This is a guest post from Judith at pay per lead affiliate programs

Debt affiliate program are a great way to make your website profitable as it gives you an opportunity to offer your visitors debt settlement or debt consolidation service. These services help the debtors to pay off their unpaid bills and in turn help you earn money. Debt affiliate programs are just a form of pay per lead affiliate programs that help you make money through affiliate marketing.

How pay per lead debt affiliate programs work?

Pay per lead affiliate programs provide the webmasters with an opportunity to earn money online. There are 4 primary types of pay per lead affiliate programs – pay per sale, pay per lead, pay per action and pay per click. The demand for pay per lead affiliate programs has increased in the last few years. Normally, pay per lead affiliate programs such as debt affiliate programs are designed to promote services.

Generally speaking, debt settlement affiliate programs and debt consolidation affiliate programs help you earn money for each qualified referral from your website. As a member, you will be given the option to choose from a variety of graphic and textual links (banners and impressions) with a tracking code from your website to the other. As a member, you will also have access to daily impression rates, monthly checks for qualified referrals, automatic code generation and traffic reports.

Whenever a debtor refers to the website, gets a free consultation and signs up for the program, you earn a commission. However, do check whether the merchant company (that offers debt affiliate programs) is recognized by Better Business Bureau (BBB).

Why pay per lead debt affiliate programs work?

Debt affiliate programs (a form of pay per lead affiliate programs) enable you to profit from the nation’s financial woes. An increasing number of Americans and companies are suffering from debt problems. Personal and business bankruptcies are at all time high. With business and personal bankruptcies on the rise, more and more people are looking for help to reduce their debts. Debt consolidation/settlement program is the ideal way to become debt free. These programs help debtors nationwide to pay back their debts.

Super affiliate Shawn Hogan was indicted last week by the FBI on 15 counts of wire fraud and criminal forfeiture, a charge against him for cookie stuffing while being one of Ebay’s top affiliates.

At his peak, Shawn earned up to $1 million a month in affiliate revenue from Ebay.

Shawn is speaking out about these charges and you can read his side here.

If you want to see the other side of the story it can be viewed at Moebedard.com

On the business side of things, Shawn’s post shows that keeping your eyes open for new markets and affiliate programs can really put the wind at your back with making big money in affiliate marketing.

Even though Shawn may have done it illegally with cookie stuffing, at the start of the Ebay affiliate program there was still tons of opportunity for those playing by the rules.

It‘s always better to enter markets where the wind is at your back versus fighting it out in a market that has bloody waters and tons of competition with lower margins. Sometimes new markets are the best. So as an affiliate always keep your eyes open to new markets.

On the legal side of things, there are also some important lessons in Shaw’s post.

While I don’t have any idea if Shawn’s story is true, it’s quite believable to me that any company trying to gain market share could have some employees push the limits.

What would you do if an employee of your affiliate partner asked you to push the limits as an affiliate?

In business pushing the limits can happen at all levels of employees even the CEO as it did in the mortgage scandals of 2008.

Even most recently in the case of Hewlett Packard who just ousted its CEO Mark V. Hurd, for lying on expense reports among other things.

Smaller companies you might be dealing with in affiliate relationships will likely have more entrepreneur drive and even less controls in place to monitor what affiliate managers are telling affiliates.

So don’t get too confident when an employee of your affiliate partner is telling you to do something shady, blackhattish or against the terms of the affiliate agreement.

And remember it’s always best to get all communications in writing even if it is not shady!

Covering your a$$ can make a big difference.

This is a guest post by Gagandeep Singh, a freelance writer who writes on Landing Page Optimization, Affiliate marketing and Social Networking.

A landing page is a specific page where all the traffic is directed once a user clicks a link in search engine results, online ad or promotional email. It is the first page which your visitor see when reaching your website and it is not always the homepage of website. Landing pages play an important role when they are created with specific purpose to get sales or generate leads. The conversion ratio and success of an online campaign depends on how optimized your landing page is.

In this post, I am going to share some practices which will help you in creating a landing page that converts and sells well.

Setting a Goal for Each Page: Experts have different views on this. Some think that your landing page should be dedicated to only one offer but other think that there is no problem in adding navigational links or to mention about other offers.

The best way to find an answer to this is to experiment with both and find the solution which works best for your niche. It may vary niche by niche. Normally, if traffic to your landing page is coming from any PPC campaign then you should mention only one offer in your landing page. PPC traffic is very focused and looking for a specific thing.

Relevancy: The headline and title of the landing page should be relevant to the advertised offer. You should consider creating separate landing pages for each different keyword and offer. If a user clicked on an offer which claims to give 14 day free trial then don’t direct him to the landing page where he have to pay.

Compelling Headline: Make Your Headline bold and strong so that it can stand out from the rest of the page. Don’t use headlines like “ Learn how to earn online money” instead of that use compelling headlines like “ Learn How I earned 100,000 dollars in 30 days”. The second headline is more likely to get clicked and have a high Conversion rate.

Add Images: An image is equal to 1000 words, using a relevant image can convey your message quickly and effectively with very less effort. Image describing the product and your offers play a very important role in increasing the conversion rate.

Call to Action: The purpose of the landing page is to encourage visitors to get the desired action. The call to action link For eg: – Click here should be at the top of the landing page so that it could be easily visible to everyone. Putting your call to action link at wrong place can reduce your conversion rate a lot.

Building Credibility: Building Credibility with your customers is very important to sell your product to them. Adding short testimonials from likeminded people, awards and recognitions or putting logos from some reliable websites can build trust amongst your prospects about your website. Landing pages with testimonials and reviews always have high conversion rate as compared to others.

Keep it Simple: Try to keep your landing page simple. A complex landing page filled with images, videos or information about other offers is very distractive and don’t convert well.

Focused Content: The content on landing page should be highly relevant and focused completely on a single offer. Break big paragraphs in to short and highlight the important points so that they catch the user attention easily. Provide all important information and conclusions at the top of your landing page as users don’t wait long to read so far. Not so important or supportive information should be last.

Free Offers and Money-Back Guarantee: Always provide free offers related to your product as such offers will help your prospects to remember you and encourage them to buy from you whenever they need your product. If possible try to provide a money back guarantee with your product. These guarantees help in creating a risk free environment for your prospect to buy from you.

Contact Information: Always add your contact information with your image and a short profile at the end so that users can feel that your website is completely reliable and they are not going to buy from a scammer.

Much has been written on the subject of affiliate marketing, but sometimes until you see specific examples ideas just don’t click.

In this post, I’m going to show you a very creative affiliate marketing example created by Tissa Godavitarne of ACME People Search.

People searches represent a huge market, and affiliates have substantial opportunity to generate income from this niche. What most affiliates do in this niche is just throw up a review landing page and send traffic to affiliate partners.

But Tissa created an “out of the box” business that combined two highly profitable markets and drives massive affiliate profits.

Market # 1

Tissa’s business model began by recognizing the huge opportunity in the people search niche market. To dominate the niche, Tissa created a very unique way to capture the market with his own search engine.

The ACME search engine is simple. When you search for a person it returns results just like Google does for keyword searches.

But unlike Google keyword searches, the Acme People search engine only provides partial data about the person being searched. If you want to unlock all the data, the search engine refers you to affiliate partners where big affiliate commissions are earned.

Another unique aspect of this business model is the auto responder feature.    Before referring you to an affiliate partner, the Acme search engine is setup to capture your e-mail address.   Your e-mail address is then placed into an Aweber autoresponder for future follow-ups on the person you were searching about.

In total there are 4 streams of affiliate commissions generated from the search engine. But those 4 income streams are only part of the story, market # 2 is where Tissa really distinguished himself.

If you want to see the search engine live and play around with it click here.

Market #2

The true power of Tissa’s people search engine is centered around another massive affiliate market, the online business market. Tissa recognized there is a huge barrier for people entering the online business market. That barrier is the technical skills required to get an online business running and actually making money online.

Consequently, Tissa, built his AMCE people search engine so that anyone at the “push of a button” can start their own affiliate earning search engine for FREE.

That handles the technical hurtle, but what about making money. Well Tissa did not stop short, he built lots of money making opportunities in his people search engine.

First if you follow Tissa’s 3 steps (1. Affiliatize 2. Monetize 3. Advertise) and flip his super affiliate switch, you will have access to your own people search engine which can earn money from 7 unique affiliate programs.

Four of the affiliate income streams are in the people search market itself and are earned when people do searches via your search engine.

The other 3 income streams are in the make money online market and have high conversions since you must complete the affiliate offers to get the maximum benefit from your search engine.

For each person you refer to start a free ACME people search engine, Tissa pays the below 3 affiliate commissions to you.

1. Referral Fees – If a user completes the 3 steps (1. Affiliatize 2. Monetize 3. Advertise) your referral earnings are as high as $30 per signup.
2. Global Domain International (GDI) Affiliate Commissions: Each time a referral sets up a free people search engine a domain is needed. When the domain is purchased from Global Domain International, 100% affiliate commission is paid. As an Affiliate of GDI you can also make money for every person who signs up under you or someone in your downline 5 levels deep.
3. HostGator – When you follow all Tissa’s steps and flip your super affiliate switch, you can earn as much as $125 per sign up from HostGator hosting for all your referrals. If people you refer want to flip their super affiliate switch then they must first get HostGator hosting from your affiliate link. A win win for driving hosting affiliate commissions to you.

Please don’t misunderstand this post as me selling Tissa’s system, because I am not.

What I want you to see is that with a little bit of creativity, you too can create value in any niche that will drive big affiliate profits.

If for some reason you want to learn more about ACME people search,
click here.

In my post How I Track My Pay Per Click Landing Page Sales Using Clickbank And Commission Junction Affiliate Links, I showed you how to add tracking to your Clickbank and Commission Junction affiliate links to help you track your landing page sales from your affiliate partners.

In this post, I will show you how to take the same method a step further and track your sales results down to the individual keyword with MSN Adcenter and Google Adwords.

By using the method discussed in this post, you will be able to track multiple landing pages and pay per click keywords.  With this tracking system you will instantly see exactly which landing pages and keywords are the best at converting into affiliate sales.

First let me add a disclaimer. 

The keyword tracking method in this post will work with your Commission Junction affiliate links or any affiliate link that allows tracking with enough characters to track keywords. 

The method in this post, will not work with your Clickbank affiliate links.  The main reason for this is that the Clickbank tracking id (known as tid) can only be 8 characters which is not enough characters to track keywords.   

The best method for tracking your Clickbank affiliate links is to track your landing pages as I showed you in my prior post.

With the method I will discuss in this post, your landing page will need to be a php page and you will need to have php running on your web server.

The first step is to set up a php redirection file which purpose is to hide your affiliate link on your landing page and redirect your users to your affiliate partner.

For my example, I will use a file name of marketingsecrets.php as my php redirection file.  This file will include my affiliate link that will redirect to my affiliate partner.

To create your php redirection file open up a Windows notepad file and paste in the redirection code shown below:

<?php
$strKeyword = $_GET['kw'];
header( 'Location: http://youraffiliatelink/?sid='">http://youraffiliatelink?sid='. $strKeyword ) ;
?>

In the above code, change the http://youraffiliatelink section to your actual Commission Junction affiliate link. Do not change anything after the ?sid section.

Next, save the file as a php file and upload it to your web server.  I saved mine as marketingsecrets.php, yours can be named anything.  This file will be used to redirect users to your affiliate partner. 

Sidebar:  To save a file as a php file you simply create it in Windows notepad or with your favorite html editor.  Then choose file “save as” and name the file with a .php extension (i.e. marketingsecrets.php).  After the file is saved you can view it in Windows Explorer and it will show a php extension.

The redirection file works like this.  When someone clicks on the redirection link from my site (i.e. http://www.mysite.com/marketingsecrets.php) it will redirect them to my affiliate partner’s site giving me credit for the affiliate sales.

Once you have your redirection file complete and uploaded to your server, the next step is to create your landing page and save it as a php file.  I will save mine as landingpage.php for this example, but you should name yours specific to your affiliate offer.

After you save your landing page upload it to your server.

On your landing page wherever you insert your affiliate link use the below method:

<a href="http://www.youraffiliatelink.com/marketingsecrets.php?kw=Goolpms1-<?php echo($_REQUEST['kw']); ?>" target="_blank">Change This For Your Desired Anchored Text</a>

In the above link you will need to change a few things:

1.  Change the http://www.youraffiliatelink.com to your actual Commission Junction affiliate link.
 
2.  Change the marketingsecrets.php to the actual name of your php redirection file you created above.

3.  In the section that says Change This For Your Desired Anchored Text you need to change this to what anchored text you want for your affiliate link.

Notice in the above link the section showing ?kw=Goolpms1.  This is the parameter used to track your landing page and pay per click engine.  It is a completely made up code that will make sense to you for tracking your landing page.

So in the example above my tracking code stands for Google Adwords (Goo), landing page (lp), marketing secrets 1 (ms1).  You can change the code to what makes sense to you for tracking your landing pages.

The next section of the above link <?php echo($_REQUEST['kw']); ?> will capture your keyword that is passed from your pay per click ad.  So it will capture the keyword the user searched for when arriving at your landing page.

The last step is to set up your pay per click campaign to pass the keyword in the url.  This will allow the keyword to be captured by the <?php echo($_REQUEST['kw']); ?> code when the user reaches your landing page.

To pass keywords with your pay per click campaigns you simply add a parameter to your landing page destination url so that the keyword is passed in the url. 

Here is the parameter you add for the MSN Adcenter and Google Adwords pay per click search engines.

Google Adwords – Add the parameter ?kw={keyword}to your landing page destination url.
i.e.  http://www.youraffiliatelink.com/landingpage.php?kw={keyword}

MSN Adcenter – Add the parameter kw={QueryString} to your landing page destination url. 
i.e.  http://www.youraffiliatelink.com/landingpage.php?kw={QueryString}

The last time I checked Yahoo Search Marketing did not allow tracking of keywords in the url.  

Once you have completed the above steps you will have developed a very powerful system to tell you exactly which keywords and which landing pages are the highest converting into affiliate sales.  This system will provide you a huge edge with your Commission Junction pay per click campaigns.

As an affiliate marketer, I find it crucial to track my landing page sales results to survive in the ultra-competitive pay per click market. 

Many people use Google analytics to track CPA affiliate offers.  However, with Clickbank and Commission Junction affiliate offers, it is difficult to use Google analytics tracking unless you can get your affiliate partners to put your Google analytic’s tracking code on their webpage that the customer sees after a sale is completed.

Plus, it is no secret that Google is slapping affiliates with high bid prices and low quality scores everyday. By using Google analytics to track your pay per click campaigns you’re giving Google an open invitation to see how much money you’re making on each campaign.  Do your really want to give Google an open invitation to how much you’re earning on each of your pay per click affiliate campaigns?  Not me!-:

I use the below method for tracking my sales conversion for my Commission Junction and Clickbank pay per click affiliate campaigns.  I like to hide the Clickbank hop link so I use a php redirect as you will see below. 

You can use this same method, but you need to make sure your web server has php installed on it in order for it to work.

Here are the steps:

1.  Open a new Windows notepad file and copy & paste the below code in the file.  This code will be used to create a php redirect file with a tracking code, which will redirect your users to your affiliate partner:

<?php
$strKeyword = $_GET['kw'];
header( ‘Location: http://youraffiliatecode?sid=’. $strKeyword ) ;
?>

2.  Change the http://youraffiliatecode section in the above php code to your Commission Junction or Clickbank affiliate link. In the above code be careful not to erase the ? or anything after the ? sign when you replace your affiliate link.

3.  If your offer is a Clickbank affiliate link change the ?sid portion of the link to ?tid. Otherwise if you’re doing a Commission Junction affiliate link the above will work fine because sid is used for tracking in Commission Junction.

4.  Choose file Save As and save the above file you created naming it something relevant to your affiliate program.  When saving the file make sure in the file name box you add a .php extension to the end of the file. 

For instance you could save the file as superaffiliate.php.  After you save your file you should notice in Windows Explorer that the file type is called php.  If you see it is a text file then you have not added the .php to the end of the file name when you saved it.

5.  Ftp the created php file to your web server. 

Ok, now that you have created the php redirect file you will use it as the link on your landing page anytime you want someone to visit your affiliate partner.  Anytime a link on your landing page is clicked the above php redirect file will redirect the user automatically to your affiliate partner with your affiliate link. 

Next you need to set up your landing pages.  Landing pages can be done in html, htm or php it does not matter.  For this example let’s take a look at 3 landing pages and how to track the sales results of each of them.

On each landing page when you want to direct the user to your affiliate you simply have to add a parameter to your link for tracking the landing page.

Here is how the link would look:

<a href=”http://yoursite.com/superaffiliate.php?kw= GoogSa1”>Anchor Text</a>

In the above link, you would change the superaffiliate.php to whatever you named the file you created above and the http://yoursite.com/ to your sites actual URL.

Notice the parameter added to the url ?kw=GoogSa1.  The GoogSa1 is how to track your landing page sales.  You can change the GoogSa1 portion of the code to whatever you want (for clickbank affiliate links keep it to 8 characters or less).  It simply identifies which landing page you are tracking.  I selected GoogSa1 to tell me this landing page will run on Google Adwords (Goog) and it is my first version of the super affiliate landing page (Sa1).

Each time you get a sale from the above landing page, it will report in your Clickbank or Commission Junction account with a tracking code of GoogSa1.  That is how you know which landing page is selling the most.

Your next step is to create different versions of the landing page above so you can see how changes to the landing page impact your sales.  So when you make a second and third version of the above landing page you can simply change the tracking code from GoogSa1 to GooSa2 and GoogSa3. 

Also once you create 3 versions you can copy each version and set it up for pay per click campaigns on MSN, and Yahoo.  You simply need to change the tracking portion of the url to reflect those engines.  So for your copied version of landing page 1 your tracking code may be MSNSa1.  For landing page 2 and 3, it would be MSNSa2 and MSNSa3.

I hope you are seeing the power of how tracking gives you real time statistics on the landing pages that are generating sales from your pay per click campaigns.  Not only are you seeing which sales letter works the best, but you are also seeing which pay per click search engine (MSN, Google or Yahoo) is generating higher sales.

Once you start tracking your sales and landing page conversions you can really start to separate your profitable campaigns from the losers and dominate your competition.

In the near future, I will be doing another post to show you how to make a minor change to the above method to track which keywords in your pay per click campaign are generating the most sales.

Stay tuned!

Lately around the web, I hear many affiliates talking about link cloaking, mainly for two reasons.

First, affiliates are trying to hide their affiliate links from being identified by software like Affiliate Elite.

Secondly, I often hear cloaking mentioned when affiliates want to hide affiliate links from search engine spiders.  The perception is that search engine spiders flag affiliates hurting their organic search results.

Are these reasons justified?  Sure they are! 

Everyday markets are getting more competitive and the search engines aren’t exactly overjoyed with affiliates.

If you want to prevent users from visually seeing your affiliate links you can do it FREE with the below method.

1. Visit http://tokira.net/unicode/ and convert your affiliate link to Unicode.
2. At http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/web1/affiliate_link_cloaker.htm under the section called “How Can I Do It For Free” (scroll down the page) copy the Model Page code.
3. Next paste the copied code into a blank html, htm or php file.
4. After pasting the code change the section labeled “–TITLE’–” to whatever title you want for your page as James
   describes.
5. Next in the file put the Unicode affiliate URL (from step 1 above) in place of –URL– in the code as James describes.
6. Save your file and name it anything you want.  For this example I will use the file name “superaffilate.html”.  Note your  file can be any name, but it is a good idea to make it relevant to your affiliate offer.
7. Next, you need a directory on your server to store the file you created.  I suggest you create a special directory instead of putting the file at the root.  For instance, you could name the directory, “recommends” or whatever you like.
8. Upload your file (i.e. superaffiliate.html) to the directory you created.
9. Next on your affiliate landing page you will need to link to the file you created which will lead your visitors to your
   affiliate partner’s site.  To accomplish this simply create a link to your file  (i.e. <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/recommends/superaffiliate.html” rel=”nofollow”>Super Affiliate Profits</a>) on your affiliate landing page. 

If you want to block spiders from following the link make sure you use the rel=”nofollow” feature as I have above.

If you are using the link in email you can just place the direct link (i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com/recommends/superaffiliate.html)

That is it.  It looks like a lot with 9 steps, but it can actually be done in about 3 to 5 minutes.

With this method your affiliate links will be completely hidden visually.  You can even use the affiliate link in email marketing and .pdf ebooks and it will be hidden.

If you want to try to prevent the search engine spider from reading your html file that includes your true affiliate link (in my example superaffiliate.html) you can block the spiders with a disallow in your robots.txt. 

Since we put this file in a special directory (in my example recommends directory) you simply block access to this whole directory via robots.txt.  In the future this can be the directory you house all your affiliate links in.

If you do not know how to block your directory via robots.txt, it is easy.  Just create a text file in notepad called robots.txt and paste the below into it:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /yourdirectoryname/

Change the yourdirectoryname with the name of the directory on your server where your affiliate file is located (i.e in my example it would be the recommends directory). Then upload the robots.txt file to the root directory on your web server.

Once you get the hang of this it is nowhere as bad as it looks. 

Good luck.

Here are a couple little tips to help you create your own digital products fast and make enormous profits.

There are tons of sites on the web offering rights such as private label right digital products.  With these products you can sell them on your own website and get 100% of the profit.  Many of these private label right and resell right products also allow you to fully modify and edit them as you see fit, but make sure before you do you fully understand the rights set forth and always keep a copy of the rights.

You could just take resell right and private label product and sell them “as is”, but then you just have the same old product everyone else is selling and listing it in clickbank will be difficult. 

Therefore, a good strategy for creating your own products fast and not having to write every word is to take sections from various resell or private label right products and create your own product by combining them into your own digital product.  You can also editing or change them as you see necessary.  Of course, only do this if the terms of the product allow you too.

After you create your new product you should next have a new cover and sales letter created for your new product. Then you can sell it on your own through your own site or blog and also recruit affiliates to sell your products.

The benefit of resell and private label right products over traditional affiliate marketing is clear:

1. You get 100% of the profits from your sells.

2. You can list the product on Clickbank and recruit your own affiliates to sell the product and earn further dollars and also build your list at the same time.

3. You can include your own affiliate links to related products in the digital product to make further commissions.

The key to this strategy is thinking of the big picture.  You not only want to set up your one digital product for a sale, but you want to have a marketing funnel of other backend products to sell. 

These backend products can be sold through internal links weaved in your digital product.  These links can either be affiliate links or simply links to other products your own.