If you have been involved in Internet Marketing, chances are that you have heard about Affiliate Marketing many times. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced marketer, you have to know the description of affiliate marketing first.

Affiliate marketing has a lot of descriptions; however all have the same meaning. Simply, you promote and market the merchant´s products and services and will be compensated for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer that you provide through your marketing efforts. So, the commission you will earn is based on that specific action and could be measured as Pay Per Click (visiting the merchant site), Pay Per Lead (joining the merchant site or taking a trial and subscription) and/or Pay Per Sale (purchasing a merchant´s product or service). Since Pay Per Click action does not give a reasonable amount of commission, it is not normally categorized under the term of affiliate marketing. So, whenever we talk about marketing as an affiliate, we mostly mean Pay Per Lead and Pay Per Sell actions.

Affiliate Marketing is the fastest, easiest and most cost-efficient way to make money on the Internet compared with other forms of online businesses. You don´t need to create and manage your products or services, you don´t need to handle customer orders and support, you don´t even need to have your own website. On the other hand, if you don´t know exactly what to do, you will never make money as an affiliate. Getting the needed and updated information and taking action are the most important steps of this process.

I have been evaluating affiliate programs and reseller opportunities over the pass few years. Some programs were free to try and some cost a little money. I read many articles and books on the topics but in the end, there is no better way of learning then just to get your feet wet and try the programs.

There are many article on the good, the bad, and the ugly when it come to affiliate and reselller programs. I'll tell you about the top 10 programs that is working for me, without any vague theory or complex rating system. These are the top 10 that are earning the most money. They have superb products, fair commissions and good online reporting of affiliates' sales. Again, they work well for me.

If you have a site aimed at website owners, or a section of your site aimed at them, these affiliate products should sell well for you, too.

Ken Evoy's Site Build It! is right up at Number 1, where it belongs.

I earn four-figure commissions (and sometimes five-figure commissions) from Ken's affiliate program now, with only minimal maintenance.

Ken is a truly amazing, multi-talented individual. Among his achievements, he has taught medicine, designed toys and games which earn millions of dollars in royalties, and invented a "virtually impossible to sell" niche software product - which he sold on the Net, earning $1,000 to $5,000 a day.

SiteSell's fast-selling Site Build It! (SBI) has been my top money-earner for years.

It makes it easy for you to create your own website simply and easily, even if you have no technical knowledge at all. It analyzes which themes will be profitable.

Even better, it helps you optimize the pages for the main search engines and turns promoting your site into a push-button task. This remarkable tool also generates your Google and Yahoo! Sitemaps and automatically submits them when necessary so you don't have to!

Site Build It! doesn't just teach you search engine optimization. It teaches you Internet marketing.

Most important of all, it teaches you how to be successful. No wonder SBI! has thousands of happy users.


Ken Evoy explains how SBI changes lives

Ken Evoy was the first to introduce the concept of PREselling to affiliates. This is the process of building relationships with your visitors and putting them into a warm, willing-to-buy mood so they are much more likely to make purchases based on your recommendations.

The Site Build It! Action Guide will show you how to master this technique to drive your affiliate conversions through the roof. You won't just be building a website, you'll be building a long-term web business.

There's an incredible private SBI forum where SBI owners and users share tips and help each other. There's nothing else like it on the Internet.

I use Site Build It! for several websites and highly recommend it.

SBI! sites succeed. 61% of SBIers end up in the Top 3%. And only SBI! sites prove success. You'd think that others would if they could, wouldn't you?

See the proof.

As well as offering fantastic value for money, SiteSell President Ken Evoy works extremely hard to help his affiliates earn money. I've spent many hours chatting with him and learning about his products and plans. You can trust him to OVER-deliver on his promises.

The SiteSell program offers:

• Outstanding value for money. You can feel comfortable promoting excellent products.


• Lifetime commissions. You don't just earn a commission on the first sale. You earn a commission on every purchase by that customer - for life. Think about that. You sell once, earn indefinitely!


• Two-tier commission structure. You earn revenue on the sales made by the people you refer to Ken.


• Limited number of affiliates. Your efforts are protected.


• A fair contract, which has non-terminatable/non-modifiable features. Ken looks after YOUR interests.


• The BEST manual for affiliates - 224 pages packed with useful ideas - totally FREE. You receive excellent advice to get you started earning money.


• A site that SELLS!
  Ken's site makes the sale for you.

All these features ensure this program is a long-term winner.

SiteSell's lifetime commissions are for active salespeople only. You stop receiving lifetime commissions if you stop generating new sales.

Ken writes THREE newsletters which consistently offer the most detailed, helpful, step-by-step advice for affiliates I've seen.

Click here to see a sample of the single best affiliate-support e-zine on the Net.

Join the SiteSell 5 Pillar Affiliate Program here

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If you're looking for a way to earn income from eBay without having to actually sell anything yourself, the eBay affiliate program is something to consider. eBay offers a staggering array of options for affiliates to utilize eBay's marketplace and its content for potential referral revenue. Search engine marketing, banners, auction feeds and Web Services are all part of eBay's offer to help affiliates profit from "the world's online marketplace."

Getting Started
Though the affiliates program is specifically not intended to market your own auctions (that's actually against eBay affiliates terms of service), to get started you do need to be an eBay member. The actual affiliate program itself, in terms of registration, tracking, payment and "some" of the linking options is done via Commission Junction, so you'll need to get an ID there as well. This is easily done by going to http://affiliates.ebay.com. Approval for the eBay program is almost instantaneous so you'll be able to get right into the thick of it immediately.

Payouts
It's important to understand eBay's commission structure so that you'll have a reasonable expectation of what to expect in terms of potential revenue. eBay pays out affiliate revenues for two things:

1. Links that convert when a New "active" user registration occurs. The new user must either use Buy It Now or place a bid within 30 days of initial registration to be considered active.
2. Links from which a user bids on an item or uses Buy It Now (BIN)

Both of those items are volume indexed so the payout increases as you get more bids/user signups. As of February 2005, eBay will pay a minimum of $20.00 for every new active user registration (when you have 1-499 monthly active registrations) and a maximum of $45.00 (when you have over 7,500 monthly active registrations).

In recent years, pay per click (PPC) advertising has accounted for the bulk of spending for search engine marketing.

More and more websites and business are utilizing PPC campaigns to drive traffic to their sites and increase their online exposure, but online merchants aren’t the only ones benefiting from this technique.

Affiliate merchants often utilize PPC advertising to lead readers to their affiliate links. By directing traffic to cost-per-action (CPA) or pay per sale offers, affiliates can significantly increase their clicks, sales and commission earnings. Often referred to as PPC arbitrage, this method can lead to big profits when used appropriately. Before you begin using paid search to promote affiliate offers, take the time to learn more about some of the basic PPC management techniques.

How to Use PPC to Promote CPA Offers

How can marketers use paid search to drive traffic to cost-per-action offers? Successful pay-per-click management involves choosing a CPA offer to promote, selecting targeted keywords, writing ads, and running a PPC campaign. In order to use this method effectively, it is important to choose your affiliate promotions wisely, select the best keywords possible, and learn how to write very effective PPC ads. The following tips can help you learn the skills you need for effective PPC management.

1. Choose Affiliate Programs Wisely

Before you can begin planning a campaign, you need to select the CPA offers that your want to promote. With literally thousands to choose from, finding one that is right for you can be a difficult choice. Always consider important factors such as how much the program pays for each lead and the general reputation of the merchant.

2. Utilize PPC Research Tools

Once you’ve chosen an offer to promote, you need to select they keywords that appeal to your target audience.

Affiliate websites are one of the fastest growing wings of e-commerce. You can literally find thousands of affiliate partnerships to choose from. This is both good and bad news. The good news is that there are great affiliate deals to be found online that haven't yet been over-saturated by partnerships. The bad news is that there are affiliate partners out there that you shouldn't touch with a virtual ten-foot pole.

There are a number of steps you should take before signing up with an affiliate partner. First, you should read the affiliates terms and conditions. Too often, budding marketers skip over an affiliates terms. An affiliate partner may not allow for Google Adwords or other marketing avenues so make sure this is not explicitly laid out in the affiliates terms and conditions. If there are no terms of service, this should be a warning in itself. A reputable affiliate will normally have terms of service.

Payment is obviously a huge one. Make sure the affiliate has reasonable terms. Some affiliates, such as Amazon, only pay out after a set number of sales—you do not make a dime on the first, second, or even tenth sale. Other affiliates will pay out for each sale. The flip side is that an affiliate with a sales minimum may also have a better percentage payout. The best-case scenario is to find an affiliate partner that pays out for every sale and offers a good percentage.

This will be all for naught if the affiliate does not pay out in a timely manner. Try and not learn from experience, in other words, don't get burned. Instead, learn from other people's experience. Go to affiliate marketing forums to see if a particular affiliate has a good or bad reputation. The trouble here is that a new affiliate might not have a marketer base yet, and these affiliates usually offer the most attractive terms in order to bring affiliates in.

As a novice ecommerce affiliate, there are a number of things to consider before getting started.

Once you have determined how you will first venture into the ecommerce affiliate world, be it through a website, PPC or other means, it will be important to choose affiliate programs that will best complement your efforts.

What’s your Marketing Profile? Finding Merchants that Match

Will you have an informational website? Will you be using PPC? Email marketing? This information will be the key to selecting the right merchants. Some affiliate programs don’t allow PPC or email marketing, while others both encourage and support these marketing practices. Also, certain verticals convert much better using specific methods – for example, education merchants such as eLearners have a history of converting well using email marketing techniques.

Quality is Key

While searching for products to promote, make certain to include testing the products or services you will be promoting. You’ll be far more convincing to potential consumers if you can provide a genuine testimonial about the products you promote. If that’s not possible, research the reputation that your products/merchants have. If your merchant’s positive reputation precedes it, you will be much more likely to convert and receive your commission on a timely basis.

Reputation Testing

A reputation can be tested by investigating:

• Where else the merchant is advertising (PPC, paid banner placements and email).

• Who is linking to the merchant through reverse lookup on the search engines.

• Press Release activity.

• Forum participation and/or comments from fellow affiliates;

• Signing up to the merchant’s customer newsletter to get a gauge for how well they are treating your traffic.

Affiliate programs can either be a way to put a little extra cash in your pocket or, hopefully, become a full time job. However, it's not like you can put up a bunch of affiliate links and expect to start making a mint. If you want to make a full time job's worth of money off affiliate marketing, you have to work at it full time. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it works 24/7—but this doesn't mean you should also put in several hours a day of your own time.

The affiliate marketers who have had the most outstanding success are normally those who have more than one site working at once. It's much harder to make a decent amount of money if you have one affiliate site at a time. Experienced affiliate marketers will have a number of different sites running at once, all with different types of affiliate links. What this means is that each affiliate site will need separate SEO: new content in the form of blogs, forums, articles, and other techniques.

A key to a successful affiliate marketing program is to make the affiliate site a useful resource. Just posting a bunch of links is not going to impress many web surfers. They'll leave and likely never come back. The trick to any web business is to keep people on site—this is true for the affiliate partner and it's true for affiliate marketers. An affiliate site shouldn't necessarily scream, "affiliate site." Instead, it can be a trusted resource on a particular topic.

Useful content is the best way to make this possible. Take a site that has a number of links to sports-related businesses (apparel, equipment, tickets, books, etc.). The affiliate marketer can then set up a forum that talks about different sports teams, strategy, and so on—potentially, this forum could bring in sports fans from across the country. Blogging is another great medium for affiliate marketing.

There are a number of different tools out there that can help you both determine and improve your search engine ranking. Many of these tools do a variation on the same theme. For example, there are several tools available which check you backlinks, page rank, domain popularity, and keyword density. All of these are vital to seeing where you need to improve a site's SEO.

Some tools are more useful than others. For instance, a keyword-writing tool will scan your site and look for the most relevant keywords. The answers can sometimes come out as gibberish, or if you have yet to provide any content, the tool will provide very little at all. A keyword density checker, on the other hand, can check current content and tell you the frequency of certain keywords. If keywords are too close together, the site could risk being red-flagged by Google spiders and others.

Other keyword tools include tools that rank different keywords in search engines. Really, this ranking is just as important as your site's own page rank. Once you determine the most popular searches for sites in your industry, you can then tailor content around that keyword. Keep in mind that one keyword could elicit dozens of pages of topics, so don't necessarily stop at one page per keyword. The quantity of content is important, so long as it is well written.

Link analyzers are good for a couple of reasons. First, it checks your link rank vs. other websites. Second, and more importantly, it can give you the link data on websites that may be potential link partners. To improve your search engine ranking, it's best to have links coming in from sites that already rank high in search engines. A link analyzer will tell you where to direct your link-trade marketing efforts.

Checking page rank for your own site is not nearly as important as checking page ranks of the competition. You should always be looking to improve your page rank regardless of what it is currently.