onKeyDown=textCounter(this.form.f_artBest route to article marketing for free traffictitle,this.form.avachars_title,150);

To all writers and non-writers out there, now is the time to start digging up those creative writing skills back.

With modern communication technology comes the popularity of information-based marketing, which is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. This is why article writing, submissions and publications are also getting popular.

There are already many tools that people can use to make the process of distributing their articles more easily. Though this is invaluable in getting the contents more exposure, which is only half of the story.

Let us take a look first at the common mistakes that some people make before submitting their contents to article directories:

1. Confusing the reason to promote the articles with the reason to write them.

In article writing, there are three key benefits why you are promoting them; branding, lead generation and promotion, which are all part of your optimization efforts.

But there is only one reason why you write an article, and that is to inform your audience. If the article is not focused on this primary and most important purpose, it will fail to achieve the three promotion benefits because no one will be interested in reading them.

You need to figure out first how to get people to read what is in your article, then make them click on your resource box. You can achieve this by producing better contents.

2. Failing to maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing.

You may know already that your articles can help you generate additional links back to your site. But do you know that you can get more visitors and better search engine results from that same articles?

Mention keywords at strategic places. Just be sure not to overdo them. Some are even using anchor texts which is also an effective method. But it is important to know that majority of the directories are not able to support this.

Remember that is not only about the links back to your site. Part of doing well in your article marketing is getting picked up by publishers with a large number of audiences and gaining the ability of leveraging other brands because of the quality of your work. Better search engine results also are great benefits.

But these things do not put much money in your pocket. There are other factors that can turn your article marketing efforts into an opportunity that can boost your earnings. Not just increase the number of visitors to your site.

Start out with a plan and see to it that your article will serve the function that you intended it to have.

3. Publishing content that does not help your readers.

Maybe in the process of writing articles, you are thinking that all that is you wanted is links back to your site. And any visitors it can generate are fine.

Guess what? Not all article banks and directories are going to accept your content automatically. Oftentimes, they have some guidelines and specifications on the articles that they are accepting.

You can double the number of sites you can submit to by writing articles that the directories want to share with other people. All it takes is one publisher with a hundred thousand readers to increase your potential audience overnight.

Write the articles that publishers want in their publications if you want your article marketing to work the most effective way for you. This also means you have to obey the standard guidelines, spell checks, researching on a good topic and even hiring a writer to produce a good content on your behalf.

In the end, it is all really a matter of choice on your part. You can start getting a little exposure from increased links back but on a very basic level. Or enjoy massive exposure from a little extra time making quality contents.

It will be your choice. You may not be aware of the fact that an article submitted on directories is not meant to have the same level of exposure as highly-targeted content ones geared on a narrow group of people.

Learn the difference between these two and it will surely help you know what kinds of articles to write and to submit.

5 Unbelievable Secret Facts Of A Sure-Successful Joint Venture.

As you read this article, you’ll find that the subject of successful joint venture is certainly no exception.

Joint venturing is the fastest and most preferred way to increase sales and cash flow. It is no longer a secret, business partners are what make a strong company. It is impossible for a person to sit alone and wait for businesses to come, you need to get your influence out there and that is where joint venture partners jump in.

If you have been staying for some time on the Internet, you should know that JV partners are the master key to online success. Here are some reasons of why people are failing to get quality joint ventures:

1. Other marketers will not be waiting for you to reply why they should joint venture with you. Make sure you include the reasons why the other marketer needs to joint venture with you, throw all the benefits in and give a compelling reason why they should.

If you think that giving your product for free to a joint venture partner and expect them to endorse it to their list of subscribers, it won’t work. Even if you offer your joint ventures a greater profit than you do, it still works if both of you get to know each other better and have more joint venture plans in the future.

2. Many JV offers are thrown into the trash bin at first sight. Why? The more famous marketers can receive up to 200 JV offers every week, they can’t afford to just joint venture with any little beings on earth. Which is why, you need to follow-up. It is important that you don’t stop requesting until you are noticed.

Even if they trashed your email for the first time, on the second, third and fourth time, they should be noticing your existence and be urged to open the mail. Be consistent, follow up, and you’re half way there.

If you base what you do on inaccurate information, you might be unpleasantly surprised by the consequences. Make sure you get the whole successful joint venture story from informed sources.

3. If you think sending an autoresponder series of template emails to your potential JV partners is a good idea, you’re killing your own business. People are very busy and to see that you are not even using your own time to write a proper JV offer, they don’t have time for you as well.

Your JV proposals should be more personalized - if possible you will even want to do a research on them so that you can know more about them and include the points in your JV offers. This makes sure that the both of you have a potential of being serious JV partners in the future.

4. JV partners are not affiliates. They are more than just affiliates, they’re potential super affiliates. You need to give them more commissions on any sales they’ve gotten for you. If you offer a 50% of commissions to your affiliates, your JV partners deserve 70% or more.

JV partners turns you targeted customers, they are hungry for similar products. Their subscriber trusts what they endorse, so it is the best way to promote your product. With a list of 10,000, if only 1% which is 100 who purchase your $97 product, you’ll earn $9700 over night with a single endorsement. 1% is a really low conversion, if the conversion rate increases by another 1% - you’ve already received $19,400.

5. Targeting the “big fishes” is not a good idea. You should begin from smaller JV partners, slowly build each other’s publicity, and only approach greater marketers when your subscriber lists are huge. This way, the greater marketers will get a more compelling reason in having a JV with you.

Joint venturing is no doubt the greatest way of getting successful in the Internet online venture, be sure to use it to the extreme and you’ll be delighted with the outcome.

To Your Success!

How To Turn Your Traffic Into Greatest Profit

The following paragraphs summarize the work of traffic experts who are completely familiar with all the aspects of traffic. Heed their advice to avoid any traffic surprises.

Do you have a website which pulls in large number of visitors everyday? You can actually benefit yourself with the traffic and earn a great, residual income if you give a little more effort. Here are some of the greatest ways you can convert those traffic into mountainous cash:

1. Sell a product/service

Of course, to earn money you need to sell a product or service to your visitors. It is the best way to profit from your own product. Usually, an e-book or software works the best &ndash they can be downloaded right away, no shipping included, no handling to be done. You earn 100% of the profits without any investments to be taken before that.

Other than that, selling your own product allows you to set your own price.

2. Opt-In list

It is very crucial that you try to convert every visitor of yours to a subscriber of your mailing list. The most important asset that an Internet marketer has is his or her list of subscribers. They define whether you will go far in the online business venture.

With an opt-in list, there are tons and tons of ways you can profit greater in the future. You can make previous customers purchase again from you, making them your repeating customers &ndash that is of course, if they are in your mailing list and you can urge them to buy again.

Building a closer relationship with your own subscriber will be the best thing you can do. By having your subscribers ‘trust’ you, you can endorse many other useful products to your subscribers and the chances that they will buy from you will be high &ndash because they trust you.

3. Viral marketing

You can provide a free product or bonus to be listed on your site to be downloaded by your visitors. Usually it’ll be an e-book where people can read from and learn useful information. In this bonus, you include give away rights and urge readers to give it away to anyone they want to. This way, you increase your own publicity and branding.

In the future, you will receive great benefits as when you are known, people will trust you more and this profits you. Between a product &ndash let’s say a tooth brush from a beggar and a doctor, who will you prefer to purchase from? Unless the beggar offers something special, it is hardly that you will purchase the tooth brush from him.

How can you put a limit on learning more? The next section may contain that one little bit of wisdom that changes everything.

4. Pay-per-click

In this case, you don’t pay for every click but earn instead. There are many advertising programs that give you a percentage of the bidding on a certain keyword. The famous ones are Google Adsense, Chitika, Yahoo Publisher Network and Kontera.

When people click on the ads shown from either of these advertising programs, you will earn a small portion of money. Nevertheless, if you have high traffic to your site &ndash these programs alone can generate your residual income.

5. Offer an advertising space

Usually websites which brings in very high traffic will sell a small portion of space on their web page. You can charge a minimum of $300 for advertising someone’s ad a single month on advertising fee if your web page is pulling more than 2000 visitors a day.

Other than that, you can also create exit pop-ups that advertise other websites as well. By doing this, you don’t clutter your website with too many ads and you can earn a better reputation from your visitors.

6. Affiliate marketing

If you don’t have your own product for sale, you can sell other’s products instead and receive a commission on every sale. With affiliate marketing, you have an unlimited source of products to sell and you don’t need to go through any problems after your sales.

No customer service, you don’t need to issue any refunds, just let the owner do everything else for you after each sale. If you have a mailing list, you can endorse many other products and earn very great profits from your subscribers.

7. Pay-per-lead

Instead of earning money from every click your visitors clicked on, you are paid if you get your visitors to subscribe into other’s mailing list. Nevertheless, it is not necessary that you just get visitors to become other’s subscribers.

There are a lot of bigger companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi which holds survey every few months. By referring your visitors to them in order to complete a survey, you can also earn great profits from it.

Applied correctly, you can make a huge fortune on the Internet and build a steady online business &ndash taking over the place of your day job. Take some time to put effort in either of these strategies, because it can make your day bright.

When word gets around about your command of traffic facts, others who need to know about traffic will start to actively seek you out.

People Who Need People - Find Your Niche

We understand what it means when someone says, “Don’t get your cart before your horse,” but often that’s just what we do when we’re looking for a niche market. We find a product we want to market and then we begin looking for folks to market to.

Instead, the first thing you must do is find a market; a group of people you know something about. Or maybe it’s a group you want to know something about. Either way, your niche is the people and their needs, wants and desires.

Are you interested in cuddly little pets? Or do your interest run more towards your not so cuddly pets; maybe reptiles. Do you love cars? Maybe you have a Porsche passion. If you’re single maybe you’re interested in dating or single parent issues. In any case, your first mission is to find a group of people you want to provide services and products for; that’s your market.

Next, you must find out what they want. Look up forums, groups, email lists and blogs for your market group and find out the problems they face and the type products or services this market is looking for. You should be a groupie; first to find out what your customer wants and then later to publicize your website. (For a list of the best Newsgroups, Forums, E-Mail Lists and Blogs, check the authors resource box below.)

As you’re doing this, make a list of the different words they use to describe the products and services they want. These will be your ‘keywords’ when you write your webpage. These are the words your new potential clients will key into the search engines to find the products you will be offering.

Then use a keyword tool such as the overture suggestion tool to find out how many people are searching each month on keywords your niche group was interested in. Find out if there is a strong enough demand for products to this group.

And last but not least, it’s time to find a product. You know what your group is looking for; you now understand their problems. Go to Clickbank, Commission Junction or PayCotCom and look for products to meet the needs of your group. Or better yet, develop a product yourself.

Remember the most important factor in online marketing, or any type marketing anywhere, is to help your customer. Now having found your customers and their needs as you have, finding or writing content for your website is a breeze. Those in your market will flock to your site for your information; and then, while they’re there, they’ll buy.

If you help enough other people get what they want; you’ll get what you want. Build you business to help the people in your particular niche and you’ll stand out from the crowd. Marketing, whether it’s for a niche or the masses, is all about people.

Why Residual Affiliate Programs Is The Best To Promote

Are you a webmaster in need of additional income? Or are you planning to set up an online business but you still don’t have any product to sell? If so, affiliate marketing may be the best solution for your problems. With affiliate marketing, you won’t need to worry about the products you have to sell. All you need to have is a website with sufficient contents that are related to the products of a certain online company offering affiliate programs. By becoming a member of the program, or by becoming an affiliate, you can start earning a certain amount of money right away!

Affiliate marketing is some sort of business relationship established between a merchant and his affiliates. In affiliate marketing, an affiliate agrees to direct some traffic to a merchant’s website. If that traffic is converted into some kind of action, like a visitor purchasing a product on the merchant’s website or a visitor becoming a lead for the company, the affiliate who directed the traffic will be compensated. Compensation may take the form of either a percentage sales commission for the sales generated or a fixed fee predetermined upon the application of the affiliate on the merchant’s affiliate program.

Promising a lot of benefits both for the merchants and the affiliates, affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular online marketing methods today. In fact, almost every merchant or retailer site today offers an affiliate program that any one can join into. Most retailers would entice people to become affiliates or members of their program by promising great benefits like large commissions, lifetime commissions, click through incomes and a lot of other benefits. But would all these affiliate programs bring off the same benefits?

Most affiliate programs would pay you, as an affiliate, a one-time commission for every sale or lead you brought to the merchant’s website. Commissions for this kind of affiliate programs are usually large, ranging from 15% to a high of about 60%. Other affiliate programs would pay you a fixed fee for every click through or traffic you send to the merchant’s site. Programs like this often pay a smaller fee for every click through, usually not getting any larger than half a dollar. The good thing about this kind of program, however, is that the visitor won’t have to purchase anything in order for the affiliate to get compensated.

Another type of affiliate program is the residual income affiliate program. Residual affiliate programs usually pay only a small percentage of sales commission for every sale directed by the affiliate to the merchant’s site. This commission often comes only in the range of 10% to 20% sales commission. Because of this, many people ignore residual affiliate program and would rather opt for the high paying one-time commission affiliate program. Are these people making a mistake, or are they making the right decision?

We can’t tell, for sure, if people are making a mistake by choosing a high paying one-time commission affiliate program. But we can definitely say that they are making a large mistake if they ignore residual affiliate programs. Residual affiliate programs would indeed pay at a lower rate, but merchants offering such kind of programs would generally pay you regular and ongoing commissions for a single affiliate initiated sale! That means, for the same effort you made in promoting a particular affiliate program, you get paid only once in a one-time commission program, and a regular and ongoing commission for a residual program!

So, are the benefits of promoting residual affiliate programs clearer to you now? Or are they still vague? If they are still vague, then let’s make them a bit clearer with this example.

Suppose there are two online merchants both offering web hosting services on their sites. The first merchant offers a one-time commission type of affiliate program that pays $80 for every single affiliate initiated sale. The second merchant also offers an affiliate program, but this time a residual affiliate program that pays only $10 for every single affiliate initiated sale. As an affiliate, we may get attracted at once at what the first merchant is offering, as $80 is definitely a lot larger than $10. But by thinking things over before actually getting into them, one may be able to see that the second merchant is offering us more opportunity to earn a larger amount of money.

Supposed you have directed traffic to the merchant and it converted into a sale, you’ll get paid once by the first merchant for the sale you have initiated. But with the second merchant, you’ll get paid monthly for as long as the customer you have referred to the merchant continues to avail of the web hosting service. That means that for the same effort of getting one customer to avail of the merchant’s service, you get paid monthly in residual affiliate programs while you only get paid once in a one-time commission type of affiliate programs.

So, are residual affiliate programs worth promoting? Definitely yes, because you virtually get more money from these types of affiliate programs in the long run! And would residual affiliate programs work best for you? Probably not, probably yes. It is not really for me to tell. But with the benefits that residual affiliate marketing can provide, it would really be unwise to ignore such programs.

Merchants Earn More After Affiliate Marketing

An attraction of affiliate marketing is the savings that the merchant will gain when he no longer conducts his own advertising and publicity. Some merchants, who already have a well-established affiliate marketing program, no longer bother to conduct any activity that will lead to more sales. Such may not impair the current sales of the online business, but it failed to tap into another avenue of selling that can increase the revenue of the online business.

Thus, the merchant must still conduct some form of advertising even when he has an effective affiliate marketing program, and even when he has hundreds of affiliates conducting the promotions for him. The merchant must look into making a second or even a third sale to the customers he acquired. Such is called back-end selling. The practice of back-end selling can complement affiliate marketing.

Here are some ways that a merchant can perform back-end selling:

Newsletters &ndash Whether through email or sent through snail mail, these publications are perfect avenues to introduce the other products of the merchant. These other products are the back-end products. Therefore, in the merchant’s website, there should be a part where the customer is asked whether he would like to receive free newsletters from the online company. If the customer clicks yes, then this customer will be taken to a page that will ask for his email or mailing address.

Thank You Letters &ndash Sending a thank you letter for patronizing the merchant’s products is not just a form of courtesy. It is a wise business practice. With the thank you letter, the merchant must mention the back-end product.

Customer Satisfaction Calls &ndash If the merchant is not comfortable in writing brilliant thank you letters, he may choose to give the customer a phone call. During the phone call, the merchant will check if the customer was happy about the product they already bought. This call shows a concern for the customer. But it is again an avenue for back-end selling. The merchant will attempt to mention the back-end products.

Customers Only &ndash In the website of the merchant, there will be a webpage that can be accessed only by its customers. When a visitor has become a paying customer due to affiliate marketing, this paying customer can go to the webpage that contains more about the product that he has bought. In that same page, there may be ads for the back-end products

Back-end selling for the merchant becomes easier because the customer has already given his trust after the initial sale brought by affiliate marketing.

How To Promote Your Affiliate Marketing Programs

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make some residual income online. If you use your affiliate marketing properly, you can actually make a fair amount of money. But you have to market your affiliate programs and utilize the Internet to its fullest potential, otherwise your affiliate marketing will be a bigger waste of time than raking leaves in the fall. Here are some tips to help you take advantage of the Internet when you’re affiliate marketing.

START AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH YOUR OWN WEBSITE

The obvious starting place for an affiliate marketing campaign is your own personal website. Whether this is a blog, an online portfolio or an online business, affiliate marketing can make your site a bit more profitable. As long as you have some site traffic, affiliate marketing can work on just about any kind of site that you have. When you’re choosing affiliate programs for your site, do your best to make sure that they correlate to your content, or try to skew the link names so that they do, and make sure that the links that relate most closely to your content appear first. The object is to make sure that people go to the links, so make them as enticing as possible.

FIND MESSAGE BOARDS FOR YOUR AFFILIATE MARKETING

If you can, find message boards to post your affiliate marketing links on that, again, relate in some way to the link. If you can, include links both at the end of message board posts and in the content. Gear your posts to the link, so that they seem like a natural extension of your topic. Before you start posting on all kinds of message boards though, make sure that the board allows affiliate programs in posts. If they don’t, then your post will be deleted, and if you break these rules often enough, you might be blocked from posting again on that or other message boards, especially if you are operating in a specific niche. Not only that, but people are less likely to click on links on a message board that frowns on affiliate marketing.

DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE POWER OF CHAT ROOMS

Chat rooms are a great way to get in touch with a number of people who already spend a lot of time on the Internet. Many chat rooms allow you to create a guest user profile or a one time only user. You can go in and promote your affiliate programs and convince people to visit the links in real time. This gives you the benefit of being able to respond to any questions or hesitations people might have immediately. You can really act as a salesperson, much more so than if you were to simply paste an affiliate program on a website somewhere.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE PYRAMID STRUCTURE OF SOME AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Many affiliate programs will give you partial profits of people that you sign up to become affiliate marketers. This can often be more profitable than using your own actual links, if you’re good at getting in touch with people. If you dedicate most of your affiliate marketing time to finding other marketers, then you can establish an organization that functions without a lot of input from you, leaving you time to grow your base instead of trying to find places to post your links. Of course, you should not neglect to work on your tier of the organization, both to make sure that you get some income from yourself, and out of respect for the person who brought you into the organization.

4 Steps To Explosive Joint Ventures

Everyone needs targeted visitors to their websites and tis could proof, at some times, to be a very tough job to do. You hear that you need to do one thing from this guru and the other guru tells you to do another. It gets confusing at one point.

Now, the one strategy that will never fail you is finding good partners. Basically even internet marketing is about the “partners” you have and find. You need link partners to gain popularity in the search engines and when you want to sell a product, effectively, you need JV partners to get this thing rolling.

Now why should I do a JV?

Well, whenever you have a product and you want to launch it, it may be wise to find websites in your niche that have lists and may be interested in selling your products. And even if they don’t have a list, just ask them if they would like to promote your product on their website.

What is in it for them?

Great question… whenever you set-up a JV, you need to be sure there is something in it FOR THEM. So depending on you focus you could offer them a commission of 50 up-to 100% on a product you sell.

So how do your determine what kind of commission you will give to your affiliates? It really depends on your focus… if you want to build a list of paying customers quickly, you set-up a JV and give as much commission as possible to your JV partners but when it is for a product that you are going to sell as your main product, you could offer them a commission anywhere between the 50 and 65% (you still need to make a living yourself).

In the first case the product doesn’t have to be extremely high priced, it is all about building that list with “paying customers”… your golden list. So something like $9,95 would be just fine and perfect to attract partners and hand you over their lists. Especially if you give-out a commission of 100%.

Now, the next thing you should do is make it as simple as possible for the JV partner. What I mean by that is that you shouldn’t let them do to much work. You should create all the messages for them(so they can send it out to their list), create a couple of banners that they can put up on their websites, text links, etc.

Now, I have shown you the basics of setting up a JV. Marc Goldmann knows a lot more about how-to set-up Joint Ventures, effectively. So if you ware truly interested, I highly recommend you to do a search on him on Google.

I want to stop by giving you step by step directions you can follow when you set-up your Joint Ventures:

#1: Have a product to sell. You need to make sure you have some kind of product your could sell before you can set-up a JV. And this doesn’t have to be your own product, just think outside the box or check out this website for more information about Joint Ventures.

#2: Set-up you website. When you set-up a JV for your own product, you need a website to promote that product. So you will need to buy hosting and a domain name. I personally get my domains at Godaddy and my hosting at Hostgator.

#3: Find JV partners. This is a very time-consuming task but very rewarding in the end. All you should do is look for websites in your niche and ask them if they want to be your JV partner. Try to call them if possible and otherwise send them a email about your affiliate program(how much they can make, other advantages for them).

#4: Set-up and prepare for launch. If you want to learn more about how to set-up a launch, you should take a look at this website. He knows everything about launches and can most surely help you set-up a launch in your own niche. I will just cover some basics.

What you need to do is make sure your follow ups are ready, that you start getting prospects before you launch and keep these prospects updated and interested about your product, Create a sense of urgency like your product is the best they can get in your niche. And it will make sure that your partners will make more money and the next time you launch something, they will be happy to help you out.

I hope this article has been useful and will help you set-up some explosive Joint Ventures in the future. Take action right now and good luck.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicholas Kidd has been an internet marketer for over the past 3 years and is now the Affiliate Manager for Affiliate Cash Secrets and he is paying an unheared of 75% commission on every member you refer, every single month for life. For more information and free subscription to his newsletter(value $197 a year), please click here: .superaffiliatemarketingsecrets.com

Niche Blogs And Why They Make Such An Excellent Affiliate Marketing Tool

Blogs or more specifically… Niche Blogs are simply blogs that are topic focused and target a specific market and/or niche.

More importantly though, these blogs contain targeted information that their target market is searching for.

This is KEY.

As an affiliate marketer we are always told that information, whether its an article, review, ebook, ecourse, report, mp3 or pod cast, is a key Pre-Selling tool before your potential customer decides to buy what it is that your offering.

This is where Niche Blogs come into play because of there many capabilities and functions.

The biggest advantage Blogs have is they give you the ability to syndicate your content and/or information through a technology called RSS(Real Simple Syndication).

The types of content you are able to syndicate are as follows:

- Articles

- Product Reviews

- eBooks

- eCourses

- Special Reports

- Mp3 Files

- Steaming Video(A.K.A Pod Casting)

Are you starting to see the advantages to blogs or more importantly, having a network of affiliate Niche Blogs?

I hope so.

Also, with your blog comes an RSS Feed that your potential visitors can subscribe to.

Whats this mean for you?

Simple. When ever you post to your affiliate Niche Blog or network of Niche Blogs guess who will INSTANTLY receives that post?

That’s right, who ever subscribes to your RSS Feed.

Are you starting to see the many benefits of having a Niche Blog and incorporating it into your affiliate marketing mix?

Only you can answer that.

Another great thing about Blogs in general is that search engines love them and everytime you post to your Niche Blog it “Pings” the search engines and other RSS Directories you’ve submitted to letting them know that there’s new fresh content for them to come and index.

The more you post, the more pages that will be produced, which means… more for the search engines to index, which means… more traffic to your Niche Blog.

The best way to take advantage of your new source of traffic and maximize your Niche Blog profits is to modify your blog template and add Google Adsense and your affiliate programs marketing materials to it.

By doing this, everytime you post to your Niche Blog your marketing message will always be there and Google Adsense will display targeted ads related to your content.

Now, I can’t go into alot of detail on how to modify blog templates in this article simply because that’s an article within itself and then some.

What I can do is show you one that I just put together as an example.

.internetwondersezine.com/internet-joint-venture/

All I really wanted to get across to you is the advantages to having your own Niche Blog as part of your affiliate marketing mix to help market your affiliate programs to your target audience.

Blogs are here to stay so we might as well take advantage of them in any way that we can.

Website Or No Website…That is the Question

Do you want to make money through the Internet but you don’t have enough experience or capital to start your own online business? You don’t have to worry, for a lot of online marketing options exist for you to start with. One of these options, and shall I say the best, is affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing provides first time online marketers like you the chance to market something online even without having your own product to sell. All you have to do is to sign up with an affiliate marketing program, which is usually owned by an online merchant or retailer, and start picking the products you want to promote. As an affiliate, you are paid by the merchant for your services on a commission basis, that is whenever you have directed a visitor to the merchant’s site and the visitor actually buys something.

Becoming an affiliate in an affiliate marketing program is often quick and easy, and for most affiliate programs, signing up is also free. But despite these and all the benefits being promised by affiliate programs, many people are still hesitant to get into affiliate marketing. One of the reasons why a lot of people remain hesitant is the lack of a website to start marketing his affiliate products with. This now leads us to the question of whether a website is required or necessary in affiliate marketing or not.

Many people say that one can do affiliate marketing even without a website to start with. Actually, one can really start promoting and marketing his affiliate products even without a website; and there exist a lot of ways on how this can be done. In fact, many affiliate marketing strategies that leads to success can exist without actually needing a website. Among these strategies are email marketing, offline promotions, writing e-books, writing ezines and engaging in online discussions like forums, chats, message boards and others.

*Email Marketing

Email marketing, or maintaining email lists, is actually the most popular affiliate marketing strategy that doesn’t require the affiliate to maintain a website. In this affiliate marketing strategy, what you basically do is maintain a list of the email ads of your prospective customers and provide them with articles that are relevant with the affiliate products and programs you are promoting. Articles that you provide your contacts with need not always be promotional, for many individuals find such types of email annoying. Rather, it would be better if you provide them with something informative and just add small text ads that link to your merchant’s site.

*Offline Promotion

There are many ways on how you can promote your affiliate products offline. Among the common medium used for such promotions are classified ads, brochures and flyers. Classified ads would generally work better compared to the other two because classified ads in periodicals often get a wider audience.

*Writing Free e-books

If you have a knack in writing, writing an e-book can be the best way for you to promote your affiliate products in the absence of an actual website. Just like in emails and newsletters, your readers would better appreciate your e-book if it is not too promotional but rather informative. Be sure, however, to make the contents of your e-books relative to the actual affiliate products you are promoting. And just like in email marketing, you can just place text ads or banners somewhere near the end of your e-book that links to the merchant’s site.

*Writing Free Ezines

Ezines are publications or articles that aim to inform individuals about a particular topic. If you don’t have a website and yet want to be an affiliate, you can well use ezines to promote your affiliate products or to insert links to your merchant’s site. If you have a website, your ezine article may actually work well as content for your site. But since you have no website, you can just submit your free ezine articles to various websites that hosts ezines, like goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com and others.

*Online discussions (Forums, Chats, Message Boards, etc.)

With or without a website, you just can’t ignore online discussions because they are great venues for marketing your affiliate products. In chats, forums, message boards and discussion boards with topics related to your products, you can easily find people who may be interested with the products you are promoting.

With all these strategies, it may appear that one really doesn’t need to have a website to start marketing his affiliate products and promoting his affiliate programs. Well, starting in an affiliate program without a website may be easy, but getting successful in affiliate marketing without a website is another thing. While one can actually gain enormous success in affiliate marketing even without a website, it is a rare instance that “newbies” like you can reach the same levels of success.

Having a website is not really a pre-requisite in entering into an affiliate program, unless otherwise the program owner would require you to have one. But while this is so, I would still recommend that you have for yourself a website, if not now, then maybe at a later time. Having a website creates a lot of advantages in affiliate marketing. For one, it provides you a place where you can creatively promote not only one of your affiliate products but all of your affiliate products. With a website, you can also advertise your affiliate products to a wider market.

Again, having a website is not a requirement in affiliate marketing. But with the advantages that a website can provide, I’d rather have one for myself and make affiliate marketing a lot easier for me.