Business strategies that were applicable to only large corporates now make a new meaning for small businesses & online affiliate marketing. The new category Affiliate Business News will highlight the industry news & analysis.

We would be linking to information on strategy, business, statistics & analysis & business trends that would be helpful to you in running your own marketing & advertising business more effectively.

We also recommend that you adapt parts or the whole of such news on technology & strategy for your personal business. You can share with our readers your success stories by leaving a comment here.

In this post on Affiliate Marketing Tip we will share our success story with one of the fastest growing affiliate marketing technique.

Pay Per Download / Install is no different from any other marketing. We started off the easy way by setting up a few web pages describing the software & added a couple of links to the download page. The information caught the attention of our readers & they started downloading these free software – we made money from each such download!

Click Here to Sign Up Now & Start Making Money with Pay Per Download-Install Program.

What makes this Pay Per Download Program so attractive for affiliate marketers & new bloggers?

• there is no selling involved – these software are free
• you get a variety of software to offer to your readers, including a couple of very popular & sought after software
• these downloads are free of virus or malware so you would not upset your readers
• you can make money every time someone downloads the software
• you get paid for any installation, anywhere in the world

What makes this free software attractive to your readers?

New bloggers & new affiliate marketers are constantly competing to get the best deal to attract new customers & new readers. It is not easy to get such a deal every time. But this is an evergreen opportunity that would only get better with time.

• the list includes a few very valuable software that people have to buy at a high cost but you could give it for free
• there are no malware or adware in these downloads that your readers have to worry about that could crash their computers
• these software can be used by everyone
• these free software can be downloaded by anyone anywhere in the world (unlike other campaigns that allow downloads only from specific countries)

We have started to make significant money from this new affiliate marketing program. And we found out that we do not need to do anything different or expensive to make money from it. Even the program is free to join.

Click Here & Join this Marketing Program for Free.

These countries alone tend to account for over 80% of any website traffic. Thus is makes it very pro9profitable to be able to provide something of value to visitors from these countries. In this post on the Affiliate Marketing Tips series, we shall look into one of the best ways to monetize your diverse international website visitors.

What better to offer than free software! With this affiliate program you can offer free software download to readers from any country & you get paid for it. This is truly one affiliate program that lets you monetize your international traffic effectively.

Click here to sign up with the international traffic monetization opportunity.

Advantages of international traffic monetization affiliate program:

• your return per visitor goes up exponentially
• you have something to offer for everyone, which is a safe approach even when you are new to affiliate marketing
• even if you are not into affiliate marketing you could use this program to distribute free software & make money from it
• you get paid for every single download from every single country

All the software available for downloads are distributed free. This makes it even easier for anyone to monetize & profit from this program. Whether you are a new blogger looking to get more subscriptions, or a new affiliate marketer looking to monetize your international traffic, this is a great opportunity for anyone to make cash easily.

Click Here to Sign Up & Start Making Money Now.

Click Here to Sign Up for a Dollar & Use Creative Templates Now.

These templates are designed for almost every niche marketing areas – technology, publishing, health, food, diet, games and a lot more!

It is also very easy to use any of these free templates – simply click to choose your template & design your form (usually takes less than 3 minutes for a non-technical person) & drop the script they will provide you into your web page. You are done!

There are 5 Top Advantages of using this system for your business:

1. wonderful variety of designs both in color schemes & targeted to niche markets
2. allows you to customize each template easily with your catch phrase, logo & messages with simple online drag-and-drop tools
3. allows you to have custom fields in the templates (you can collect as much of information as you want from the sign up forms)
4. change the design on the fly from the central dashboard without having to touch any code, making it very easy for all non-technical users
5. allows you to keep a simple text based email version of the newsletter  for users who do not have HTML enabled in their emails (so you do not miss any readers at all)

We have been using these email newsletter templates on all of our marketing websites now. And here is the best part! Once you get familiar with it (it takes about 15 mins to know how the forms work) you can run your simple A/B Split tests on the subscription forms to find out the best placements, the best designs & the best ways to implement them on your websites.

Click Here & Sign Up for these Free Templates Now.

In this article in the Affiliate Marketing Tips Series, we will share the most common scams & fraudulent activities that you could expect.

Online scammers & frauds exploit either your ignorance of how things happen or they take advantage of you not implementing things right so that they use loop holes to steal.

1. Protect Your Passwords

This is the most common & the most frequent way that new bloggers & new internet marketers get scammed. Create strong passwords for all your accounts – your hosting accounts, your bank accounts, PayPal (or similar) accounts etc.

It is also a recommended tip to change passwords very frequently.

2. Partner with the Reputed Online Businesses

When you sign up with the Best Affiliate Networks you are sure to be protected from online scams when it comes to selling or registering commissions. There are numerous fake networks that will sign you up but will not get you the commissions you deserve.

Choose your partners after careful reviews & doing your own research. You will find a number of forums or internet articles on various issues people have faced with various network programs. Use these information to decide which ones to sign up with.

3. Secure your PayPal account for Seller’s Protection

Many internet scammers work in groups. While one group buys your products online, the other in the same group will raise a “Fraudulent Activity” report with PayPal blocking all your earnings. So on one side you lose products (in case you have shipped them already), while on the other, you will find that PayPal has reversed all payments in response to the account holder’s request.

You would be surprised to know that people in various respectable profession are so involved in this. In a recent event, we lost sales to a doctor who downloaded our themes for selling medical products & in 3 hours of downloading raised a “Fraudulent Activity” report claiming that all the sales from his PayPal account were beyond his knowledge!

4. Hosting your Own Download Page

If you are an online affiliate marketer or blogger selling your own product you can allow customers to download your product from your own website. Scammers often find a way to bypass the payment channel to come directly to your download page.

In many cases, scammers will bookmark your download page & will route their, unauthorized visitors, to your download page while charging them money. This sort of scamming is hard to detect, especially if you are new to internet or you are not tech savvy. You will continue to lose sales until you change your download page.

You are mostly protected from these scams when you host with the reputed Internet Downloads & Distribution Marketing Programs.

If you are scammed, do not panic. This is an occupational hazard of all internet business owners. While you should do your study upfront to safe guard your business from day 1, learn from any of such incidents & take measures to not allow that to repeat again.

The top runners have strict measures that can prevent many willing bloggers or new affiliate marketers from getting into their network. They also have strict policies that can prevent anyone not prepared to either work for lower commissions or being dropped out completely.

5 Tips on Getting Selected into Top Affiliate Marketing Programs.

1. Have a well developed website or blog – this is one of the first things that you get evaluated on. Build your website & blog diligently for at least 6 months & try to get a high Page Rank as quickly as you can. Focus on publishing good, relevant content that are of interest to your niche readers.

2. Market your website for high page views & high unique visitors – total monthly page views & total unique visitors are 2 important criteria that affiliate networkers look for in new joinees. Advertise & promote your website so that it starts getting high page views & records high unique visitors every month.

3. Build your niche traffic – most affiliate marketing networks prefer traffic to countries like US, Canada, UK, France, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Australia, India. This is simply because there are more advertisers interested in these markets. No matter where you are located, build your niche traffic from one or more of these countries.

4. Build your email lists – all affiliate networks prefer that you use email marketing. You must gain experience in building email lists & subscriptions. Use Aweber to do that for you. Its cheap, easy & very suitable for any type of websites.

5. Get experience in Search Marketing – most affiliate marketing programs require that you know & use search marketing for conversions. Get some experience on Search Marketing & get to know how it works.

Once you apply for any of Top Affiliate Network Programs, follow it through with all the direct documents & verification process. We see so many applicants drop out in the verification process or not completing the process in time. This often leads to cancellation of your applications & you may be barred from applying again.

In this article, we will introduce a very reputed software maker & distributor who very recently started their own affiliate marketing program. We have been working with them for the last couple of months & their products have made us very profitable.

Click Here to Sign Up with Loud Mo Affiliate Program.

This affiliate program has several features that make it extremely suitable for a wide variety of affiliate bloggers & especially for new affiliate marketers & new affiliate bloggers.

Attractive Features of this Free Software Distribution Affiliate Program

1. You can sign up for Free – Click Here to Sign Up
2. Very popular Software available for download
3. Free Software distribution – no selling involved
4. Complete Software support is provided by the manufacturer
5. You make commissions every time someone installs the software
6. This Software Marketing Program is truly global – you earn from every installation worldwide
7. 4 Tier commission program
8. You can join for free from any country
9. Payment is very timely & you can be paid in various ways
10. Payment is made globally in your local currency
11. Clean reporting of all your downloads
12. You keep your commissions even if the users decide to uninstall the software after download

Any affiliate program cannot get any better than this. And software being a very competitive niche market, these policies, along with the facts that you get paid on installations globally & that the software is free, make it very profitable for new bloggers & new affiliate marketers.

Click Here to Sign Up for Free Now.

In this article on Affiliate Marketing Tips series, we will share tips from our experience in forming sales & marketing teams online & creating a very effective sales force for your business.

Marketing Team Building Challenges & Success Tips – Create Effective Sales Teams Online

1. Be involved in the affiliate selection process – set your evaluation criteria in selecting the right affiliate marketer for your business. Let your criteria known so that the right sort of marketers apply to be part of your team.

2. Communicate your Business Model - most online affiliates would not be exclusive to your business, meaning that they would sell other marketers’ products along with yours. In such a situation, you must communicate & take the time to explain your business model to your teams & see how well they align to yours.

3. Nurture & Groom your online sales team – with the growth of online businesses & the success of individual based affiliate marketing, you will probably never even meet many of your online affiliate marketing team members as frequently as you would want to (they could be spread all over the world, speak different languages, come from different cultures etc).

While such a diversity is great in a sales team, it also challenges you to spend adequate time grooming & nurturing them for your specific business. Since most of them are like to be involved with many other marketers, you have to fight for attention & your time with them.

You may want to create a couple of handbooks to distribute to your new affiliates – eBooks that:

• describes who you are
• describes your business
• provides them with information on your products, customers, historical success etc
• outlines your expectations of them & what you are ready to do for them
• describes your incentive plans
• provides them with a road map of your business so that they know you are here to stay & grow your business

4. Learn from Your Online Affiliate Teams – the biggest opportunity that online affiliate marketing has opened up for small businesses, is to create a truly international team of marketers, who can sell your products to specific customer segments.

This also brings up the challenge of providing with the right marketing tactics to everyone. What works in Canada, may not work in France or what works with customers from Thailand may not work with customers in Mexico.

Your affiliate marketing teams however, know their communities better than you do. You would have a lot of opportunity to learn & customize or tailor your product & marketing tactics for various market segments & your affiliates are the best people to help you do that. Urge your teams to share & teach you – this learning is a big asset to your business.

5. Induce Pride, Encourage & Eliminate – to maintain a productive & efficient online marketing team, you have to keep your teams encouraged all the time. Post newsletters frequently, share success stories, revise marketing materials, create an award system to acknowledge the successful ones & make them feel proud of being a part of your team.

The 80/20 rule works in this business as well. Your sales data would probably show that 20% of your affiliates are making 80% revenues for you. Focus on these marketers & promote them over and above the ordinary rules.

At the same time, a large section of marketers could be passive – they could be new, or struggling to establish themselves. Reach out to help, & if that doesn’t work, be ready to decide & eliminate them if necessary.

We hope these simple tips would help you build a strong & successful online marketing team. It is an ongoing process & you have to repeat this with every new affiliate that joins you. At the same time, these could be very rewarding & could help you grow your online business quickly & steadily.

Let us know your experience in building online teams & any challenges you face that we could answer.

In this article on Affiliate Marketing Tips series, we will share our thoughts on various ways to price your product so that you can balance your revenues with your marketing expenses & keep a profitable margin on the sales.

Why is pricing so important?

1. Product Price – Cost of Product = Profit. You would want to increase your profits.

2. Price determines the product gestation period – this is especially true if you are manufacturing your products. The lower the price, the longer it will take to break even on that product.

3. Buying power – price of a product also determines how many people could afford it. Keep in mind that when you market a product online, people from around the world could be buying them. Currency rates, ability of people to spend etc depends on the price you set.

4. Price creates exclusivity – product prices could help customers separate them from the rest. A high priced product can be afforded by a few & hence they must be willing to pay the premium for that. Your product’s price could provide a sense of exclusiveness to your customers.

5. Affiliate commissions – the successful affiliate marketers spend a lot of money advertising. A product with low price is attractive to the end user, but it also reduces the affiliates’ commissions. They would, in turn, be less interested, or spend less money in marketing them.

One of the most attractive features of online digital marketplace like Click 2 Sell, is the ability to set variable pricing on a new product. This can be set while you are setting up the product. It looks into various factors like prices of similar products, number of products sold, number of affiliates selling the product etc, to make up a price.

Depending on the conversion rates, the system keeps revising the price. This is a great advantage if you are selling your own digital products, like eBooks, or Photoshop files, or Templates etc, where it could be difficult to estimate a price.

Case Study – Pricing Creative WordPress Themes for Small Business.

When asked to create a pricing model for Creative Marketing Themes, we set the price to USD 9.95 at the beginning. It was the lowest price in the internet market place for a premium marketing WordPress theme.

Sales varied from about 20 in a month to about 27.

We conducted a short market survey, asking random customers what was the prime reason they chose these Marketing WordPress Themes & what would an increased price mean to them?

Customer Feedback

1. Customers liked the “Under $10″ strategy but mentioned that “price was not the priority” when they were looking to purchase themes for their business.

2. Customers wanted to separate themselves from the rest & felt that a slightly higher price could provide them with that “exclusivity”.

3. Customers did a lot of research online & knew that similar Wodpress Marketing Themes were very costly at other places (often 10 times costlier).

4. Customers were prepared to pay a higher price in exchange of installation support.

Corrective Action

1. Prices were raised – actually doubled in most cases & tripled in a few

2. Free support was added as part of the purchase

3. Free Annual Upgrade was added to the purchase

4. Theme Packs were created for the more cost conscious buyers

Final Results

1. Sales grew to over 120+ downloads a month for the premium marketing themes

2. Customers liked the free consultation during installation & set up – happy customers means more future business

3. Margin per download doubled

4. Affiliate Commissions were increased to help them market effectively – happy affiliates mean more sales!

We hope this article along with the case study will help you improvise your product pricing techniques. As a new marketer or affiliate blogger, if you are using services like Click2Sell (which is free to join), you can get additional help with Auto Pricing options to begin with. You can always switch over to manual pricing once your product starts to sell more & improve your margins going forward.

We use Aweber as our primary email service provider & have been extremely satisfied with their services. You can sign up for about $1 now! You will not regret the decision.

Before I begin, here are a few absolute NO-NOs when it comes to email marketing:

• Do not adopt unfair means to collect emails – never works out in the long run. Unfair means include email scraping from websites, uploading mass emails, buy email lists in bulk, auto-generate email IDs, collect email IDs from emails etc
• Do not spam your subscribers’ mail box
• Do not sell or give out your subscribers’ emails & other data to anyone else – while some desperate marketers resort to this, it is not worth losing your subscribers’ trust for the peanuts you might get from selling these contacts
• Do not harass or compromise confidential information of subscribers if they un-subscribed from your lists

Practical Tips on How to Grow Email Lists for Marketing

1. Put up a Subscription / Sign Up form – keep your subscription visible to your readers. 2 effective places are the right sidebar & the end of your article (bottom of posts). Many marketers also create a dedicated page with a subscription form in it.

Aweber makes it easy to create various types of forms – inline, hover, lightbox etc. The lightbox subscription is the most effective.

2. Offer Something of Value – as a courtesy for signing up, offer something that would add value to your readers. We offer numerous free ebooks on Effective Blogging, Marketing Tips, Case Studies etc to our subscribers.

Just because you are giving it away for free does not mean people will rush to subscribe. Think like a subscriber – “does it add any value to me?” If the answer is “no”, think of an alternative.

Many readers will subscribe just because of the free offer. They will unsubscribe within days or a few hours, as soon as they get what they wanted. That is the nature of the business. Simply let them go!

3. Create an Effective Email Signature with your Sign Up link – you probably send about 50+ emails in a day. Create a catching message in your email signature with a link to your subscription page.

4. Use Social Media & Micro-sites to advertise your Subscription Links – occasionally tweet your own email subscription link on Twitter & set up a link from your Facebook profile directly to your email sign up page.

You can also add a short link to your sign up form in your Social Media sharing tools so that anytime someone tweets your post or shares them on Facebook, your subscription link is shared too.

5. Leverage YouTube videos – if you are owning channels on YouTube, make it a point to mention the subscription link either as part of the video or as a link in the video. Also add the link to your YouTube video description so that people would know where to find your subscription form.

Building email lists is a slow process. But following these tips can help you increase your subscription to a high degree.

Many marketers are also bothered by the fact that some people subscribe only for the free gift. That is a natural phenomenon – a business hazard. People will take what THEY want & go away if they do not see any additional value coming their way.

It is a good practice to let them go. If you can focus only on those who chose to remain with you, build a strong relationship & continue to offer value, rest assured, you will continue to grow your subscribers.