Get Amazon's Customers to Buy Affiliate Products Through You

As Google and Bing continue to tidy up their search engines, we have to constantly continue to come up with advanced strategies to bring traffic to our websites and blogs.  Posting rich content to our blog is not enough and if that is the only thing we do, we will never make a dime. You have to network, post comments, be a guest blogger, build backlinks, post videos, and do several other things constantly to get visitors to your sites and blogs. New strategies are being born daily and so are products on how you can get more traffic to your blog.

Well there is one powerful free method you can use to get more visitors and sure buyers to your sites and blogs. The answer is Amazon. See when people visit Amazon, they are already looking to buy something. Their database is full of buyers. Amazons customers are looking for solutions at that moment, so why not cash in on some of the action. I did a blog post on “Use KDP Select to Increase Website Traffic” and I explained how KDP Select can bring in more traffic. I’ve had success with KDP Select and made a passive income from creating information products. I’ve even helped a couple of family members do the same.  It is very easy for you to do, especially if you are a blogger because you already create content on a regular basis and this is something you have to do if you want to maintain a good blog.

So here’s the strategy I use in my own business.

I create kindle eBooks. Some of them are not related to my blogs, a few are. The ones that are related I put links in them back to my blog or to a product. Since these customers are looking for solutions already, there’s a greater chance that someone will want the product that I recommend. And since we don’t have access to the customers’ information from Amazon, we have to create books with a few links placed in them, (you don’t want to overdo it though).

This strategy will help you to get new visits to your blogs and new customers. The guide just needs to be something short, but long enough for you to give valuable information to your reader. So don’t just throw together a book and expect to put it on Amazon. Your books will have to be accepted in order for you to sell it on their site and it needs to actually help your customer in some way.

So let’s say you are promoting an affiliate product on losing stomach fat, you can create a book on helpful tips to lose body fat and recommend the affiliate product and your weight loss blog/site.

 If you can give the best and helpful info, your customers will listen to you when you are recommending a book or a product and will more than likely buy it from your site or the affiliate product through you.

Now what I do recommend is you put a link to your site in every kindle book you create. You can use affiliate links, but I highly recommend you put your site or blog more so than anything. The reason I recommend you do this is because you will have more control and contact with your customers and you want to do things in a professional matter.  Since you most likely have affiliate links on your blog or site, sending buyers to your site will be the best thing for you, this way you’re building your business and not just passing all customer contact to the vendor of the affiliate product.

You also want to make sure you have your contact information such as an email address and/or a phone number in your kindle book. You can also include a link to send buyers to a squeeze page and offer a free useful product there.

I’ve seen some kindle books where people will have the link to their website or a free product in the preview or introduction area of their book. This way if a customer doesn’t buy their book, they can still click on the link and access the free product. I’ve even done this myself and got information I was looking for. There was a book I was interested in but instead of buying the book, I clicked on the cover to look inside and clicked on the link to get their product and I ended up on their email list.

This strategy works well in the affiliate marketing business and it works even if you have your own product and want to spread the word about your business.  You can also give your book away for free for five days if you choose to join the KDP Select program, but book has to be exclusive to Amazon to be in the program. If you choose not to enroll your book in KDP Select, just place a link on the first page of your book and guide Amazon’s customers to your sites and blogs. 

Recommended Reading

Use KDP Select To Increase Website Traffic

Disadvantages Of Using Affiliate Marketing Tools

Warning: Don’t Promote Hyped Up Affiliate Products

What Do Dogs And Blog Titles Have In Common?

Use Content Curation To Attract Readers 

Powerful Often Overlooked Traffic Tips

Recommended Product From Amazon

How To Write A Kindle Book In Three Days

Compelling Keywords To Convert Visitors To Buyers

How do you choose compelling keywords?

One of the most important ways to get targeted traffic to your website, blogs, and ads is to choose compelling keywords. One should think about what their possible prospect may type into Google or other search engines to quickly grasp their attention. People are always searching for something they crave and if you want to succeed, you must find the audiences that desire what you have to offer and draw them to your site or blog. To do this you need to choose compelling keywords that will convert your visitors into buyers.

Buyers are usually seeking for distinguishing answers to problems they have. You never know what a person is actually looking for and it could be in the product that you are promoting and if you write a well thought out article or blog post with specific keywords that will attract this visitor to your blog, you will more than likely make the sale.

Now to start out you need to put compelling keywords in the title of your blogs and articles. Make sure the keywords are targeted to the right audience. When choosing a keyword, its best to choose keywords with less competition that grants you a better chance to score the first page on a Google search. 

Keyword researching is one of the best ways to ace this task. Also don’t select words like “make money”; this will only make it a dilemma for prospects to find your site or post. It would best to use words such as “how to make money posting blogs”. This is more direct to the point and your outcome for a higher rank in search engines will multiply. Just search for keywords by going to Google and typing them in and put it in parenthesis to see how many results you come up with. If the results are too high to rank for, you may want to find compelling keywords with fewer results that you can rank for effortlessly.

It is more desirable to rank for lower competitive keywords than high ones. You may get a first page position with a high one for a short time and then other people who are competing against you will push you off of page one. So while others are aiming for more competitive words, why don’t you tackle the lower ones? In the long run, you will have a favorable outcome and maintain your position for quite some time. 

If you really want to beat out competition short term to make some quick money with Clickbank, do a constant search on new products that just launched or explore products that is in pre launch on other sites that prospects thirst for and be the first to endorse them. Now although you are working on this task you still ought to think about attaining a long-term income. Eventually after you start promoting new products, other people can rank higher than you and you must write more articles with compelling keywords to keep on converting prospects into buyers

What else can a person do to choose compelling keywords? Leave your comments below.

Recommended reading

What Do Dogs And Blog Titles Have In Common?

Write A Guest Blog Post & Get Visitors

5 Creative Traffic Building Ideas

Use Semantic Keyword Research For Higher Affiliate Sales

Powerful Often Overlooked Traffic Tips

Is Money Evil?

Also take a look at this info graph below that will help you create compelling content


Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

What Do Dogs And Blog Titles Have In Common?

I know you are probably thinking "what in the world do dogs and blog titles have in common?" You probably are also thinking they have nothing in common. Now dogs and blog titles do have something in common, they know how to get attention. But that is only possible if your blog title is attractive, eye catching, engaging, amazing, mind boggling, intriguing, and stirs curiosity. This is exactly what I did with my title. If you are reading this, more than likely you are reading this because my blog title made you curious.

If you want more attention to your blog, want more clicks, and more views, you have to create a blog title that gets attention. Fido gets your attention in different ways. For example, if your dog wants you to play with him, he will bring his toy to you. He will also bark or lick your face for attention. Fido doesn't have to do much for attention because he knows what to do and how to do it. Dogs will whine, cry, or bark if you leave them or if you put them in the kennel.

Dogs and blog titles have another thing in common, trust. In order to get a dog to be comfortable around you, you have to build trust. If you want more visitors to your blog, your blog title has to build trust. For example, when you create a blog title, make sure the post explains what the blog title is about. If you write a post and it doesn't match you title, you'll lose the trust of your viewers. The blog title should be related to what you are going to talk about in the post, not just a title created to get clicks.

You need to also feed your dog good food they will eat and you have to feed your readers. Once your reader clicks on your blog title, you have to keep your readers' attention with juicy, sexy, and enticing information.

                                                                   

Curiosity is a very powerful tool that is often used in marketing. You see it on the Television,  internet, in the newspaper, you even hear it on the radio. When you stir up curiosity by creating a blog title that leaves your readers hanging, you will most certainly get clicks. This method can be used in articles, emails, ads, and when you are selling your own products on your product page.

When you look at a newspaper, magazine, or online, you are going to choose to read the story where the headline either made you curious or immediately grabbed your attention and you will be compelled to read the whole thing. When you check your email, the same thing is going to happen. You are going to click and read the email where the subject line made you want to read more. If you have one email that says, "how this font can affect your search rankings and sales" and another that says, "increase sales using your iphone", which would you open first? You get my point? You must create blog titles that will stir curiosity and even emotion.

Next time you are having a hard time coming up with a blog title, just remember the times you've opened emails, read magazines, searched the web, and watched TV and ask yourself what made you read a story or click an ad. You can get good ideas by doing this.

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Funny Google Jokes

Here's a laugh for you today:

Enjoy and share this post!

Top Reason You Can't Succeed At Anything

Do you allow your so called friends or family to hold you back from success?

There are quite a few reasons a person can't succeed at anything. It doesn't matter what you are trying to do, if it is affiliate marketing, being a big time sports star, becoming a successful author, or trying to get hired at your local grocery store, there is one thing that can stop anyone from succeeding, other people. That's right, you've read that correctly, other folks can determine your success if you let it.    

What do I mean by that you may ask? If you are one to worry about what people think, they will have control over your life. There are haters and people who don't believe in your dreams, but you have to keep it moving. What's even more hurtful is when this comes from the people you love the most, family and friends.

How can you beat this? You let them have their opinions. Everyone is entitled to feel how they want to feel, even if that means they don't agree with your dreams or anything else you may want to accomplish. I've had this problem myself. I have family and even some friends I know who didn't believe in me and that really hurt me. But I learned that it would not change. You are going to have to realize this also if you are struggling with this that it simply will not change. If you don't, you'll never succeed at anything.

As I mentioned a few sentences ago you have your haters. Some people simply want to rain on your parade because they didn't succeed at anything. You need to avoid these type of people because they will pull you down and you will become bitter.

I know someone now who let their family and friends influence them. He had a dream of being successful at something he loves so dearly, playing instruments. He allowed his family, friends, and other people from his town to tell him he need to be more like his father because his father was very successful. He had people telling him that he ought to be following in his dads footsteps and they were steering him away from his dream. He was very good at what he did and I feel he could have been successful if he had more positive people in his life encouraging him at that time. Now he is stuck doing a job he really doesn't like to do and a family member told him few years ago that he will be doing that job the rest of his working career. I told him to block that from his mind, but he believe he can't do any better and that it is too late for him.

Look, it is very important that you don't let people tell you that you can't do something. Don't let others tell you that you can't succeed at what you are tying to do. This is one of the biggest reasons why a person can't succeed at anything. Don't let your family or friends talk you out of your dreams. I was talking to a friend about one of  my dreams and one of my sisters said she needed a stiff drink. She didn't believe in my dream and it bothered me. But people will belittle you, laugh at you, and tell you "oh that can't be done, you should just give that up". The truth is they most likely are trying to stop you so they can stay ahead of you or because they were let down or didn't succeed at what they wanted to do.

So don't worry about your friends or family's opinion and negative thoughts. Position yourself around positive people who will encourage you to become a better you. Get around those who believe in you. Constructive criticism is ok, but anything to keep you from achieving your goals in a negative way, stay away from it and dream again. If you do this, you will succeed at everything. Also don't let a challenge stop you. Sometimes you will have some challenges, but it can be the challenges that help you to succeed. So face them and overcome them to move to the next level.

Recommended Reading....

Is Money Evil 

In Need Of Motivation: How An Armless Colombian Man Repair Electronics 

Is Money Evil?

Let me ask you a question......How do you feel about money? Do you think it is evil? Do you feel that the rich are all evil stubborn people? If this is how you feel, then you may be holding yourself back from making money regardless the business you are in or the job you work. See money is important and to be honest not having money can be the very cause of evil.      

                                                                                                                Now here's why I say that; how many times do you turn on the news and hear that someone robbed a bank or stole something? When people don't have money and bills and rent is due, some people go to extreme measures to get a few bucks, even if it means doing something illegal or stealing it. With that being said we have to change the way we think about money. Yeah there are some rich folks who are evil, but not every rich person is evil because they have money.

We are usually taught that money isn't everything. Well you are going to be shocked at what I have to say, it is everything. You need it to survive, you need it to put gas in your car to get back and forth to work, you need it to feed your children and yourself, you need money to see a doctor when you are sick, you need it for everything. Without money, you will have a hard time surviving. But we are taught it isn't everything. If it money wasn't everything why do some people steal it or rob banks to get it? Why do they do something illegal to get it?

Another problem: people think they have to attend college to be successful. If that were so true, why do people graduate and still don't find jobs in their fields or find a job at all? Then many people want money but don't want to learn what it takes to obtain it. Many people who are rich don't have an education at the best and high expensive universities in the world. As a matter of fact the reason why education is the biggest industry in the universe is because people think they need an education to get rich or live the good life. Colleges and universities are a business and really nothing more and you're not guaranteed a job once you leave the place.

From the time we are young to early adulthood, we were conditioned by our families, teachers, an others in our lives to go to school, get an education, get a job, and make good money. So to a certain degree we are taught to get in debt and were not really told how to get out of it. The majority of people aren't even taught basic life skills such as how to balance a check book or manage money. The majority of educational establishments don't teach you how to interview for a job or how to run a business. You have to basically learn that on your own after you've paid thousands of dollars to go to college.

So the first thing we need to do is change our thinking if we ever want to make money. If money is not truly welcome somewhere it either won't stay long or want come at all. So if you think negatively about money, you may never get it.

With that being said I want to share what these two authors, Wanda and Paula, wrote on their blog about money and it is very interesting what they had to say.......

A good majority of us are brought up to believe that either money is evil or that you have to work hard to get it…or both! If you were brought up in a lower or middle class environment then that is probably what you were taught.

I was brought up in a middle class environment although it started out more at the lower end of the scale. And although I wasn’t brought up by my parents to believe money was evil, I was brought up to believe that you had to work hard to get it. And then of course TV reinforced that only those evil, nasty, greedy people have money. So for quite a period in my life, I wasn’t really favorable towards the rich.

It wasn’t until many years later that I had a major turnaround. This came about through a mix of self-improvement authors and speakers until I realized that my thinking was affecting my ability to make money. If I thought the rich were evil then how could I ever be rich? I didn’t want to be evil so I couldn’t never make much money. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Continue reading here------> It's Just All About The Money

So you see what I mean. What we believe can many times be based on what we were taught growing up and what was instilled in us. Half the time we don't know why we believe what we believe, do the things we do, why we are either Democratic or Republican, or even down to why we celebrate the holidays we do. We are too busy trying to please other people instead of doing what makes us happy, making the best decisions, or even doing what is right. But this is definitely something to think about. I hope no one takes offense or get mad because I think this post will help a lot of people realize things.

I also want to share something else with you. I recommend that you read this article called "21 Ways Rich People Think Differently". This article is most certainly an eye opener. You can read the article through this link ------> 21 Ways Rich People Think Differently

I really hope this blog post help you to think differently about money. Money is not evil, it's all how you look at it. But there are some rich evil people and some poor evil people, just like there are nice rich and poor people. Just like a weapon only harms people if it is in a person's hand who seeks to harm an individual, a car can be looked at as good and bad, the internet can be looked at as a gift and a curse, the same goes for money and everything else that is a material or an object.

Do Longer Blog Post Get Higher Rankings?

In a post I did a while back I told you that Google cares about what grandma wants. Well more and more each day that holds true, and the more content your sites or blogs have, the more visitors Google will send to your sites and the better your chances of getting higher rankings and people linking to your sites and blogs.

Google prefers to give sites that have the most content the higher rankings. On social media sites people tend to tweet and share longer blog post. Neil Patel talks about how important content is in his blog post. Here is just part of what Neil had to say below about how important content is….

I took the 327 blog posts I have written on Quick Sprout and broke them down into 2 buckets. The first bucket contained blog posts that were less than 1500 words and second contained posts that were greater than 1500 words. I then analyzed how many tweets and how many Facebook likes each post got.

Posts that were under 1500 on average received 174.6 tweets and 59.3 Facebook likes. Posts that were over 1500 words on average received 293.5 tweets and 72.7 Facebook likes. Continue Reading Neil Patel’s post here----à  How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions

As you can see longer blog post got more attention than the shorter ones. As Bill Gates said in 1996, content is king and it is so important to take your time and write longer blog post. I think this will always remain true. If you have a website you need to always add content to your site so that you increase your chances of ranking higher and getting your blog post liked, tweeted, shared, re-tweeted, and re-posted. When your posts are shared Google will take notice and start ranking your higher.

Also the quality of the content is important as I said in previous post Google puts searchers over site and blog owners, which means Google will continue to give searchers what they want. Blog post that contains more detailed information is what people are looking for and if you can provide this information to others, people will stay on your post longer.

Plus Google will analyze your blog post and send more traffic, you'll get more trust, which will then increase your income. In affiliate marketing this is even more important because you want people to trust your judgement when you recommend a product or service. So try it and see what longer blog post can do for your blog rankings.


Recommended Reading......

Traffic To Blog: Help Grandma Find Your Blog

Use Content Curation To Attract Readers

CashCrate Brutal Truth

CashCrate Pros And Cons Review 

CashCrate is a program that pays it’s members cash to complete offers, do surveys, watch videos, shop, task, and sign up for trial offers. CashCrate also offers an excellent affiliate program that will pay you 20% of all earnings your referrals make and 10% of what their referral make off of completing all offers and task. As you go to the higher levels, you can earn more as an affiliate from your referrals. The site does pay its members so it is legit, which I have proof of that. On the other hand, I feel there are some things you need to know that will help you decide if you want to join or not. All of these things are things I've experienced while using CashCrate.

In my blog post I talk mostly about affiliate marketing and I also talk about other ways to make money, an example of that is writing for Amazon. I feel that I should share this information, so I’m going to start with the bad then tell you about the good. Plus I will make suggestions on what you should do if you decide CashCrate is for you.

The Bad

As I mentioned already, CashCrate does pay and I joined the program on November 19, 2012. I received my first paycheck of $60.52. $1.62 came from surveys, $2.10 came from referrals, $10.02 came from bonuses, and $46.80 came from offers. I know this does not sound like a lot of money as most people who are members of CashCrate report they make several hundreds to thousands of dollars a month. I’m not saying it’s false because on their payment wall some people post decent sized checks. But it’s the work you have to put into this program to get that amount of money, and you’re definitely not gonna make that kind of money by just completing offers and doing surveys and that goes for any programs that are related and similar to CashCrate.

Most people make that amount of money by referring others. But at the same time, they have to complete the offers and the offer has to get approved and counted as being done correctly before money is added to their accounts. So you will have to refer a lot of people to ensure that you may make a good income. You only get paid from your referrals if they get paid. After they make their first $10 bucks, CashCrate will give you a three dollar bonus. In this post I will show you the proof that money can be made, but you need to know it is easier said than done and most people will just show you the proof and talk about the good without telling you the whole story about the cons.

One thing that does suck about CashCrate is you need to make sure you have a very good anti virus protection in place. Sometimes the site can be a little buggy and this can slow your computer down. I’ve experienced a slower running computer since I started using the site. Plus you have to make sure you clear your cookies to better your odds of getting your offers approved. Cookies are placed on your computer by the partners of CashCrate which can also slow your computer down.

You also have to worry about answering questions for surveys you don’t qualify for even though they say you qualify. I've had this happen quite a few times. I would spend five minutes on the site answering questions and I’m either told I don’t qualify, they've reached the number of people they need for the survey, or people that fit my description or answer the questions in a similar matter has already taken the survey, so basically they don’t need your responses. You have to almost be on the site every time new surveys are posted to better your odds of being accepted, but even then you still may not get to take it.

While you don’t need to have a credit or debit card to make money on Cashcrate, a majority of the offers on the site require that you have one. The offers that pay the most are the ones where you need a card. Plus the companies are really gearing towards people who don’t mind spending money and are interested in buying their products.

See I've made most of my money on doing trail offers and signing up for other survey panels. The trail offers is offers that you sign up for and try it out for free without the company charging your card for 5, 7, 14, or 30 days. You would have to cancel in that length of time for them not to charge your card. But some will threaten to revoke your earnings if you don’t stay long enough or if you cancel your order in the first few days. If you don’t have a credit or debit card, most don’t except prepaid cards, you can’t earn anything doing cash offers and free trails, or even to shop. So the only ways to make money will be the surveys, signing up to receive emails from other companies, watching the videos, and referring others who successfully complete their offers.

CashCrate also have the free offers where you sign up to enter their sweepstakes and along the path you are asked if you want to join sites or complete other offers other companies are offering. Sometimes these sites can bog your computer down.

But the other bad thing I don’t care for is they will tell you to participate in the offer to win money, ipads, jerseys, gift cards, computers, or iphones but to be credited in most cases you have to participate in two or three other offers at the end of the path which require a credit or debit card. I’ve click on this type of offer several times and they would say your entry has been accepted and put the offers up below it. Plus it would mostly say in order to qualify for the prize you have to complete a few of the offers at the end.

I also don’t care for the fact that these offers will have the button to skip in different areas throughout the path. Sometimes it’s in an area where you can see it and some times it’s a small button you can barley see. I think they hope you give up so you can’t be credited or they hope you cave in and purchase their product or offer.

But once these types of offers (win an iphone, gift card etc), get your information and take you to these offers to either skip or sign up and you click out, they still have your information. They will have their third party partners contact you anyway and you don’t even get the credit from CashCrate for trying the offer so they gotcha.

Considering all of these cons can make one say no it’s not worth the time and to a certain extent they would be absolutely correct. I feel the same at times.

Plus you have to consider if you are a member of programs similar to CashCrate the offers are mostly the same. To get credited you have to be a first time member. So if you are a member of Swagbucks or Inbox Dollars and you tried an offer with them, you can’t sign up for that offer with CashCrate because you tried that offer with Swagbucks. And trying to use a different email may not work especially if you need to use a credit card and because of the cookies that are placed on your computers.

Beware also that you may complete offers that will continue to be in the pending status. This can be due to the offer not being completed to their standards or sometimes the company hasn't paid CashCrate yet, especially when it comes to downloading games and other things. In my opinion they don’t pay you enough to download games or downloading anything else.

That’s my two cents, or maybe 75 Cents on the bad (the cons of using CashCrate).

The Good

While CashCrate has their bad there are some good. The site does pay you monthly and the cash out amount is $20. So that’s not too bad. Plus CashCrate has 5 levels and each time you get to a certain level, you will earn more off of referrals and the option to get paid weekly and paid direct deposit. But to get to level five you will need 500 active referrals, level 4 you’ll need 300 referrals, level three you need 150 active referrals, and level two you need 50 active referrals. So there is some hard work that is involved. But the good thing is if you can get this many referrals to sign up you won’t have to worry so much about doing offers yourself, you’ll earn a good income from your referrals and their referrals.

In my opinion getting referrals will be the best way to make a steady income. But you will have to continue to referral people. The best way to do that is to share your honest experience with others. Don’t try to hype it up to make people sign up.

Your mind should be on helping people not trying to make a buck. I’m an affiliate and member of CashCrate but I want to help people make the right decision for them. Plus I want people to know the good and the bad that I've experienced so they can know that to expect and be able to make a good decision. Honestly there are only so many offers one can complete but you can do the daily surveys and make 50, 75, or 80 cents per survey if you qualify.

My suggestions is to stay away from game downloads, entries to win prizes and offers that don't really pay much for what you have to do. Example if you're getting only 20 or 30 cents and you have to buy something or download an app, I wouldn't do it. Plus you may want to get an email specifically for cash offer programs like CashCrate. I suggest this because if you do happen to sign up for jokes, sweepstakes entries, and to receive daily or weekly emails, you will crowd up your main email and may miss something important (this has happened to me). Plus you want to stay away from offers that ask for your cell phone number and want you to confirm it by sending you a text. You'll get to many messages plus unwanted charges to your bill. 

And my best advice is to sign up referrals. Treat this as you would any other affiliate program; show proof, give advice, and answer questions. And if you are already a member of CashCrate and you are struggling try these tips and you will see improvement. Plus read my other blog post on affiliate marketing.  My blog has incredible information that will help you. 

If you want to learn more about CashCrate or you want to sign up view my proof first and click on this link: CashCrate

Now My Proof 

Here is a picture of my check and screen shots of my earnings. I didn't hit the jackpot but this 60 dollars did help me to get extra food for my family. 

Below are a few pictures and screenshots of my earnings

Affiliate Marketing Program Checklist

Many people are struggling to make the decision on whether or not to become an affiliate. Some just don't know what to look for.  Most expert affiliates say that it is a combination of factors that can determine if you will be a super affiliate or an average affiliate. When most people give advice on how to be successful as an affiliate marketer, they tend to skip the most critical and simple methods. In my opinion you need to know the basics or be reminded of them periodically. Below are the top ten things you need to consider before joining any affiliate program. 

The Affiliate Marketing Program Checklist

1. Minimum 25% Commission

Does the affiliate program have a great payment structure; meaning a high percentage of the purchase price.

2. Excellent Company Presentation

The website of the affiliate program you join should have a clean, attractive design, easy to navigate with full disclosure of their program details. Remember, you will be sending your prospective affiliates to this site.

3. Accurate Tracking Methods

The affiliate program should provide a comprehensive affiliate statistics page that lists the number of clicks, sales, lead and amount of commissions earned on a monthly basis. The affiliate statistics should be updated automatically and immediately. Who wants to find out today about a sale you made in the previous month?

4. Marketing Tools

Make sure the affiliate program provides a wide variety of text links, banners and graphics to put on your web page. Text links are definitely the best choice.

5. Payment Schedule

The affiliate program should tell you how often you are going to be paid. There are programs that pay monthly, quarterly and by percentage. In addition, there are some programs that have a payout minimum. In most cases, the programs that pay monthly are a better choice. No one enjoys waiting for months to be paid.

6. Affiliate News

Investigate whether or not the affiliate program shares data about how their top affiliates are doing. This can be a great indicator about the popularity of the product or service they are offering. If there are some affiliates are earning over $5,000 per month, it is a good affiliate program.

7. Affiliate Strategies

Check the affiliate program website for a forum of tutorials, strategies, tips and techniques between the affiliates.

8. Company Updates

Does the affiliate program offer a company newsletter on a regular basis for their affiliates? This is a great way to get extra tips and techniques that are working well.

9. Communication with The Affiliate Program

Find out if they offer email notification when you make a sale or get an affiliate signed up under you (if it is a 2-tier program). It is very motivating to see ‘You have a new affiliate’ in your inbox.

10. Customer Support

You need to ensure that your questions will be answered within 48 hours.

Forums are great ways to get support and advice on how an affiliate can increase their income. Other affiliates will participate in these forums to get the advice they need. And super affiliates will offer their own tips they use in their business on how to make money. Most forums will provide good helpful tips from other affiliate who are working towards the same goal. So you should make absolute that you join an affiliate program that has an active forum. Do a search of affiliate programs online and find the right program that will fit you and your needs to ensure that you can make a decent income as an affiliate. 

Do Product Testing For Max Profits

If you have a following via blogging or social media, doing product testing can help you to maximize your affiliate profits. Everyday new products enter the market and if you have the trust of your valuable subscribers and your followers you can demonstrate how products work in your niche and post a video of your demonstration. This builds even more trust and helps you to recommend the best products. I would share the good and the bad about all products. You need to tell them which products to avoid and which ones you feel they should try in their own business.

Doing this involves product research and time so you can effectively find products and do the testing. (Think of the testing as a school science project.) This also involves spending some money. If you are just beginning a business in affiliate marketing and don't have the funds to put into product testing, this can be difficult. But if you made money from affiliate marketing, you need to take some of that money and invest it back into your affiliate business so you can produce more income.

In the long run you will make more money and the investment will be well worth it. This will become more important because ClickBank will be implementing their new color coded risk management and all accounts will be judged based on this system, which I talked about in a previous post. To avoid the refunds, charge-backs, and boost your reputation, product testing is the route to consider taking. There are other changes Google and other major search engines make daily such as the SEO penalties and post panda changes to their algorithms that is making it difficult to rely on the search engines for traffic and affiliate product sales.

After you test 3-4 products within your niche, you can share it in the form of YouTube videos, a kindle eBook, blog post, and through emailing your subscribers/followers. The kindle eBook is definitely good because you get the option of giving it away for free and you can get many people to download for free to their kindle readers or they can download the book on the kindle app for their computers. People are giving away their kindle books for free and getting free advertisement in this way.

All you have to do is write a short kindle book that talks about the products you tested and your results, take screen shots of your demonstrations, and put links to videos of your demonstration in the book. You can also put your affiliate links to all three or four products in the kindle book. Just enroll in the KDP Select program with Amazon and you will get the 5 free days during a 90 day period. Make sure you price the book at $0.99 and pick your free days.

We constantly have to change the way we run our affiliate business because changes are constantly being made in the internet/affiliate marketing world. If you have a huge following you can surely take advantage of testing products, especially the new products. If you keep up-to-date with the new products' launch dates, you can be one of the first to try them out and share the results. Even if you don't have a huge following, writing the kindle book and doing the video demonstrations of the products you're promoting will help you increase your affiliate profits.

ClickBank's New Color Coded Risk Tiers

ClickBank will be using the new color coded risk management tiers to determine the status of everyone's account and this does include affiliates. Clickbank wants to ensure that customers are happy with purchases and they want to make sure vendors are selling high quality products. This will take effect in January of 2013.  How does this affect you? Well it is all about choosing the right products to promote and in many cases old methods of choosing products can put your account at risk. It is definitely more important to pick the right products because you want to keep a good reputation and you want to keep your ClickBank account in good standing.

What are some ways you can do this......by finding a good product and putting in more research. I've mention before that you want to stay away from overly hype products, especially ones that don't live up to what is promised. One way of doing this is finding out what is missing in the market and what people actually need. You also want to make sure you are not over hyping the product in any of your promotions.  Doing so can cause refunds and charge-backs and this can cause your account to be placed in the high risk category.

You don't want all of your hard work to go down the tubes if your account loses points because if you get down to a zero your account can be at risk for termination. Accounts considered unacceptable will lose 2 points a day. So you have to take responsibility as an affiliate to make sure you are choosing good quality products to promote. Quality is so important as I talked about in a previous post.

Now lets talk about some affiliate strategies you can use:

Discuss a problem that you want to help your audience fix and then provide the solution. You know affiliate marketing involves more than just promoting an affiliate link. You should be talking about the problem. You need to become an expert in your niche and create a video or a blog post that talks about the situation. You need to provide tips and tell them how they can fix their problem. You should also consider purchasing the product to make sure it provides the solution before you recommend it. This is your business and if you don't take care of it, you lose it.  It's that simple. And if your account gets terminated all work is gone down the drain. It's like throwing away money. When you give good tips on how to fix a problem most people are experiencing then you can provide the product which will be the solution. This will help you to cut down the chances of getting a refund or a charge-back.

You need to tell your audience how they will benefit from using the product. Telling them how they will benefit will make them want to continue using the product. This is what you want to look for when searching for a product to promote, good benefits. You can easily do this by reading reviews that others wrote about the product. If the reviews are mostly bad, you may want to stay away from promoting it. Also you want to be careful with the reviews, if they are too hyped up, it's probably a fake review used to generate sales. That's why it is best that you try the product for yourself; it will help you promote it better. If you don't, you are putting  your reputation on the line and your ClickBank account in danger of being put in a high risk category. If you cannot buy the product, email the vendor and ask him or her for a review copy. It's worth the try. And if you are a good affiliate he or she may give you a copy if you can show them you can generate sales or show proof that you did it in the past with another product. If  you have to pay for the copy consider it an investment for your business. It is an investment because if a vendor's account is terminated from having zero points, your hard work will be for nothing and all the traffic you send to that product will result in all potential income lost.

You don't have to look at ClickBank's new color coded risk tier as a bad thing because it can actually be good. It can help you as an affiliate pick out the best products to promote that have a low refund/charge-back rate. I know it seems unfair that an affiliate has to suffer because of dishonest vendors or vendors with poor products, and it is, but affiliates do have a responsibility. We have to make sure we are doing our research and that we offer our readers, subscribers, audience, and customers with high quality products. We can't just go after a product that is paying high commissions with a webpage that has a bunch of colorful words full of hype because it seems appealing or look pretty. ClickBank knows this and that's why they are cracking down, so the time to make changes for the better is now, not later or next week because January will be here before you know it. Visit this page to see ClickBank's new policy.

Recommended Reading 

Struggling Affiliate? Learn To Offer Quality To Your Visitors

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ClickBank Alternatives For Vendors & Affiliates

Avoid Preselling On Your Squeeze Page

Affiliate marketing is becoming a more challenging business to get started with all of the panda updates and changes in the search engines. This means it will become more difficult to build natural traffic to your websites. This doesn't mean it is impossible; but you will have to work a little harder to work around these changes.

One way of attracting more visitors and subscribers to your page is to create squeeze pages that are rich with content and take the focus off of preselling completely; don't even do a little preselling. People are becoming more and more aware that affiliates are trying to make a buck so don't even do the preselling on your squeeze pages and avoid them on the main pages of your website. If you want to attract visitors, make sure your squeeze page offers a valuable report and make sure your report has your blog or web address so you can send them back to your website or blog. As you know, people are looking for information not to spend money and that's cool. See the more people visit your site, Google will take notice and you will be rewarded with more visitors.

Your report need to be about something that is really hot and sizzling now. For example, people need methods and want to learn how to successfully publish with kindle. If your blog is about self publishing perhaps you report can be related to the subject of publishing for Amazon kindle and making money selling and writing booklets.

Not preselling may go against what you learnt in the past but this is mainly for the squeeze page. You don't want to run visitors off because they see a preselling method 50 miles away on the page.

Now when you send emails to your subscribers your autoresponder need to have all high quality content; but when you want to make a product recommendation, I advise you to send out a content filled e-newsletter 2 times a month and recommend your products in that newsletter.

You should do this in addition to sending out your helpful emails. Most of your emails should contain the URL to your blog posts. I advise this because Google will take notice that people are visiting your site from your email and since a majority of people use gmail, Google will see this and you will start to show up in the search engines. And when you do recommend a product, don't just say click here for more information; give them a reason to click your link. Ask them if they are tired of their problem and tell them the solution the product provides, then tell them click the link to get the secrets.

Always remember that the trust you build with your visitors and subscribers will make them more likely buy a product from you and they will, in most cases, turn into repeat buyers. Don't worry if they don't buy from you now because it is later that matters the most.

How To Write For Kindle

Amazon is a great place for authors, internet marketers, affiliate marketers, or anyone who has knowledge about a specific subject to make money online. Amazon offers plenty of income opportunities. I recently did a post on using KDP select to increase traffic to your website and I talk a little about how to create a short report to put on the Amazon website. Before you decide to self publish to kindle, you need to know how to write a kindle book. I will explain how you can do this in three simple steps.

-Pick a Profitable Niche & Research

This step is very important. You want to make absolutely sure you pick a money making niche. Picking a profitable niche involves a few moments of research because you need to give people what they want. If you are an affiliate this can come easy for you because you should already have an idea what people want. And you will perform your research much like you would do for affiliate marketing. If you are used to writing short reports to give away to your subscribers list, you could write the short reports and sell them on Amazon KDP. Just put a link to your website in your kindle eBook. You can use Google to find a niche and you can also use Amazon to see which categories sell the most books. You can also use others book selling platforms (websites) to find niches that make money by doing the same thing. Check out the book How To Find A Profitable Niche For Amazon Kindle Publishing which explains exactly how to choose a money making niche for publishing eBooks on Amazon.

-Create Content

The next step you need to do is create the content from the research you preformed. To do this you should create an outline of how you want to write your book. You need to include a compelling introduction and a table of contents. When publishing on Amazon, people will get a chance to see inside your book before you buy it so it is very important you impress your viewers and they will be more prone to buy your book. You also need to create a compelling title with keywords so that your title will show up in the search engines. If you are not a good writer you can always hire someone to do it for you for cheap. Simply put out an ad or contact someone you may know who love to write. You can also find a private label rights (PLR) book for the subject you choose. Just make sure you add research to it and change up the information to make it your own. You also don't want to publish the book as is because this is not allowed on Amazon.

-Create Your Book Cover

If you know how to draw, you can simply draw a picture to use for your book cover and scan it on your computer. You can also use Paint on your computer to draw on there if you're good at it. You can also take a picture with a good camera and use it for your cover or find a picture from a picture website (royalty free image). Your book cover need to be compelling and eye catching. Once you find or create your picture, go to a site where you can add text to your picture or drawing. There is a site called Picfont and you can upload your picture and put the title of your kindle book on your picture.

As you can see it is not that hard to write for kindle. Writing for kindle takes a little research, quality content creation, and producing a good book cover. Now you can publish your book on kdp.amazon.com .

Google Plus Circles & Hangouts For Business

As you already know, communication is the key to a successful business and Google Plus can help you to communicate with your customers and other people. Two great ways to communicate with your customers is by using the Google Plus Circles and Hangouts features. With the Google Plus Circles, you can organize people in one or many circles. For example, one circle can be for your customers and you can have other circles for your friends, family, and business associates. If you want to, you can send just your customers a message on updates for products and anything else you need to tell them without everyone else receiving the message. Circles are convenient and it saves you time and money.


Google Plus Hangouts is also a great way to communicate with customers and business associates. You can use video to do a live presentation of how to use a new product, you can use this feature for free training, conference calls, and webinars. You will gain more trust from others because they will be able to see and communicate with you and you can answer any questions live.  It is a great way to be in front of customers without having to leave your home or make arrangements to travel. It will be easy for customers to talk to the owners of a project and it will make them more comfortable and you will have more conversions. 


These are just a few of the wonderful features of Google Plus. If you are not using Google Plus for your business, you should. I believe pretty soon a whole lot more people will be on Google Plus and they will have a much better chance to rank higher for their keywords because this is a product of Google. 

Use KDP Select To Increase Website Traffic

We know that we need traffic to our websites and blogs to make money and to build a fan base and following. In affiliate marketing that can be tough. In this blog I've shared some ways you can increase the traffic to your website and how to make an affiliate income. But there is another way you can get people to flock to your sites and blogs; that way is through publishing a kindle ebook on Amazon.

Amazon KDP Select Program is a great way to get people to download your books for free. It is a program that is suppose to make you money when people borrow your books through Amazon Prime. The bad thing about this program is the people get only one borrow per month so it really isn't that effective. But for a person who is trying to build a business, Amazon KDP Select will allow you to make your book free for 5 days out of a 90 day period only if your book is exclusive to them. You would have to price the book between $2.99 and $9.99 to be apart of it. I know 5 days is not a lot, but you can use these 5 free days to to get visitors to your site and spread the news about your business because Amazon has a huge amount of targeted traffic monthly. This is what you can do to use KDP Select to gain more visitors and traffic to your site: 

1.  Create a short information guide. This is where you will focus on solving a pressing problem. This can apply to any niche. If you have a blog about weight loss, you can create an information product that focus on building muscle to increase weight loss. You can write a short 5-7 page guide on things a person can do to build muscle. Then put your website address or the name of your business in the book so people can visit your site. Also put your email address in there. Then upload it on Amazon KDP Select and price the book at the lowest price of $2.99. When you set the promotion for the book to go free on the days you choose, people can download the free copy to their kindle or computer (when they download the kindle app on the PC) and read it. This is the best reason to use the Amazon Kindle Select Program. Your primary focus is to get people to see your info guide and your site, not to make money from it. But you can make a few bucks when you are not using your free days and get a few sales. My book, How to Create a New Information Product in 90 Minutes Or Less, will show you how you to create an info product in less than 90 min.
2. Find sites that will let you announce when your book is going free. Author Marketing Club is a great place that will let you promote your kindle eBook and they will offer other helpful benefits to authors. 
3. Make sure you are really helping your future customers. Provide them with very helpful info to make them want to check out your site and keep your book. If it doesn't help them they can decide to get a refund. And if it does help them, they may share it with others.

So far I've had some success with the program by getting my name out there. I've made a small amount in royalties from the USA sales and a a small amount of £ from UK. And that's from all six items I sell through Amazon KDP, including a short romance novel I wrote and I recently signed up with KDP at the end of April. So it's not that bad for earning a few extra bucks. In my opinion it is best to use this platform to get future customers for you online business more so than making a lot of money from it. 

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