Let’s start with an important fact. Though you can earn from affiliate marketing even without the benefit of having your own website, it is still a much better option that you get one. A website is the anchor of your work at home business. It will be easier to promote your business and products or affiliate products if you have your own pages in cyber space.

We have previously discussed the basics of creating your own website and optimizing the same for the search engines.

In this article, we’re going to tackle some initial steps you should take in securing an enrollment to an affiliate program and in ensuring that it will be a profitable enterprise. Study these steps carefully.

* Choose the right affiliate program as covered in last weeks article.

* Enroll for the said program. Keep in mind that before you can be a part of this work at home business, you must first opt-in, or verify your application, through your email.

* Once enrolled, you will be given access to a website where you must log in. Do not forget your login details.

* You will see the list of the affiliate merchant’s products inside. You will be given the option to choose a product for which a campaign will be launched. Once a product is chosen, you will be furnished an affiliate link. Do not lose this affiliate link!

With your affiliate link at hand, it’s time to move to the next level!

Your affiliate link is what will tell the affiliate program’s system that a purchaser was referred by you. Your pre-sells that end up becoming successful sales are actually coursed through your affiliate links, thus informing the affiliate program that commissions are due to you.

It is quite evident then that affiliate marketing as a work at home business is all about persuading a potential customer to at least check out the affiliate merchant’s products through your affiliate link. The reason why affiliate marketing is called, well, marketing is because you need some promotional strategies to induce a person to become a purchaser.

We will discuss these marketing strategies in the next article.

The success of an enrollment with an affiliate program as a work at home business depends on the amount of commitment and effort you invest in the same. Being an affiliate, you must remember, is an online job, but a job nonetheless. You cannot just sit down and let this home business earn for you, at least, not initially.

Eventually however, you should be able to automate most of the process by installing some tools for a self-sufficient system of your own. We will cover this thoroughly in subsequent articles.

About the Author:
Mal Keenan can show you step-by step how to set up and run a successful online home business. Learn the 7 essential strategies to internet marketing success. To receive your free 7 day mini-course visit: http://www.malkeenan.com

With eBay holding a sweepstakes that encourages its PowerSellers to become affiliate-merchants, one has to wonder if eBay is getting into the affiliate network game. Sure looks like it to me.

eBay has expanded its affiliate program to allow their merchants/sellers to get rewarded for driving traffic to their own eBay.com listings.

The eBay Promote It Sweepstakes gives Powersellers registered as an eBay Affiliate, the chance to win any one of 25 cash prizes for using their off-eBay website, blog or online store to drive traffic to their own listings.

Author: [Jim Kukral]
Friday May 12th 2006, 1:39 pm
Filed under: Forge Corporation

To download the white paper… Please visit www.forgebusiness.com and use the contact form in the right-hand side navigation to get your free copy of the PDF. It will be emailed to you instantly.

Affiliate marketing is hard work, and takes a lot of skill and insight to do it successfully. Want to learn more about how to run a successful affiliate marketing program? Now you can. Forge used their years of experience in the Affiliate Marketing Industry to create this comprehensive white paper entitled Affiliate Marketing Do’s & Don’ts.

Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs) are essentially commission-based sales schemes.

Joining an affiliate program is a neat way to make money from your users. But just as you can join someone else's affiliate program, so you can set up your own program and invite webmasters to sign up. Here are my top 3 tips to succeed with your own affiliate program.

1. How to attract affiliates

One of the biggest fears new Affiliate managers have is in finding new affiliates. This fear is a stumbling block that stops many site owners from getting started with affiliate marketing. Interestingly, with a proper marketing strategy, getting affiliates may not be very difficult. Given below are some tips that may help in attracting new affiliates.

Find complimentary sites - "Complementary" sites are sites that sell products or services that compliment your offers. If you sell "gardening tools", a site that sells books on "gardening tips" would be a perfect affiliate.

Find content sites - There are many sites that do not sell any kind of product or service but are mainly content oriented sites. Such sites promote an idea, concept, study or belief. Content sites that are used as a resource for your target market are ideal affiliates.

Finally, there are several sites on the Internet dedicated to listing affiliate Programs. Get your program listed in these directories.

2. Classifying Affiliates for Better Management

The hardest part of administrating an Affiliate Program is deciding what your affiliates need to help make the sale. But, by carefully categorizing your affiliates, you can easily determine what their needs are and how to accurately meet them.

The first step is to pick at least three types of affiliate. Take a look at your affiliates and try to determine one outstanding characteristic that can easily be compared across the board and choose at least three types of the characteristic.

The Second Step is to determine the needs of each type. Each of your affiliate types will have different needs; some of their needs will overlap, but you should find a distinct difference in many of their needs. If you find that all of them have the same needs, go back to step one and re-think your types.

The Third Step involves the process of creating and compiling linking methods for each group of affiliates. Based on the needs you identified in Step two, create and compile linking methods for each type.

3. Safe Guarding Against Spam

Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely on other signups to generate profits, you will eventually have a problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitably get it into their head to blitz the Web with unwanted garbage.

When this happens you need to be ready to take action otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet company can boot you off your server and you can find yourself blacklisted. Not good for business. If you get an email from someone claiming they received spam with your URL, then take it as an early warning.

I am not advising you to immediately terminate the affiliate's account, but be sure to contact them to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate know you received a complaint and advise them to remove this person from their list.

If you only get one or two complaints, it's probably not spam, the complainants might simply have signed up for an email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all regarding the same URL.

The best thing to do in this case is to immediately terminate or disable the account of the affiliate URL that was spammed.

Running your own affiliate program can become an extrememly profitable venture for your business. You can recruit a HUGE sales force promoting your products for you, and ONLY pay them when you make a sale!

About the Author:
Andy Murray is a marketer and publisher writing informative reports to help grow your online business. Get his latest offering "Get Stinking Rich From Affiliate Programs" for FREE by simply following this link: http://www.zerohourmarketing.com/Affiliate-Marketing-Report.htm

My Odeo Channel (odeo/0a80d6da719ef29b)

I met Marc Chase in a affilaite focused forum. He's an Affiliate Manager trying to fire up a new affiliate program for MyCreditGroup.

Marc's got some strikes against him, as he's got a spanking new affiliate program in a niche that's flooded and really hard to rank in.

Marc's Affiliate Program is in the Finance niche with a focus on Credit Repair, Debt Settlement and Mortgages. It's one of the toughest to break into, and most expensive to participate in.

I know this niche very well as I used to own a business that generated leads for Merchants as large as Bank of America. I used to earn upwards of $50 per lead. That's per lead, not per sale. Money was good way back then, but not anymore if you're new to the game.

So, when I saw Marc's post announcing his offering to the affiliates … I saw some really good things and I saw a few things that could be better.

Marc's post read something like this…

We've put a lot of effort into building a flawless reputation before launching our affiliate program.
We put just as much effort into creating support for our affiliates. 

Some Features:
- Multi Tiered: $50.00 per 5% second tier
- $1000.00 bonus per 100 sign ups
- Additional bonuses of 500.00 for second conversion
- Huge industry and we are hands down the most trusted.

We're even working on health benefits (lots of details of course)

The affiliate page can be found here:
The Best Credit Repair Affiliate Program - My Credit Group

Feel free to research our company thoroughly and you'll see the effort we've put into ethics and integrity.

If you have any questions, or suggestions we'd love to hear from you.

Thank you in advance
Marc Chase

• They're listed with Dunn and Bradstreet.
• They have a flawless seven year old BBB record, which in that niche is unheard of.
• They are registered with the Attorney General and Secretary of State.
• They offer the affiliate a lot of incentives.
• They offer the affiliate revenue potential for the client's many possible trasactions.
• Their payout for sales seems generous.
• They offer a second tier opportunity.
• They don't compete with the affiliates.
• They are very responsive to their affiliates.

What I didn't see caused me to ask Marc a few questions and offer some suggestions:

• I wanted to see a short form for affiliates to put onto their websites to generate sales easier.
• I wanted to see a 365 day cookie set because in this niche clients take a long time to sell to.
• I wanted to see a first-in cookie so that affiliates who really work it can benefit and not have to worry about cookie theft.
• I wanted to know what states they could service, because this niche has lots of legal limitations.
• I wanted to know who owned the company.

Marc was prompt to respond to all my questions, and lightning quick to supply all the elements I suggested. He also gave me some more insights into his company and their ethics:

Debt Settlement. Its rather lengthy so I'll paint some broad strokes
1) Greed - average fee is 14% we charge 8%. It still makes a ton of money. I dont understand 14%.

2) Because we have a credit repair mentality, credit scores are first things we think of. So, while client is saving their "settlement" money, we keep the debts tied up with validation, method of validation, FCBA requests etc. What this does (not always) is prevents them from marking the accounts late while they are saving. Goal being to get them debt free and preserving their credit.

3) Greed again: Settlement companies get paid on the total amount of debt settled. Many debts that arent even necessary to settle are included because its more commissions. We work on repair first (where applicable) if we can get something removed, then its less the client has to pay. Again, still a ton of money.

4) We always attempt to pay for deletions (credit repair mentaility). Collection agents usually just care about money and will delete the tradeline entirely as long as they get paid.

Again, settlement companies don't do credit repair, so those things aren't their concern. Since we want everybody to eventually turn to a mortgage, it is in our best interest to perfect their score no matter what service we're providing.

I am impressed with company's business model, and after chatting with Marc, I'm also impressed with their attention to details and customer service for their affiliates.

I decided to join their affiliate program and if you have finance sites that focus on CPS more than CPM/CPA, this would be a good affiliate program for you too … very ethical todate.

Affroogle.com from Affiliate Classroom is posed to light up the affiliate space with a little more Google activity.

Now, affiliates can add links for affiliate marketing services and websites to this Google-based search engine. This should further help define the affiliate marketing space for Google. But now the question remains, will this help us or hurt us? Given the recent dropping of many affiliates from the Google AdSense program without warning or in most cases, provocation … it will be interesting to watch how Google uses this information.

Should you add your links to Affroogle.com? I'm gambling the answer is Yes. Anik Singal of Affiliate Classroom is usually right on the mark with his business recommendations.

SimpleTuition Debuts Affiliate Program For Organizations Looking To Share Student Loan Comparison Research
Tuesday November 14, 10:27 am ET
Innovative Referral Program Allows Donations to Educational Charitable Organizations

BOSTON, Nov. 14 /PRNewswire/ — SimpleTuition, Inc. (http://www.simpletuition.com), a company dedicated to helping students and parents make sense of education financing choices, today announced the launch of its new Affiliate Partner Program. Available today at http://www.simpletuition.com/friend, the program is open to high school guidance officers, personal financial planners and advisors, as well as professional and student organizations and others that wish to offer objective third-party student loan comparison and research.

As a SimpleTuition Affiliate Partner, organizations that refer parents and students to the SimpleTuition web site for advice will earn a reward for each new visitor that uses the SimpleTuition solution to compare student loans and then clicks through to a lender's loan application site. For non-profit partners and public schools, SimpleTuition is planning to offer the option of donating the referral reward to an educational charity, thereby avoiding any conflicts of interest. A first for referral programs, SimpleTuition is working with leading educational charities, who all share a common vision of helping students and their families attend college, to make this a reality.

"Every year hundreds of thousands of students and parents receive advice and conflicting recommendations from friends, family, co-workers and other advisors about how to best research and manage student loan finances," said Kevin Walker, co-founder and CEO of SimpleTuition. "Since launching SimpleTuition, numerous parents have been telling us how desperate they are for a resource that offers a clear and easy way to understand their student loan options. When they hear of SimpleTuition, they want to tell all their friends. With that in mind, we created the partner program."

According to the recent College Board report, caps for federal student loans are not keeping up with inflation, yet tuition costs keep rising, up 35% from five years ago. With the cost of college at an all-time high — projected to reach $220 billion this year, $86 billion of which will be financed by students or their parents — families nationwide now require multiple loans each year to pay for college. Many are desperate for a clear, concise and easy-to-use resource to help find the best student loan options.

Currently, nearly twenty organizations have already joined the SimpleTuition Affiliate Program. Designed for all types of educational support organizations, partners can choose from three options:

• Partners who want to be able to share student loan information can link directly to SimpleTuition
• Affiliate partners who want to send SimpleTuition applicants (first-time visitors that open a student loan application with one of SimpleTuition's lending partners) receive a referral commission
• Colleges, universities and other organizations can request a customized solution that integrates with their web site

The amount of information on student loans is overwhelming with many different types of loans from various lenders; each with different options, including fees, repayment plans, total loan amount, consolidation options, credit strength scores and FAFSA eligibility in some cases. SimpleTuition allows users to compare multiple financing options from a variety of lenders that can be sorted by monthly payment, total cost of the loan, number of payments, fees and APR. SimpleTuition is not a lender.

About SimpleTuition, Inc.

Founded in 2005, SimpleTuition is dedicated to helping students and parents make sense of education financing choices. Recently featured in FastCompany.com's top 12 innovative websites for Web 2.0, SimpleTuition is the only company to offer an independent and objective solution for researching and comparing parent, private, GradPLUS and federal loans. SimpleTuition is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts and is funded by Atlas Venture and IDG Ventures Boston. For more information visit http://www.SimpleTuition.com.

Heads up Amazon affiliates and cell phone affiliates, you might want to take a look at this one…  

The Associates Team has teamed up with the Amazon Cell Phone Team to create an exciting new offer for you to earn additional referral fees. Beginning May 1, 2007, when you refer a cell phone with a service plan, you will earn an extra $15 bonus on each referral! Why market Amazon Cell Phones and Service? Amazon offers the hottest phones, 30-day returns, an easy comparison shopping experience, and some of the most competitive cell phone pricing on the Web.

Learn more through your Amazon affiliates area. 

Several new free affiliate classess have been added on the Affiliate Guild and a couple of free softwares to help you improve your affiliate knowledge and affiliate functionality.

Free Affiliate Classes on Affiliate Guild

As an Affiliate Guild Member, you will have free access to all Free Classes offered by the Affiliate Guild. Membership into the Affiliate Guild is 100% Free. It's a Win-Win for all affiliates and newbie affiliates.

Affiliate Guild offers you Free online classes for both newbies and more advanced affiliates, to teach you how to maximize your internet profits through Affiliate Marketing. Classes are packed with all the information you need.

Free Affiliate Software on Affiliate Guild

To get access to this software, all you need to do is join the Affiliate Guild. By joining the Affiliate Guild you will have access to the Free Online Classes. They have listed each software as its own class … just sign-up for the class and they will email you the access code. Joining the Affiliate Guild will enroll you into the opt-in Affiliate Guild Newsletter, so use an email address that will accept Affiliate Guild's emails to you.

Jude Wright might be on of the most unorganized affiliate marketers, but not anymore. Jude's been working in Internet Marketing for a lot of years. Don't worry Jude, I won't say how many!

As a basically unorganized person, Jude admits, "I was losing everything! I needed a solution to help me find the information that I wrote on slips of paper, kept in notebooks and saved in emails. I wanted to find that information fast!"
 
An old hand at creating databases for the construction industry, Jude turned her attentions to making one for Internet Marketing too. 

The result is a MUST have application for Affiliate Marketers called i-MarketingOrganizer.

The Version 1 software application is the result of Jude's real world experiences in Affiliate Internet Marketing, lots of research, and hard work. i-MarketingOrganizer works beautifully!

Personally, I can't even begin to tell you how valuable a little application this is. Imagine having all your affiliate program account information at your fingertips 24/7 … imagine having all you passwords and usernames waiting for you on your desktop every time you need them … and most importantly, imagine finding any of them in seconds.

No more scraps of paper or notebooks filled with scribbles. Welcome to the enlightened age of Affiliate Marketing … welcome to the world of i-MarketingOrganizer.