Can part time hours result in full time online income? The answer is definitely yes!

Affiliate marketing need not take up all your working time. You just have to work smarter, not harder, by setting up the right systems with the right components and adding in a healthy dose of creativity.

Take the time to plan in advance and target your niche and you’ll have everything necessary to make a great full time affiliate income just by putting in a few hours a week.

Start With A Plan

No business can be successful without a plan in place. It doesn’t matter what you are doing to earn an income, you must have a blueprint that outlines your next steps and future goals. Don’t waste time and resources trying to figure out what to do when income suffers; do some research and develop your plan first, then stick to it.

Spend some time researching the various affiliate marketing programs available. There are many different levels of compensation available in addition to nearly unlimited products and services you can publish. This research will help you identify a good niche for your business, too.

Once you’ve got a good idea of where you’re going, investigate how you’re going to get there. Do a comparison of various website hosting plans. Figure out what key components you will need on your site and whether or not you want to include a blog (it is recommended that you do since the frequently updated content tends to drive traffic and give you a better ranking with the search engines). Decide on where affiliate links and advertisements will be placed and what SEO elements you want to include.

The next elements to include in your business plan are the types of marketing and promotional campaigns you will institute. These can be free or paid methods, depending on your beginning budget. Never fear, if you don’t have any start-up capital, there are lots of ways to advertise without spending money straight away.

When you’ve got your website up and running, be sure to create some informative and interesting content. How-to articles, video tutorials, and product reviews with photos are all good forms of content. If you’re pressed for time, write blog posts when time permits and schedule them in advance. No site will be successful if it doesn’t offer value to the visitors.

Choosing An Affiliate Marketing Program

As you research and select merchants for affiliate marketing, consider more than just the commission rate. Try to find products or services that you believe are high quality and useful. It’s very difficult to sell something you feel is questionable or offered by a less-than-reputable vendor. Look at other affiliates’ reviews of the program, too.

Whatever links you publish should be for products or services that fit into your niche. Use your own interests and hobbies to give you good ideas for a topic. It’s easier to become viewed as an authority on a subject if it is something with which you are intimately familiar.

When you’ve got your plan and your affiliate marketing programs in place, use SEO techniques to drive traffic. It’s going to take some time for your website to be crawled by search engine bots, so do be patient. While you’re waiting for the pages to be indexed, be sure to spread the word through social media and social bookmarking.

The beauty of being a part-time affiliate is that you only have to setup your system one time. After that, only occasional maintenance and continually making connections through social networking is necessary.

Yes, you really can make a full time affiliate income on a part-time work schedule!

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012

When you are earning an income via an affiliate marketing program, why allow the commissions to stop after one sale? How about a program that provides commissions over the lifetime of an active customer?

A passive and recurring affiliate commission from a single referral is one of the easiest ways to earn money for months, and even years, to come.

Finding Recurring Affiliate Commission Programs

There are many merchants that offer a compensation system based on subsequent sales, subscriptions, and upgrades that allow you to keep making money after the first commission.

Of course, the type of vendor you are publishing links for will determine the type of commission plan in place. For instance, an online dating service is a good example of a merchant who might offer a recurring affiliate commission program. Your referral initially signs up for a limited time subscription but if they keep renewing, you should be able to earn subsequent commissions.

There are many other service vendors who may provide the same such as ongoing training providers, membership sites, clubs, advertising agencies, software developers, and some website hosting companies.

Others Forms of Recurring Affiliate Commissions

Not only service providers offer a recurring affiliate commission scheme. There are other ways of creating passive income through online marketing.

One way to keep the money coming in is to write articles for an online aggregation site, such as Associated Content or Helium. You write one article, promote it heavily, and receive a commission based on number of hits over the lifetime of its online availability. Write on a popular topic and keep it fresh by submitting to social bookmarking sites over time. Remember to post links to the article on your website or blog and through your social media accounts, too.

Joint ventures, outside of affiliate marketing programs, are another way to augment recurring income. Create a partnership with a non-competing niche company and negotiate a deal that allows you to share a percentage of all current and future sales that result from your promotional efforts.

Review sites often offer recurring affiliate commissions, too. You are paid for writing product reviews about a particular product or service on your site. Sometimes you are required to write the review; at other times you merely have post the review with a link to the merchant site.

Don’t let your affiliate marketing efforts go to waste. Do some research and find companies that allow you to keep making passive income for an unlimited period of time through a recurring affiliate commission structure. With enough of these programs in place, you might never have to work at trading your time for dollars again!

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012

Are you earning a full-time income from your affiliate marketing? If not, why? This is one of the easiest forms of creating a passive income stream that you can find – and you can do it working part-time hours from anywhere! So, if you’re not achieving massive success just yet, consider these tips to increase affiliate marketing income.

The Basics

Anyone who is interested in affiliate marketing needs three things:

• A website
• An automation service
• Great content that drives traffic

Those are the basics, really. Those three components are the basic building blocks of any successful affiliate marketing business.

The basics are all well and good, but what tools are available to drive your success?

Autoresponders

A good one is autoresponder software. This is really vital in order to build a hefty database. Your first goal is to gain subscribers to your site via an opt-in form. This allows you to contact your visitors in the future and communicate special offers, new products, and the like. Your database allows you to develop direct relationships with prospective customers.

While there are some free software programs available, you are better off spending a bit of money and purchasing a full-featured autoresponder that can handle your opt-ins, send frequent emails, and track click-throughs. AWeber is one of the more popular pieces of software available.

Staying in frequent contact with your email marketing list is another key component to earning higher commissions through affiliate marketing. The more times you can entice a subscriber to return to your website, the more chances you have of gaining a sale.

It also gives the opportunity to contact each subscriber’s circle of contacts. Provide a “share with a friend” link in your email messages and perhaps even offer an incentive for doing so.

Custom Error Pages

The second tool is an error page. What happens if a visitor uses a broken link or reaches a page with problematic code? The default text they see is 404 File Not Found: This page cannot be found. Contact system administrator. Obviously, this isn’t helping to increase affiliate marketing income for you at all.

How about changing that message to something like: Sorry but this page isn’t available. Please accept a free gift for your troubles (then use your auto responder software to opt the visitor in and send an ethical bribe). Or Sorry but there appears to be a problem with this page. Perhaps you would enjoy reading one of these posts (include list of posts).

Pretty cool, huh? This keeps the visitor on your site and just might turn them into a subscriber (and now you know how important your subscribers are).

Honest Product Reviews

Another suggestion is to offer honest product reviews of whatever you are promoting. Everyone wants something that will solve a problem, make them money, make their life easier, or provide entertainment. Show, don’t tell, how the products you are promoting do this. In fact, a video review is even better than a written post.

There is lots of money to be made with this form of online marketing. These basic but effective tips should help to increase affiliate marketing income over the long term.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012

Referral marketing is another form of affiliate marketing, but instead of getting paid for driving sales, you are compensated a flat rate for providing referrals that augment a company’s database.

The referrals become prospective clients who are moved down the sales funnel. Referrals, on average, tend to pay less than traditional affiliate marketing programs, but this type of passive income can be easier, and quicker, to produce results.

Some companies also offer a bonus if the referrals you send their way turn into paying customers. Still, others work with a non-monetary compensation scale, offering such things as discounts, vouchers, or prizes to those who produce qualified referrals.

How And Why Referral Marketing Works

Success with referral marketing comes from using your circle of acquaintances. Referral marketing has long been a very successful form of gaining new leads and clients. People are much more likely to trust those whom they already know. Aren’t you more apt to trust the opinions and referrals of family members and friends? It’s simply human nature.

Numerous recent studies have shown that particularly with the explosion of online social media, the majority of consumers who are in the market for a particular product or service will first seek the counsel of trusted contacts, their “sphere of influence”, before using other methods to determine the best vendor or the highest quality item.

Making Referral Marketing Successful

One of the earliest examples of a successful referral marketing campaign is Hotmail. When it first became available, anyone who signed up for a free Hotmail email account had a small line added to the bottom of each outgoing message that said “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com”. The more people who created an account, the further this short little message virally spread. These were actually referrals since they signed up via a link from an email contact.

This campaign worked incredibly well due to the key components of any successful referral marketing campaign:

• A free giveaway to entice prospects.
• The offer is easy to spread (with the hopes of going viral).
• The campaign is scalable (allowing the vendor to meet expected or unexpected demand).
• It uses common human motivators such as greed, popularity, or the desire to belong to a group.
• Uses networking to reach the prospect’s circle of influence.
• The message is spread vertically as well as horizontally (to other websites as well as other people).

So for you, as the affiliate marketer, to make referrals successful, you can put the same components in place. Your freebie could be a how to manual, a discount coupon, or special offer provided by the merchant. Post it on your web page or blog and allow it to spread further by providing social bookmarking buttons so your visitors can share it with others (always using a unique URL to track your efforts).

Send an email message to your full database that includes a clickable link to the merchant’s URL. Post the link to the freebie via your social media updates and also on some of the top bookmarking sites.

Don’t forget to use offline referrals, too. A simple business card with the unique URL to the offer is an easy piece of collateral to keep on hand and pass around at any event.

Referral marketing is just one more way to monetise your website and augment your internet marketing income. Why not give it a try?

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012

In recent years, online affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular ways to earn money online. But have you ever stopped to think about why? Perhaps you’ve always shrugged off the idea of affiliate marketing as nothing more than a scam, a typical get-rich-quick scheme. But that is not the case.

There are many legitimate affiliate marketing programs out there and there are plenty of people who are making money from affiliate marketing. There is a reason these programs remain so popular! Let’s examine why affiliate marketing programs work so well.

Minimal Responsibility

Firstly, the nature of online affiliate marketing programs allows their affiliates to avoid some of the negative aspects of working online that other cyber-workers experience. For one thing, you don’t need to have a winning idea or a first-rate product of your own to promote; you are by nature selling someone else’s idea and earning a commission from your sales. You are merely charged with the task of driving traffic to the vendor’s sales page by way of your affiliate link.

All other business aspects like customer service, research and development, packing and shipping, etc., are the responsibility of someone else. Your entire role is to generate targeted traffic. When you own your own online business, you are responsible for all aspects of your business. If you want to make money without the headaches, affiliate marketing online might be a good choice for you.

High Commissions

Next, many online affiliate programs these days are offering very high commission rates to their affiliates, sometimes in excess of 40 or 50 percent! (in some cases much more). Traditional full-commission sales does not earn for the salesperson that which might be considered a fortune, but affiliate marketing programs can be very lucrative for their affiliates.

If you are good at driving the right kind of traffic to the vendor’s sales page, you can end up earning a very nice living.

Time Factor

Finally, affiliate marketing programs offer affiliates a great deal of professional flexibility. It takes very little time to set up your marketing campaign, especially if you sell products without a website. This means that even if you have a day job, children, or other responsibilities you can set yourself up to start earning money right away.

Also, you can make adjustments to your campaign game plan mid-stream, as you start to get a picture of what’s working and what isn’t. That means that you don’t have to waste time on efforts that aren’t making money and pursue the ones that are.

And on top of all of that, because your affiliate marketing campaign can be pursued in your spare time (although the more time you dedicate to it, generally the more money you’ll make) you can use it to earn extra income in addition to your primary income source or other money-making avenues you may want to pursue.

It’s easy to see, then, why so many people have turned to affiliate marketing as a way to generate income. Legitimate affiliate marketing programs are around; all you have to do is look. Affiliate marketing has proven to be one of the best ways to make money online and if you want to build yourself a nice little online business that’s quite simple to operate, it is definitely worth your time to at least give it a try.

Ready To Get Serious About Affiliate Marketing?

If you are serious about succeeding online by making an income from selling affiliate products, I invite you to take a look at my comprehensive Affiliate Marketing Mastery Homestudy Program.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012

A lot of newbies to the world of affiliate marketing don’t realise that there are quite literally dozens of ways of making affiliate commissions.

One often overlooked way is the newsletter or mailing list method. A newsletter / mailing list can help you market in a very targeted way.

By building a mailing list, you can have a list of people to communicate with directly. Instead of targeting new business exclusively through organic SEO, pay per click, and through social media optimisation, you can get right in front of people who you’ve qualified as interested in buying whatever it is that you are selling.

What Can You Do With Your Mailing List?

• Email marketing – Launching a product, got a special deal, fire sale, or promotion going on? Send an email out to your list. It can direct them to your “buy now” page.

• Write a newsletter – Weave interesting articles into a weekly or monthly newsletter that intrigues people into buying from you.

• Make an e-course – Set up a weekly course that helps your customers learn something. There may be products or services that go along with that course that you can benefit from. And, giving that value can also help you build trust so that future sales can happen.

• Set up an autoresponder series – Through a mailing list, you can walk potential customers through a sales pipeline repeatedly. As long as they remain opted in to receiving communications from you, you can link them to various sets of messages, such as: invites to courses / product launches / webinars, offers, white papers, and more.

With mailing lists, another great benefit is that success can be measured. You can utilise tools that help you understand read rates, click throughs, and other statistics so that you can hone your skills and tweak your approach.

Marketing through direct emails and through autoresponder series is just one of the many ways you can make money online. There are many ways of building a mailing list and there are some do’s and don’ts. Learn all you can about successful list marketing techniques and this can be another way to build credibility and create income and wealth.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012

There are countless free blogging and publishing platforms online. In many cases, a lot of people who are new to affiliate marketing do find success in earning generous affiliate commissions without ever having a website.

So.. is affiliate marketing without a website or blog possible?

That depends. For the most part, yes, it sure is. There are great tools out there that you can take advantage of. You may not get all the revenue from ads and you may not get all the power over design but what you do get is: established traffic, existing pagerank, at times there is a built-in community that you can take advantage of, and you get more ways to build links, gather followers, and improve your online presence.

Affiliate Marketing Without A Website – Examples

• Building traffic to a free hosted blog with links and advertisements through your content and social media marketing as well as off page SEO strategies.

• Creating HubPages, Tumblr pages, and Squidoo lenses and directing traffic to a free blog that acts as a landing page with links and banners and even an opt-in.

• Using social media tools to drive traffic to your affiliate links.

• Using free tools that let you create opt-in lists for newsletter and email marketing.

Kicking Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts Up A Notch

While a lot of newcomers to affiliate marketing get started exclusively with free online tools, the top 10% or more of earners will say that you need your own self hosted blog or website to take your earnings to the next level, though.

It takes a lot of work to build consistent and passive income and when you use free tools, you are relinquishing some control and leaving some money on the table because you’re giving away part of your profit potential.

Many will use bum marketing techniques, such as article marketing, and directing to affiliate links from free blogs such as Blogger and WordPress.com exclusively for a while but eventually they look for their own piece of online real estate that they’ll have 100% control over. While there are great free publishing and blogging tools out there, the most successful internet marketers use them in conjunction with some tools that require an investment.

Many of even the most successful affiliate marketing pros will use free blogs and other free tools for multi-way linking strategies and for SEO purposes to build rankings for their landing pages and blogs. They will use as many tools as possible, but in the end they will direct traffic to their own self hosted blog or website so they have maximum control over their income and their success.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012

There are dozens of social media tools that can help you make more money from affiliate marketing. Here are some of the great ones that you should definitely be using to your advantage.

1. Twitter

Twitter offers great SEO potential for links that you post as well as the potential to find new followers. If you’re an avid tweeter, your follower list will grow. Rules of Twitter success include: follow and be followed, quid pro quo, and, POST. Get into conversations, re-tweet interesting links, talk to others, be helpful, and you can definitely benefit from this great tool.

Even a few minutes a day on Twitter can make a difference. And, you’ll find many tools that you use can automate Twitter posting for you so integration can save you time, like SocialOomph for example.

2. Facebook

Facebook offers some great opportunities to connect with others. Not only can you share links and start Facebook fan pages and discussion groups, but you can share a bit of yourself with your audience.

People like buying from people rather than companies in many cases. This works particularly well if you are in an affiliate marketing niche that’s built on relationships and trust.

3. FriendFeed

The great thing about FriendFeed is that it feeds in a lot of your activities from other online sites. In reality, you don’t even need to login often to benefit from the tool because it feeds your other social activities into this site, helping you from an SEO perspective as well as from a viral marketing perspective.

4. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon gives you sites to look at based on your surfing activities. Set categories you want to see and vote up or down to tell the tool what other things to show you. Categorize your links so that people who are interested in those topics will stumble upon your links. If they find a link stumbleworthy, they’ll vote it up.

This tool has great potential for helping your links go viral. And, you can build a follower base and share links directly with those people as well.

5. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is definitely a more professional than casual networking tool so some wouldn’t expect to market to customers with it.

But… LinkedIn does several things for you. It establishes you as a professional, it allows you to present your professional abilities, it helps you network and connect with other professionals, and offers you social media tools as well.

With microblogging, networking and industry discussion groups, RSS feeds, question/answer sections, and a place to give and get referrals, it’s a great tool for helping you connect and establish yourself. Just think of the increased potential of your prospective customers looking you up and seeing a professional-looking profile with dozens of professional connections and recommendations.

There are dozens of social media tools that various affiliate marketing gurus and success stories credit with helping them get traffic, get followers, and make sales. Dabble with a few and then, track your results to help you see what works well for you.

I would love to connect with you on any of the above social media sites, you can locate my profiles by clicking on the following links: Twitter Facebook Friendfeed StumbleUpon LinkedIn. What social media tools do you find the most success with?

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012

How can you use YouTube to your advantage with affiliate marketing? This is a free and powerful tool and unleashing its potential could definitely help you succeed with our online business.

YouTube is one of the most popular websites online, millions of people use it daily. They use it from their desktops and with smart phone technology, more than ever are using it on the go. In fact, new home entertainment systems come with YouTube so you can even market to people via video marketing while they’re on their sofa!

Let’s look at some ways you can use YouTube for affiliate marketing…

Tips On Using YouTube For Affiliate Marketing

• Create videos to direct people to your website. Your website URL on the video or commentary by you telling people where to learn more, get free info, get a free e-book,etc. will help you. Do commercials, presentations, tutorials, etc. Videos can also go viral so creativity could definitely help!

• Embed videos on your website. Video blogging, or vlogging, can help you attract an audience, especially if you have charisma. Not only will the video help your blog’s SEO but it also helps you appeal to people that prefer visuals rather than reading articles.

• Video testimonials. If people post video testimonials on your site or landing page, this is a good thing. The testimonials can also be posted on YouTube so that people could find them there and link through to your site.

• Link videos to your PPC (pay per click) campaign. Instead of sending ad clickers to a long sales page, a video sales letter could have more punch.

• Create videos for your mailing list and / or membership program. Webinars can be recorded and posted as well so that if you’re marketing via video, you can share it repeatedly.

Using YouTube for affiliate marketing can definitely help to get more traffic and increase sales, don’t forget to use social tools to market your videos as well. Embed them in your Web 2.0 pages, social bookmark them and spread the word via social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012

Last week we talked about the importance of establishing trust in affiliate marketing. You want clients to trust you. If they don’t, they’re not likely to buy from you and your affiliate marketing efforts will be for naught.

One way to help that process is to give them background information when they look for information about you. Many people who buy products online will take the time to research who they are buying from before they click the “Pay Now” button.

It has become part of our nature to be distrustful and consumer groups have taught us that we ask questions and do research in order to be savvy consumers. You do have a degree of control over what people find out when they search for you; provided, of course, that you have done nothing to warrant a bad online reputation.

Optimising Your Name As An Affiliate Marketer

Here are some suggestions for optimising your name so that people who “Google” your name will find good things:

• LinkedIn – Professional profile sites, such as LinkedIn often rise to the top of search engines when people search for names. This site allows you to demonstrate yourself as a professional and link your name with other professionals who can recommend your services.

• Facebook – Facebook ranks high in Google and by having a Facebook account, you give people an opportunity to connect with you directly. Conduct yourself professionally on this site and it can be used to market your affiliate products as well as to establish yourself as a trustworthy professional.

• Twitter – Twitter is another site that ranks high when people have an account with their name in it. Your Twitter profile can establish you as an expert in your field (especially if you write your bio that way) and people can check out your conduct by reading your last dozen or so updates. This is a good reminder to act professionally on social media sites as people who may be thinking about buying something from you may look you up on these sites to see how you conduct yourself.

• Article directories. If you have an ezinearticles profile, for example, this can often come up on Page 1 of results when people look for information about you. Not only will they find a professional looking profile but your profile can contain links to articles that pre-sell people and further establish you as an expert on your subject matter.

Take the time to search for your name on the top few search engines and if you search your local Google as well (google.com.au if you’re in Australia, for instance), you can see what you may look like to the eyes of a potential customer. If you don’t find much, get working at optimising your name.

Search engine results pages change on an ongoing basis so it’s also prudent to keep an eye on those first few pages to see what turns up. The above list is just a few of the many social media tools and websites that can help you with optimising your name and company name. If you find anything negative, get to the root cause of “why” so you can balance a negative review by seeking to improve and get more positive reviews in the future.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketer
Learn Affiliate Marketing with Year Of The Affiliate © 2012