What is Affiliate Marketing & How Does it Work?

Mar 8, 2009 Small business marketing

Affiliate marketing is marketing and selling products on behalf of another company. The marketer doesn’t produce and warehouse products themselves, instead, as an affiliate marketer you are affiliated with one or more companies to sell their products.

Online, affiliate marketers are given a special URL with a unique AffiliateID (affiliate identification) that’s embedded in it. This is so all traffic you drive to their site through your marketing efforts can be identified as yours. When a potential customer visits the site through your link, their browser also sets up a cookie which is also linked to your AffiliateID.  How long the cookie lasts varies by website; it usually doesn’t last indefinitely, instead cookies typically expire in 30 – 60 days. This means that even if a person does not purchase a product on their first visit to the site, if this person returns to this site and ultimately makes a product purchase, the credit for the sale will go to you, the affiliate marketer.

Most companies compensate their affiliate marketers in two different ways: either Pay Per Lead, or Pay Per Sale. Pay Per Sale is more common and as the name implies, the affiliate marketer only gets paid a fee if the click-through is converted into a sale. The marketer typically gets a flat fee per sale or a percentage of the total sale. It is very cost-effective for companies to use affiliate marketers as they only have to pay for results; the affiliate marketer does the rest of the work. Pay Per Lead is different in that the affiliate marketer gets a fee when their link is simply clicked, whether or not the click-through leads to a sale.

To get started in affiliate marketing consider choosing a product that is popular, easily promotable and has keywords or keyword phrases that you can dominate quickly on the search engines. If you’re seeking an idea on where to start, consider products that help with a specific task, like how to do or get something or how to stop or get rid of something else.  Along with being easy to target with keyword searches, people looking for this kind of information are typically farther along in the buying cycle than those just browsing and therefore they are easier to convert into a sale.

Once you have success with a select number of products and established a proven method of marketing and promotion that works for you, expand your efforts. With your proven methodology and tactics, you can promote many products for different companies at once and grow your earnings. You can either stay in the same niche on your website or start a new website. It’s the old “wash, rinse, dry & repeat” cycle.

If you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate marketer and ultimately working your own online business from home, it may be one of the biggest decisions you make. The idea is great, you don’t have to clock in or worry about rush hour traffic. The problem is, the learning curve to success can be steep. However, it shouldn’t have to be too complicated.

If you’re getting into internet marketing for the first time and getting inundated with “buy this” and “buy that” or “get the latest wonder tool.” These constant messages can quickly become overwhelming.

What should you do to successfully launch your business?

Consider a membership in Portal Feeder.

Following is a partial list of what’s available to members. As you can see, Portal Feeder provides the affiliate marketer with the best tools to super charge their business:

- 6000+ Blog Network
- Highly interactive Forum/Community
- Your own personal affiliate marketing Mentor
- Ad Copy Wizard (More than double your conversion rates)
- Affiliate Research Tools (clickbank database, monthly keywords and reviews)
- PPC Training
- RSS Account Creator & Submitter
- Social Bookmark Account Creator & Submitter
- Article Directory Account Creator & Submitter
- Blog Content Management
- Site Builder
- DataFeed management
- Blitz PPC (similar tools sell for $500)
- PPCKahuna Software
- Monthly PLR
- Web 2.0 Training
- Blog Training
- SEO Training
- 3 Way Link Exchange
- Monthly Newsletter
- Webinars
-AdWords Digger Software
-Blog comment software

There is much more to the Portalfeeder membership. It also includes the most advanced web building software Portal Feeder 3.0, an incredible suite of promotional and site optimization tools, extensive training material covering all aspects of affiliate marketing, a blog boot camp course which helps you to successfully launch your site, PLR articles, html and Wordpress templates and an amazing forum community that is essentially a safety net for when you run into a “bump in the road.” You’ll be surprised, no mater what the issue, the answer is within the community, just ask!

The doors to Portal Feeder will open again soon. It could be six months before they re-open again. If you’re floundering in your online marketing endeavours right now, then do yourself a favor…get on the Portal Feeder notification list right now so you don’t miss the boat.

Tags: Affiliate marketing, online business, Pay per click, Pay Per Lead, Pay Per Sale, Portal Feeder

Small Business Marketing “How to Get Started Guide”

Mar 7, 2009 Small business marketing

It’s important to treat your small internet business as just that, a business. Your strategy should be to find one to two unique selling points and build your business these points. The more distinct your niche, the more successful you’ll be able to market to your website’s visitors. Although you may not be able to work at your business and website full-time, be prepared to spend some real time and effort making your new venture a success.

Once you’ve decided on your niche, including target markets and products, then it’s time to build your website. Although this seems like the obvious next step, you must ensure you spend enough time producing quality content. All of your marketing efforts will be directed back to your website. A small business without an established brand name to fall back on will live or die on the quality of the website and its content. It is imperative to the success of a small internet business to be easily found using search engines.

Next you should consider outside marketing in order to bring sales into your small business. It is imperative to the success of your small internet business to be easily found using search engines. You want to build an audience and customer base, which will then bring in the funds that you can reinvest into your business. This reinvestment will likely include some form of small business internet marketing.

There are some no cost internet marketing options. These include: Directories which can help build an audience and potential customer base as well as establish non-reciprocal links that will improve your search engine ranking. There are many free directories and some low cost niche directories that are great for that targeting to a specific audience.

Article marketing is another great way to market your small online business. Like directories, your articles will reach out to new customers while helping you to establish links. Typically these articles are available as white pages on your website where you allow your customers to access the information you post free of charge. If you can, collect valuable email addresses of your customers when you provide them with these free reports. This way you can start to build your mailing list.

Perhaps the most valuable marketing tool for a small business on the internet is to treat your customers well. Don’t underestimate the value a happy customer can be to the small internet business owner. The goal is that your happy customers will tell other people who are also in the market for your product.

As you can see, effective small business marketing is not easy.

• Would you like step by step training? Even if you’ve been an internet marketer for a few years, would you like to have any question you have answered?
• How about a mentor who could provide personal guidance?
• Would you like to have access to cutting edge software that is continuously upgraded; as well as being able to test new software while it is being developed by some of the brightest, most effective internet marketers in North America?
• Would you like to have access to new, up-to-date, monthly training on a variety of topics to help your business?

If you’re asking yourself, where this invaluable assistance is available? The answer is simple….PORTAL FEEDER

Portal Feeder can easily assist in getting one way back links (a well known SEO strategy). This is because PortalFeeder has several systems in place that with a little bit of work help you gain dozens of back links, including one-way links, to your sites. The search engines love this and you can have a new site indexed in hours with this system. This also helps with natural search engine rankings. And the best part…you can do this over and over again.

PortalFeeder provides a variety of additional software and items at no additional charge. These tools include a web page analyzer, directory submitter, ArticleAnnouncer Lite, a blog comment management system, new monthly articles and themes for your sites, and much more.

The Portal Feeder training is also a never ending part of the system. Every month there is a variety of training (videos and downloadable hardcopy) on various aspects of online business and marketing.

A sample of some of the training includes:

• Building a Website
• SEO Optimization
• Market Research
• List building
• Using Press Releases
• Article Marketing
• Using Free Link Directories
• Submitting RSS Feeds
• Link Building
• Using a Sitemap
• Using a Robots.txt
• Starting a Blog
• WordPress SEO
• Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)
• Selling Info Products
• Using Video
• Using PLR Articles
• Using Social Media Sites like Gather, Squidoo, Hubpages and more
• Social Bookmarking
• YouTube Traffic Generation
• Using Google’s Local Search
• Using Yahoo Answers

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