The Affiliate Guild has recently posted a great affiliate help list tips of 25 things that new and struggling affiliates trying to make a go of affiliate marketing should take a look at and give careful consideration to.

The Good Advice for New Affiliates post was inspired by Linda Buquet's super affiliate contest going on at 5 star affiliate programs.

Good Advice for New Affiliates
from the Affiliate Guild

25 Affiliate Tips To Success
1. Too much time building websites will bog you down. Make easy to maintain sites.

2. SEO does matter if you want targeted traffic.

3. Get a newsletter email opt-in on every page of every website you own.

4. Either get a forum or get a blog going. (Need one built?)

5. Write about your affiliate programs (article-repository.com). Tell everyone!

6. Focus on conversion not payout. Commissions are important though.

7. Get really, really niche.

8. Find affiliate programs that will be around awhile.

9. Find a search engine friendly cloaking script for your links.

10. There is more to affiliate life than Google! Diversify!

11. Learn about your affiliate programs and speak intellegently about them.

12. If you don't see what you want to represent, go get it. Consider your own affiliate network.

13. Make friends with Affiliate Managers … and if you have a lot of traffic ask for a bigger percentage on payout.

14. Work with reputable leadership (affiliate guild)

15. Buy from the affiliate program if you want to know how they work. We do it.

16. Monetize your websites.

17. If you have enough traffic sell ad space. If you have good SEO ranking, charge more for ads.

18. Ask for the sale. Most affiliate program banners don't close sales, you must do it.

19. You must work 8-10+ hours daily to be a successful super affiliate.

20. Keep it really simple … accomplish your goals with focused resources.

21. Find affiliate programs that offer a wide variety of advertising opportunities from banners to datafeeds.

22. Find affiliate programs that require strong marketing ethics and follow them, WIN-WIN.

23. Find affiliate programs that payout on schedule everytime. You're in control here!

24. Look for affiliate programs with affiliate tracking for phone sales you generate.

25. Look for affiliate programs with solid servers and software that works 100% of the time. Other affiliates write about the bad ones, so be aware and read the affiliate forums and blogs.

Posted by Bobbie Grennier on August 10, 2006 05:53 PM | Permalink

I was reading a few relevant tips from Darren at ProBlogger about some Do's and Dont's for professional business blogs. I wanted to pass on his wisdoms because I think that they're right on the money, no pun intended.

These are the same strategies I use on my blogs Affiliate Blogger, Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate Blog.

The topic was about what to do if you have viewers coming to your blog, but they never buy anything through you. The advice is sage:

Product relevancy and quality - unless the products you're promoting relate to the content/topic of your blogging you're wasting your time. Not only should they be relevant - they should be quality affiliate products. Don't get sucked into promoting something just because it relates to your site. Test it for yourself and if it's rubbish - stay clear. You can hurt your own reputation by recommending second rate products.

Traffic - the more people that see the promotions you run the better. While traffic isn't the only factor, it is certainly a big one. Work at drawing people to your blog and particularly to the pages that you are featuring affiliate promotions on.

Placement - affiliate links IN content tend to out perform promotions that you run in sidebars or banner ads. One genuine review of the product (see next point) seen by a handful of readers can be much more powerful than a banner at the top of your blog seen by many readers.

Your reputation and 'Sales Pitch' - I find that affiliate products work best for me on sites where I have a loyal readership of people who respect what I say and when I give genuine recommendation that show not only the positives of a product but the weaknesses in it. The way you promote the product is as influencial as almost anything else. Don't hype, don't lie and don't spin it.

Affiliate Blogger posts and articles are all over the Internet as resources and helpful tips for the success of other affiliates, but this blog … my Affiliate Blogger blog … is my home-base where I bring all those tools and tips together in one place.

I also have the Affiliate Guild, where I offer a ton of educational materials for new affiliates and tools to make the process easier. A lot of those tools are totally free, as are most of the affiliate classrooms and materials.

My personal goal is to help others get started in Affiliate Marketing, and not have to learn the hard way like I did.

Things are much easier these days, and then again with all the changes in technologies happening so freaking fast … maybe in some ways it's harder. That's why I take the time to create thoughtful posts as the Affiliate Blogger … to try and help you stay up with the trends of Internet Marketing.

One of the biggest trends is the movement towards more use of video, and especially interactive video. I've found an awesome tool for you and gotten a great reduction in the pricing to offer as well. It's not free, but it's close to it.

The tool is called Screen Show Pro and it's an inexpensive screen capture tool similar to Camista. Only difference is that Camista will cost you $299 and Screen Show Pro will cost you $29 …  this is a keeper!

I'm using Screen Show Pro to build my interactive videos for my various Internet businesses. I'm liking it a lot!

After I made my videos, I joined the new interactive video community site called FreeIQ. It's free to join and gives both a venue to distribute your videos, as well as your products, services and affiliate links.

FreeIQ is full of helpful and informative educational materials and products … many of which are for free.

Visit my FreeIQ website … http://freeiq.com/bobbiegrennier to learn more about all of this because the Internet is quickly moving towards a video rich world and you need to be a part of it to be successful.

No longer is content king. Now it's all about entertainment and video education.

Poker affiliates should have a look at the new merge of the leading poker sites on the Internet.

Poker 100 announced today that they have signed an affiliate agreement with Party Poker and Pacific Poker which are the two largest Poker sites on the internet.

Party Poker and Pacific Poker have been leading the Online Poker industry on the internet.
Poker 100 plans to develop a new marketing concept for direct access to free online chips from one easily accessed point.

The site, which will be launched in beta version on May 25th this year and will provide its visitors with all Rules, Strategies, History and many helpful Tips from expert Online Poker Players, until final launch of the site by the second half of 2006.

Poker 100 http://www.poker-100.com is a new fresh spirited startup R&D company, with a talented team dedicated to bringing a new interface technology to all Poker Players on the Internet.

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)

Ros Gardner caught my eye today with her post about Kanoodle changing names and modifying their business strategies. It figures huh, right after Google dances on their affiliates again … we go over to Kanoodle and join, paying the stinking $1 for them to process us … really to get our credit card info, which is suspect … and then, they make these changes without notifing us in a timely manner.

Way to go Kanoodle/Seevast !!! Way to win friends and influence people.

I've had the new Kanoodle ads running now for about a month. Yeah, I was ahead of the Google beating most took. I have to say I'm not all that impressed with Kanoodle … okay, I'm not impressed at all and here's why.

Their ads are not relevant to the information on the web page, not even close.

Half the time their JavaScript code doesn't work right. For example, on some of my three-tall skyscrapper ads … where I should be getting three text ads, it only feeds one. Yeah, that looks real nice on the page. I replaced the code several times with the same results. I'm guessing that Kanoodle (Pulse 360) are trying to get to a place of relevancy, so their system screws up and only feeds one ad … which wouldn't be as bad except that the ad isn't relevant either to the information on the page.

Okay, so those are my personal observations with the newer Kanoodle (Pulse 360) contextual ads service. I'd really like to hear some feedback on what others are expereiencing.

Anyhow, according to Ros…

On August 8th, Kanoodle announced that they will break out their content targeted sponsored links business from Kanoodle into a separate business called Pulse 360. ContextTarget, LocalTarget, BehaviorTarget, and BrightAds will move over to Pulse 360.

Kanoodle will continue to offer search targeted sponsored links through their KeywordTarget product.

Each of their companies will be held under a new parent company, Seevast.

The changes should be in effect by late September, if not sooner. Advertisers will be notified via email when any changes are required.

Article Marketing for Affiliates

This video from DiamondSEO does a nice job of summing up the two methods of article marketing by affiliate marketing affiliates. Can you see the difference in where to publish your articles and why?

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.

The Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) Internet Marketing Advisory Board announced a Best Practices for Online Advertising Networks and Affiliate Marketing.

The DMA list is a simple five rules, but important rules that set a generalized guildline for the Affiliate Marketing Industry … something sorely lacking.

The only rule I see as having possible difficulty in obtaining,is the full disclosure of their eligible sites. These Marketing firms keep their sites a virtual secret to stay on top of their game … not something they would readily share.

Search Marketing Expo - SMX
Inaugural Event: SMX Seattle, June 4th & 5th, 2007

I SO want to go to this! Anything with Danny Sullivan involved is going to be hot!

Search Marketing Expo — SMX — is the new search engine marketing conference from Third Door Media, the company behind the Search Engine Land news site and the Search Marketing Now webcast series.

Programmed by search expert Danny Sullivan, the inaugural SMX show on June 4 & 5 will be especially geared toward advanced search marketers who want to hear about the latest search marketing techniques for both organic and paid placement.

And if having Danny Sullivan involved isn't cool enough, the first SMX will be held in Seattle at the extraordinary Bell Harbor Convention Center on Pier 66. Bell Harbor features state of the art convention facilities in an exceptional indoor and outdoor atmosphere. If you haven't been to Seattle, it's absolutely beautiful there.

For now, they're taking sign-ups for the email list. So, go drop in your email so you can be notified when the registration opens. Search Marketing Expo - SMX