Beating the Recession With Affiliate Marketing

A recession is now inevitable. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently predicted that the current recession in the United States will last for at least the whole of 2009. It is of global proportions and it will not discriminate and thus will affect each and every single market. Moody's stated that China is in for its most serious economic downturn in two decades and trade figures have been described as just awfully dreadful. All is far from well in the Euro region, already said to be plunging headlong into recession, with the UK economy being the fastest to contract. Developing countries will also feel the crunch with growth predicted to slow to an abysmal 4.5% for the pre-developed. Shades of the Great Depression seem to be colouring the present global economic crisis so the big question of how to safeguard our financial well-being is springing into everyone's mind.

For this I offer a simple straight-forward answer. Start one or many low investment, high return businesses! Cynical readers will be tossing around expletives at this statement as it is common knowledge to everybody that doing this will ensure profitability, even in the worst of downturns. It is the method of what businesses we should be starting that is this article's concern. My advice is, start an affiliate business! It possesses low initial investment and at the same time maintains high yield characteristics that I believe we should all take note of.

The cost inherent in setting up an affiliate program is fairly paltry. Simple things like hosting, domain name registration, and pay-per-click advertising, are all fairly inexpensive. Compared to traditional physical commerce, affiliate marketing offers a host of benefits with the most useful characteristic being never having to ever stock up on the wares that you are marketing! It also does not require having any physical office, storage or operations space. This translates into never having to pay rent or a mortgage installment! Estimates put US spending on affiliate marketing channels at $2.1 billion dollars for 2008. In terms of your audience however, you are not just marketing to the US. You are marketing to the entire world!

If you have diligently marketed your affiliate products, you stand to make ludicrous sums of money. Since low operating costs are coupled with opportunities to generate extremely high returns, affiliate marketing is the ideal way to generate more income during economic slumps!

5 Steps to Create Income Online

Do you want to create income online with an autopilot system? You don't need to be a professional in website design and you don't need to be an expert in your market. With the help of affiliate marketing, you are able to generate a 4 figure online income by just spending a few hours into it everyday.

Many people thought that create income online is something difficult and complicated. In fact, it is not. Many people are generating money from the internet these days, especially with the existence of affiliate marketing, more and more people are making money from the comfort of their home.

Now, here are the 5 steps how you can create income online using affiliate marketing...

1. Start by targeting a hungry crowd. This is the same as looking for a profitable market. Remember, it is the people in the market that are going to buy from you, therefore, do your market research correctly.

2. Find the problems in your market; solve the problems by providing an affiliate product. For example, if you are in golf market, there are a lot of people who want to learn how to play better golf and so you can promote affiliate products to fulfill their needs.

3. Build a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a simple one-page website that you use to capture visitors' emails and names so that you can contact with them anytime. Use an auto-responder to do this. Outsource this if you don't have any idea about it. It is not complicated and it can be done within 5 minutes. Building your own list of subscribers is a very important task to create income online.

4. Build trust and relationship with the people in your market by providing what they are looking for. Nobody is going to buy from you if they don't know you and if they don't trust you. Thus, you must build relationship with them and promote them at the same time. Use your auto-responder to send automated emails to them.

5. Drive targeted traffic to your squeeze page. Traffic generation is all about taking action. As long as you take the necessary action, traffic will come. Use article marketing, forum marketing, social networking and more to generate traffic to your squeeze page.

This is how you can create income online by using affiliate marketing. Once the system has been set up, it will be in autopilot mode. All you need to do is to drive traffic and improve the conversion of your business.

Make Money Promoting Affiliate Programs

As an affiliate marketer, you make money by promoting affiliate program. But there are so many programs out there and how do you choose the right program to make money with?

First, don't be tempted by the high commission. Often merchants will need to jack up their selling price in order to pay you. Your prospects are unlikely to pay for high end product which then makes it hard for you to make money with affiliate marketing.

What you need to do then?

When you are selling digital product, the minimum commission you should consider is 25%. There are plenty of affiliate programs with that kind of commission on the internet and if you can increase your conversion rate, you can discuss with the merchant to raise your commission.

When you want to make money with affiliate programs, you need to join affiliate marketing programs that supply lots of marketing tools like articles, auto responder emails, banner and other marketing materials. You can then go straight to build your online business without developing the marketing tools.

However, you need to take into consideration that you are not the only one promoting the program. It is wise that you use the merchants write up as reference and generate your own written marketing materials. You can still continue to use the graphics supplied by the merchant because it is not easy to change the graphics and you certainly don't want to waste time on that.

In order to make money with affiliate program, you must understand the program thoroughly. Read the FAQ and make sure you got all your questions answered. You can always email the merchant if their FAQ is not helpful.

If the merchant never answer you, it might means that they are not serious about making money with you. Then it is better that you move on and look for another affiliate marketing program.

If you want to maximize the profit from the affiliate program, you should check the terms. Not every merchant is going to pay you monthly. Some of them will only issue your check when your commission has reached the minimum pay commission and some of them are going to deduct part of your earning as processing fee. You can't blame the merchant for not paying you accordingly because you forgot to read the terms.

Essential Elements to Make Money Online

Many people are in online business nowadays. In fact making online money has become a fashion in the recent times. Many offer line business owners are also entering in the online business and these new comers find the online stream a very attractive one due to the advantages associated with the online business.

There are certain rules for follow for earning online. You are required to make yourself familiar with the tips if you really are in need to make fast online money.

In order to make money online quickly it is required for you to provide a product or sell a service. For this you have to those your products carefully. There are certain products that sell better online. In case you do not have a good product to sell, you can join an affiliate program. In such type of program you can join those merchants who are already there in the established business and sell their products for a commission. There are good rewards in this work and people are early successfully. Thus it can be a good way to start your online business.

You can create your own website or blog to make fast online money to market your products. Blogs can be created easily at the blog spot and you can put a link to your product on the blog. While making a website ensures that you choose a proper host to manage your website. This will help you to run your online business smoothly without any problem related with technical interruptions.

You also require customer for your online business in order to make online money. Many people shop online now days. There also people who routinely search the internet for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. You can generate a source to collect some of these people as your customers. Some will become repeat and loyal customers in case your products are good. Another good way is to gather good customers automatically is to use the reliable auto responder. A good auto responder helps you to create regular communication with your customers thus making a very good relationship with them thus generating more profits and sales.

You also need to learn various ways to promote your products and bring traffic to your website. The more amount of traffic you get the more the sales and more money you are likely to make through it. In order to generate online business there is lot of valuable material available on the internet.

Top 2 Keys For Affiliate Marketing Success

While the concept behind affiliate marketing is simple to learn, the process itself can be a bit more difficult to master, especially if you have little to no experience working in the Internet environment. Learning affiliate marketing is not impossible, however it does require focus, energy and determination if you are to not only succeed but also thrive as an affiliate marketer. Here are the keys to success when it comes to succeeding in this game:

The First Key - Be Careful Which Doors You Open

It is a common mistake when learning affiliate marketing to align yourself with too many product providers. If you would not do business with them as a customer a good rule of thumb is to not do business with them as an affiliate marketer. If you're careful which doors you open from the beginning it is much easier to establish your credibility right off the bat.

The Second Key - Be True to Your Word

Always deliver as promised. If you can live by those four words consistently, then you have accomplished one of the most difficult tasks in learning affiliate marketing. If you promise customer service response times of 24 hours or less, then your customers should expect exactly that - respond on time every time and your customers will get the message. By the same token, it is important not to overstate your abilities or misrepresent yourself, your company or your products.

These two keys will help you to unlock the doors that stand between you and gaining the necessary marketing skills that can earn you a respectable and impressive income from your Internet based business.

Find Top Clickbank Products

Finding quality Clickbank products that convert is one part of the riddle to being a successful Clickbank affiliate. The other part is successful marketing.

But for this article I will provide some basic tips to finding Clickbank products that sell.

First, how well is a product selling? If the product is brand new it's impossible to gauge, but if the product has been around a while you can tell by the product's gravity and gravity history. Gravity is not an exact number representing total sales. Clickbank does not give the information away. But it's a general idea of how well a product is selling. I typically look for products with a gravity of between 10 and 100. Any product with a gravity over 100 is obviously a great product, but its more than likely that product is hyper-competitive and getting any marketing traction is going to be somewhere between tough to impossible.

Look for products on the rise. Find a couple dozen new products and track them over the course of two to three weeks. If you see a consistent climb that is evidence the product is selling well, finding a market, and since it's new you know that competition from other Clickbank affiliates will be small. Jump on and ride the wave as long as you can.

What is the return rate? Clickbank doesn't offer this data, but there are few places online you can find it. I personally wouldn't touch a product with more than a 20% return rate. The ideal would be no more than 10%. In rare cases if the conversion rate is high and the commission generous, then a higher return rate might be tolerable. That's up to you to do the math and make sure the numbers gel.

Finally, do research. You may find a product in the Clickbank marketplace that has simply been overlooked or undiscovered. It could have a gravity of zero, but that's doesn't mean the product isn't a winner. Do your research. How much search traffic does that product's niche get? If it's decent, put the product out there in front of prospective buyers and see how it does. You might find a diamond in the rough and have it all to yourself. It happens. When it does, focus on that product and squeeze as much money out of it as possible.

Another way to gauge the worth of an untested product is to look at the pitch page. Is the merchant website professional? Is the text readable? Does the product's pitch make you want to buy? Really, really, really buy? If so, that's a product with potential.

These are just some of the tips I use, they are other ways to evaluate top Clickbank products I will cover in future articles.