Many a marketer has gotten his or her start as an affiliate marketer.  Aside from shuffling around in your attic to find something you can sell for a profit on eBay, affiliate marketing is your best bet for a zero-dollar start-up business in the Internet marketing industry.

All you need is a free ID that you can get on PayDotCom, Amazon, Commission Junction, LinkShare, or ClickBank (to name a few), and the ability to learn about free traffic sites and you can begin generating an affiliate income without investing a penny of your own money.

That said, it’s best if you save a few dollars here and there to invest in some tools that are going to make your Internet marketing efforts a whole lot easier.  For instance, you could sit around and brainstorm for five days to get a list of keywords – or, pay for a one-day subscription to WordTracker and harvest thousands of keywords in less than an hour.

You could also use nothing but web 2.0 social sites that are free, such as MySpace or Squidoo, to host your content and affiliate links.  Or, you could pony up the $9.95 one-time fee for a domain name and $6.95 a month for hosting and have your own business presence on the ‘net.

You can also spend days and weeks searching for information about how to do a task that will help you make money as an Internet marketer – such as how to master pay per click advertising.

Or, you can invest in a step-by-step guide t shorten your learning curve.  What most marketers suggest is to take a look at your budget and see what you have to invest.  If you have to start out with nothing, go for it – but set aside a few of your profits to pour back into your online efforts.

Everything you’ll invest in is built to ease your workload and hasten the procedures, so your income will increase faster and with less input from you as you learn to wield these tools in your favor.

Shawn Collins is one of the Top Super Affiliate’s in the world.  All these videos are under 2 minutes so take a look.

Activating your Affiliates

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWQ8oPSeY8w

Online and Offline Affiliates

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ9WIO-6Pkg

Finding Super Affiliates

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7-QBWVvm9s

Why would anyone go to an Affiliate Site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOlmiJp7siw

Start to have a proper understanding of Customer Lifetime Value because it’s key to the success of your business.

First you need to know  the difference between your Customers and List Members.  Your list members are everyone who joins your list.  Your customers are everyone who joins your list and buys one product from you.

Example of Life Time Value of your Customers:

 Your customers are your most valuable asset.  These are the buyers, and if someone is a buyer, they normally buy over and over again over time.

Say out of 5000 List Members, you have 2000 that have brought something from you.  You made $60,000 durning the year.  This means that each buying customer is worth $30 per year to you.

Here is an Example of the Life Time Value of your List Members:

Say in your first year you get 5000 members on your list.  Say you make $60,000 durning this year.  The value of your list member is then $12 for this year.

Now you know that for each person you get to join your list, you will make $12 for the next year.  

Right now I will be paying my Affiliates %50 on both One Time Offers.  When I know the life time value of my list subscribers, I might be able to raise the amount I am paying my affiliates, which in turn will get them to try and sell more.

Think of it this way.  If the life time value of my customer is $300, and the cost of my One Time Offer is $50.  Now %50 of the $50 OTO go’s to my affiliate, which is $25.  That means that the Life Time Value is $275 profit per customer for me.

Now if I want to get my Affliates to sell more, I know I can give my affiliates %100 of the OTO, or I have even heard of people giving more than %100 of the profit of the OTO to encourge their affiliates to sell more.

I give $50 for each affiliate sale, 100% but I still make $250 for the lifetime of each customer.

Always be thinking of ways to give your affiliates more, and in the end you will make more.

Steps you need to take when you join a Affiliate Program:

• Document the login url, username, and password.  Documentation is so very important.  If you want to keep your Online Business running and making money, you need to keep great documentation.
• Document your Affiliate ID or Link.  Same as above, documentation will save you time and money in the long run.One thing about Affiliate Links, they are just plane ugly period.  All those numbers and random letters, look bad.  Another thing about affiliate links is that someone can just remove the affiliate part of the link and go to the domain and buy the product.  This doesn’t hurt the product owner, even helps them as they get all the profit.  But it does hurt the affiliate, because he doesn’t get any commission for the work he has done.

  One of the best investments I have made since starting my Internet Marketing Business is Mike Filsaime’s “Power Link Generator”.  With this program you can take an affiliate URL like my Power Link Generator, https://paydotcom.com/r/72/tomshay/21375150/ and turn it into an URL like the one below.

  http://www.im-organizer.com/recommends/powerllinkgenerator

  Which one looks better to you?  Check out my Blog Post on  Product Review for Power Link Generator for more information.

• Blog – Write an Article to Post to your Blog.  I like to do Product Reviews, and plan on doing a lot more in the future.  Use the product for a while and see how well or bad it works.  Give people the truth, not just the hype.  Write about the good points and bad points of the product.
• Autoresponder – Setup a 3 series email for your email List.  Add at least three emails to your autoresponder series.  Most product owners have one or two emails already written for your use.  Its very important to read emails and I recommend that you change some of the wording, so your list knows its you who is writing them.
• Think about where else in your online business you can use your affiliate links for this product.  (bonus pages, download pages, banners for your blog or website pages, 404 error pages and many other uses)

Chances are you saw a generic page that said something like, “The page cannot be displayed,” or “Not Found,” or “The requested URL was not found on this server.”

This is what is more commonly known as the 404 Error Page.  It’s the page that shows up by default when someone ‘accidentally’ types in the address of the page they are looking for on your site incorrectly.

Now, in many cases, it truly happens by mistake.  However, in many other instances, people end up on this page because they are snooping around trying to look for your download page or thank you page without having to pay or opt-in.  Kind of shady, but people do it.

Why, not capitalize on it whether they are doing it purposely or they are truly ending up there by accident.  If you have your own website and it gets traffic, some of your visitors are ending up on that page.  Now, if they are seeing the generic message that their browser shows them when it happens, then you are not making good use of your web real estate.

http://www.im-organizer.com/recommends/404Secrets

Every page of your website can put money in your pocket.  Even your 404 error page.  You can customize that page just like any other page on your website.

Some ideas to utilize on that page include:

-Making an special offer at a discounted price.
-Having it be a squeeze page.
-Making it an Adsense page.
-Redirecting it to a related affiliate product.

Those are just a few of the many different, yet profitable types of ways you can make good use of your 404 error page.

It won’t make you rich, but it definitely will put some extra money in your account.  Maybe it will help you pay one of your bills, or you can just reinvest it into your business.

Either way, if you don’t customize this page, you can be leaving money on the table.  Having something for your visitors to see that end up on that page is extremely more beneficial to you then not having anything on that page.

Here’s to making good use of every page on your website.

http://www.im-organizer.com/recommends/404Secrets

If you want to learn even more effective methods to make the most of your 404 Error Pages, then make sure you visit:
http://www.im-organizer.com/recommends/404Secrets

Click Here to Download Free eBook “404 Secrets” by Jason Dinner No Signup Required

These rules will affect Internet Marketers in two ways.

First is that we need to disclose any connections we have with Product and Service Owners that we are promoting and endorsing.  If we are getting paid when a sale happens, we need to let the public know about it.  If we are getting a free product from the owner, and they want us to review it, we need to let the public know.

Second is in how we use testimonials in promoting our products.  As for testimonials, I am not sure how to think about this.  When someone makes a testimonial for your product, you need to explain what typical results are for your product.

This is going to be the hardest thing to do.  As an Internet Marketer, you know that most of the people who buy your products end up doing nothing with it.  So how do you get typical results for your product, if most people don’t follow your product to the letter.

Below is the link to the FTC”s PDF document explaining about the changes.

http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf

This affects all Internet Marketers and we all need to read this document.