AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate Program - A merchant (usually online business) that uses affiliates to sell its products. The affiliate sends customers over to the merchant’s website (the affiliate program). If a sale is made, the affiliate gets a percentage of the value of the sale. In some instances it is not necessary for an actual sale to be made. The affiliate gets paid just for sending a visitor over to the merchant’s web site. These are, however, somewhat questionable programs. Make sure you do your due diligence before joining such an affiliate program.
 Do not confuse the affiliate program that pays affiliates for visitors with advertising selling programs such as Google AdSense. In the latter case a sale actually takes place. When the visitor clicks on the link, the affiliate program - Google AdSense - gets paid by the owner of the link, and the referring website (affiliated with Google AdSense) - the one that hosts the ad - gets paid a percentage of whatever Google cashes in. This is a totally different approach and is covered in detail elsewhere on the site.

CLICKBANK

http://www.clickbank.com/

Clickbank is the treasure trove of ready-to-sell online digital products. There is perhaps no decent topic on which you won’t find a ClickBank product. And after you identify one (or more) you simply set up your own facility to sell - rather resell - that product.What happens is people who offer their products for sale through ClickBank are in fact looking for affiliates that will resell them and earn commission when the sales happen through their efforts. ClickBank is therefore a marketplace for digital products, having over 10,000 of them, where you go as a seller of either your own digital product or those of others.

What attracts Affiliates to ClickBank is the fabulous commissions one can earn by selling top-notch products. On its part ClickBank makes it easy to identify the popular products that sell more, making it easy for affiliates to get going without delay.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online and when you market ClickBank products you have the assurance that you will get paid without any hassle. In case you are new to Affiliate Marketing and are not familiar with ClickBank, I’ll explain a little about it. Clickbank is the Internet’s leading retailer of digital products. By signing up as a Clickbank affiliate, you get access to thousands of digital products. The products include hundreds of ebooks on all sorts of topics, anti-virus software, video instruction courses. In fact, if a product can be downloaded, ClickBank will have it. You don’t have to worry about keeping track of individual programs or making sure you get paid, Clickbank does all that for you by acting as middle-man between the affiliate and the product vendor. All you need to do is choose programs through ClickBank and promote them. ClickBank pays affiliate commissions regularly every two weeks. When choosing programs to promote, you will obviously be drawn to programs that have a high conversion rate - ie a high percentage of the people who click through to the program actually purchase it.

There is, however, a further thing you should be checking when choosing ClickBank products to promote and that is the refund rate.

ClickBank has a no quibble refund policy. This policy means that prospective customers will be more likely to buy a product because they can feel safe in making a purchase since, if the product does not live up to the advertising, they can obtain a full refund without any problem. Obviously, if a product is not satisfactory to customers, it will have a high refund rate. You can check the ClickBank refund rate of a product, by making a simple calculation. When you are selecting products, one of the pieces of information available is $/sale. This is the simple formula for calculating the refund rate of any product:

(Commission - $/Sale)/Commission = Average Refund Rate

Example

Product Price: $49.95

Commission: 75% ($37.46)

$/Sale: $27.29

Average Refund Rate = (37.46 - 27.29) / 37.46 = 0.27 = 27%

A refund rate of under 15% indicates a high level of customer satisfaction. That however, is not the whole story because conversion rates also have to be taken into account. Although a product with a refund rate of under 15% can reasonably be expected to be a satisfactory product, you can still earn commissions on products with a higher refund rate if they also have a higher conversion rate.

So always bear in mind both conversion rate and refund rate when selecting products.

COMMISSION JUNCTION

http://www.cj.com/

Commission Junction operates very similar to Clickbank but you will find Affiliate Links to many sites selling products for actual physical delivery. The analysis of their market place is very impressive giving you excellent statistics on current earnings of Affiliates by product.   Many Affiliates make a full time impressive income selling purely through CB and CJ. Both sites offer impressive help and information pages with CJ having a CJ University to help you to take advantage of all their facilities. You should check out both sites.

If you want to look for other merchants then here is a good directory to start with:

http://www.associateprograms.com/

Now, when choosing affiliate programs, here are 10 keys to look for:

1. Ideally, choose an affiliate program that promotes products or services you enjoy!

2. Choose a program that offers high commissions, preferably 30% or higher.

3. Look for programs that offer residual, weekly or monthly income.

4. Look for a program that offers a product you would purchase yourself. Chances are, if you're interested in the product,many others are as well.

5. Look for a program with a good sales conversion rate. You can email the program operator and ask for statistics and proof of sales conversion rates.

6. Choose an affiliate program that provides a good set of promotional tools and resources that you can use to promote the program.

7. Look for a program that caters to a growing market or target audience.

8. Watch out for pyramid schemes. Participate only in programs that offer real, viable products.

9. Look for a program that targets a wide audience - not a small niche that could be saturated quickly.

10. Look for a programs that pay. Luckily, it's a small percentage, but there are dishonest program operators out there. If necessary, ask the program operator for the contact info of a few other affiliates.

One affiliate program that meets all of the above criteria, besides points 1 and 4 which you'll have to determine for yourself, is the program you'll find here:

http://www.how2makemoneyon-line.com/affils/pushbutton.php

(Click on the "Get Paid" button after reaching the page above)

PushButtonPublishing.com or PBP as we'll call it, provides online business owners and affiliates with virtually everything needed to start and run an online business (of most any type) in one convenient location, for one unbeatable price or for FREE by referring just one new PBP member per month!

Click here to learn more about this excellent resource:

http://www.how2makemoneyon-line.com/affils/pushbutton.php

So, if Internet marketing and making money online is "your thing" and I'll assume it is since you're reading this course, I highly recommend signing up for the PBP affiliate program as I'm confident it will be one of your top performing programs. And don't forget, it will never cost you a penny to join and participate as a PBP affiliate. You are offered the same commissions as monthly members!

We'll be putting on a lot more information about Affiliate Marketing over hte next few months - so keep an eye out and in the meantime, make sure you've signed up for at least one good affiliate program by then (if not PBP, then another program that you feel comfortable with)!

Here's to for Your Success,