If your new to affiliate marketing start here!

Welcome!

Trust me, or don't! I'll tell you one thing right now. You're going to lose money before you start to make anything. By the way.. Creating a blog on how to make money is your first mistake if you think you're going to get rich. It doesn't work like that. The competition out there is extreme for the money millionare information. You've probably read this a hundred time over already.

First off.. Buy 1 of the guides on how to make money. They are mostly the same information, but if you don't have a clue where to start, it's a decent place to start.
Why! Cause you don't have a clue, and starting a website and sticking banners on it. Might make you enought to buy a pint of beer in a few months.. remember, hosting fees, your time and effort will eat most of the profit you'll make.

Google cash 3rd edition is actually a nice manual. It will show you a few streams of marketing ideas that create some instant gains. You'll be able to afford a few nights out next week.

You've read google cash!

• so you've set up and account at Commission Junction, Clickbank and Google adwords(PPC) and Google adsense.
• pick a product. remember to think about what you are going to market.. Halloween Costumes you think! Well as of this post it's too close, but three weeks ago you could of posted ads to baby stores that ship great costumes at great prices from commission juction. They pay commission on each sale that is made off your ad.. see how this works.. why is it too late.. that has to do will all the other people doing this.. They set up their campaigns in Sept and had them running early to gain better positioning being the first advertisers.. paying clicks up front and getting the ads better quaility scores.
• research up coming launches of products or events that have a global impact. Meaning you can sell to billions instead of millions.
• Create niche sites that are 20-100 pages that market products and have your adsense and affilate links on them.
• Create a blog on the niche topics and monitize the footer with adsense of links of the niches interest.
• Create Articles and post them with footers that have links back to your niche sites.
• Create Landing pages for Clickbank products that review multiple links, but have a common intrest.
• Create Squidoo lenses on your landing pages and place links to the squidoo pages in your footer section of your blog feeds
• Create a FeedBurner feed off those feeds and Squidoo lense those feeds.

Ok so now you've made a bit of cash.. re-invest it.. get a copywrite to write you a ebook on your topic. Affliate link the ebook to the niche interest. Sell it on clickbank.

Take some more of that money and buy a few domains.

1. have a pop-over or a pop-in to an email opt in.
2. ask those opt in's if they would like to get offers on different products.
3. create mail out's based on 4 or 5 categories.
4. use links banners to wrap your newsletters
5. mail to your opt in lists.

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Again, nothing is easy, I'm not forcing any links in this post, as it's how I see it. Take it or leave it.. it's up to you.

The biggest issue you'll have at first is traffic to your links. PPC will solve that, but it costs money, but you will make money back.

Google Pay Per Action - Is it worth it

So Google launched the PPA campaign for google adsense.

If you don't have a google adsense account get it now!


Once you have your google adsense account, you can not only access google's content network and place the all too familiar google ads. You can sign up to the Google Referral's beta, this is google Pay Per Action program. You can customize links by categories or pick single creatives.

Now if you've used the Commission Junction Smart zones.. it's google answer to a smart zone, but they control the content for you. They add the companies. You don't have to apply to the company. That being said.

Will google's pay-out's match the other affilate programs like CJ,Linkshare,Red Golashes and such, or will goolge pay out lower. We will see. You don't really get any information on what % is being offered on the commission or what your PPA will be defined on a company basis.

I do like that this way of doing things, On some of my content pages, I don't have to worry about managing that ad space. It's the same reason I like using adsense.
I'm sure for some application the other companies will be a better fit.

When more companies affiliate with google referral, we will have a better Idea on what the PPA (Price Per Action) market will be like.

I'm sure also google ref will lay down a lot of usage rules on using the new referals.

Using Email to Market Affiliates

One rule about marketing to e-mail. You need to make sure your not breaking any anti-spam laws.
If your interested in marketing in this area. You need to.

• Build or Buy a targeted e-mail address list. Buying an address is actually a shady area. You need to make sure that the e-mail address on that list where obtained in a legal fashion and that the customer base that you e-mail have a sure way to opt-out of any future communication that you send them.
• Get Creative for your e-mail from your affiliate marketer.
• Create an attractive HTML page that you can import into a email mailer application. (I wrote a simple e-mail .net smtp application that pulls a template HTML and plugs in the email from a e-mail database and processes it that way. )

Disclaim the email to identify that it's not being sent by the company, that it is an advertisment. Be upfront about what you are sending.

Link the email link back to your site, not the company that you are affiliates with.

Redirect that with a META redirect tag to Commission link.

(This is a great place to tag the HTTPUtility information to a database to record the traffic information.)

Please make sure you read you e-mail contracts with your affiliates. Most will outline what rules and disclaimers you need to follow.

If you really want to be upfront. Create opt-in forms on your websites to allow users to accept email for caterogies they are interested in. This will also help you understand what your users want to read. It builds you a solid targeted user based to promote different promotions.