It is an often quoted statistic that about 90% of affiliates make no money from affiliate programs. The top 10% of affiliates make all the money. Some of these are super affiliates who make very large sums of money indeed.

What is the reason for the big difference between those who succeed and those who fail?

The following rules should be followed when choosing affiliate programs:

1) Only promote products/services in a niche that is in demand and profitable.

2) Join programs where you earn at least 20% commissions on sales.

3) Only promote products that tie in with the theme of your web site. Unrelated products make a site look bad and sell poorly.

4) Concentrate on promoting programs that pay recurring or lifetime commissions. In other words, make a sale once and get paid indefinitely for any repeat sales to the same customer.

This is the big secret of the super affiliates. They put most of their efforts into promoting residual/lifetime affiliate programs. Gradually, like compound interest their profits mount up.

If you are not in a residual affiliate program and you get paid only once per sale, you will never get rich. You are wasting your time chasing one sale per customer and getting only one commission. Whereas the big affiliate earners put their effort into recruiting customers who will give them lifetime commissions on all the sales they make at any time in the future.

For a selection of top residual affiliate programs go to:

http://www.merchant-account-service.com/affiliate_programs.html
http://www.lifetimecommissions.com

(c) John Lynch
 For a Free 6-part mini course on Internet Marketing including free interviews with top marketers such as Jay Abraham, Joe Vitale etc., free autoresponder and free Internet Marketing ebooks by top gurus. http://www.merchant-account-service.com/internet_marketing_explained.html

Unfortunately, too many beginners and even some more experienced affiliates tend to make some core mistakes that hinder their ability to earn an income. In this article I will discuss six mistakes you should avoid if you want to be a successful affiliate.

1) Waiting Too Long to Put Up Your Site Many affiliates fall into the trap of fixing and tweaking their website and waiting too long to make it live. I was certainly guilty of this when I first started affiliate marketing. In building my affiliate website I would constantly be adding pages that I might need in the future and tweaking content that I'd already written. Meanwhile, no one was visiting my site because I hadn't put it up yet. Now I'm not suggesting you quickly put up a bad site, but you should establish early what your basic website requirements are, and put the site up once they are met. After that, you can continue to work on it while people are visiting and your search engine rankings are building.

2) Thinking that Your Website is Complete

Once you have your site up and it is just the way you like it, then it's done, right? Wrong! You must constantly be adding new content and updating the site. Search engines like Google prefer sites that update their content regularly and will come back to them often for indexing. If a website is static for too long it can begin to drop its search engine ranking for your keywords. Moreover, if your content never changes, there is no encouragement for people to revisit your website. In both cases, visitor counts will drop, resulting in fewer people clicking your ads, converting to leads, and making you money. Remember, your site is never complete.

3) Joining the Wrong Affiliate Program

There are literally thousands upon thousands of merchants with affiliate programs. It is up to you to find merchants with products that relate to your website's content. For example, if your website is about gardening, then having banner ads that read 'Web Hosting at Great Prices' probably won't get many clicks. Why? Because most gardeners visiting a gardening website really don't care about web hosting at that time. In comparision, if you have an ad reading 'Gardening Tools at Great Prices,' you are more accurately targeting your visitors and as a result will get more clicks.

4) No AdSense on Your Site

Lots of affiliates fail to use Google AdSense on their websites. I know first hand that you can earn massive amounts of money by simply putting a snippet of code on your site. If you aren't familiar with AdSense, it is an advertising technique developed by Google that allows them to place targeted ads next to your content. It's free to join and when someone clicks one of these ads, the advertiser pays you for the click.

5) Failing to Promote Your Affiliate Website

Too many affiliate marketers put together their website to promote merchant products but don't actively try to get new visitors. Unfortunately, the old adage, "Build it and they will come" most definitely does not refer to websites. A lot of time must be spent promoting your affiliate website so that you always have visitors coming to your site and buying the products you are promoting.

Concentrate on getting your website's link included on websites, preferrabely those with a high page rank. Join forums, make helpful posts, and have a link to your site in the signature. Write articles relevant to your website and include your link in your bio. Join Google AdWords to have your ad show up for targeted search results and thousands of sites related to your content. Whatever techniques you use, just make sure you promote.

6) Spreading Yourself Too Thin

I have heard some affiliates say that they have lots of sites and none of them are making any money. So what do they do? They make another site in hopes that it will be the one that works. Some people have different views on this, but I would recommend only running a few sites but running them well. Make sure you give yourself enough time to properly make, maintain, and market your site. If you run 40 websites then you can only spend 1 hour/week on each. This isn't enough time to do anything productive. If you only have 4 websites then you can spend a full 10 hours/week maintaining and marketing them, which will result in far more visits.

In Conclusion ...

By avoiding the six mistakes I've discussed in this article, you are more likely to succeed in your efforts as an affiliate marketer. In no time flat, you'll be making the kind of money that will allow you to quit your job and work-at-home full time. Best of luck!

Scott Roy, B.A. is a web development and Internet marketing specialist. With years of affiliate marketing experience under his belt, Scott is well versed in the field. He currently runs Residual Income Finder, a human-edited directory featuring affiliate programs offering recurring commissions.

You spend hours every day with your weblog. It's become a labor of love. Wouldn't it be nice to find a way to earn some extra money with your weblog?

There are ways of making money online with blogs. The method you've probably seen on most blogs is to host ads, such as with Google Adsense. You let Google put their ads on your site and get paid when people click on the ads. These get mixed reviews. Some say they make a lot this way, but many people don't report much income. Since they are free to ad to your site, it doesn't hurt to try.

Affiliate programs work on blogs as well as they work on websites. Affiliate with companies that sell products related to your site. When people click on the link in your blog and purchase a product, you profit. This is another way of making money online with blogs that doesn't cost you anything. If you are passionate about a product and write about it, this can work well.

If you have a website, blog about some aspect of it and provide a link. Your weblog can effectively sell the product, and all the customer has to do is click to your site and order it.

You will never make money with your blog unless people can find it. Search engines seem to prefer blogs because they tend to be content rich. It helps to stick to one topic. If your blog serves a niche market, it will have less competition.

All of the methods above are very effective and will make you money, the one thing that has to be remembered is that if your blog is hosted somewhere else other than your server, you will have to be careful not to spam your site with ads.

Everyone knows that blogs are the future of the internet, they are search engine friendly and get listed very quickly, which is why many people are hosting their blogs on their own servers now because they see the importance to their business. The last thing any Internet Business Owner wants to happen is that their blog is shut down at Blogger or any other free blog hosting site.

Making money online with blogs is possible. Consider your blog as another avenue for making money online with little or no cost. Write about what you love, market your blog, and see if the money will follow.

About the Author: To get the Best Free Home Based Business Ideas, Opportunities and Articles visit: http://www.siriusfreehomebiz.com

By: Ryan Cole

Anyone serious about affiliate marketing has most likely considered using Google AdWords. It's a great way to get instant traffic to your site, and if you know what you're doing you can get that traffic for much less than it's worth. But most beginners do it all wrong, lose a bunch of money, and then pause their AdWords accounts without having seen a single sale. There is a way to avoid this.

Let's say you've got a site that sells iPod accessories. (It doesn't matter what the product is, really, or if you're an affiliate or a vendor.) Your site has a separate page for dozens of different iPod accessories, from carrying cases to battery packs to stereo docks, each with a picture, a little blurb (preferably a review), and a purchase link. So how do you set up an AdWords account to sell this stuff? Most people fill up a single ad group with keywords like "iPods," "iPod accessories," "iPod headphones," etc., write an all-purpose ad that sends visitors to their home page, and then watch as click after click -- all of which cost anywhere from $0.10 to a couple of bucks -- fails to result in a sale. A few hundred clicks and you're deep in the hole with nothing to show for it.

Where did you go wrong? First (and most important), you should have different ad groups for different sets of keywords. For example, an ad group for headphones, an ad group for cases, an ad group for stereo units, etc. This makes it easier to write targeted ads for specific products. Someone looking to buy a pair of headphones is much more likely to click on an ad for "iPod headphones" than one for a general term like "iPod accessories."

Second, your keywords are all wrong. They're too general. The people who click on ads for general terms are usually in an early stage of the buying cycle -- they're just looking around, not really sure what they want to buy or if they want to buy anything at all. You want to catch people after they've looked around and decided what they want to buy. To do this, you've got to focus in on super-specific keywords. Don't just bid on "ipod headphones"; this term will be far too competitive and the clicks will be too expensive. Bid on "Etymotic Research ER-6i earphones" or "Shure E4c earphones." Use the exact name of each product on your site, stick it in its own ad group with its own highly targeted ad, and send users to the purchase page for that specific product. The clicks you'll get for these ads will be ready to buy and may convert hundreds of times better than clicks for more general terms. Of course, setting up all those different ad groups can take a lot of time, especially if you're selling hundreds or thousands of different products. (Check out my article on dynamic keyword insertion for some tips on how to automate a big chunk of this task. You'll find the link at the end of this article.)

Last but not least, you need a good landing page. This is the page a user will see after he clicks your ad. This should never be your home page. Someone searching for a specific product doesn't want to find a link for it only to be taken to a catalog where he/she'll have to find it all over again. The person will click the back button before your page finishes loading. If the ad is for "Shure E4c earphones," for example, the landing page should be your Shure E4c earphones page. This should contain a headline -- "Shure E4c Earphones" -- a picture, maybe a star rating, and a blurb or review, followed by your purchase link. That's it. No AdSense ads, no banners -- no "traffic leaks," in other words. It should be very clear what you want the user to do: you want the person to see that he/she's on the right page (by reading the headline and looking at the picture), read about the product (thus confirming that, yes, the person wants it), and then follow your link to buy it. Don't give him/her any other options.

Set up your AdWords accounts following this blueprint, and you can't lose. With paid clicks, it's all about quality over quantity. (Would you rather get 300 clicks and no sales, or 60 clicks and 10 sales?) You won't get as much traffic this way, but the clicks will be cheaper and more targeted, and your conversion rates will go from abysmal to awe-inspiring, just like that.

About The Author:
Ryan Cole runs http://www.theinternetmarketingblog.org. To learn more about affiliate marketing through Google AdWords, check out his http://www.theinternetmarketingblog.org/2006/08/30/chris-mcneeneys-adwords-miracle

By: Don Scott

First of all, many people confuse the difference between reseller programs and affiliate programs, and at times even use the two definitions interchangeably. However, there are distinct differences between them.

An affiliate will host a link or banner promoting another company's website or product and if someone purchases a product through that website or link they earn a commission which is then processed through specialized affiliate software tracking their unique affiliate ID.

A reseller is actually purchasing a product or resource from another company and then reselling to an end user for a profit. Reseller programs usually include resale rights, which allow the reseller to advertise, package and present that product or resource as if it were their own.

Both affiliate and reseller programs can be profitable, however, when comparing the two as a business opportunity, and before you decide which way you should go, consider these 6 reasons I have outlined below.

1. Credibility. What kind of feeling do you get from a particular offering on a website when you realize that the offering you see is just a link to another website? Let me take this one step further: Have you ever discovered a product or service that you were interested in while browsing someone else’s site; moused over it, then noticed that it was just an affiliate link to another website? Didn't that site immediately lose some credibility in your mind? You then decided to type the URL directly into your address bar, and went straight to the originator of that product while bypassing the commission for that affiliate who introduced you to the product in the first place.

You never did that? OK, fine, but this happens all the time in affiliate marketing, and forces the webmaster to put additional lines of code in to prevent the affiliate link from ever being displayed until it's actually clicked on. This in itself is not enough and does nothing to increase credibility. A business model with its own unique product and content will always lend itself to greater credibility.

2. Competition. Affiliate Programs grow exponentially. Even if you are lucky enough to be the first one to sign up for a brand new shiny affiliate program and the only one on your block with the latest and greatest product to sell, you can bet that in no time there will be thousands of affiliates competing with you, selling the very same product, many of whom will have more experience and better marketing skills than you do.

3. Price Control. You can't discount something that doesn't belong to you in the first place. To stay competitive in any market you have to have some control over the selling price. When you're shopping in the department store, aren’t you more interested in buying a product when you see an item that has been marked on sale? With affiliate marketing you have no control over the price whatsoever. On the other hand, a reseller of digital products with full resale rights for example maintains complete control over the final selling price, and since there is no more overhead involved in selling 1 or 1000 digital products for download, a reseller of these types of products can always afford to offer a sale price.

4. Packaging. Have you ever noticed those nifty box type packages for digital products such as ebooks and software for download? This is nothing more than eye candy, but those little graphics have really become popular over the last 5 years or so, and for good reason. Obviously, this packaging is not really downloaded along with the product itself, and actually doesn't even exist except for the graphical representation to display on the web. This type of packaging makes your product aesthetically pleasing and really stand out against your competition. You can purchase easy to edit templates for these boxes all over the internet at places such as boxedart.com (they primarily sell website templates but they also offer a few box templates as well), then simply open them up in Photoshop or Fireworks, and change the text to reflect your product name and bingo. You've got the look and feel of a professionally packaged product ready to sell and looking like something you might see on the shelf of your favorite retail outlet.

5. Resellability. Only a reseller or owner of an original product can offer their own affiliate program. Offering an affiliate program can be a great way to generate exposure for your product and dramatically increase your potential for sales. An affiliate marketer can never offer an affiliate program but rather rely on someone else’s product, or at best, offer another marketer an affiliate program which is accomplished with a two-tier type system.

6. Indexing. The major search engines are quite aware of the duplication that exists because of affiliate marketing and do take great steps in preventing that duplication from compromising the system itself, and understandably so. Imagine doing a search for a product that you're interested in, and your search result displays an affiliate marketer in the number 1 spot above the actual company who originated that product. It just doesn’t happen. Knowing that the major search engines give the most weight to original content you would best serve yourself to create some. A site compromised mostly of affiliate links can actually be penalized by many of the search engines. A site made with original content which hopefully includes an original product can go a long way in increasing the likelihood that the search engines will give you a top spot for your particular venue, and because people do use search engines to find what they are looking for, your chance that they will find you really does depend on you becoming indexed for your keywords and preferably in the number 1 spot, or at least on the first page of results. An affiliate can never achieve these results for the products they are selling because of the duplication factor; however, a reseller can achieve this with high quality packaging and the right presentation.

Now having said all that, let me add that I especially love affiliate programs. Huh? This is about the 6 good reasons why reseller programs are better than affiliate programs, then hmm, why? Let me explain: If the affiliate program you are marketing is a good match for the venue and content of your website, then an affiliate offering will enhance the usefulness of your website. Let us say, for example, that your website is about weddings. Let us imagine that you write wedding speeches. Your wedding speeches are original, so will be well received by those who are searching for wedding speeches, and the search engines will love you for your original content. Unfortunately nobody is actually buying your wedding speeches, so you are offering them for free just to gain some traffic. What can you do with that traffic? Well, you can sell wedding gowns, cakes, or just about anything else associated with weddings by using an appropriate affiliate program. You can find an affiliate program for just about any venue that you can imagine. Visitors to your website will appreciate the convenience of having all those products related to weddings all in one place, and your content specific offering will make good sense to them. That is opposed to, let's say, a website about resume writing who tries to sell everything from tube-socks to cell phones.

So you see that in the end reseller programs do better than affiliate programs for at least the 6 reasons that I explained. However, affiliate programs do have their place on the web and can be extremely lucrative if utilized properly which can greatly improve your chances for success as an internet marketer. Happy Marketing.

Don Scott is the owner of resellerdepartment.com Reseller Department is a resource for internet marketers interested in affiliate programs and reseller marketing, tips, tools, products and information.

So you've found the perfect affiliate program, you've signed up and they gave you a website....now what? "They" say that "all you have to do" is drive traffic to your site...but you don't have a clue where to begin...
Never fear, Affiliate 101 is here...here's a list of a few simple, free or inexpensive tasks you can accomplish today. Details follow, first just the list:

1. Send emails to friends and family;
2. Make new friends on the internet;
3. Print out and distribute posters, business cards, and/or postcards;
4. Write articles and post free ads.

First of all, don't panic. You don't have to do all of these, just whatever you feel comfortable with. But I do heartily suggest that you push the envelope a little on your comfort level...

Email friends and family if you're uncomfortable with contacting family members (they can be your sharpest critics) first scan the options, maybe one of the less obtrusive ones would work.

Be sure to write only to friends. Anything else will be considered spam; any worthy company will drop you like a hot potato when they receive legitimate spam complaints.

Consider the friends and family you might write to and decide the best approach for each:

1. The Second Opinion Approach: save this for the hard nuts to crack, flatter them with "I've signed up for this opportunity and would really like to hear your opinion..."

2. The Beating Around the Bush Approach: "I'm making some extra money doing this biz, do you know anyone who might need a few extra dollars?"

3. The Direct Approach: for those close friends that you know could use some financial miracles in their lives... you can lead with the business opportunity or with the products. I think it's Avon that has a nice promo these days, "products you can buy and sell." Simple and to the point...

4. The Chummy Letter Approach: just write a letter to a friend as you usually would and casually mention what you are doing, that it's on "wait and see," or already is making you a little money, or whatever.

5. The No-Mention Approach: just add a signature to all your emails that includes your website's URL and your email address, maybe the name of your company. Subtle, lets them explore if they want.

Getting to Know You...

How do you currently meet people on the internet? Game chat rooms, forums, opt-in email lists, Yahoo groups, messenger services...these are only a few ways to meet people. Many sites such as Yahoo, AOL, or ICQ let you create a profile including favorite websites, etc. While direct advertising is often frowned upon or prohibited, usually signatures at the bottom of posts is allowed. Many friendships formed in forums and chat rooms lead to email and website exchanges.

Stuffing Envelopes...

Printed fliers can be distributed everywhere you go, posted on your car...be creative. Include a business card or flier in every piece of mail you send including bills, on tables in restaurants, in phone booths, stick them in business books in the library. Make it fun. If you have mailing addresses rather than email addresses of anyone who might be interested, send them a flier or postcard.

Become a Famous Author

Anyone can write an article, everyone is good at something or has an experience that would help someone else out. Article writing helps build trust, and over time will brand your name and drive traffic to your website. And it's free. Submit your articles to individual webmasters and editors as well as article directories.

Banner Swapping and Text Linking

Some say that banners are not very effective in getting traffic to your website, but hey, it's free and it doesn't hurt to try. It's best to spend some time finding a high traffic site or two and not fill your site with banners. Text links are still your best bet.

There you have it, lots of good ideas for beginning promotion of your website.

I'll leave you with one more thought, something to come back to and mull over as time goes on... Spend some time on this one...

Find an online entrepreneur that you truly admire. There are lots out there, but there will be someone that really rings true for you. Maybe it's this person's style, or background, but something makes him or her stand out in your mind. Think of something that you can do for this person, and pursue that thought. Joint ventures...more on this later.

About the author:
Glenn Beach is a poet, writer and home business entrepreneur in Nova Scotia, Canada. Free newsletter, more articles, and business start-up info at: http://www.work-at-home-business-opportunity-canada.com