Below are a few of the many reasons why making the step into the affiliate marketing business might be good for you:

ANYONE CAN DO IT

Well that’s not entirely true. There are certain personal qualities that you need if you want to be successful. In a nutshell you need to be focused, patient, keen to learn and be passionate about what you do. Other than that, yeah, anyone can do it. You don’t need to have any previous experience or qualifications in order to start as an affiliate marketer. Once you have done your research and you know what you need to do to get the ball rolling, you can have your own business up and running within a day.

LOW START UP COSTS

Your essentials for starting in this business are a computer and an internet connection. If you have those then you are ready to go. You will need to make some small payments to get started, the main ones being buying a domain name and web hosting. You can find some very good deals out there which won’t break the bank and once you are earning through your affiliate site, then it will pay for itself. You should also remember that it is free to join an affiliate network, so that’s a saving right there.

IMPORTANT: If you are ever asked to pay to become an affiliate then walk away and find another network!

NO PRODUCT COSTS

Take any product you like. All of them will have had to have been designed, tested and finally manufactured before being made available to the public. Just think of how much time, effort and (most importantly) money went into that. That’s something that you don’t have to worry about with your affiliate business. All of the hard work is done for you.

WORK FROM HOME

In fact you can work from anywhere, at any time. For most people this is the key reason for entering into the world of affiliate marketing. Whether it’s from a desire to spend more time at home with family or simply because you are tired with your regular 9 to 5 job, affiliate marketing offers a whole world of freedom.

YOU CHOOSE WHAT YOU SELL

You can find almost anything sold online, and chances are you will find an affiliate program connected to it. By having such a wide choice of products that you can market, you are guaranteed to find one that will suit you. The best way for you to pick your product is to choose something you know that you would like creating your sites content around, because that is what you are going to need to do.

NO CUSTOMERS

Once you have led a customer to buying the product that you are marketing, they are out of your hands. You will receive your commission for making a sale, and it will then be down to the merchant to deal with them from then on. This means that you don’t have to worry about dealing with taking payment, shipping and if they arise refunds and complaints.

MAKE MONEY OVERNIGHT

This should not be confused with the bogus “get rich quick” claims that say you can make money overnight from day one of your affiliate career. It takes time before you start seeing the real cash start coming in. What I mean here is that you can earn money 24/7. Just because you aren’t sat at your computer working doesn’t mean that your website will stop making money. Particularly if you are promoting a product that is available globally; just because it is night time for you, the other side of the world is going to be up and browsing.

YOU ARE YOUR OWN BOSS

It’s a great feeling not to have someone on your back, always looking over your shoulder telling you to work harder and longer. Especially when the results of all your work aren’t reflected in your salary. With affiliate marketing you can be sure in the knowledge that everything you work for is yours (although do save some aside for the tax man!) But, and it’s a big but! Sometimes not having somebody else pushing you and setting you targets can lead to your affiliate campaigns stagnating. You always need to be pushing your campaigns, keeping them fresh, trying new ideas and exploring other possibilities. It’s all down on you to motivate yourself.

From taking a look at the list above, you can see quite clearly that the benefits of a career in affiliate marketing reach further than just making money. You will be able to find more information on the “how to” side of affiliate marketing, but the reasons here should be enough to make you want to go and find out more. Ultimately affiliate marketing is a lot of hard work, but if you choose your niche and products wisely it can also be a lot of fun.

The rewards are there if you work for them.

About the Author

Stuart Bourne is a full time affiliate marketer, and part time content writer forCPANetworkReviews, a site which offers unbiased information about the leading CPA and affiliate networks, as well as providing helpful tips and guides for internet marketing on the blog pages.

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 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.

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!

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.