Affiliate Marketing Without a Website

By Alec Olive

Having your own website to promote your affiliate products is a good option. But it is not necessary. There are many methods available that can be used to do your affiliate marketing business. The list is long, but the most important methods are email marketing, writing articles to e-groups, joining online discussions etc. Let us discuss some important methods that can be used to promote your affiliate products without having your own website.

Email Marketing

In this method you can promote your affiliate links and you do not need your own website. People can click on your affiliate links present in your emails and can go directly to the merchant website to purchase the products.

Your email should contain the introduction about the product you are promoting and your affiliate links. Try to make your emails interesting and brief.

Try to expand your contact list. Use as many methods as you can to grab the email addresses of new people. Use online forums, chat forums etc to make new friends. Your email list must contain a few hundred contacts, at least. But do not spam. Do not send emails to the people who do not know about you or who do not want to receive your emails. Otherwise they will just block your emails and you will lose your contacts. As I said, your emails should be interesting to get the readers attention.

Offline Promotion

You can use the offline methods of promotion, like the classified ads, flyers etc. The best choice is the classified ads because its exposure is largest.

Writing free e-books

It is similar to email marketing. But in this method you will write the informative and interesting e-books and will send to the people via their email address. These e-books should be easy to read and helpful for their readers. The topics should be related to your affiliate products so that you can recommend the products in the body of e-books. Alternatively you can add a brief note about your affiliate products and affiliate links for promotion. If the readers like your e-book, they may visit the merchant website and make a purchase.

Writing in Forums

Search for some forums, at least three, that are related to your product and have high page rank. Register on these forums and start some discussion in the forum where maximum people are involved. Just post your questions there or answer some questions of other members. But do not add any promotion text in the body of your posts. You are allowed to put your signature at the end of your post. Here you can write your name and your affiliate links.

When you become an active member of this forum then you may get some traffic from these forums to your merchant website through your affiliate links. This will ultimately result in more sales of the products you are promoting.

Writing Articles

You can write articles and publish them in the free article directories. You can embed your affiliate links in the text (resource box – editor) of your articles. If your articles are well formatted, informative and the article directory has large traffic then you can expect some good traffic to your affiliate links. And you know that more traffic on your affiliate links will result in more sales through your affiliate links.

Conclusion

The use of a website to promote your affiliate products is a good idea but it is not necessary. You can use the alternate methods to promote your affiliate products and links. The most popular among these methods are email marketing, writing to forums, article writing and offline promotion like classified ads. The main idea is that instead of promoting your website you will directly promote your affiliate links and people will directly go to the merchant website by clicking your affiliate links to purchase the products. This way you do not have to pay extra for your website creation and maintenance.

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

Alec Olive is an Affiliate Marketer. Find out how you can start your online business at http://www.affiliatecashsecretsonline.com

Investment Scams On The Internet

By Jim Pretin

Since the year 2004, there has been a sharp increase in the amount of investment spam we are receiving in our inbox. I personally receive up to 10 emails per day containing offers or lures to invest in various scams. It is estimated that millions of dollars are lost every year by people who have invested money in something they read about in an email.

Pyramid schemes are probably the most popular. Typically, you will be asked to invest a certain amount of money, and then you are promised a return when new investors make an equal contribution. Eventually, the pyramid either collapses or the person who initiated the pyramid is able to make a lot of money, but no one else makes anything.

A common scam associated with the stock market is referred to as the pump and dump. This is when a small group of investors who hold a large number of shares in a penny stock hype the stock to the general public. The resulting frenzy drives up the price of the stock, at which point the pumpers dump their shares at a high price before the rest of the investors realize that the company is worthless.

Sometimes, pumpers and dumpers will engage in short selling (short selling is perfectly legal; you borrow stock from someone else and immediately sell it, hoping that the price of the stock will go down in the near future so that you can buy it back at a lower price and return it to the lender at a profit). With pump and dump short selling, the borrower instantly sells the stock that was loaned to him and then goes around spreading bad rumors about the company to drive the stock price down so he or she can buy it back at a low price before returning it to the lender.

You should ignore any emails you receive that promote offshore investing or prime banks. Promises of huge returns from offshore investments are usually totally disingenuous. Prime banks are the top 50 banks in the world. Solicitors for prime banks will ask for your money so that they can invest it in high yield prime bank financial instruments. However, they will likely invest your money in high risk, speculative investment vehicles that have absolutely no connection to prime banks whatsoever.

You should not necessarily ignore all of the investment spam in your inbox. You might receive an email containing a stock tip that could turn out to be a lucrative investment in the future. Just make sure you research the investment on your own before you partake in any investment that was sent to you via email.

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

Jim Pretin is the owner of www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form

Designing Your Website for Affiliate Marketing

By Alec Olive

If you want to start marketing as an affiliate then you need to have your own website. This is the main requirement to start your online business. Your website does not have to be loaded with graphics, but it does need to be informative, simple and professional.

To make your website you will need to do three things. Purchase a domain name, purchase the hosting service and design your website to upload to your hosting server. While purchasing the domain name, try to get a name that contains the main keywords of your website. Or you may simply choose a name that you like.

While selecting your hosting company, look for reliability. Hosting companies will be responsible for the storage of your files and to keep your website up and running. Godaddy.com is a well known, reliable hosting company.

How should your website be designed?

Hire a Designer

You can hire a web designer to do this design work for you. Just ask him to make the site professional looking and clean. The easiest way to hire a designer is to use an auction website like RentACoder.com or ODESK.com. Simply type a description of your project and designers will enter their bids. You will receive many bids from different designers. Check the portfolio and rate of each designer. Select the one which is best for your work and award him your project. After getting your website you can pay him through the auction website.

Use a Free Template

If you do not want to invest to do the designing then you can get some free templates. There are many websites on the internet that are offering free website templates. Just visit these sites and choose the template that you like. Fill in the template with you own content and upload it on your server.

Use Site Builder Tools

Another choice is to use the site builder tools. You can use "dreamweaver" and "frontpage" to make your website yourself.

Characteristics of a Good Website

Simple and Professional

Your website is meant for business, so it must look professional. It should not be over loaded with heavy graphics and lots of flashy banners. Simplicity is best. Try to use light colors. Make a nice header to show your company name and theme. The site navigation must be simple and easy. People should not have any difficulty in searching for a specific page or information, otherwise they will not re-visit your website.

Provide Search Facility

Your website should have a search box on every page to search your website. This will be a great help for the visitors that want to search for a specific product or information on your website.

Build Your Mailing List

Some affiliate programs offer you a website to promote their business. This is the ready made solution. But in this case you cannot build your mailing list. Always try to get your own website where you can easily build your mailing list to promote your business.

Your own website is the key requirement for affiliate marketing. The overall look and feel of your website should be attractive and the site must provide the information for which people are looking for. Provide easy navigation and search facilities to make it user friendly.

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

Alec Olive is an Affiliate Marketer. Find out how you can start your online business at www.AffiliateCashSecretsOnline.com

Finding Affiliate Program Providers

By John Hartley

There are at least 10,000 affiliate program providers out there, if you consider each company or individual which markets products through affiliates. They should provide you with tools to sell their products, such as text ads and banners.

When you are looking for affiliate program providers, you want to take into account what they offer their affiliates. Many just offer you the link, which might look like:

http://www.example.com/example/1300768

That is the last type of affiliate link you want. It shouts out that you are an affiliate, is long and unwieldy. You can get that altered, but the point is this: if they can only be bothered to give you a link with no help in marketing, then they are not really that concerned whether you presell the product or not. Big mistake.

Affiliate Program Providers Provide Tools to the Affiliates

The better ones provide you with banners, text ads, articles to put on your web site and email letters you can send to your list. Some even offer full web pages, not just for their range of products, but for each product. Banners do not work very well these days, but a tall banner can work well in the sidebar, especially for a blog.

Always consider what the merchant is offering and whether it will help when you sign up as an affiliate.

Obviously, you cannot scour the internet for affiliate program providers in every category you want to market, and you want to find which are the best ones. That is not difficult so long as you are marketing digital products like e-books and software and access to membership sites.

You just head over to Clickbank Marketplace and look through the categories to see which are the most popular products in a category. You do not really want to promote the top product, unless it has been launched that day, because so many internet marketing gurus will be marketing it. You will be outgunned.

However, you can do very well with products that are ranked in the top 30 for popularity in a big category. In smaller categories there may not be many products to choose from, but make sure it is selling well.

Also, to make money as an affiliate you need to consider products where the commission is over $20 or so as a rule, because you can afford to spend $10 to get one sale at this level.

Other places to find good affiliate program providers are Paydotcom, Commission Junction and Linkshare. They have services and physical products on their list mostly.

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

Get FREE reports and loads of information about affiliate marketing at jrhmarketing.wordpress.com - your source for guides and tips, run by John Hartley.