Month: March 2015

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Affiliate marketing programs are great for generating income from your website if you created a website with that goal in mind, and are committed to working toward such a goal. These programs can also be instrumental in introducing you to the fascinating world of eCommerce. That having been said, it is important to point out the one inescapable fact that most affiliate marketers learn very early in their careers: As website visitors increase, so does the probability of generating income.

An affiliate marketing program can be described as: A company (also referred to as “vendor” or “merchant”) offers to pay website owners/publishers (affiliates) a set amount for either a click-through from their websites, or a set amount for visitors signing up to their service via the affiliates’ links. The most popular method of payment, however, is a percentage of purchases made by visitors as a result of being referred from the affiliates’ websites.

There are some protections built into affiliate programs to safeguard affiliate commissions in the sense that, understanding that visitors often decide against making purchases immediately, a majority of affiliate programs utilize a cookie duration of between 30 and 90 days. What this means, is that as long as the visitors have the cookie in their cache (a small computer file), the affiliate will still recieve his/her as long as that visitor returns and completes the purchase during the specified time.

Proper maintenance of an affiliate’s website combined with searching and implementing affiliations with various merchants constitutes the most important work a new affiliate marketer might have to do in the early days of his/her affiliate marketing business. Yes, there is a lot of money to be made in affiliate marketing, but those who excel in this business take the time to keep their sites up-to-date and well-maintained; but they also search for the best programs to form affiliations with.

So if you’re thinking about affiliate marketing as a career or means of generating income, the one thing that you should keep in mind is to do proper research in order to find reputable programs (vendors/merchants) with which to establish affiliations, while providing them with an active and viable website on which to promote their products, because many merchants will ask to review the site on which their products/services will be promoted.

One other thing to keep in mind is keeping your site competitive, but also neat; so you may not want to place too many banners on your website because this will have an adverse affect on your site in more ways than one. First, too many banners or links placed on any web page will confuse and irritate visitors; second, such displays will drown out your valuable content; and third, visitors will click away from your site, thereby spending the bulk of their time on other sites; fourth, its distracting.

Affiliate tracking can also be a problem in the sense that once you apply to become an affiliate with a company, you will be issued a personalized link or code by that company; and it is very important that you implement (embed) this code into your page correctly, or you could end up sending visitors to the company’s website without recieving compensation for your efforts. Keep in mind that a majority of snippets in that code will contain a unique user ID, which the company uses to identify you as the referring affiliate and insure you receive payment.

 

Catchy URLs Can Add Value to Money-Making Articles

One of the first things an article marketer will need to do after deciding on a niche topic is to choose a catchy URL (Uniform Resource Locator or web address); and if the marketer needs a little inspiration s/he might leave the choice of an article URL for last. Whether such a selection is first or last, however, it is important that whatever the URL is, it should be one that will stand out and be easy to remember for those visitors who plan on returning to the site.

Before proceeding further, it may be helpful to take a closer look at exactly what is being referred to with the terms “URL” and “Web address,” since a URL could be used to describe a number of different things. Think of it in the sense that every website, Web page and blog must be located at an extension of a domain name or the domain name itself, such that when a particular site is being searched for the first thing the searcher might type is www.example.com (the domain) and then type “/” after which the extension is typed (“index.html,” “pagename.html,” or other identifier).

“Most web browsers display the URL of a web page above the page in an address bar” which in most cases will be displayed with “http://” preceding the domain. Thus http://www.example.com/index.html is the format which typically describes a URL or Web address of a site, page, document or other resource found on the Internet. While there is much more that can be said about URLs, URIs, domains and Web addresses, the information provided above should be enough for the purpose of this article.

That having been said, it is important to note that article writers are often in search of creative ways to convey thoughts to their readers, and to that end they need new ideas as well as inspiration; but even after they have completed an article it is still necessary to find a “catchy” or creative URL to adequately describe their article’s location on the Web if they expect to get maximum exposure for their work, thereby increasing its monetary value.

One suggestion for finding a catchy URL is to take a look at the various keywords that have been selected for use with the niche being written about to see if any of those keywords have a catchy or memorable quality. For example, if the niche is “oomph”, suggested names might be “MegaOomph,” “Oomph4u,” “HouseofOomph,” or “OomphKingdom;” All be original titles which explain what the niche is and, most importantly, will be easy for visitors to remember.

The ease with which a URL can be remembered is among the most important elements in marketing an article, product, website or anything else, because folks have a tendency to gravitate towards that which is easy to deal with (“path of the least resistance?”); So if you are the article marketer, visitors to your site (or URL) will respond in a similar fashion by returning to your site – since you have made it easy to remember – instead of clicking on other affiliate links.