The affiliate program is also known as associate program and is increasingly becoming popular form of online marketing, where you pay a small commission to your affiliates for promoting your business. To make this affiliate program successful you have to recruit the right affiliates. If you run your own affiliate program you know that it's not very easy to find good and performing affiliates. However, there are some tips that will help you recruit much more active affiliates and keep them happy, so they will promote your products even more. Here are the 8 best ways to recruit affiliates:

1) Use Article Marketing to Recruit Affiliates

One of the very cost effective and simple ways to recruit affiliates is article marketing. You can either write the article by yourself or recruit someone to write attractive and promising article focussing on the product or service that you provide and post them on article submission sites like Ezine, Submityourarticle and much more. The main advantage of article marketing is that only those who are interested in your product or service will read those articles and if you have successfully attracted them then you have gained a right affiliate for your business. This method can even attract potential customers.

2) Write Reviews about Products to Attract Potential Affiliates

Writing reviews is another very effective way to attract affiliates. All you have to do is write some reviews about the products you promote. You can generate a large traffic to your site by this way. While writing reviews try to make it unbiased i.e., you shouldn't advertise yourself too much. The review should be very interesting and it would be even better if you do some comparison between similar products. Finally you can post the link of your affiliate page at the end of the review. So, the interested candidates will follow it and become your affiliate.

3) Post Comments in Related Forums to Signup Affiliates

Another very easy way to attract affiliates is to post comments on public forums where people discuss about your product and/or are interested in your product. The public forums have discussion groups where they post ideas and their opinions on a thread. Usually these forums allow you to add your signature below your comment. You can use this portion for advertising your product or can link it to your website's affiliate page. If the comment that you post is interesting then you can expect more affiliates for your program. This method is very simple and less time consuming where you can attract the affiliates by just writing some three or four sentences.

4) Empower Social Networking Websites to Grow Your Affiliate Database

Social networking sites have great potential for attracting right affiliates for you. Today more or less who ever have access to internet has membership in any of the social networking site like Orkut, Yahoo groups, Myspace, etc. So, you can have large coverage by promoting your business on social networking sites and you can find the right affiliates for your affiliate program. On such social networking websites you can find friends of the similar interests, etc. This way you can even make business contacts and recruit affiliates for your online business.

5) Social Bookmarking Websites Can Be Used to Your Benefit

Social bookmarking like digg, del.ico.us and others are an excellent way for affiliate marketing. When a visitor visits your site and finds it interesting then he can bookmark it. Then others do the same and it creates an exponential amount of visits. In this large group of visitors there will be some right affiliates for your site. This way you can recruit a lot of affiliates easily.

6) Make Your Affiliate Program Page Attractive and Appealing for Affiliates

Now you might have attracted potential affiliates to your site successfully using any of these methods but making them to sign up as your affiliate depends on the quality of your site. The site should be appealing and shouldn't make them feel that you may be a spammer. Otherwise you risk losing the potential affiliates hence, make your site more appealing and attractive. Keep the content well organized and make the sign up procedure simple and less time consuming. Try to explain them the benefits of your affiliate program in a polite manner, using bold letters or yellow background for the text nowadays are used mostly by spammers so, your affiliate may move away. If your website is good in all means then all the visits made by potential affiliates will increase your affiliates count. If you don't know how to properly design a good looking website, just hire a freelancer and he/she will do all the work for you really cheaply.

7) Have You Considered a 2-Tier Affiliate Program?

To make your affiliate program more successful you must at least use 2-tier affiliate program. Where an affiliate will get more benefit for recruiting another affiliate. This type of program will encourage your affiliates to great extent and you can get more affiliates without wasting any resource, it will be done by your affiliates themselves. Empower your affiliates to recruit even more affiliates for you!

8) Find Out Your Competitors And Attract Their Affiliates

The best affiliates for your affiliate program are the existing affiliates of your competitors or other successful sites. But unfortunately there is no secret technique which can help you to get them. Instead you can try to trace out the methods used by your competitor and there is a large probability that these affiliates may be even visiting those areas like articles or social bookmarking sites and others. Just try to pin point the areas like the thread used by your competitor on a forum and post your comment as a reply to his post, hence you can get the attention of those potential affiliates.

These are some of the very potential and best ways of getting affiliates for your affiliate program. You may do some research based on your own experience on these methods to get even better results. We at Click2Sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) always ready to help. Sell your products online, recruit affiliates, accept payments instantly. Recruit affiliates successfully and skyrocket your income!

Affiliate marketing is growing by leaps and bounds and it seems there is no stopping it. This form of marketing has become so vital for every business that without it a business is nothing less than dead. Affiliate marketing multiplies the internet presence of a business's products or services in the market by encouraging other internet sites to promote them. It enhances the exposure of the products and services of a business, thus also improving the efficiency of its overall advertising costs.

A natural focus of any marketing initiative is to ensure that more and more number of surfers click onto a site and also become active buyers. There are various ways to promote your site through other online channels using affiliate marketing such as including banners that affiliates can display on their sites or developing email templates that can be sent by affiliates to the database of their users.

An affiliate works by way of developing traffic by taking care of the individual needs of each user and customizing their content to prospective customers' requirements and expectations before facilitating delivery of a call into action through to your site. The interesting part is that customers that are diverted to your site have already made up their mind about what you are offering, and therefore are very likely to make a purchase. This way you get a pre-qualified customer, and all of you have to do is make a purchase bill. All this has been possible only because of affiliate marketing.

Contacts that are developed through affiliate marketing are very important because they are derived from places where your business would have not reached or would have reached after having to part with valuable time and money through conventional channels.

Now the big question is who should be hired to carry out affiliate marketing for your business and the answer is it should be the best in the industry. Logic applied here is simple. An affiliate that understands your needs and has a trusted and close relations with the major operators so that it is ideally placed to run is affiliate marketing services should be the one you should have

The first step in becoming a super affiliate is not to own a 5 figure business, it is to adopt the super affiliate mindset. Of all 100 people who want to earn big money online, only 5 of them actually achieve their goals and earn the super affiliate income. Why is this so? Is that affiliate marketing does not work? No, it is not affiliate marketing does not work; it is you that did not work.

Do not blame on other factors if you fail to achieve your goals. You are the one that is going to shape your environment. Therefore, your mindset plays a very important role in transforming you into a super affiliate. Adopt these top 3 super affiliate mindset below and I believe that you will earn the super affiliate income real soon.

1. Treat your affiliate business like a real business. The problem with most people is that they do not treat their affiliate business like a real business; instead, they treat it like a hobby. If you treat it like a hobby, then you will earn the hobby income. You have to be serious and treat your affiliate business as a real business. The moment you treat it like a business, you will start to operate from a different frame of mind, this is what is going to transform you into a super affiliate.

2. Be committed in achieving success for your affiliate business. No matter what business you do today, you have to be committed in it. The number one reason people fail to achieve their desired income is because they are not committed in making their goals come true. Are you willing to do whatever it takes to make your goals come true? Are you willing to stay up late and spend extra 3 hours into building your online business everyday? Are you 100% committed?

3. Never give up in your affiliate marketing business. Most people will switch affiliate programs the moment they find it hard to make money out of it. If you did every right, you just have to stick with a few affiliate programs and they can make you super rich. However, people want instant result, they want to see and make cash fast in their life. This is what makes them keep on switching affiliate programs to promote the moment they come across a better offer. If you keep on giving up on the current affiliate program that you are promoting, you will never achieve what you want because you are actually wasting your time. Give yourself at least a few months to really stick and promote an affiliate program before decide whether it works.

Remember, it is the mindset that separates a super affiliate from an ordinary one. Thus, if you want to be a super affiliate today, you must first start from yourself, start by changing your mindset to the super affiliate mindset.

Discover The Answer To The 10 Most Common Affiliate Marketing Management Questions

1. Is affiliate marketing right for my business?

Affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful and effective means of gaining new customers, regardless of your product or service. Affiliate marketing exposes your business to new customers and can get you out of your marketing rut. Additionally, when you initiate an affiliate marketing campaign, you’re in control. You determine the commission rate you pay and pay only when your affiliates make a sale. It’s a no loss operation for you because you only pay when a sale is made.

2. What are the startup costs?

When you start an affiliate program you have the choice of handling the operations yourself or having it managed by an affiliate network. The costs for either choice are reasonable and generally start around a few hundred dollars. Additionally, as a business owner don’t forget that many of your costs may be tax deductible. To start an affiliate marketing program in house, costs will include:

Affiliate management software

Affiliate marketing support including a website that answers affiliate questions and a means for them to contact you if any issues arise.

Affiliate marketing materials including banner ads, copy, coupons, and promotional content.

An affiliate marketing contract agreement

Tracking software to track cookies, click throughs, payments, etc…

If you choose to hire an affiliate network to handle your program they generally charge a flat fee or a percentage of what you pay out each month.

3. How much time will it take out of my workday/workweek?

Most experts agree that it will take you about an hour and a half each day to manage your affiliate program. They also recommend you to budget more time in the first few months of your program, approximately two to three hours a day. Even the most efficient affiliate managers spend about 45 minutes a day managing their affiliate program.

Professional affiliate managers generally spend an average of 40-80 hours a month dedicated to managing, tracking and promoting your affiliate program.

4. Should I use an affiliate network?

Do you have an extra 3 hours a day for the next two or three months? Do you have an hour a day to devote to managing your program after the initial three month program is complete? An affiliate network, while it may be a bit more expensive on the outset, can help you focus your time on other profit generating tasks. Additionally, an affiliate network can help expose your affiliate program to a wide variety of experience affiliates, which means more money in your bottom line and more exposure overall.

That being said, there are a tremendous number of effective in-house solutions including some you’re likely already familiar with like 1shoppingcart.com and affiliatepro.com. These programs will help you stay 100% in control of your affiliate program and are effective at managing your program.

5. How should I pay affiliates? What type of commission works best?

This is a very important decision because it not only affects your profits, the right commission rate will help you recruit top-notch affiliates. The general rule of thumb is to set your default commission rate at a rate you can afford to pay while leaving room for time limited commission increase offers, promotions, and private offers. For example, if you can afford to pay 50% of your gross profit margin, pay 25% instead and tier it so that after a sales goal is reached they earn 30% or you can bump it up to 50% during the holidays or during typically low sales times.

6. How do I recruit affiliates?

Your customers may be your best affiliates. After all, they already appreciate and enjoy your products or services. A simple link on your website is a good place to start. Here are a few ways to find quality affiliates:

Online forums. These are excellent places to meet and greet and connect with like minded individuals. They’re also a good resource for affiliates who are interested in, motivated, and qualified to sell your products and services. Using a forum, you can announce your affiliate program. Be careful to not ‘sell’ on the forum as most forums look down on this and may kick you off. Additionally, you can include a link to your affiliate site in your signature.

Find websites that link to your competitors and approach them about being an affiliate for you. Likewise, you can find affiliates using your favorite search engine and contact them about joining your program.

One last way is to join an affiliate network or become listed on an affiliate directory. This will ensure that affiliate marketers who are searching for new products and services to promote. However, keep in mind that many beginner marketers also seek products and services to promote via affiliate directories and they may lose interest and motivation before they ever make a sale. This isn’t a strong deterrent because they don’t get paid unless they make a sale, however it should be noted.

7. What is the best way to communicate with my affiliates?

Email is the general tool of choice, which makes an auto responder a fantastic tool for basic emails like the welcome email, introducing promotions, coupons, sending links and banner ads, and answering Frequently Asked Questions. It is also generally advisable to have an email address, fax number, and telephone number available for when affiliates have questions that are not answered by your frequently asked questions web page or when they simply want to speak with you.

8. How do I motivate affiliates?

Money motivates no doubt about it. That being said, affiliates are also motivated by feeling that they’re important to you. This means when they ask for your time, you give it. Additionally, promotions, bonuses, prizes, contests, and commission increases are all tools to motivate and inspire affiliates. Constant communication, like sending a weekly or monthly Ezine, will also help remind your affiliates that you’re out there and invested in their success.

9. Do I need to hire an affiliate manager?

The answer to this question really depends on your needs. How large is your company? Do you have the time to manage your program? Do you have the skills to manage your program? An affiliate manager is the person that:

Recruits affiliates

Communicates with affiliates

Develops, tracks, and reports on promotions

Develops programs to enhance affiliate program

Motivates affiliates

Tracks sales and pays affiliates

Monitors your competition

These are all extremely important functions and if you have the time to handle them yourself, excellent! If you do not, then consider hiring an affiliate manager.

10. How do I find/hire an affiliate manager?

Outsourcing an affiliate manager is fairly easy to do. There are hundreds available with a quick online search. You can ask associates, inquire at online forums, or post an advertisement seeking someone to fill the position. Depending on the complexity of your affiliate program, you could consider a well qualified virtual assistant for the job. The skills your affiliate manager will need are:

Organizational skills

Communication skills

Attention to detail

Knowledge of online business, internet marketing, and basic ecommerce operations

Basic html and graphic experience are a plus

Because they’re going to be representing you, you’ll want to make sure they’re personable.

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Today, many of us want to pack up our jobs and be our own bosses. The idea of working for you attracts many. However, the reality of making it happen soon stops most. In fact the vast majority of us cannot get a business off the ground due to 2 main factors; the first being money and the second being risk.

Starting even a small business takes a fair amount of money. You need to buy or rent premises, purchase your stock and equipment and pay staff if you have them. You will also have other outside expenses such as advertising.

Risk is the factor that kills most businesses off. Even if you’re lucky enough to get the capital to start, nearly 90% of all small businesses fail in the first year. If yours is one of the lucky ones, you have to keep reinvesting your time and money to build up the businesses reputation. It could be anywhere from 5-7 years before any significant profit is seen. Most of us cannot wait that long which is what makes affiliate marketing such an attractive offer.

Affiliate marketing involves you, working as an affiliate for a merchant or company. You sell either goods or services and you’re paid on how much you produce. There are no costs and no risk. You put in what you choose and are rewarded accordingly.

Running an affiliate marketing business is challenging. You’ll have to work very hard to build it up. However, you’ll be rewarded for your hard work not someone else. Getting an affiliate marketing program going may seem difficult. The truth is it is down to you and how much you want to put in. There is no sure fire way to success but there are some good tips that you can follow to make you affiliate marketing scheme as successful as possible.

There are literally thousands of programs for you to choose from. However, to get started you may want to choose something that you are familiar with. This product or service may not be the hottest thing on the current market or make you a millionaire, but you will come off more confident and sincere with something you know and believe in.

This will also help when it comes to creating your site. Something familiar will allow you to be personal and creative. Trying to create a site around something you know little about will soon become boring and tedious.

Working with something familiar will also give you the some experience in the program. You can always expand at a latter time when you are more familiar with how things work.

Another good piece of advice is to watch the number of banners that you put up. A site full of banners will make the site look ugly and put off potential buyers. Carefully place your banners and use them to accent your site. Stuffing it full will not help.

Remember, in the world of affiliate marketing there is no such thing as the perfect program. Any particular program will be stuffed full of varying testimonials. Some will be great will others will have not done so well. You need to decide for yourself and not be put of by a few bad experiences. In the end it is down to you and how much you want to put in.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money and work for you. The risk to you is minimal and there is no start up cost. There are many great affiliate marketing programs out there and choosing the right one may seem like a daunting task. When you first start out remember to stick to what you know. Find something you know about and have an interest in. Make your site attractive to others and resist the urge to fill it with banners. This may end up having the opposite of your desired effect. Finally remember, there is no perfect program. Some will have success where others have failed. It is all down to you. Don’t give up.

Historic development

Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce2006 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 advertisingGoogle AdSense. 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 programs such as

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.

Types of affiliate websites

Affiliate websites are often categorized by merchants (i.e., advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are currently no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. The following types of websites are generic, yet are commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.

• Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e., search arbitrage)
• Comparison shopping websites and directories
• Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back, or charitable donations
• Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions
• Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
• Personal websites (This type of website was the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing; however, such websites are almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate websites.)
• Weblogs and website syndication feeds
• E-mail list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in email lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy
• Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website
• Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates
• Cost per action (CPA) networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliate

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 a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.

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.

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.

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 a significant role in

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.

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.^[3]

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.

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