General Marketing - Affiliate Marketing

It's coming up to the that time of year again when we go crazy spending loads of money in the high street that come January we wish we never did.

How can you go and spend that much money on a celebration when you don't have it in the first place?

I have five kids so when it comes to christmas time it's an expensive business but this time I'm fighting back and not without good reason.

For the past few years we've given each of the kids £100 each. So that comes to a tidy £500 to start with and then they want a games machine on top. An Xbox 360 would be nice Dad they say.

They're not getting it. What they are getting this year is an exercise in money management and budgeting. If they want another games machine then they'll have to club together to get it. I've opened them each a bank account and half of their money is going into it not for any other reason than I'm sick of seeing broken toys littered around the garden come spring.

Of course the older boys are buying mobile phones with their money but even then last years phones are long gone to the mobile breakers.

What is going on here? This is descending into complete madness. We work hard to earn our money and then give it to our kids who have absolutely no idea what to do with it or more to the point what the value of it is.

Is this my fault or a society problem? Am I the only one who thinks that the lack of financial awareness amongst the next generation is astonishingly low? There is no respect for money anymore, it's just a commodity item that "needs" to be handed over.

With that said if you have "commitments" and your supply of ready cash is drying up as the household bills eat up more of your income then you need to think of generating some extra cash and what better way to do it than by building an affiliate business system.

Now, before you step right in like most other folks and start registering your domain name and blindly building your first site take some time to think about what is going to be profitable for the long term.

First of all you need to accept that you have a limited amount of time. In fact, in affiliate marketing time is THE most precious commodity. Time is what everybody doesn't have enough of because there are so many ideas that are all potential winners. Your management of time will determine how successful you are as an affiliate.

Realistically it is going to take you three to four months to build your first affiliate site. So if you started in January you should be finished by the end of April. Any other thoughts of making five sites in a month are unrealistic. You need to build a day job killer and escape the rat race, not waste all of your time chasing unreachable goals. Building a content rich site that attracts enough traffic to enable you to make sales is not a five minute job.

Forget all of those ebooks and other get rich quick schemes that litter the web, we are talking about building a sustainable lasting business system, not something that falls flat on it's face when your one google ranking disappears in the next upddate.

So what markets are good markets for our first foray into affiliate marketing?

First of all - not all affiliate programs are made equal. In fact some affiliate programs are so poor that they are not even worth the time spent signing up for and others are pure gold.

What you are looking for in an affiliate program to promote is ideally the following:

1. Lengthy cookie duration. If the tracking expires after a few days then a lot of your marketing efforts are going directly into the merchants pockets. 5 day cookies and the like are to be treated like the trash they are. You need 180 day or lifetime cookies for a workable business system.

2. Proper creative support. You need the merchant to be on top of their game and always coming up with timely and relative creative material. It makes your job so much easier to convert traffic with timely and up to date offers.

3. A dedicated affiliate manager. It's ideal to have but most likely you are not going to get it. Nearly all full time affiliate managers are working full time supporting their most successful affiliates and so you need to work hard before they will pay you any attention.

4. Repeat business. This is the most often overlooked part of the affiliate business system. If you refer someone today and make a sale then you get the commission. Most affiliate programs don't support repeat commission which means that when the customer goes back and purchases again you don't get credited for it. A good affiliate program will support repeat commissions and work hard to actively keep track of all of the business you have referred.

5. Real time tracking system and adwords integration. You want to log in and see how much commission you have made today, not last week. Changes you make today can be reflected with increased sales in hours, particularly if you have a high traffic site. If you are using adwords or pay per click to promote your product then delayed reporting systems can cost you a lot of money.

Typically, high street shopping feeds and affiliate programs are useless for building long term income, their cookie duration is usually very short and repeat business is not supported, so building this type of site means that you are reliant on your current traffic levels and all the previous business you have written counts for nothing. They are easy to build though and you can get complete shopping feeds so they take very little time to put together.

Poker sites, casinos and bingo affiliate programs are all very profitable and once you've signed a player up you'll get a continuous revenue share of everything they spend. For long term income these are great affiliate sites. All betting and related type affiliate programs work on this basis too.

A good start for aspiring poker affiliates is the poker affiliate guide

With most gambling related products you can specify whether or not you want a CPA (cost per aquisition) model or a revenue share model. What you can do is start out as a CPA affiliate so that you start getting instant cash for the players you sign up (usually $25 -$175) and then once you have established your site and got some income coming in you can move over to the far more lucrative revenue share model.

Weight loss pills and related health products also have high margins and good repeat business potential - these are great sites to build if you have an interest in nutrition or health and fitness as you can contribute a lot of self published content.

Male enhancement products have one of the highest payouts per sale. If you have an interest in mens (and womens) libido then this is an area that is still open to new affiliates.

Ringtones are lucrative but it's a very competitive market.

Dating is another lucrative repeat business generator but again is a very competitive area.

The golden rule of affiliate site building is to build something that you have an interest in, that offers repeat business that you get credited for and has a tracking system with good creatives support. Follow this advice and don't make my mistakes all over again.

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