The Best Affiliate Tracking Solutions

Most affiliate marketers like to start out with simple direct linking ad campaigns. This is the easiest way to get started and you don’t need to waste money and time creating landing pages. Of course the real money and monetization of ad campaigns is through the use of landing pages and understanding how to advertise to your market. Whether you are going to build campaigns with a landing page, or go with direct linking, you should have the proper stats tracking in place.
Let’s look at four different solutions that you can use for ad campaign tracking, from the simple affiliate, to the advanced marketer with tons of live ad campaigns.

Affiliate Network Tracking (The Noob)

The easiest and fastest way to go live with an ad campaign, is to simply direct link. What I mean by this, is that you log into an affiliate network, grab an offer url, then start promoting it through Facebook Ads and cpv advertising. If you want to test a bunch of offers and don’t want to do any internal tracking or creating landing page, this is a quick way to get started to see if an offer has any traction, though it is not recommended for long term and large ad campaigns.

Tracking 202 (The Amatuer/Advanced Affiliate)

One of the most popular tracking solutions out there is Tracking 202, and it’s free. In just a few years, Tracking202 and Prosper 202 have become the tracking solutions of choice, as more affiliate share their experiences and who doesn’t love a free tracking solution. You can also download the hosted version, so you can upload the software to your server and start tracking all of your campaigns on your own server, so you don’t have to worry about any tracking/data issues. Tracking 202 is a great solution for anyone starting out, or advanced with creating ad campaigns and looking for a way to track clicks, leads and conversions on ad campaigns of all levels and sources.

CPVLab (The Professional)

For the advanced and professional affiliate, there are high end tracking solutions such as CPVLab, though the name mainly focuses on CPV (pay per view) type of advertising, you can still track everything from ppc, media buys, movie, social to orangic traffic. Like Tracking 202, CPV Lab is hosted on your own server and you can do a crazy amount of tracking for your ad campaigns. There is a wide assortment of campaign type tracking that CPV Lab allows you to run. Whether you prefer to direct link to a landing page, or want to run a complicated lead capture of your own, CPV Lab can track it all. CPV Lab is priced at $297.

3rd Tier Tracking (The Outsourcing Affiliate)

For every advanced marketer who loves working with software and stats on their own servers, there’s another person who just want to track links and let someone else manage the support and tech issues. For those looking to outsource their affiliate tracking, there are plenty of solutions out there, such as LinkTrackr and HasOffers. Through both of these solutions you can track your links, place pixels, split test your landing pages/offers and more.

Are Your Network Stats Accurate?

No matter what tracking solution you decide to use, it’s extremely important that you have one in place. As much as we would like to trust all of the affiliate networks and traffic sources out there, it’s extremely important that you run your own tracking stats and compare them against others. At the end of the day, tracking your own campaigns and learning how to place pixels, dig deeper into ad campaigns and eventually create your own offers will make you a better affiliate marketer and more money online

Make Money with Travel Affiliate Programs

Are you looking for a way to diversify your affiliate income? Through the use of travel programs, you can effectively make this change while putting yourself in position to break into new markets.
There are many reasons why travel programs are becoming increasingly popular among affiliate marketers.

Integrate with Other Offers

Just because your affiliate site is not geared towards travel does not mean you have to leave these programs to somebody else. Instead, it is important to note that affiliate travel programs can be used in conjunction with many others.

For example, maybe you have an affiliate website with a focus on gambling – online and at land based casinos. In this case, you could use a travel program to promote the best hotels in popular gaming cities such as Las Vegas and Atlantic City. This is an opportunity to seamlessly integrate new affiliate opportunities along with those that are already making you money.

Big Payouts for Big Purchases

There is no denying that the cost of travel is on the rise. This holds true for everything from rental cars to hotel accommodations to flights. As an affiliate, the more money somebody spends the more money you are going to earn. It is not uncommon for a single consumer to book a vacation online for $5,000 or more. Imagine what your affiliate payout would look like on a deal this size.

People are Attracted to Traveling

It may not hold true across the board, but a large majority of people are interested in traveling. No matter if you are actively promoting travel programs or doing so in a more subtle manner, you are going to attract the attention of visitors to your site.

Options Galore

If you think that finding a travel affiliate program will be an issue, you should reconsider. In addition to a large overall number, many of the top names in the industry have an affiliate program. With name recognition, your chance of making a sale increases greatly. For example, Priceline offers up to 7% on hotel room bookings and 3% on rental cars, vacation packages, and cruises

Forex Affiliate Marketing Tips

As an affiliate marketer, you should always be looking for new ways to diversify your portfolio. By getting involved with Forex (foreign exchange market) you are putting yourself in position to take advantage of a hot market that offers large payouts and multiple high-level programs.

When it comes to financial affiliate programs, those with a focus on Forex are growing quickly for a variety of reasons including:

• High commissions


• A growing number of traders interested in the foreign exchange market


• Multiple promotional strategies across multiple products and offerings

Revenue Options

Affiliates have one thing on their mind: increasing conversions as a way of earning more money. Fortunately, with a Forex program you don’t need to convert many people in order to increase revenue.

One large deposit or one high-turnover trader could put thousands of dollars in your pocket. Imagine how much you could earn if you were able to generate a large number of leads.

• Cost per active trader. With this structure, you receive a one-time payment for each active trader referral. With most programs, you receive the equivalent value of the initial deposit. You receive payment once the client reaches a required volume. Now for the good part: the maximum CPA is as high as $250.


• Economic value. If you are not interested in the above payout structure, this one may be better suited to your needs. The economic value is a combination of the effective spread x volume traded.

Tip: experiment with both options to determine which one is right for the type of traders you are attracting. After several months, you should have a solid understanding of which one can earn you the most money.

Related Products

In addition to referring actual traders, there are many products related to the foreign exchange market that have an affiliate program. These include: Forex signals, Forex VPS hosting services, and trading courses.

Final Word

Despite the fact that Forex affiliate marketing is becoming increasingly more competitive, it can still be very rewarding to those with a good grip on the market. Unlike most affiliate programs, one conversion can result in a large payout (as noted above, up to $250).

Proven Tactics in Affiliate Marketing - 7 Secrets to Be Apart from Other Many Competitors

Within this article, you will discover and learn 7 proven tactics in affiliate marketing business in order to ensure that you will stay in the affiliate marketing business and outstanding among other affiliates.
1. Conduct the fixed affiliate marketing business plan. There is no doubt that planning is the first critical factor for all business in the world. It will save your time and money. The undo and redo tasks will be minimized. Also, you will have more time to grow your affiliate business when you have your own fixed affiliate marketing plan. Surprisingly, I have found that several affiliate marketing entrepreneurs have their own fixed affiliate marketing business plan. This business plan is a must for all affiliate marketing entrepreneurs who are looking for how to go step forward to their competitors and grow their business. It is an absolutely great affiliate marketing ideas to come up with the fixed daily business plan. The great affiliate marketing tips for this tactic is to start planning monthly, weekly and daily for your affiliate business.
2. Come up with aggressive affiliate marketing ideas. There are many affiliate marketing ideas, techniques or strategies to earn more affiliate commission on the internet. The aggressive affiliate marketing ideas is one of the most effective ways to gain more sales and build highly profitable affiliate marketing business. The real key to your success in this proven tactics in affiliate marketing is to keep advertising your affiliate products consistency with several of marketing techniques. My experiences show that you will reach a wider range of customers and earn more affiliate sales with this proven tactics. For example, you can keep advertising your affiliate products through email marketing. The aggressive idea is to keep sending quality emails (i.e. follow-up message or broadcast emails) to your subscribers to advertise your affiliate products.
3. Combine your affiliate marketing ideas. This proven tactic is very powerful in the affiliate marketing particularly for building highly profitable home based affiliate business in long term. All you have to do for the proven tactics in your affiliate marketing business is to think. Creativity mindset is one of the key successes of this tactics. For example, you can apply email marketing with the article marketing by sending a high quality and fully articles to your subscribers. With those fully articles, you can lead readers to your website or reprint your articles on their websites.
4. Automate your affiliate marketing business with tools. With the daily business tasks in affiliate marketing, you will have no time to think and grow your affiliate business. My highest recommendation is to find an automated software or tool to help you to deliver automatically services or products. Obviously, for example, the auto-responder software is a must for all affiliates to deliver their email, newsletter or promotion information to their subscribers. With this auto-responder software, you can send and reply email automatically to your subscribers or even customers. I am sure that with those kinds of automated software, you will release yourself from daily business as usual task and will have more time to grow your affiliate marketing business.
5. Protect your affiliate commission and business. There are many hackers and crackers on the internet. It is an absolutely great affiliate marketing ideas to protect your affiliate commission and business with software. With that software, you will ensure that your affiliate commission will not be stolen by third parties on the internet. There are many link protections, prevention and convert software for your affiliate links on the internet. Another example of protecting your home based affiliate business is to backup your important information and list. This is a must for affiliates to ensure that those affiliate marketing business will not be lose in any situations.
6. Offer great incentives and bonuses. There are no doubt that if there are two affiliate marketing entrepreneurs who are promoting the same affiliate products in the same industry, the winner is a person who offers better incentives and bonuses to potential customers. The examples of great incentives and bonuses could be: a package of software, a set of special reports, superb additional services and great books. The great affiliate marketing ideas to find the bonuses are: to find resell products and to conduct special reports.
7. Spy on your competitors. Keeping your eyes on your competitors is the powerful and proven tactic in affiliate marketing business. You can start spying your competitors by subscribing their newsletter or buying their products, if they have. Other great examples are: to spy their keywords and history of changing websites. There are many spy keyword tools or tracking website software on the internet to spy on your competitors. Personally, I believe that this tactics has been proven and it is a great alternative approach in affiliate marketing business.
Final thoughts, it is obvious that you can be apart from your competitors with those above 7 proven tactics in affiliate marketing. Importantly, the first key of your success is to come up with the fixed affiliate marketing business plan. Then, all you have to do is to take those tactics into your affiliate marketing promotion plan now. You will see great results in the long run. And you will success in the affiliate marketing business.

Siripong R. or zMillionDollars is a recognized authority on the subject of building success and profitable affiliate marketing business. His website, www.zMillionDollars.com [http://www.zMillionDollars.com], provides a wealth of informative articles and resources on everything you'll ever need to know about affiliate marketing business. Grab free special reports at: www.zMillionDollars.com/free-report [http://www.zMillionDollars.com/free-report].

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/599907

Top Affiliate Marketing

ow that we’ve recapped the top affiliate marketing stories of 2011, such as the Amazon Affiliate tax in California, the war on online poker, and Google Panda, it’s time to look toward the future.

What’s in store for affiliate marketers in 2012? How will the industry continue to meet challenges such as the onslaught of state sales taxes and Amazon’s weak response? What avenues of promotion will be the best way to generate traffic for our affiliate sites?

Here are my predictions:

Affiliate Nexus Tax — While it might be easy to think that the confusion unleashed this year because of the Affiliate Nexus Tax in California and other states would lead to some kind of well-planned legislation with a clear process to help online retailers collect sales taxes, don’t hold your breath.

The U.S. Congress is proving that it’s incapable of passing even the simplest legislation without bickering and stalemate. And more complex issues such as the debt ceiling have showed the willingness of a minority in Congress to derail legislation to meet the wishes of their narrow constituency. If you think that’s a recipe for Affiliate Tax clarity, think again.

My prediction is that nothing improves until after 2012′s elections. But we can look for some kind of federal guidelines on sales tax collection in 2013.

Google Panda — I don’t think there’s anyone out there who thinks that Google got it right in 2011 with their incremental updates that have pushed spammy affiliate sites off the top pages of the search results pages. Expect more from Google in 2012. And if you’re the owner of one of those spammy affiliate sites, my advice is that it’s time to start creating better content.

Social Media — Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are going to become less of a big deal. The kind of sharing and recommendation that happens on them will become a part of almost every site we visit. And the big-name social media sites are going to make it harder for affiliates to directly monetize their social accounts.

Growth — Market research firm Forrester predicts that retailers will spend $4 billion on affiliate marketing by 2014. That’s 16 percent growth each year!

Online Poker — In the United States, the lack of legislation governing online poker will continue the uncertainty cast over the industry this year. And while creating clear national guidelines for online gambling would make sense for the country, see my rationale regarding the Affiliate Nexus Tax as to why this won’t get done in 2012.

Mobile — It’s getting easier and easier to buy stuff on your mobile phone. And that means affiliates are going to need to embrace mobile in 2012. Depending on your site, that could mean creating an app, or it could mean

Secrets of Affiliate Millionaires - 7 Alternative Success Tips in Affiliate Marketing Business

There are many affiliate marketing strategies to help you to generate a million dollar in your affiliate marketing business on the internet. Alternatively, you will discover and learn 7 success secrets of affiliate millionaires in this article. With those secrets, you will become a wealthy affiliate millionaire in the long term, not overnight.
1. Selling Primarily Informative Product Online.
It is obviously that selling informative products online is perfectly fit to the affiliate marketing business. The reasons, why it is perfectly, are: (1) people are always looking for the information online (2) you can offer services along with those informative products online (3) people can download and get those informative products instantly and (4) those informative products are the intellectual properties online.
The only possible drawback for selling the informative products online is that people can look for free information on the internet. To solve this possible drawback, that is why you have to offer your expert services along with those products, if you want to become an affiliate millionaire. With those services, you are so far away from your competitors.
The real secrets of affiliate millionaires are: (1) sell information which can be used to solve other peoples' problem and (2) offer your expert services along with those informative products to help others easier.
2. Stay Focus On The Market.
There is no doubt that there is a lot of information on the internet. With those overwhelm information; it is easier for affiliate marketing entrepreneurs to lose their focus on what they are doing in the affiliate business. Otherwise, there are so many low-value tasks to prevent you from your success in your affiliate marketing business. For example, checking emails, replying customers' emails, performing account works, and performing tax issues are the low-value tasks for your affiliate marketing business. You can absolutely find automated software tools or assistance to handle with those tasks. To become an affiliate millionaire, you have to optimize your time to the highest value tasks for your markets and business. Your time is a money and very valuable for your business. For instance, opening a new line of business, focusing on customer's needs and closing sales are high-value tasks you should do.
The real secrets of affiliate millionaires are: (1) stay focus consistency on what you are planning and doing for your affiliate business (2) maximize your time for the highest value tasks, which generate sales for you, in your affiliate marketing business always (3) get the high-value tasks done always for your business and (4) look for new opportunities in your markets always.
3. Deliver Over Your Customers' Expectation.
Delivering your products or services over your customers' expectation is one of the most significant habits of millionaire. Likewise, if you want to success in affiliate marketing business, you need to deliver your affiliate products along with your services over your customers' expectation. The minimum delivery to your customers is not enough to become an affiliate millionaire. With this habit, you will impress your customers and they will be happier with your delivery.
The real secrets of affiliate millionaires are: (1) deliver over whatever you think your customers' needs (2) delivery over the expectation all the time and (3) think about long term success and relationship with customers if you want to become an affiliate millionaire.
4. Generate Passive Income Through Recurring Affiliate Programs.
Your wealthy in financial in affiliate marketing business, like other business, is based on the passive income. It is an absolutely great idea to generate your passive income for your affiliate marketing business. There are many opportunities to generate recurring passive income from online affiliate programs on the internet. The highest recommendation is to look for great recurring affiliate program online, what you are believe that it can solve other people' problem. With those programs and appropriate affiliate marketing strategies, you will generate a lot of passive income for your affiliate business. It means you will be paid for life if you can refer those programs. In general, you can search those programs in the search engines, like Google. You will discover a thousand of programs.
The real secrets of affiliate millionaires are: (1) look for a valuable recurring informative affiliate programs for your markets and (2) promote those recurring programs with multiple affiliate marketing strategies.
5. Hire Sub-Affiliates Through 2-tier Affiliate Programs.
What if you can generate commission without your action, what's happened? You will live in your dream life! Another secret of affiliate millionaire is to promote 2-tier affiliate program in your market. You will have your own sub-affiliate marketers who are willing to promote the products and you will be paid commission when they can generate sales.
The real secrets of affiliate millionaires are: (1) hire sub-affiliate marketers through multiple marketing strategies (2) support those sub-affiliate marketers with tools, research information, and special reports and (3) keep motivating sub-affiliate marketers.
6. Improve Yourself And Mindset Always.
One of the most valuable assets in your affiliate marketing business is you. You have to improve yourself and mindset always. You have to think and behave like other millionaires do. With those habits and behaviors, you will grow yourself and business exponentially in the future, of course.
The real secrets of affiliate millionaires are: (1) think and behave like other millionaires do and (2) improve yourself and mindset to the positive way, like positive thinking, critical thinking and proactive behavior.
7. Believe Strongly In Yourself, What You Do and What You Will Do.
To become an affiliate millionaire, you must have a faith. You must believe in yourself, what you are doing and what you will do. You have to drive yourself to where you want to go in the future with the strong belief. Without this faith, you will lose your direction for yourself and your business.
The real secrets of affiliate millionaires are: (1) setup a clear vision for your affiliate marketing business (2) believe and respect in what you are doing and what you will do in the future and (3) drive yourself to where you want to go with your strong faith.
Final thoughts, the affiliate marketing business is all about "creativity". You have to combine what you have learned from this article and take it into your action accordingly. With those secrets of affiliate millionaires, your life will be changed forever! Also, you will earn top affiliate commission and success in the affiliate marketing business in the long term, not overnight or short term.

Siripong R. or zMillionDollars is a recognized authority on the subject of building success and profitable affiliate marketing business. His website, www.zMillionDollars.com [http://www.zMillionDollars.com], provides a wealth of informative articles and resources on everything you'll ever need to know about affiliate marketing business. Grab free special reports at: www.zMillionDollars.com/free-report [http://www.zMillionDollars.com/free-report].

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/600100

Affiliate Marketing Secrets, Strategies, and More!

Step-by-step Guide of Affiliate Marketing Strategy
Making money from affiliate marketing is an art. Only writing a great product review or promoting a great product will not work to make any sales from your affiliate links. But you have to do many other things to make money from your affiliate links.
Most of the Blog and website owners think that writing a great product review will work. But this is not enough. You need a perfect Affiliate Marketing Strategy and MUST work on it to generate sales from your links.
Here is a Affiliate Marketing Strategy Model. You can simply print out this page or save it on your desktop.
Step 1: Take Time (10-20 hours or even more) to chose a product to promote and write down a great, unique, and informative product review. This is very important.
Step 2: Become an Affiliate of ClickBank, Amazon, or Commission Junction and generate an affiliate link for your product and put it on your review page and publish it on your website or a blog. Now, suppose if you are not the owner of any website or a blog then it's also perfectly alright. You can post your review on Squidoo, HubPages, WetPaints, and other sites of that nature.
Remember, all we need to do is publish your web page containing your affiliate link anywhere on the web and divert the web traffic towards it.
Step 3: Link Building: This is very important. Your Affiliate link is live now. The only thing you have to do is drive web traffic towards it (the more the better). For this, you have to create and publish the content on other popular websites on the Internet and then put a link of your affiliate page.
Examples are EzineArticles, Squidoo, HubPages, WetPaint, YouTube, Xomba, eHow, WikiHow, Triond, Associated Content, Knol... etc...
Post content having your affiliate link page link on each of the above websites.
Step 4: Social Media: Try Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon & Reditt to divert more web traffic towards your affiliate links.
Step 5: Now sit back and wait for the web traffic to accelerate. This will probably take 1 week to 15 days to drive web traffic towards your affiliate page. Once the web traffic comes toward your page, you will definitely make money.
This is the Model of Affiliate Marketing Strategy. Nobody will teach you this.
Affiliate Marketing Secrets
Secrets of Successful & Profitable Affiliate Marketing
In fact, after reading this article, you will understand that there is no secret at all. But everything about affiliate marketing revolves around the one basic principle and that is:
"To make money from affiliate marketing, you have to drive more web traffic towards your affiliate links."
The more web traffic you divert towards your affiliate links, the more sales it will generate and the more money you will make. It is this simple. And I believe you should not spend money on those products which claim that they are offering you some kind of secret.
Once you generate an affiliate link on your website or a blog, all you have to do is divert more and more web traffic towards those affiliate links by Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Articles Directories, SEO and many other things.
The more web traffic that you divert towards your affiliate links, the more sales it will generate. There is nothing secret about it. Even a School going Kid can do this to make 6 figure Income every year by following this basic principle.
What is important, is the proper mindset. You have to understand the principle and develop a mind frame and stick to it and prevent this mind frame by eroding from your emotions. That's it. This is all you have to do to make money from affiliate marketing.
You don't have to be a popular product review writer for this. Nor do you need to be the owner of an Authority Blog or a Website. Of course, if you are an owner of a successful blog or a website, it will be easy for you to make money from affiliate marketing because you can leverage your existing reader/customer base.
Thus, these are the secrets of successful affiliate marketing.
Now, Take Action and start making money.
Affiliate Marketing eBooks
Should I Buy Affiliate Marketing eBooks?
You are here on this page probably because you have searched in Google for "Affiliate Marketing eBooks". I am sure that you have already gone through several websites and reviewed lots of books on affiliate marketing. But after watching literally hundreds of dollars of prices of those eBooks, you probably landed on this page.
Don't Worry.... After reading this Article, You won't need to buy any Affiliate Marketing eBooks from the Internet. And Yes, I am giving this Information to you for FREE!
Let me tell you that all of those eBooks are revolving around the one basic core principle. And this Principle of making money from Affiliate marketing will never even change in the near future. And that Principle is:
"The Key of Successful Affiliate Marketing is Web traffic. The more web traffic you divert towards your Affiliate Links from all around the web, Naturally more Sales it will generate and the more money you will make."
Everything about Affiliate marketing ultimately revolves around this simple but very basic principle. You will find literally millions of eBooks on this topic. All of those eBooks are written around this basic principle. So if you understand this basic principle, there is No Need to buy any eBooks.
I have given you the principle of profitable aff. marketing right? So Now, you have to use your mind and figure out "How to Divert more web traffic towards your Affiliate Links?" Lets discuss the example provided below:
Suppose I want to make money from Affiliate marketing so What Will I Do? Well, First of all I go to ClickBank.com and chose a product to sell. Well, I advise you to start from Digital Downloadable products first, this is because they are easy to deliver and the commission per sale is very high (20-75%) in these products.
Ok so now I have chosen the product. So the next step is to create an Affiliate Link. So What will I do? Well, I will write a keyword rich Product review having affiliate link and post it on my blog or a website. Or any other social network that we have discussed earlier.
After that process, the affiliate link is on the web. It's live now. So your 50% of the job is complete. The rest of the 50% is to divert the web traffic towards your blog/social network/website page on which you have put the affiliate link.
You can do this several ways.
One is Link Building. There are 2 advantages of link building. One is that they will divert more traffic towards your web page as well as it will increase the search engine rankings of your web page so drive organic (Search engine) traffic.
For this you have to write down and post articles on various 5,6, & 7 Page rank articles directories such as:
- EzineArticles
- Squidoo
- HubPages
- WetPaint
- YouTube
- Xomba
- Triond
- Knol
- eHow
You post articles on the above web directories. This is because Google simply loves and trusts these websites. So if each of these websites direct towards your web page having affiliate links, it will shoot up the page rank and thus more web traffic.
Now, the second way to drive more traffic towards your websites is Social Networking & the third way is Social Media. Here are the examples:
- Facebook
- Orkut
- MySpace
- Digg
- Delicious
- Stumbleupon
- Reddit
In short, you have to use your mind to find out more and more possible ways to divert the web traffic towards your affiliate links. Once you do all of this hard work. Just sit back and enjoy the steady passive income coming into your bank accounts.
Facebook Affiliate Marketing
How to Make Passive Income from Facebook Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing means selling other people's products from your web properties (Blogs & Websites) and getting commission for each sale you make. Many people have asked me: "How they can make money from Facebook Affiliate Marketing?"
Well, As far as I know, there is not any direct method of doing affiliate marketing on Facebook. But let's go to the basics and find out how we use Facebook to do affiliate marketing?
What is the Basic Principle behind Successful Affiliate Marketing?
Well, the basic principle of profitable affiliate marketing is - "The more web traffic you divert towards your Affiliate Links (Web pages having your affiliate links), the more Sales your affiliate links will generate."
This is the basic principle of Affiliate marketing and every theory and techniques of profitable affiliate marketing revolves around this simple basic principle.
Now, here we want to make money from Facebook affiliate marketing. So obviously, we need to find out the ways to divert traffic from facebook to our affiliate links. Is this Possible? Well, Yes. There are several ways by which you can divert the web traffic on Facebook to your affiliate links.
Say for Example, Fan pages, Comments, News Feeds, Facebook applications, Direct Advertising on Facebook... etc...
By these methods, you can easily divert web traffic from Facebook to your own web property having affiliate links. The more web traffic that you divert to your affiliate links, the more sales it will generate and thus the more money you will make.
However, There is only one problem with Social Networking sites traffic and that is the traffic of social networking sites is not a buyer's traffic. They are there on the Social Network for being Social. So making money from Social Network traffic is really a difficult task.
And for Affiliate Links to work, you need the Buyer's Traffic

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4368995

The Ins and Outs of Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

Let the professionals help you... in mass:
Affiliate marketing networks provide an environment where companies who have something to sell (Advertisers) meet with companies who know how to sell it (Publishers). Many large Affiliate marketing networks provide hundreds of products to be sold to their network of thousands of publishers.
Affiliate marketing networks generally work on a performance basis (CPA), where you only pay when a sale or lead is generated for you. You receive a sale or lead at a predetermined cost and then award the affiliate network with a bounty for generating the sale or lead for you. The Affiliate network then pays their publishers for generating sales on your behalf, minus what the network keeps for itself for putting the deal together. This may sound similar to a shopping portal, however there are some distinct differences. A shopping portal places your products in direct connection with the online shopper. Affiliate marketing networks place your products in direct connection with publishers (marketing or media companies.) Each publisher will then use their own resources to generate sales for you, be it PPC, SEO, email, banners and the like.
Not every product or service will work with an affiliate marketing campaign, and many affiliate networks will not accept your offer unless certain criteria are met. The average website is not "marketing ready" for an affiliate marketing campaign, and often requires a redesign or a separate website to allow for easy sales or lead conversions. Most sales lead generation campaigns work across affiliate marketing networks as long as you are not trying to collect too much information, or information that makes your customers feel nervous such as a social security number. For product sales, you need to present a very attractive offer like "a free 7 day trial for a diet pill", "free services for 1 month", or anything that can be considered a low risk bargain. An offer such as "a 42 inch plasma screen Television for only $1,597" will not work. As always, there are exceptions, and you may need to work closely with your affiliate manager to produce a campaign that will be popular amongst the publishers.
Due to the nature of the affiliate networks, they can be volatile and risky, and are not recommended for any company until they have a lot of internet marketing experience under their belt. The overall sales potential of affiliate network marketing can be enormous, and any time gigantic sales numbers come into play, so do gigantic risks. Many affiliate networks have what are known as "Super Affiliates" who have the potential to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales commissions each month. The volatility stems from both the marketing power available through an affiliate network, along with the performance-based environment they provide.
For the most part, the publishers who do the selling through the affiliate networks are greedy. They want to sell only the products and services that yield them the most revenue. It is their right, after all, because they are working on a performance basis and assume all marketing risks. If a good offer comes across an affiliate network, where a lot of money can be made, many publishers will market the product and sales will come streaming in. If a product comes in that does not generate good, or at least acceptable, revenue for the publishers, they will chose to not market the product and sales will be almost nonexistent. It is difficult to find the right balance to satisfy all parties involved (advertiser, publisher, affiliate network, and potential customer.) All parties must be happy in order to yield a successful affiliate campaign. The swing between a high performing campaign and an unpopular one can be tremendous. This volatility introduces significant risk, which comes in three flavors.
Affiliate Network Marketing Risk:

• (1) Not enough business You have put significant time and resources into building an Affiliate marketing campaign. You have commissioned all types of marketing creative, website design and even bulked up your sales staff. Despite this preparation, your offer is not a money maker for the publishers, and they are not marketing your campaign. Your expenses have increased in anticipation of increased sales that simply never materialized.
• (2) Too much business You hit the nail on the head... Your offer is hot and the publishers love it. They love it so much that sales flow in faster than you can handle. Your call center can handle 50 leads per day but the publishers are generating 200. For each sale or lead made you must pay a commission whether or not you can address it. You are literally downing in too much business, and your pocketbook can't hold out long enough to expand accordingly.
• (3) Cheating You didn't invest much effort in validating your sales or leads. Your affiliate marketing campaign is generating a lot of leads, but sales are not happening. You are receiving numerous disconnected phone numbers, invalid credit card numbers or people who say "I only signed up for the free gift." Leads are coming in, but a bunch of crooked publishers are submitting fake information to get paid as if their data was real. Notice how that last lead had a Texas area code, their zip code was "12345," they stated they live in Alaska and gave you the credit card number "4444555544445555."

Many Affiliate marketing networks will also ask if they can run your campaign exclusively. This means that they are the only affiliate network that can provide your offer to the world. There are some distinct advantages and disadvantages to running your campaign exclusively with one network.
Exclusive Affiliate network Campaign Advantages:

• Your Affiliate marketing campaign manager may pass your campaign on to other affiliate marketing networks, and manage your account for you. This saves you considerable time by not having to seek out new networks, organizing campaign launches, marketing creative, and other tasks required to launch a new campaign.
• You will not have to pay startup fees or sign contracts for the affiliate marketing networks that your affiliate manager passes your campaign on to. You simply work under your single agreement with your affiliate manager. This can save you thousands of dollars in startup costs, and lots of time.
• Affiliate marketing networks use exclusive campaigns as "bragging rights," and often give priority to their exclusive campaigns. Your campaign is more likely to be advertised to the publishers and given special attention. This helps to get your campaign noticed by the publisher, and ultimately increases sales or lead flow.

Exclusive Affiliate network Disadvantages:

• Your campaign manager will outsource your campaign to other affiliate marketing networks. You will not know exactly who is marketing your offer and therefore the quality of the web traffic coming into your website is unknown.
• Your affiliate manager may not be as ambitious as you. Your campaign may not get passed on to other affiliate marketing networks, and because it is an exclusive offer you can't pass it on to other networks. Growth may become stifled.
• The publishers who run your campaign through outsourced affiliate networks will not receive as high of a payout (sales commission). There are effectively two affiliate marketing networks: Your direct affiliate network and the outsourced network. More hands are in the pot, taking money and leaving less for the publishers themselves. The decreased publisher bounty with result in decreased interest in your campaign, so the outsourced affiliate marketing networks will not be as productive as if you worked with them directly.

Most affiliate networks will want to incorporate email marketing into your campaign. This is strongly recommended, as sales or lead generation volumes could be significantly higher. If you do allow your campaign to be email marketed, you will need to be able to maintain an email suppression list. The suppression list is a list of email addresses of people who want to opt-out from receiving your offer. An opt-out link must be provided on your email marketing creative where people can opt-out from your offer. You must then supply the suppression file to your affiliate network so they can in turn pass your suppression file to their publishers. This is a part of the Can-Spam law and it can be effectively managed with a small opt-out landing page connected to a simple database. Make sure you provide an updated suppression file to the affiliate networks at least once per week.
Launching affiliate marketing campaigns that convert:

• Your goal is to generate a campaign that puts the most money possible into your publisher's pockets, while also generating a profit yourself. Keep in mind that a break-even campaign is also a successful campaign as long as you can re-market to your clients and generate additional sales, upgrades, etc.
• Design your campaign to maximize conversions. Minimize the clicks needed to purchase a product, or have your lead generation form on the home page. Don't collect information that you really do not need, or that people do not like to give out (like an SSN.) You may have to build a unique website for the affiliate marketing campaign if your current website is not fine-tuned for affiliate marketing.
• You are competing against all of the other campaigns on an affiliate network, not just ones selling the same thing you are. Publishers optimize the offers they market and drop the poor performing campaigns. Design an offer that works both for you and your publishers; your affiliate manager can help.
• Make the steps necessary to allow your campaign to be email marketed by the publishers. This means you will need to create Can-Spam compliant email marketing creative, an opt-out page linked to a database, and provide access to an updated suppression file (a text dump of your database suppression file.) Email marketing will significantly amplify your campaign's effectiveness.
• Develop a large selection of various marketing creative, lots of standard size banners, multiple email creative, multiple email titles and subject lines, various text links and so on. Your affiliate manager will provide you a list of critical media types and sizes, but try to provide more than their minimum requirements.
• Stay on top of lead quality and fraud. No matter how advanced your validation system may get, someone will try to sneak fake data past you. Make sure that you can track all lead sources, including the subIDs that are passed on through the affiliate network.
• Every time you make a change to your website, submit a test to ensure that the affiliate campaign is still running as it should be. If your website has an error preventing sales conversions or introduces tracking problems, you may be asked to pay the publishers for their lost business. Remember that your broken website will affect many companies who stuck their neck out for you.
• Be prepared for large volumes of leads, or no leads at all.

The risks associated with affiliate network marketing are many, and they are significant. You must be on your toes, thinking ahead and quick to move if things turn sour. But if you come prepared and design an offer that the publishers love, the financial rewards can be enormous.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3592143

The State of Affiliate Marketing in 201

A few weeks ago, Google rolled out Search Plus your World on US and UK search result pages, a new format that merges social and personalized search results for logged in users, which also includes relevant Google+ pages in the results.
This is clearly another attempt from Google to put affiliate marketers out of business, seeing that this major change in search engine optimization is more focused on their users’ social activity. Affiliate marketing has been an industry for over a decade (since 1994), serving as a marketing tool for ecommerce sites, helping them get more sales and is projected to help the ecommerce industry reach almost $300 billion in sales in 2015.
However, with all the changes that Google is continuously implementing on their search engine algorithms such as last years’ Google Panda update, Freshness update as well as the use of social signals in determining quality and popular content over the web, this only entails that affiliate marketers must also step up to keep up with imminent changes that have always been a part of this industry and become savvier in terms of how they use multiple marketing platforms to reach their target audience.
I recently had the chance to ask some of the most renowned thought-leaders in the field of Search and affiliate marketing about their views on the current and future state of the affiliate industry, particularly when it comes to affiliate sites’ search visibility.
Simon Slade, CEO of Affilorama, relates that:
“Since we launched Affilorama in 2006, there have been many changes in affiliate marketing but many core principles remain the same and it’s something we try and educate our members about.
Never rely solely on one form of traffic. If you are relying single handedly on Google to drive you visitors, you are in huge danger as a lot of people found out with Vince, May Day and more recently Panda. We strongly encourage members to diversify their traffic sources whether it is social, paid or direct forms of generation. Not only is it smart risk management, but it also presents other more viral opportunities as well.
The other piece of advice I would have is to think outside the square and try to offer a unique solution that solves your users’ problems. Don’t try and copy what everyone else is doing, be creative and come up with a unique way to give your customers what they need. Think software, mobile, gaming – these are different platforms that are open for affiliates to monetize.
The web is moving very fast and you need to move with the times.”

Read more: http://technorati.com/business/article/the-state-of-affiliate-marketing-in/#ixzz1slVCQhI0

Three Affiliate Marketing Trends to Watch in 2012

With 2012 quickly approaching it's time we take a look at some of the largest trends in the affiliate marketing world. If you're unfamiliar with affiliate marketing, I would encourage you to check out our webinar "Affiliate Marketing 101" by visiting www.eboostconsulting.com/affiliate-marketing-101. (In short, affiliate marketing allows advertisers to crowdsource their media buys, often paying only on a performance basis.)

Mobile

Unless you've been under a rock you've most likely heard that mobile is seeing explosive growth; in 2011 spending on mobile ads is anticipated to reach $1.23B (a 65% increase from 2010). Affiliates and advertisers can generate a large amount of mobile traffic, but the elephant in the room remains: does mobile traffic convert (into leads, engagement, etc.)? It largely depends on the offer. If you're promoting an iPhone app and the conversion path is intuitive and easy, then you'll probably have success. If you're promoting car insurance and trying to get a consumer to fill out a 25 field lead form, good luck. Consider the fit of your offers to the mobile audience. Is it simple, straightforward, compelling and quick to complete conversion? Does it fit in the context of how people engage with their mobile phones in various settings (e.g. when searching for a local restaurant, surfing the web, or shopping for a particular app)?
The trend in mobile is more than just "mobile is growing" and is really focused on finding a new and unique way to convert traffic. The mobile world of online advertising is still in its infancy of finding what does and does not work. Get creative with conversion paths:

• Instead of using a lead form for car insurance offers why not run a pay-per-call offer where a user can just click the number and contact an agent instantly?
• Instead of trying to get a user to download a desktop application why not create a landing page that just collects the visitor's email which you can use to send them the download link at a later time (when they are on their laptop or desktop)?
• Instead of encouraging a purchase of a good through your mobile ad, collect an email address, marking the address with a tag that indicates this subscriber's interest. (Where did they come from? Did they click on a specific product page and then submit their email?). Follow up later with more information and a compelling call-to-action.

There are a lot of ways to leverage mobile traffic and to make it work for you. Expect to see more tactics like these in the near future.

Affiliate Tools

It boggles my mind why some people think you can simply throw up an offer on the top affiliate networks and instantly see converting traffic. Just like any lasting relationship, Mr. Advertiser and Mrs. Affiliate (see webinar "Affiliate Marketing 101" at www.eboostconsulting.com/affiliate-marketing-101) must take time to grow and strengthen their relationship. No instant gratification here (unless you're one of the lucky few). If you're in a competitive or saturated vertical, consider how you are differentiating your offer from the others? Giving affiliates the tools they need to succeed is vital if you want to succeed as an advertiser in the affiliate space.
A deep linking tool like the one below by CJ.com is one of the most basic ways to allow affiliates to link to any page on your site. If you have a site that allows users or affiliates to generate content then this tool becomes even more valuable as it allows the affiliate to generate value for you (content) and it also allows them to target specific pages that might convert better than the ones you chose for them. Give affiliates as much flexibility in promoting your offer as possible by offering tools like CJ.com's deep linking tool.

Expect to see more advertisers giving affiliates unique and custom tools to help them achieve better conversions and higher EPC's.

Monetization

As CPM's and CPC's continue to increase for every vertical on the web, affiliates are being forced to find better ways to monetize each and every click. Imagine competing in the car insurance vertical and paying $9 CPC's in AdWords. Do you ever wonder how anyone is able to make that work? It comes down to knowing your traffic and understanding that once a user clicks to your site, in order to make the traffic worth your time, you must have multiple conversion paths with different values.
Take a look at www.quotelab.com. They have two conversion paths, zip submit and email submit. Both are easy and both get the visitor into the conversion funnel. When you submit your zip code it pops up another window, one with a full lead form and the other with PPC links from BrokersWeb or SureHits. The lead forms range from $6-$12 and the PPC results range from $6-$13 per click. (The reason for the range in payouts is the location of the visitor. Different states have different value.) In this example, QuoteLab has not left the conversion up to fate or good luck. Instead, they've set themselves up for success by creating multiple options at each step, thus increasing the probability of monetizing each click.
As the affiliate marketing industry grows and verticals become more competitive, expect to see more and more affiliates utilizing multiple conversion methods within their campaigns to monetize every action a visitor takes.