Ways To Boost Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight

· The ideal world of affiliate marketing does not require having your won website, dealing with customers, refunds, product development and maintenance. This is one of the easiest ways of launching into an online business and earning more profit. Assuming you are already into an affiliate program, what would be the next thing you would want to do? Double, or even triple, your commissions, right? How do you do that.
Here are some powerful tips on how to boost your affiliate program commissions overnight.

• Know the best program and products to promote. Obviously, you would want to promote a program that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time.
• There are several factors to consider in selecting such a program. Choose the ones that have a generous commission structure. Have products that fit in with your target audience. And that has a solid track record of paying their affiliate easily and on time. If you cannot seem to increase your investments, dump that program and keep looking for better ones.
• There are thousands of affiliate programs online which gives you the reason to be picky. You may want to select the best to avoid losing your advertising dollars.
• Write free reports or short ebooks to distribute from your site. There is a great possibility that you are competing with other affiliates that are promoting the same program. If you start writing short report related to the product you are promoting, you will be able to distinguish yourself from the other affiliates.
• In the reports, provide some valuable information for free. If possible, add some recommendations about the products. With ebooks, you get credibility. Customers will see that in you and they will be enticed to try out what you are offering.
• Collect and save the email addresses of those who download your free ebooks. It is a known fact that people do not make a purchase on the first solicitation. You may want to send out your message more than six times to make a sale.
• This is the simple reason why you should collect the contact information of those who downloaded your reports and ebooks. You can make follow-ups on these contacts to remind them to make a purchase from you.
• Get the contact information of a prospect before sending them to the vendor's website. Keep in mind that you are providing free advertisement for the product owners. You get paid only when you make a sale. If you send prospects directly to the vendors, chances are they would be lost to you forever.
• But when you get their names, you can always send other marketing messages to them to be able to earn an ongoing commission instead of a one-time sale only.
• Publish an online newsletter or Ezine. It is always best to recommend a product to someone you know than to sell to a stranger. This is the purpose behind publishing your own newsletter. This also allows you to develop a relationship based on trust with your subscribers.
• This strategy is a delicate balance between providing useful information with a sales pitch. If you continue to write informative editorials you will be able to build a sense of reciprocity in your readers that may lead them to support you by buying your products.
• Ask for higher than normal commission from merchants. If you are already successful with a particular promotion, you should try and approach the merchant and negotiate a percentage commission for your sales.
• If the merchant is smart, he or she will likely grant your request rather than lose a valuable asset in you. Keep in mind that you are a zero-risk investment to your merchant; so do not be shy about requesting for addition in your commissions. Just try to be reasonable about it.
• Write strong pay Per Click ads. PPC search engine is the most effective means of advertising online. As an affiliate, you can make a small income just by managing PPC campaigns such as Google AdWords and Overture. Then you should try and monitor them to see which ads are more effective and which ones to dispose of.

Try out these strategies and see the difference it can make to your commission checks in the shortest of time.

Internet ScamBusters "Snippets"

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Beware of These Email Bank Scams

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One of the most popular identity theft scams is to send spam to potential victims advising them that they need to visit a financial service's Web site to update or confirm their personal information.

Naturally, the URL in the scam email sends the victim to a phony Web site, and when the victim has divulged his or her personal and credit card information, the scammer can make off with lots of cash -- and perhaps the victim's identity as well.

Later in this issue you'll read about how scammers are targeting Best Buy and eBay users with similar schemes, but this section describes the latest forged emails purporting to be from banks. Don't be fooled...

1. Citibank c2it

The scam: You're a user of the c2it money transfer service from Citibank, and you receive an email saying that your account has been placed on hold for security measure maintenance. You're asked to visit a Web site to confirm your account information.

Tip-offs that it's a scam: Not many. It's a professional looking email, with a Citibank logo. One tip is that the return header is from a Hotmail address. Another tip is that, if you click the submit button, the link takes the user to a site owned by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

2. Bank of America

The scam: You're a customer of the Bank of America, and you receive an email from custommersupport@bankofamerica.com with a subject line "Security Server Update." It informs you that because of a 'technical update' you need to reactivate your account by visiting a URL and re-entering your personal information.

Tip-offs that it's a scam: It contains many spelling and grammar errors. As well, the URL leads to a broken Web site (it has been taken down).

3. First Union Bank

The scam: You're a customer of First Union, and you receive an email from bankaccount@firstunion.com telling you that First Union has lost your online banking user name and password. The email tells you to go to a Web site and re-enter the information.

This one is particularly nasty, because simply visiting the Web site downloads a 'backdoor' Trojan program to your computer that can give scammers the ability to control your computer remotely.

Tip-offs that it's a scam: The URL given is a firstunion.com address. Wachovia.com is now the Internet address for both First Union and Wachovia customers.

How can you avoid getting scammed this way?

1. First, be calm. Most of us receiving an email like this might be alarmed that our account was frozen or our credit card information had been stolen. But by being calm, you can make sure you assess the situation rationally instead of just following the instructions in the email.
2. Recognize that legitimate companies never request this information via email. When you get this kind of email, realize the chances are excellent that it's a scam.
3. Go to the official Web site for the financial institution directly by typing its URL in the address bar of a Web browser, *not* by clicking any hyperlink in an email. If there is a real problem, it will most likely be on the home page.
4. If you're still uncertain, email or call the company's customer support department, and ask them to confirm the email's authenticity. They will then tell you what to do next.

AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing — using one website to drive traffic to another — is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play

History

The beginning

The concept of revenue sharing — paying commission for referred business — predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the World Wide Web was born in November 1994.

The consensus of marketers and adult industry insiders is that Cybererotica was either the first or among the early innovators in affiliate marketing with a cost per click program.^[2]

During November 1994, CDNOW launched its BuyWeb program. With this program CDNOW was the first non-adult website to introduce the concept of an affiliate or associate program with its idea of click-through purchasing. CDNOW had the idea that music-oriented websites could review or list albums on their pages that their visitors may be interested in purchasing. These websites could also offer a link that would take the visitor directly to CDNOW to purchase the albums. The idea for remote purchasing originally arose because of conversations with music label Geffen Records in the fall of 1994. The management at Geffen wanted to sell its artists' CDs directly from its website, but did not want to implement this capability itself. Geffen Records asked CDNOW if it could design a program where CDNOW would handle the order fulfillment. Geffen Records realized that CDNOW could link directly from the artist on its website to Geffen's website, bypassing the CDNOW home page and going directly to an artist's music page.

Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its associate program in July 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page.

When visitors clicked from the associate's website through to Amazon and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program, but its program was the first to become widely-known and serve as a model for subsequent programs.

In February 2000, Amazon announced that it had been granted a patent (6,029,141) on all the essential components of an affiliate program. The patent application was submitted in June 1997, which predates most affiliate programs, but not PC Flowers & Gifts.com (October 1994), AutoWeb.com (October 1995), Kbkids.com/BrainPlay.com (January 1996), EPage (April 1996), and several others.

Historic development

Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the Internet, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. According to one report, the total sales amount generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the UK alone. The estimates were £1.35 billion in sales in 2005. MarketingSherpa's research team estimated that, in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned US$6.5 billion in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources in retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation other than contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense.

Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling, and retail sectors. The three sectors expected to experience the greatest growth are the mobile phone, finance, and travel sectors. Soon after these sectors came the entertainment (particularly gaming) and Internet-related services (particularly broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from business-to-business marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as part of their mix. Of course, this is constantly subject to change.