Join Affiliate Programs - 15 Reasons Why

By Jeff Casmer

If you’ve been sitting on the fence deciding whether or not to take up affiliate marketing, today is the day you get off the fence and on with your affiliate marketing adventure. Below are 15 reasons to partake and join affiliate programs.

1. No production costs
The average person can not afford the costs involved in developing a new product. Joining affiliate programs you do not have to worry about this. The merchant has already gone through the trouble and expense.

2. Minimum setup costs
Compared to offline businesses held in a rented or bought building, an online affiliate business is relatively inexpensive. For the most part, one only needs a computer with internet access. Many affiliate programs are free to join which means that if you already have a computer then you can start this business without any initial capital.

3. No Fees or licenses
An offline entrepreneur has to deal with the costs of distributing a line of products within a limited geographical region. Affiliate marketers however, do not have to worry about this fee or about the geographical boundaries.

4. No business borders
The internet lets you reach different people without leaving your home. Your site can see more visitors in a day than an offline merchant will see in a year.

5. No inventory
The majority of us can not, and do not want to fill our house with storage. As an affiliate marketer you can sell large items without storage concerns.

6. No shipping
The costs involved with preparing and shipping products from one end of the world to another can be mounting. Affiliate marketers sell products without ever having to consider postal rates or packaging supplies.

7. No order processing
Trying to remember all the names, credit card number, and addresses of each order is not only a pain but more than the average person wants to handle. Luckily an affiliate marketer does not have to. The merchant takes care of it.

8. No employees
Employee salaries are the largest business expense. You do not have to worry about employee related benefits and compensations. All the work can be done on your own at your own pace. Even if you did want to work with someone occasionally or outsource some tasks to a specialist they can help you from their own home and only when you need them.

9. No customer service
No business is safe from customer complaints, but many people do not want to deal with them, and with affiliate marketing you don’t have to, the merchant does.

10. No merchant account
Unlike merchants who have to deal with the hassle of setting up and maintaining a merchant account, affiliate marketers don’t need a merchant account. This means that they are free from worrying about fraud, charge-backs, and possibly losing their merchant account.

11. Low risk
Offline businesses are frightening due to the major risk you take when you invest in a product. No other business lets you dump unprofitable products faster and easier than affiliate marketing. If you decide that you are no longer interested in a product you are selling, you can just take down the links and replace them with new ones. There are no long term contracts binding you to products.

12. No Sales experienced necessary
The notion that you have to be a sales whiz puts people off business. But this is not an issue with affiliate marketing. Many affiliate programs come with excellent marketing tools such as prewritten sales copies and banner ads to help you make your sales.

13. Sell almost anything
Nearly every niche is covered online, which means there are products being offered for just about every niche. An affiliate marketer can find at least two programs that offer products for their desired website theme.

14. High Income Potential
Because the internet is the world’s largest marketplace, your income potential exceeds anything you could ever make in a salary based job or even as an offline entrepreneur. Your income potential is limited only by you -- your drive and your efforts. Those who put in the effort can see themselves very wealthy, very quickly.

15. Make money in your sleep
This is perhaps the best reason to join affiliate programs. The internet operates on a 24/7 basis. Thus when you shut down for the day your business is still open and still making you money.

If you’re still contemplating whether or not to join, think of this: to date affiliate marketing is still the most inexpensive, convenient way to potentially make millions. Join affiliate programs? Still need to think about it?

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com/

Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant and work at home business owner. For more information on affiliate programs please visit his "Top Ranked" Internet Affiliate Programs Directory that gives you all the information you need to Work at Home in the 21st century.

Getting Traffic To Your Site -- How Do You Determine What's the Right Strategy For You?

By Michele Pariza Wacek

So you're looking for more traffic or visitors to your site. How do you determine the right strategy for you?

Below are some questions to ask yourself so you can put together what's right for your specific business.

1. Do you need traffic now (or sooner yet, like yesterday)? If you need immediate traffic then the choice is easy. Start running pay-per-click ads. That's the fastest way to get traffic to your site. (Those are the ads that show up on the right-hand side when you do search.)

If, however, you can wait for traffic, then you might want to consider doing some warm traffic strategies, such as Web 2.0 tactics (blogs, articles, press releases, social networking sites, podcasts, etc.) The good things about those tactics is they're either free or low-cost. They also bring warm leads and visitors to your site (unlike the pay-per-click, which brings you colder leads, more about that later). But they do take time, both time to see results and time for you to set them up. So that's why if you need traffic now, then you need to go the paid route.

However, you can do a combination of paid and unpaid -- paid traffic until the other, warmer, low-cost and free traffic strategies kick in.

2. Are you selling something relatively complicated, such as services or information products, or is it something easy to understand, like a toaster? If you're selling services or products that need a certain amount of explaining, then you may want to do more of the free and low-cost methods. Why? Because many of the free and low-cost methods are based on either information or building relationships (or both). You want your visitors to be interested in what you have to sell and interested in working with YOU. That will make the buying process go much smoother. A little 3-line pay-per-click ad can't do all of that.

However, if you're selling something like toasters, pay-per-click works well. Why? Because people already know what a toaster is, know they want to buy one, and all they're looking for is the right model at the right price. That's easy to get across in a pay-per-click ad.

3. Are you a master at writing copy that gets people to buy and converting visitors to customers? Okay, clearly this is key no matter how you're getting visitors to your site. But consider this -- pay-per-click traffic is pretty cold. What I mean by cold is these are people who don't know you at all. They're responding to an ad they see in a search engine (not even on a Web site or a publication they read), and it's a very short ad at that. They have no idea who you are, what you're selling, if you're any good at what you do, if you're credible and if your product or service will do what you say it does.

Therefore, when these cold visitors end up on your site, you have a lot of work to do on that page. You have to not only get them to know, like and trust you (at least enough, so at the very least you get an email address out of the encounter) plus you have to prove to them that the product or service you're selling is going to solve their problems.

This isn't easy. Even for people who are professionals at it. So if this isn't something you're an absolute master at, I would say either think twice about doing it or hire someone who is a master to help you out.

Now, consider this scenario. If you have people coming to your site who already have some idea who you are, like what they hear and are interested in finding out more, then your job to turn them into paying customers just got a whole lot easier. Warm visitors, or a warm list of prospects, will respond much more favorably to your sales messages. They're also more forgiving. The sales letters may not have to be absolutely perfect for you to get a decent conversion rate. That's because they already know, like and trust you (and people buy from those they know, like and trust) so all you have to do is match what you're selling to their needs.

Now, here's one more thing to consider. Even people who are masters at the pay-per-click and master converters still incorporate other traffic strategies into their marketing. Why? Because it's a smart thing to do. First of all, they'll end up making more money overall because all these tactics work well together. (And if they have a sales letter that has a high conversion with cold prospects, conversion rates should be much higher when the prospects are warm.) Plus, it's also never a wise idea to put all your eggs in one basket. You should diversify your traffic methods whenever possible. After all, you never know when one avenue is going to disappear, and if all your traffic is based on that one tactic, then you're entire business is at stake.

That said, I don't want any of you to panic because you don't have a variety of traffic strategies in place yet. Instead, pick one traffic tactic to focus on (use the above questions to get some idea on what that should be). Once you get that one down, pick a second one. And so on. Before you know it, you'll have lots of traffic swarming to your site.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com

Michele PW (Michele Pariza Wacek) helps people become more successful at attracting new clients, selling products and services and boosting business. To find out how she can help you take your business to the next level, visit her site at http://www.michelepw.com.