Learning Affiliate Marketing-together #2

At this point I have my website more or less set-up and ready to go. Now it's time to find, what I call, an affiliate management website. Initially, as I wondered through the Internet looking for company's that I wanted to deal with, I found that at the bottom of their website was a small link that said, affiliate or associate, and in some affiliate/associate program. Click on those links and it will take you to their affiliate program. These programs should be free, if not get away from it. with that said, they will give you a break down on commissions and their rules for affiliating with them. They will also refer you to an affiliate program management site, that you also have to sign up for and should again be free. Now if you have a stand alone website where you sale your own products, these affiliate management programs also have an advertisers program. These programs for advertisers will charge you to be listed on their sites. Now to go through that process is time consuming, you can go directly to the affiliate program management sites and view lists of their advertisers and sign-up with that company as an affiliate. When you sign on with the affiliate management company you will have to fill out a tax form and give your identification number that you use on your taxes, or your social security number. Don't worry, they have to report your income to the IRS. The enrollment form and tax form are simple and straight forward, it took me about 20 minutes to sign-up, of course I read everything, and somethings twice.
Here is a short list of the affiliate management company's that I use, you can also find a directory on the Internet of these company's, there are 100's if not 1000's, but you have to use the one that the company your affiliating with uses.

Commission junction
ClixGalore
linkshare
ShareAsale

Commission junction and ShareAsale are the two that I like best, theirsite is fairly easy to navigate. The others takes awhile to get use to, but are still okay. This is not an endorsement merely my preference. Also as a disclaimer, there is a link at the bottom of this page for ShareAsale, they are the only one of the four that will pay me for referrals.

When your all signed up and ready to search for company's that carry the items you want. You will find them on a list with your affiliate management company. You will click on a button that says something to the effect to join that company's affiliate program. Some company's have an immediate acceptance policy, and others will want to review your site and then decide if they will accept you. When a company rejects you don't get mad or upset, their are a lot of reasons they may not feel that your website portrays their company, they may not like other companies on your site with them, or they may have suspended their program. Usually, with in a week or so you will get an e-mail, stating you have been accepted or rejected. Now if your accepted some will e-mail you banners to place on your site. Look at them very carefully, if your affiliate ID number is not there, you will not get credit for sales coming from your site. I always wait awhile and go to the affiliate managers site to down load the banners, that way I know my ID code is embedded in the link. To download the banner that I want, I copy and save it to either my google documents or my google notebook. That way if i mess up pasting it into my website, I don't have to go back to the affiliate management site and download it again. It took me awhile to figure this out, I wasted a lot of time going back and forth.
(NOTE)-If you don't already use your computers hot keys to, cut, copy and paste, learn too. This will save you a lot of time, frustration and headaches. I initially used just the mouse and found that sometimes, when you placed the cursor where you wanted to go and then moved the mouse up to the browsers copy button, the cursor would disappear from the area I was pasting too. So i would go back and forth trying to do it, if it doesn't work once it more than likely will not work the second or third time either.

Ctrl & X= Cut
Ctrl & C= Copy
Ctrl & V= Paste

Once i had everything, banners etc.., on my site I went back into the manage my website control panel and updated my site description and keywords. Any time you change anything in your website, save it before you do or go anywhere else. Why? If you don't as soon as you leave, you will lose all your changes, slow down and save, save, save. I spent a lot of time redoing things because I got in a hurry, started thinking too much and forgot to save my changes.

Working with Keywords and keyword phrases is boring, but it is really important. First review the content on your site and list words and phrases that you would put into a browser to find your website. Ask friends and relatives for ideas also, when you complete your list find a keyword generator. I had a google AdWords account and so I used their tool to get additional key words and phrases. Be aware of negative keywords, when I first started i had one of those turn key websites to sell a 2 day acne cure. Well, I used AdWords to try and generate traffic. I found the keyword with the most hits, ACNE, and i got a lot of traffic but no sales or click through as they call them. So I went back to AdWords and read the help section and learned about negative key words. These are general or specific words or phrases that will generate a lot of traffic but no sales. In short use keywords that describe your website, as with my acne site instead of just acne, I used words and phrase like buy acne cure, 2 day acne cure etc..if your selling something use words that will bring you buyers, not someone looking for information about causes of acne.

Your site is now ready, all your products are listed and the links work, your site description and keywords are perfect, let the cash roll in. Not that easy, we still have something left to do, get your website on search engines. Your web building site will have an offer to list you with over 200 search engines, for a low price of 50 bucks, or something similar. You can use that service, just like you could pay someone else to build your website. What's the point, are you going to pay-out lots of money to pay some else? To make a lot of money, you have to repeat what works and fix what doesn't. These sites will hopefully make you money, and either way you are learning. That's the whole point, keep learning and growing, keep doing it if you want to succeeded. Like I said at the start, if your not willing to pay the price you will not succeed, the roadside is littered with people who got tired, frustrated, its to hard, to much work, I don't have the time. Again, you can work on your business for 80 hours a week or 2 hours a week, the difference? Working 80 hours a week you will get there quicker than working 2 hours a week, but as long as you keep on keeping on, learning, and applying that knowledge, you will get where your going, or like most people sit on the side of the road.
Back to the subject of search engines. You can go to the following search engine websites and enter your website your self. It is very simple and straight forward to complete the forms and submit them. Then you wait, most will take anywhere from a week to several months for the directories to crawl your website. Crawl your website is a phrase that means the directory has an automated system that reviews your website and determines its content, links and a bunch of other secret things they look for to rank your site for its directory. The major ones; Google, Demoz, yahoo, and MSN have other directories that are associated with them. Those other directories have different schedules, that is why it may take up to 3 months to get picked up by the sub-directories.

Now we are up to date, this is basically where I am at right now. With that said I want to restate a couple of things to make sure they are clear. I started doing this to make money, but my whole life I have never cheated anyone, lied to make money or get ahead, and believe that in the long run honesty and integrity are the values that really count. Now for the questions your dying to ask. How much have you made on your website? Earlier this week I submitted my site to the directories and have made $.70 from my website, and that was from an item I bought myself. I am also on Mylot and have made $.75 so far. With that said, I am always working to find out what I am not doing and what I can do better. That is where I am now, and my text post we will talk about some of those other things I am thinking about and starting to do.

Last but not least, I have listed some of the links I talked about in my link box. there are only two of them that I make anything from, the first is my website, but only if you decide to purchase something and the second is this Share A Sale link.

Thanks for reading this blog and as always, ideas, comments, and constructive criticism is highly appreciated.

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Learning Affiliate Marketing together

The reason for this Blog is a learning tool for me to polish and improve my skills. A learning tool for anyone that has very limited computer skills and no experience with Internet marketing. I have recently started this endeavor, and haven't gotten to far. My plan is to bring you up to date on where I am currently at in the process, and then as I make changes or attempt to polish up what I have done already, I will post it to this site.

Now should I run into trouble or a road block, I am going to rely on you all out there to help me out. Those that have sites that deal with what ever issue we are dealing with, are more than welcome to put a link to their site so we can all benefit from it.

Before we get started I want to make one thing clear that I have learned so far. There are a lot of scams and rib-offs out there, so make sure you check everything out before you turn over money to anyone promising to make you rich with little or no effort. First off this has not been easy for me, I have to learn everything and then correct all my mistakes and start from the beginning again. I could do the same thing in two or so hours a day, it would just take me a long time. I am a type "A" kind of person, normally I am working on this stuff for 4 to 6 hours a day. The good thing is if I want to go fishing or something, I go. I will catch back up later, so I can set my own schedule. Also i learned that if this was so easy and anyone could do it, there would be a lot of people quiting their day job. Anyone can do it and can learn it, I can testify to that, but the difference is most people get frustrated, scared or lazy and stop doing it. As long as you keeping going and learning you can make it. After all, even a blind squirrel will find a nut every now and then.



OK, let's get started, the first thing I did was to sit down and figure out what type of site I wanted to do. A blog, a regular style web page, and in what forum I wanted to get in. Well I was in a hurry and decided to do a regular website, on the Internet. I then had to decide what I was going to produce or sell on that site. Products, E-books, Information or anything else that I was interested in or knew something about. Initially, I decided to do a blog to float my idea of gang information. I set up a blog on Blogspot.com. It was easy to do and I did not have to have a lot of technical know how. That was a good thing, not only is my technical knowledge very limited, my general computer skills are on the novice side. They said it takes 20 to 30 minutes to set up and get a blog on line. Well, it took me about two hours, not due to content but due to setting up the blog itself. Once i finished setting up the physical lay-out. I started on the content, which was easy and fun because I knew the subject matter and enjoyed writing about it. The hold back was my typing and spelling, thank the lord for spell check. The first time I submitted my blog it did not go through, I had to retype it correct my spelling and oops and then resubmit it. I sat and watched it ready for the comments to come flowing in, after 30 minutes and no responses, I went to bed. That was about 3 weeks ago, still haven't gotten any responses. I then tried Hubpages, they were easy enough to do and it looked like people actually had sites there and made a lot of comments. So I went to hubpages.com and started a site there, still about gangs and then I later expanded it to articles dealing with California prisons, and one on my dog, Bubba, a Bichon Frise. After completing 10 hubpages, I had one comment, and that was from my daughter, but on the good side I had about 500 visitors to my posts. I then learned about Google AdSense, a way to make money by having advertisements placed on you blog or website. I went to google AdSense.com and sighed up, again it took me about 30 minutes to complete the process, but most people can do it quicker. Sure enough, ads showed up on my blog and related directly to the content of my posts. Needless to say, no one used them. After all how many people wanted to get a pen pal in prison or become a correctional officer or attend drug rehabs. Finally after three weeks I realized my subject just was not working, so it was time to change. I felt I had a good grasp on how to do blogs and was in a hurry to get to making a"real website" or a money making one.



I returned to square one, wrote down a list of ideas that I thought would be marketable. I came up with Home or Personal Electronics, and settled on a limited number of items. HDTV's, MP3 players, I-Pods, GPS systems and Accessories for them. I then had to decide if I was going to do drop-shipping, or an affiliate type marketing. Drop-shipping I would have to find a drop-shipper and spent about four hours searching the Internet for drop-shipping companies. I found several and then decided I did not want to deal with ordering, dealing with stock on hand and then of course there was a cost associated with it. The ones I looked at you either had to purchase the stock and they would retain it in their warehouse until shipped, but they pretty much handled everything, the other did not charge me for the cost of the product until I sold it, which seemed really good, use other peoples money, but they would charge me for the space in their warehouse that my products occupied. I just did not like that, so I decided on an affiliate program. I went to the Internet and went through litterly 100's of websites looking for company's with affiliate programs. I then learned of company's that actually monitor the affiliate programs for the company's and did all the accounting and tracking. Now the catch 22 came up. Before you can enter the affiliate programs you had to have a website for then to check out before the companies would decide if you would get approved for the program. My initial idea was to have four product pages and do a direct or deep link directly to the products. I envisioned, thousands of pictures of Televisions, that customers could click on and go directly to that item and purchase it through the company that the link took them too. I found out that you can do it, but it takes a lot of time and a lot of work. I decided on placing Banners on the website with a short comment above the banner, the customer would click on the banner and go to the company directly to browse their catalog or buy. My whole idea behind my website was that I would spend the time to find the companies that has the products I wanted, put them all in one place, and customers would not have to go to a search directory, click to the company and it they did not find what they wanted they had to go back to the search directory and then redo the process again. I figured if they could go from a website to a company and then back to the website and to another company in two or three clicks without having to spend the time, and frustration of finding what they wanted, it was a good deal. I actual reviewed 100's of websites and 1000's of search engine results, it took about 40 hours of work and it was really frustrating.

There are website builders out there that offer free web building sites. They looked like good deals, but they worried me, I figured there would be a monthly or annual charge that would be high. I decided to go with TriadWebZone, I could get my domain name for $ 10.99 and after 30 days would be charged a modest monthly rate, around $ 35 to $40 a month, it seemed fair so that's the one I decided on. It was fairly straight forward, you just followed the directions, almost like a blog, and bang you had a website that you controlled, and were responsible for. Again, reading the instructions, I put in content about my company, what items would be listed and the idea behind my company. It took a little thought and about another 40 hours or so to get it where I wanted it.

I hate to do this to you, but this is just to much for me to finish now. So I will leave you with a link to my website and with in the next several days, I will do another post to bring us up to the present. If you have any questions on what I have gone through so far just leave it in a comment and I'll get back to you.

See you later.

http://www.TBD-Associates-Electronic-Stores.com