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

Is SEO training important to a budding online entrepreneur? Absolutely! In fact, it’s probably one of the first things you should learn about, as it’ll help you with many aspects of launching and profiting from an online business on an ongoing basis. By learning various aspects of search engine optimisation, you can help increase the traffic levels your new site gets.

Those who are new to e-commerce stores or those who are just beginning to learn affiliate marketing have a lot of choices for promotion of affiliate products. You can create a site from scratch, set up a plug-in site, buy an established niche site, create Web 2.0 pages, set up a free blog or a self-hosted blog of your own, do article marketing, and so on.

Learning how to optimize whichever site / page you create to help you sell. Learning how to gain attention from search engines can equate to success.

Different techniques can bring great results. It’s wise to learn as much as you can about website optimization, both from an on page and off page perspective. There are many sources of SEO advice online that you can glean info from.

What You Can Learn From SEO Training

• How to get your site quickly indexed in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Lack of an SEO strategy can mean a lot longer between your launch date and a time when you’re getting consistent and productive traffic.

• How to set up your permalink structure so it benefits your SEO. Did you know that if you blog, for instance, your default settings could cost you valuable traffic that a few clicks of the mouse could result in your achieving?

• How to write content that’s optimized for words and phrases that can help you get traffic. Content writing can be a cash cow – if you know how to apply marketing and SEO tactics to get your content working for you.

• How to analyse your traffic statistics and use information about your existing traffic to help you get MORE traffic. Info in your reports can dramatically impact your business if used to your advantage.

• Getting your site optimized can help you and best of all, organic traffic is free. You’re not paying per click or per page impression!

There are a lot of ways to obtain traffic but the organic traffic method, through SEO, is the most cost effective and the most effective overall. This is because being listed among the top choices for very relevant phrases is going to provide you with more credibility than any of the sponsored ads on that page.

People inherently trust the organic result MORE than the sponsored ads. Getting the right SEO training and implementing what you learn can help you get found in those top spots.

What Kind Of SEO Training Should You Look For?

There are books, videos, courses, reports, and internet marketing programs that can help you to make the most of your on page and off page search engine marketing strategies so that you can get targeted traffic. Not all courses and books are created equally, though, so look for something that’s recognized by others in the industry as high-quality.

Read testimonials or reviews, look for guarantees, and look for trainer(s) that are reputable, and regularly examine and measure the sources you use for SEO knowledge so you’ll know if they’re effective or not.

Yes, SEO training is something new internet entrepreneurs should put on their to-do list but this should also be something ongoing as well. Rankings change on an ongoing basis, so you should consider learning and putting your newly learned skills into practice on an ongoing basis.

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

Website optimization is vital if you want to sell affiliate marketing products or make money with online advertising. By optimizing your website, you will get found by your target audience, save on advertising costs, and you could also become known as an authority in your industry.

Learn all you can about website optimization. Here are some areas you’ll want to delve into:

• Site layout
• Keywords
• Meta data
• Intra site linking
• Backlinks

Here’s more of a look into each of the above website optimization methods and why they’re important to affiliate marketing efforts:

Site Layout

By optimizing the layout of your site, you can improve your visitor’s experience. But you can also improve the search engines’ ability to crawl your site. A sitemap, search option, and good navigation / design can all help with search engine traffic and human traffic.

Keywords

People use words and phrases to find what they’re looking for. Optimize your site for strategic keywords and keyphrases and you could get organic traffic. People looking to buy what you’re selling could be referred to you by search engines that deem your site to be among the most relevant for that category.

Meta Data

Search engines do crawl everything on your website but see specific areas as vital for determining how to index each page. Meta data such as meta description, keywords, image tags, and permalink structure should all be carefully optimized.

Intra Site Linking

Linking on each page to other pages can help you sell affiliate products and can help you with other revenue-generators as well. If you link to the pages within your site, you are optimizing for the phrases in the meta data and content of the pages you link to. You also give your website visitors further info to delve into and that could help you to increase the sales with your visitors.

Backlinks

On page SEO is important but it shouldn’t end there. Off page SEO is also an important aspect of online marketing. Create links to your site from other sites and this could direct traffic and search engines to your site. Many of those backlinks could count as popularity votes and this could increase your page rankings, helping you to rise ahead of competitors in terms of perceived relevancy by the top search engines.

Create articles that link to your site, create social bookmarks, blog comments on relevant websites, article directory submissions, and try to get linked to by other relevant sites.

Website optimization is very important. It’s not a one-off task, either. It should be a regular part of your ongoing marketing efforts. It definitely bears fruit! The more time passes, the more you’ll learn, the more traffic you’ll achieve and chances are – the more profitable your site will become!

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

It’s nice to graduate from novice to success, isn’t it? If you want to succeed in affiliate marketing, blogging can certainly help you move from newbie to seasoned.

Read on for some tips on how and why blog marketing is a great way to sell affiliate products.

Why Blog?

Blogs are interactive. Blogs are quickly noticed by search engines. Blogs entries can be published often. People can easily link to them and comment on them. Blogs are a great way to communicate with others, to cover a lot of keyword phrases for your optimization strategy, and offer a great way to get noticed.

Blogs can be custom designed very easily. As an affiliate marketer, you can customize your sidebars to include plenty of money-making opportunities. You can make money with Adsense, affiliate products etc, and you can also use opt-in boxes to help you build a marketing list.

Within your individual blog posts you can target even further so that you can write around a specific product or idea. Within that post you can list other items for sale or other specific call to action choices. It’s easy to learn how to blog, blogs are easy to maintain, and you don’t have to be technical to manage your blog. These are just some of the reasons that blog marketing is a great vehicle for making money online.

Blog Marketing – Search Engine Optimization Tips

When you write and publish a new blog entry, you draw attention, particularly if you optimize those blog posts. Instead of putting up a static website that won’t get noticed unless changes are made to it, you bring traffic to your site on a continuous basis. Here are some search engine optimisation tips to help you optimize those blog posts:

• Keywords – Choose a few keywords for each blog post you write. Make sure you sprinkle them throughout the text, especially in the title, first paragraph, and in subheadings.

• Photos – Add a relevant photo to the blog. A picture really is worth 1,000 words and if you give the photo an alt image tag name that relates to keywords and phrases in your niche, this is another way to get search engines to take notice and index your site.

• Links – Link to other pages within your site. This is good practice, keeping visitors on your site longer and telling search engines that stop to visit the new content, exactly what the other pages on your site are about.

• Bookmarks – Add social bookmarking buttons, for example, you may like to use the Sexybookmarks or Sociofluid WordPress plugins. Encourage your readers to bookmark your new posts and share with the world. This can help you get more blog traffic.

• Write good content – Show people that your site is a valuable resource and they may come back more often, subscribe to you, recommend your site to others, and they could purchase something, too.

• Encourage people to subscribe – Subscribers to a blog will get new info delivered to them via their feed reader or via an email. This can help you build a following who buys from you and recommends you to others on a regular basis.

• Post new blog content often – The more often you post, the more often search engine spiders will stop by to see where they can list those new pages.

• Buy a domain name – Sure, free hosted blogs are useful for building links and directing traffic and you may even earn money from them. By all means, use them! But you’ll have more control if you also have a self hosted blog on its own domain so register a domain as well. You can even do the vast majority of your business on a blog. Choose a great blog theme, learn to optimize your blog, put together a solid affiliate marketing strategy to follow, and get going! Blogs and associated tools can help you build great communities and be great vehicles for helping you achieve the success you want.

Learn all you can about how to use blog marketing to sell affiliate products and regularly analyse your blog traffic statistics so you can see what’s working and what could be optimized further. Happy Blogging!

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

Article writing on a continuous basis is one of the smartest things an internet marketer can do for keeping two important things flowing: traffic and money.

Articles do help you profit. They draw traffic to your site, they provide search engine optimisation, and they help you to continually build your brand.

A well-crafted and optimised article strategy can help you continually expand your ability to make money online. Here are some tips to help you keep online content flowing:

Join Challenges

There’s nothing quite like a good challenge to get you motivated. Ezinearticles has one called #HAHD. HAHD stands for Hundred Articles Hundred Days. Imagine the traffic, rankings, and potential sales that could come from 100 different articles pointing to your website(s)? Not just will you get those links but you’ll get links through social media and through article syndication as well.

Article Syndication

Speaking of article syndication, make sure that while you continually publish content on your website, blog, etc. that you also submit original articles to sites that allow for syndication. By publishing content on other sites, you get a valuable backlink and an increased chance of being noticed by new potential clients.

Subscribe To Your topic

One of the challenges of continually posting valuable content is to come up with ideas. The internet is an endless source of inspiration but you don’t always have the time to sit and research for ideas.

Don’t dismay. Get the research spoon fed to you. Set up your feed reader to get fed blogs and articles on your favourite subjects and set up some Google Alerts so that when you’re ready to sit down and write, you’ve got plenty of inspiration and ideas at your fingertips.

Schedule Your Time

Maybe you don’t feel it’s practical to sit down and write an article every single day but could you spend a few hours one day each week? Some internet marketers have designated days per month for various activities and you could spend time producing content for your blogs, article marketing sites, and creating for Web 2.0 pages and then space distribution out over the month.

Online content sells. It sells your brand, it sells ideas, it persuades, and it helps you gain valuable organic search engine rankings. Strategise to create as much content as possible and you will start to see a steady flow of traffic and sales or affiliate marketing commissions.

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

Great web copy presents you and / or your company well to the public and it also converts visitors into customers. Here are some tips and strategies for writing web copy that converts to help you succeed with internet marketing.

Pique Curiosity

Curiosity is powerful online. It’s what makes them click. Get someone curious and they’ll want to dig deeper. Get them interested in your title, your meta description, your headline, and make sure that first paragraph convinces the reader that they’ll benefit from reading further.

Get To The Point

When talking to potential customers, you need to get their attention quickly. Web surfers tend to have a rather short attention span due to all that’s at their finger tips. For this reason, you need to get to the point quickly.

Sure, there are sales letters that are more than 5,000 words but until you’re a master copywriter, you’re probably best to try to say what you can a bit sooner than that. A good rule of thumb is to grab your visitors attention before they need to scroll – so they’ll want to scroll past the fold.

Solve A Problem

If you want someone to buy what you’re selling, solve a problem for them. Help them overcome a problem, save them time, or earn them money. That’s what sells products online. Be convincing in that you can help someone achieve one or more of those three things in your web copy and you could do well.

Show Them The Money

A lot of people are programmed to be wary of online promises so when writing web copy, be prepared to “show them the money” in terms of demonstrating proof that what you are saying has merit. Testimonials, illustrations, photos, videos, and other media can help immensely, so can a money back guarantee. Illustrate proof and eliminate risk and you could be laughing all the way to the bank.

Walk In The Shoes Of The Customer

Read your web copy to yourself to make sure it flows, looks formatted properly, and doesn’t contain errors. Try reading it in more than one browser and consider printing it to help you proofread as well.

Test And Tweak

The top method for writing web copy that converts is to test it out. Some internet marketers test and tweak several times before they find a winning combination. You might try running multiple landing pages and analysing results. Check your conversion rate, your organic SEO, your Google score (if using pay per click advertising), and ask some colleagues or internet marketing mentors for their opinion.

Don’t hesitate to read web copy and internet marketing guides that could help you tweak and refine your overall internet marketing strategy and help you learn the secrets of effective copywriting. Writing web copy that is high quality can be hard work but develop these skills and the fruits of your labour could be delicious!

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