Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

There are a lot of people, especially bloggers, making good money from affiliate marketing. If you don’t have time to create your own products or maybe you’re not sure what type of product you should create, you can supplement your income by promoting other people’s stuff.

Chances are you use a lot of products, take a lot of online courses, or even use plugins on your blog. Most of the things you use to build your own business can be offered under an affiliate program. It just makes good sense that you should earn a little bit of money from sharing these “must haves” with your readers.

One of the easiest ways to promote products is by writing reviews and posting them to your blog. At the end of the review, simply add your affiliate link so the reader can purchase the product.

Here are some benefits to using affiliate marketing.

* Little to No Risk.  Since you’re not technically responsible for the products you promote, this is a very low risk business. Plus, you’re not losing time and money by creating your own products. However, it is good business sense to only promote products that you use personally and that you like. You do have that much responsibility to your followers.

* Small Start-Up Costs.  You probably already have your website set up and paying for a hosting plan. Other than that, and the money you’ve already spent purchasing products, you really have no other cost involved. Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn back the money you’ve invested in quality products.

* No copywriting experience necessary. Writing sales copy can suck, especially if that isn’t your strong point. However, your job really isn’t to sale the product, per se, but to share it. Sharing honest information is a better way to make sales than using sales copy in a blog post. Your blog posts should never seem salesy or look like a product ad.

If you do need some copy material, many affiliate programs already have some sales aids in place. You can simply do a few tweaks and use it. Some even offer graphics you can place in your sidebar.

* Passive income. This may be one of the best benefits of all, passive income. Once you’ve written a review it will be online for a long time. It can continue to draw traffic when people search for specific product reviews. Plus, you can also keep linking to your reviews from other content on your website.

You may even want to set up static pages for your reviews. This makes them very search engine friendly and easier for people to find when they’re at your website. Which ever way you choose to do product reviews, it can keep adding to your income month after month.

* Flexibility. Affiliate marketing is extremely flexible. You decide how much time you want to work on affiliate promotions or how many days per week. It can be done in only a few minutes per day leaving the rest of your work time for your own product creation or for building up your own site.
Income from affiliate marketing is not limited. The more time you put in, the more money you can make. This is especially true if your readers have learned to trust you and your recommendations.
Affiliate marketing can be part time or you can even turn it into a full time job if you’d like. It’s not only flexible, but the possibilities are endless.

Another great benefit of affiliate marketing is that you can fit it into just about any niche or topic you’re interested in. There are affiliate programs in almost every niche out there. No matter what your topic of choice is, whether it’s health, fitness, blogging, marketing, SEO, social media—I’m sure you can find products to promote.

Not all topics are profitable, but if you only share products that you use yourself to grow your own business, this can still earn you some nice affiliate commissions.

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Why Bloggers Should Pay Attention to the New Affiliate Tax Laws

This guest post is by Yasmine Mustafa of 123LinkIt.com.

The Business Insider recently reported that ten thousand affiliates were recently dropped from Amazon’s Affiliate Program with little warning.

How much income would you lose if you were no longer permitted to use the program?

This is an issue that bloggers in California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Connecticut are currently facing. They were instantly cut from Amazon’s affiliate program due to a new affiliate tax law.

Update: Amazon dropped the ballot fight last week and cut a deal with California on the collection of sales tax. According to CNN Money, they have not stated whether or not they will reinstate their CA affiliates.

How did it happen? What can you do to avoid this law from passing in your state?

Online retailers such as Amazon that do not have a physical presence are not required to collect sales tax like brick-and-mortar businesses. Big companies like Wal-Mart who are taxed see this as an unfair advantage and are paying lobbyists to push what is now called the “Amazon tax” or the “affiliate nexus tax.”

In short, this affiliate tax states that online merchants can in fact be taxed if they have a “nexus” or connection within the state. Affiliate marketers are one of the groups of people viewed as a connection. As a result, state governors in the above-mentioned states are signing a law that taxes Amazon and other online vendors through its affiliates. They are now being treated as having a physical presence and are subject to pay taxes.

Amazon has reacted immediately. Wanting to avoid being subject to costly tax inquiries from the government, they are cutting connections to every state that passes the affiliate tax by terminating agreements with all affiliate marketers, leaving many bloggers with decreased incomes and some with no incomes from their blog. As long as there are states that do not tax its sales, Amazon has stated that it will continue to avoid affiliate marketing in the states that do. As of June 30, 2011, California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Connecticut have been affected by the nexus tax.

The war is not lost and bloggers can make a difference in fighting back or preventing the affiliate tax law from passing in their state.

Visit the Performance Marketing Association (PMA) Tax Nexus site to further educate yourself and join one of their state-specific Google groups.Join PMA’s fight in the reversal of the tax currently underway in certain states. To learn more, visit PMA’s contribution page.Bloggers can write their state representative and explain how the legislation will harm their income. The best letters are concise and honest, and include supporting examples. About.com has a great structure on how to write letters to Congress that is worth checking out beforehand.

If you have been affected by the affiliate tax, there are other options consider.

Find other affiliate programs to join. Some of the most popular that can fulfill Amazon’s inventory include Barnes and Noble, Buy.com, Best Buy, Newegg, the Apple Store, Wal-Mart, Target, and Sears.Sign up for an affiliate tool that aggregates all the affiliate programs and automatically embeds affiliate links in your blog. These include 123LinkIt (Disclaimer: I am the Founder of 123LinkIt), Skimlinks and Viglink.Relocate. This is a drastic step but worthwhile if your revenue warrants it.

Will national standards for taxing online retailers be implemented?  How will all this affect bloggers and small businesses? Let us know in the comments!

Yasmine Mustafa is the Founder of 123LinkIt.com, a service that allows WordPress bloggers to earn affiliate revenue from product keywords in their content. It is currently the #1 downloaded affiliate plugin in WordPress.

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Maximize Your Affiliate Income with LinkTrackr

They say that knowledge is power, but in the case of affiliate marketing, it can also be very powerful. In order to be successful promoting the various affiliate campaigns, you need a way to track your performance in a robust, yet easily accessible way. And one of the best solutions for that is LinkTrackr. This online service offers a wide range of tools that are custom built for all the affiliate marketers in the audience.

Its name might lead you to believe that LinkTrackr is all about tracking links, but that’s only part of the equation. Instead, this is a comprehensive solution with plenty of functionality for affiliates. They claim it is Internet marketing “made really easy.”

All the successful marketers in the audience will tell you that it is very important to cloak all of your affiliate links. This is true for a number of reasons. Many web users will be hesitant to click on something that clearly looks like an affiliate link, because it can look suspicious. A shorter URL with your own domain, however, looks more trustworthy. What’s more, a cloaked link helps to protect you from losing commissions that you should have rightfully earned.

LinkTrackr lets you use a subdomain off of their site, but perhaps more powerfully, you can also use your own domain as the redirection source. This is great for branding and legitimacy reasons. It’s also useful that you can hide your landing pages from search engines (protecting your rankings) and you can use a “social” toolbar that keeps your cloaked URL in the address bar of visitors.

I’m guessing that if you’re going to make it as an affiliate marketer, you’re going to handle more than one or two links. That’s why it’s great the interface within LinkTrackr makes it really easy to sort and search through your links.

The WordPress plugin takes this functionality to another level, easily integrating with your site or blog. You can set it to automatically replace certain keywords or keyword phrases with your affiliate links too, further automating your monetization process.

Not surprisingly, LinkTrackr also does a lot on the tracking side of the equation too. This can be done through tracking pixels, Javascript code, and so on. You can see the number of click-throughs, as well as the total conversions and the conversion rate. If you assign values to the conversions, you can see how much money each link is making too.

Perhaps one of the most powerful features of this affiliate marketing system is the simple utility for split-testing your custom cloaked URLs. What this means is that you can use and promote a single URL, but have that send visitors to multiple landing pages and destinations.

Many affiliate marketers will likely use this as a simple A-B split test with a 50/50 option between two destination URLs, but you could just as easily split that cloaked URL to as many destinations as you’d like. It’s also not automatic that the traffic is distributed evenly among the destinations, so you can give them each a custom weight too. And yes, all the clicks and conversions are tracked too, just like single destination cloaked URLs.

In the interest of continuity, you can enable cookies for these cloaked URLs too. This means that a person directed to one destination URL will see the same one if they visit the same cloaked URL again. Otherwise, they will once again be randomly assigned to one of the possible destination URLs.

At this time, you’ll find that there are four pricing plans for LinkTrackr. They all work on a subscription basis, but you can switch between any of the plans at any time. They start at $9/month for the basic plan, which includes 100 tracking links, 10,000 clicks/month and custom homepage. The most popular plan is the $39/month hyper plan with 1000 tracking links and A/B split testing. If you want more, there’s also the $69/month Xtreme plan with unlimited links, unlimited clicks, and more.

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Boosting your Blog # 11: Link to Hosts and theme Providers with Affiliate Links

Continuing our discussion of things you would need to do now to improve your blog, and today it tip:

I was talking with a craft blogger recently who has a small and medium-sized blog and told me that her third-strongest revenue stream came via two links in its sidebar that just people on her blog host, pointed this out, and they used to the WordPress theme. Each was an affiliate link.

Around the links gives them a short blurb on why they use the services, along with a no-pressure call to action for other bloggers in her niche who are looking for such services. They also contains a note to say that the links are affiliate links, and that the sale helped her run her site.

She saw by sales of each link and, over a year, they added up to a five-figure income (especially if the hosting committees were recurring).

You create a link to your blog theme or host provider with affiliate links?

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As money with Affiliate Marketing

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