Website Affiliate Marketing

Although PPC is easier to make money in the short term, a website with lots of traffic can provide free clicks and eventually be more profitable than a PPC campaign. Try creating a website. Make sure to have a domain name (preferably a .com) and create a niche website based on your own interests. Affiliate programs often work well with websites. Remember, the strength in websites is the power to "presell" your affiliate program's product by giving them reasons to buy it and putting them in a state of mind of feeling a need to own the product. Simply telling them to buy the product could make your visitors feel cautious and wary of your sales pitch.

http://Webmaster-Apex.com is a good site to find help with creating a website and driving traffic to it.

Yahoo + Microsoft

Although many of the effects of these two companies merging are discussed elsewhere, the potential merger will have a different effect on affiliate marketers, especially PPC marketers.

What's going to happen to YPN and AdCenter? In addition, how will the affiliate marketing models for both companies merge? Will the merger still be available to be marketed on Commission Junction or will it be a private affiliate model much like the current AdCenter model.

Perosonally, I think:
1. Both Adcenter and YPN will initially stay up while Microsoft takes the pros of both and makes something they think can compete will Adwords.
2. The affiliate marketing opportunities will probably be available through sites like CJ as it will be difficult to restructure to force all affiliate marketers to go through the MicrosoftPartners. So for the sake of not losing advertisers, they'll keep the opportunities available on CJ.

But then again, those are just my opinions.

Food for thought.

-Beck

Affiliate Marketing

After trying PPC oriented affiliate marketing for awhile, it seems that affiliate marketing is quite profitable. The difficulty in affiliate marketing is two-fold. First you need to create an ad popular enough to generate clicks and be willing to spend enough budget to get the amount of impressions needed to generate the amount of clicks you want. Then the second difficulty is that you have to make money off those clicks, more than you spent on the PPC engine, in this case, Adwords. So you don't want traffic that won't get you the conversions but you want more traffic, so you have to walk a fine line in order to get the commissions. Your skill in writing ads that get the clickers to do what you want them to do makes or breaks you in affiliate marketing.

If you want to start affiliate marketing, try Commission Junction.

-Beck

The Beginning

Everything has to start somewhere.

We learn in economics class that the opportunity cost of what you do with your time is the "next best forgone conclusion." Since I have free time now, I can choose between wasting away my time or trying to sell my time for a wage. Remember, "time is money."

So I started doing affiliate marketing a few weeks ago and I've made 60 dollars within a week, the majority of which are ticket sales through the StubHub affiliate marketing program. The start of this quest for financial freedom through nonconventional means is quite interesting. I'll update again when something comes up.

-Quester