods is dependent on your own satisfaction or lack there of, of the results rendered by such services. My advise, experiment and determine for yourself what services will help your business, who knows, that one service may be the punch in the arm your business needs to grow.
To your success.
Make Money Online Fast
Affiliate Program Marketing
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