Category: Most Read Articles

Many online publishers assume that Google AdSense has a monopolistic stranglehold on the contextual ad market, particularly for smaller publishers who may not be able to work out more lucrative deals with other networks or privately with advertisers directly. They assume that Google AdSense is the be-all and end-all of this type of advertising and that is simply not true.

Whether you’re getting into this market for the first time or you’ve been suspended, disabled, unapproved or even banned from AdSense and are looking for a viable alternative, Media.net is more than worthy of your attention. It’s an ad network that powers the Yahoo! Bing network of advertisers, meaning that you are working with a couple of the biggest technology brands in the history of the web. They say you can “tap into one of the largest pools of advertisers in the world” to “maximize revenue from your online content.”

So, what are some of the biggest reasons why you should sign up with Media.net as a publisher?

1. Large Established Base of Quality Advertisers

One of the primary appeals to Google AdSense is just the sheer number of advertisers who are actively bidding on the network. This intense competition lends itself to better ad rates for publishers who run the units on their websites. But again, Google is hardly the only player in town.

As mentioned above, Media.net exclusively powers the Yahoo! Bing ad marketplace. This gives you access to all the major buyer networks and around $6 billion worth of search demand. All of the major demand-side platforms (DSPs) and ad exchanges are actively competing for your traffic, which in turn will help to maximize your revenue.

You’d be extremely hard pressed to find another Google AdSense alternative that boasts that kind of volume, that kind of competition, and that level of quality among its advertisers. That is the reason why huge online publishers monetize their traffic with Media.net too, including everyone from Forbes and Reuters to WebMD and Marie Claire.

2. Dynamic Optimization

Having access to a massive base of high-quality advertisers doesn’t mean very much if the wrong ads are being shown to the wrong people at the wrong time. If you’ve got a website that online marketing, ads about vintage tea sets probably aren’t going to perform very well.

Media.net boasts of some truly impressive ad serving technology that will dynamically optimize the ads to best suit your content at just the right time for just the right audience. Media.net is a pioneer in the display-to-search (D2S) advertising format, monetizing your content using a CPC model. Advertisers bid on your display placements on larger CPC budgets and you get paid the most possible as a result of filtering the intent of the audience.

One feature that is especially handy is the fact that the simple two-line JavaScript code you paste into your website’s design template will dynamically yield either text ads or display ads. The network technology will automatically optimize this decision for the highest revenue potential. You’ll also enjoy a 100% fill rate across all verticals and ad formats, so every last impression is being monetized to its fullest potential.

3. Highly Customizable Style and Design

Relying on the advanced optimization engine is one thing, but you still want to exert a certain level of control over how these ads will look on your website, right?

The Media.net ads that are served on your website can be customized to match the color scheme and style of your design and layout. It has been clearly demonstrated that a “native advertising” approach to such ads is much more effective, blending the ads in more effectively with your original content to create a more aesthetically-pleasing experience for your website visitors. The ads should feel like they belong there.

The versatility of options here, particularly in terms of different ad formats, is equally impressive. You can utilize desktop interstitials, like the above example served on Forbes, to maximize returns on these high-value impressions. Advertisers are willing to pay top dollar for this kind of exposure and attention.

The “below the article” ad unit takes on a form similar to the native advertising that you may see all around the web these days too. It looks like recommended content that is seamlessly integrated with your own content.

On the mobile side, you can take advantage of the mobile docked ad unit. This ad unit remains docked at the bottom of every page, ensuring that every mobile impression counts. It is supported on all iOS and Android devices, including iPads and tablets. Considering the continued growth of mobile usage, it is absolutely critical that you monetize your mobile content just as effectively and specifically as you do with your desktop content.

4. Ad Specialists Optimize Your Earnings

A very common complaint that you’ll hear from just about anyone who has had to deal with Google, whether that’s with AdSense or any other product, is that it becomes almost impossible to connect with an actual real-life person to come to a suitable solution. Your emails may never get answered and, if they do, you may only receive a canned response. That’s no good.

Media.net is different in that every partner, every publisher, every advertiser is assigned a dedicated account manager to address any questions or concerns you may have. That personal touch makes all the difference, because it means that you have an actual person to help. This is the kind of service that is usually reserved only for “top tier” publishers. But at Media.net, every publisher, large or small gets dedicated personal support. Furthermore, there are optimization specialists working around the clock for your mutual success and benefit.

5. Powerful Self-Learning for Contextual Ads

You know how the predictive text on your smartphone’s keyboard gets better and better the more you use it? After a while, it starts to understand what words you use most frequently and in what order, getting better and better at not only completing the words you type, but also predicting the next words to follow? The learning algorithm with Media.net works in much the same way.

The contextual ads that show up aren’t being called up based solely on information gleaned in that single moment. Instead, advanced calculations are being conducted based on your history with Media.net, gleaning what ads perform best on your platforms and channels for what kind of content. It needs some time to understand and absorb your content.

Once it does, though, it will be remarkably well equipped to serve contextual ads that are specifically relevant to your particular audience, ads that are more likely to attract clicks and perform well for you. This auto-optimization process is continuous, so your performance with the network will only get better over time.

Here is where you can sign up with Media.net. You can get started in less than 10 seconds by providing your website and email address.

Affiliate marketing is simply one of the best ways to make money on the internet today. It’s actually been one of the best methods for over 20 years now. Having been involved in the world of affiliate marketing since the mid-90s, I’ve had the opportunity to not only grow an online business of my own but also see how it’s changed the way business is done around the world. Imagine the internet without affiliate marketing and the success it’s brought to all of the companies who use it — especially Amazon.com. Things definitely would not be the same way they are today without it.

With all of that in mind, I only have my one perspective on affiliate marketing and how it can be used to massively grow a business or help an individual earn income online. To help expand our knowledge and learn from other affiliate marketing experts and entrepreneurs, I reached out to over 50 different authority figures to get their best tips and advice on what’s working for them in the world of affiliate marketing and lead generation.

Be sure to read through all of the expert tips below and start implementing them into your own blog, brand or online business.

57 Entrepreneurs Share their Best Affiliate Marketing Secrets, Tools, and Business Models

I like to implement affiliate links in our blog posts when I believe the product is going to be truly helpful to my readers. This way, it’s a win/win. The reader gets to learn about a great product they wouldn’t have known about otherwise, and my blog gets to make some extra money from the referral. I don’t want to spam my readers so am very selective with the affiliate links that I choose. Right now, I’m using a WordPress plugin called ThirstyAffiliates that automatically replaces certain keywords with affiliate links which significantly boosts my earning. In addition to that, I’m always looking to find new products through different affiliate networks such as ShareASale, ImpactRadius, and Commission Junction. Not only do we sometimes use affiliate links in our blog posts, but we also have some of our plugins on these affiliate networks that bloggers can implement in their posts as well.

Syed Balkhi – OptinMonster.com

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By diving my focus between my own information products and those that are already on the market. My blog posts receive consistent viewership, and in many posts, I cite books that are available on Audible and Amazon.com — through these citations, the clickthrough from readers is a revenue stream in and of itself, however, I also kick it up a notch by capturing email data and creating clickfunnels for my own future products.

Cody McLain – SupportNinja.com

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Affiliate marketing continues to be one of the most effective ways for us to not only grow our brand and business but also our reach and relationships in the industry as well. Since we are a premium design agency, we know there is a great demand for our services in all business space. With this in mind, we created an affiliate program for our logo design service, which allows site partners and affiliates to earn a commission on all referred sales. This works quite well for our business, while also rewarding affiliates and referral partners in the process.

Srish Agrawal – Logodesignteam.com

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Currently, I am using different affiliate offers from Adcombo, Mobidea and other ad networks. Because affiliate marketing now is changed and I cannot depend too much on SEO as Google keeps changing its algorithm and I have seen many marketers have done bankrupt as they were dependent on Google too much, so I am running offers through facebook and google adwords.

I am changing my strategies and working on different offers. Also whenever someone trying offers always don’t send customers to direct landing page otherwise Facebook will block account and always try to collect email address of the lead first, this way you can build your email list always first. Because there is huge money with the email marketing. I learned this strategy from one of my friend who is super affiliates and generating tons of revenue from email marketing.

Jitendra Vaswani – BloggersIdeas.com

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When our affiliate partners run their campaigns, we can see half of our customers coming from affiliates.

We don’t open up our affiliate program to the general public. Instead we have a process that ensures anyone that becomes an affiliate meets certain requirements. It’s something we’re always changing and there are no hard rules, but we look at things like audience size, quality of their marketing/audience, and audience match.

We take this approach because we’re looking to avoid two common problems you’ll find in the affiliate world: First, it’s not uncommon to find that leads and customers sent by affiliates have lower retention. This can happen if leads are incentivized the wrong way. Second, we ensure that any marketing taking place for our product doesn’t hurt the brand. Unfortunately, there’s a fair amount of shady marketing that can take place if you don’t carefully vet your affiliates.

Finding the right affiliates is the other part of our program. We look for customers that have larger audiences first. Beyond that, we do cold outreach for cross-promotional campaigns that may later turn into affiliate relationships.

Ruben Gamez – DocSketch.com

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For affiliate marketing to work, it’s crucial that brands partner with individuals their customers either look up to or can relate to. In the first case, it would involve turning relevant influencers into brand representatives who promote affiliate links to your brand website. The second case involves finding everyday consumers who are already big fans of your brand and giving them a chance to make some money by promoting your products.

Scoutsee is an excellent platform to execute a successful affiliate marketing program. Brands like Spartan Race have used it to discover relevant influencers and fans who can promote their brand through Instagram. Their campaign resulted in 39.9% click-through and 10.1% conversions.

The platform is perfect for affiliate marketing because you can easily track the ROI of your campaign and the top-performing influencers. And influencers/affiliates can use Scoutsee to create their own storefront in which they can add products from your brand and other brands that they like. They can share the link to this storefront with their fans and easily track their earnings from this storefront.

Shane Barker – ShaneBarker.com

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Currently, I’m earning money online from affiliate marketing through a number of strategies. Due to its effectiveness, I’m naturally still using the most common one: writing helpful and useful review articles (from which my visitors can benefit) about particular affiliate products that I’ve tried, use or have used before and I think are worth it for my readers.

On my podcast, I’m also doing affiliate marketing as a means to earn an income online. Once more — and this of paramount importance to me — I will only reference and/or promote products that I have used and consider can truly benefit my audience.

I’ve tried other ways such as paid advertising and referencing my affiliate links on forums or Facebook groups but you really need to be careful so you don’t go against those services or communities guidelines.

Louie Luc – BuzzNitrous.com

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I have been generating revenue via affiliate marketing in two ways lately. The first is via the blog standard affiliate marketing model of sending traffic to a leading dating platform provider and getting a cut of revenue from customers I sent to them. I was also allowed to set up my affiliate website brand it in a way that makes it look as if I am actually running my own dating services.

Dating industry is quite competitive but it does not matter that you can’t get good money there. Affiliate marketing in dating industry is also very useful. I know some people who make very good money only on dating affiliate marketing.

You can do a research to find what is the best affiliate program in your niche today. Picking the right affiliates is everything so if you spotted some high earning program it does not mean you should go with it. Great advertising should be only with trusted affiliate programs.

The second way is a partnership I struck with a water charity called Hope Spring. Using affiliate marketing principle, I run the ecards section of their website and share the revenue generated with them. But this kind or affiliate requires a lot of coding and other customisations.

Evgeniy Garkaviy – Morak.com

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I don’t make any affiliate commission from my personal blog OkDork.

But that doesn’t mean affiliate marketing doesn’t work. In fact, one of my business — AppSumo runs mainly on an affiliate business model.

I think everyone should give it a try in their businesses.

Here are a few ways of how I utilize affiliate marketing — or partnership in overall — to make money for my online business:

• For AppSumo, we partner up with other companies with excellent digital products and promote it to AppSumo’s 750,000 subscribers with a limited time offer up to 90% off the original price.
• For Sumo, we have a partnership team to recruit and work with affiliates who want to promote our tools that help their audience to grow websites.
• And once in a while, I reach out to products I love to get a special offer for my OkDork readers. This way, the company gets exposure, and I get to make my readers happy.

Noah Kagan – Sumo.com

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No one cares about your product or service, let alone affiliate marketing product or service you want to introduce to your audience.

Your audience ONLY cares about how that product or service helps them solve their problem.

Thus, the way to a profitable affiliate marketing business lies through educating your readers on that problem (whatever it might be: a lack of something, a need for something, so forth), outlining the benefits of solving it, then teaching them how to solve it.

When do you introduce your affiliate product? At the very end. Yes, the problem could be solved in this or that way, BUT using the ABC product trumps all of the above and here’s why.

Affiliate marketing is no longer about selling a product. It’s about educating your readers and giving them a choice of solutions.

Make buying your affiliate product their choice and they are a lot more likely to trust you and buy it from you in the end.

Example of this process at work: 5 Brilliant Ways to Go Blog-to-Video with Content Samurai – as a result of that post, Content Samurai is my highest affiliate commission earner at TrafficGenerationCafe.com.

Ana Hoffman – TrafficGenerationCafe.com

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On my personal website, I use affiliate marketing pretty infrequently, making money isn’t the real point of my website. I use it more for recruiting employees for HealthJoy.com, telling my personal career story and featuring my books. I do have over 100 blog posts and some of them do get significant traffic. Occasionally, I’ll throw an affiliate traffic link. I have one article for a Kall8 review that ranks on page one for the term on Google. It just a discussion of my experience but it also contains a bunch of negative customer experiences in the comments. I don’t hide that fact and welcome people sharing their real world experience. I still send Kall8 traffic every month and make a few bucks. I think affiliate marketing works best if you are authentic about it, integrate it within your content and tell both points of views.

Rick Ramos – HealthJoy.com

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Affiliate marketing has proven to be a very successful way for us to not only generate sales, but also increase our reach in the process. Since we are focusing on selling our coloring books through Amazon, and they have an affiliate program of their own, it’s easy for us to reach out to other sites already promoting Amazon products and getting them to add our into their content and promotions as well. At the same time, we can help cross-promote other coloring books and earn a commission at the same time. The referral-based marketing platform has been working extremely well for us, while also associating our name and products with a trusted brand like Amazon.com.

Montgomery Peterson – OriginalColoringPages.com

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As a freelancer who has not yet created her own course, I use affiliate marketing to promote the courses of two of my fellow freelancers, Gina Horkey and Elna Cain. Both ladies offer affiliate programs and pay out a hefty share to their affiliates. It’s a great way to earn extra passive income!

I have links to both of their courses in my sidebar of Wording Well. I also include their links in blog posts.

Because editing is a job that takes up most of my time, I don’t do as much writing or teaching anymore. Sure, the articles on Wording Well are always super-helpful, but I also cater to writers and bloggers, not just freelancers. So promoting quality courses I’ve found on how to teach others to start a successful freelance business like mine is something I have no problem doing! 🙂

Lorraine Reguly – WordingWell.com

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Affiliate marketing is the monetization method that I always recommend to beginners. The best strategy I have found is to focus on the creation of great content that naturally incorporates affiliate links in the text form. The content would attract visitors from search predominantly as it’s useful, informative and educating while it would indirectly “sell” relevant and useful products or services through simple and non-flashy text links. There’s no banner ads and no pop-ups involved. Some of the best content types that I have found that work well for affiliate promotion are product reviews, comparisons of different solutions, and how-to guides that explain something to beginners in a nice step-by-step format.

Marko Saric – HowToMakeMyBlog.com

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I think the biggest word with affiliate marketing is trust. I’ve always been a big believer that affiliate marketing needs to be done in a genuine way. For that reason, I only recommend products I have used for months – that not only are good tools, but also have great people behind them. Since so few products make the cut, my audience knows that I only share vetted items that will help. I also give alternatives if they’re not ready for a particular tool.

The main goal with affiliate marketing should be to give people a solution that will be best for them, not simply a solution where you get commissions.

Since we train people on how we do online marketing for our clients, people know our recommendations come from practical usage, rather than just us trying to make a quick buck.

Michael Erickson – SearchScientists.com

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I use affiliate marketing chiefly through being an Amazon Associate. Since I created over 170 products and self-published these eBooks, audiobooks and paperbacks through Amazon I decided to become an affiliate. Double dipping. I earn through royalty payments and affiliate payments too. Adding widgets to my blog, creating helpful content and building bonds with top bloggers are gateway activities through which I profit on the affiliate side of things.

Remember to focus heavily on the giving aspect of affiliate marketing because you cannot squeeze money out of folks unless you are generous, transparent and helpful. I also make sure any affiliate opportunity I pursue helps me and my readers by aligning 100% with my Blogging From Paradise brand. The venture must relate to either blogging or travel to be something useful which my readers can seize and use for their benefit. Always think alignment and you will position yourself effectively in your affiliate niche of choice.

Ryan Biddulph – BloggingFromParadise.com

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I am using affiliate marketing to generate revenue online through lead generation forms to promote various online guides and ebooks that the company produces for small business owners. This has been particularly effective because there is a significant need for relevant and helpful information to help small business owners with billing, invoicing, and payments. We’ve noticed a significant increase in revenue after incorporating this tactic.

John Rampton – Calendar.co

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Affiliate Marketing is really a lucrative way to make money online. I started affiliate marketing in late 2015 and I remember the day when I had made $300 affiliate commission by promoting a web hosting company. It’s inspired me a lot. The main key to become a successful affiliate marketer is to understand your audience needs. It is very important because without knowing about your users’ needs you cannot provide them what they want.

After that you have to choose a right product which fulfills your user’s need. For example, if you are in particular niche let’s say you are working on a health niche than promoting digital and electronic products won’t help you a lot and you cannot generate a single penny with it.
There are hundreds of ways you can promote products and services. I love to do experiment with my promotion strategies. Here are some of the ways I promote affiliate products:

1. 1. Blog: – Blogging has been evolved a lot. It gives a new dimension of doing business online. Writing killer reviews can definitely help you to make sales and increase conversions. I am also writing reviews about the products which I am promoting. It is one of my primary ways to promote affiliate products.
      I usually try the product first and mentioned everything thoroughly like its pros and cons. It’s made my reviews looks more genuine and builds trust among my users.
   2. Email lists: – Email list is really so helpful to increase conversion, if you are doing affiliate marketing. I started collecting emails since the first day of my blogging and I always recommend my users to start collecting email leads. I send promotional emails once in a week with catchy subject line and give my email a personal touch. It really creates a good bond between me and my subscribers.
   3. PPC programs: – I occasionally use PPC programs to promote affiliate programs. Bing Ads and Facebook Ads work great for me. All you have to create a landing page and affiliate offer and use relevant keywords to drive traffic to your keywords. I am using Semrush and ahrefs to find relevant and high performing keywords for my campaigns.

So, these are some of the proven promotion methods that I have used and also currently using it to promote affiliate products. I hope you find these methods helpful. However, as I have said you have to keep experimenting with your promotion methods. Innovation really helps you a lot in this competitive world.

Vishwajeet Kumar – iMBloggingTips.com

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Though it’s not a huge moneymaker for me, one of the easiest ways I make money from affiliate marketing is by recommending web hosting solutions for clients of mine that are either working with me to get their website designed, or are a completely new business seeking my advice regarding general digital marketing strategy.

The limiting factor is that I’m only suggesting web hosting when people ask for guidance, but this tactic could totally be scaled up! I’m currently developing an online course called “Teach Me How to WordPress”, which will naturally tie in my preferred host, and how to use that host to build a WordPress website. I’m envisioning an accompanying blog post to live on for anyone who doesn’t necessarily decide to purchase my course.

Regardless of the current limitations of this tactic, I have a 99% close rate in terms of getting the affiliate sale, since the nature of the interaction that inspires it comes from a high level of trust between myself and the client, and the fact that I actually use the service I’m suggesting.

Maddy Osman – The-Blogsmith.com

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We manage the site OliviaRose.fr, which makes about 30% of its revenue from affiliate marketing activities.
The site generates an affiliate income through recommended products within its content marketing pieces, as well as placing affiliate links within free downloadable guides or product suggestions.

You can see an example of an article here (it is in French).
One thing to keep in mind is that the site and its content provides a lot of value to its visitors. So we’ve been able to build trust by exchanging value first. This encourages the site to become ‘sticky’and maintain more repeat visitors.

Those visitors then go onto clicking our affiliate links and purchasing our recommendations because they trust what we recommend.

David James – BusinessGrowthDigitalMarketing.com

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Currently, for one of my online businesses, we are utilizing affiliate marketing to generate us a large portion of our revenues. Our strategy takes social media influencers in our niche, creates relationships with them and eventually we become partners with them. Through these partnerships, they create sponsored content around our products and share it on an affiliate basis. This has been one of the biggest ways that we have been able to generate online income through affiliates in the last 12 months.

Jeet Banerjee – JeetBanerjee.com

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Right now, affiliate marketing is tough when it comes to generating lots of revenue. Site visitors are aware of most websites’ intentions to generate extra cash, and as a result, are not going to fall for some of the older marketing strategies they might have in the past.

That said, I think there are several ways to capitalize on your affiliate marketing strategies to make them work for you, despite the caution many site visitors exhibit when exploring the websites that interest them. For instance, offering highly valuable, long-form content is still going to be one of the best ways to not only provide site visitors something they can relate to and benefit from, but a great way to naturally add affiliate links throughout the content without seeming too pushy.

In addition, diversifying your affiliate marketing techniques is going to go a long way when it comes to generating consistent revenue. For example, invest in Facebook adds if that’s where a large portion of your target audience is. However, also check out other popular social media networks to make sure a Google update, or a shift in consumer habits, doesn’t overrun your entire strategy.

Lastly, I would make sure to focus on the mobile-friendly aspect of affiliate marketing. This concept is twofold. First, ensure that your own website is mobile friendly so those on the go that are accessing your website experience your content as you want them to. This makes clicking on your affiliate links that much easier. Moreover, check that the websites you are directing site visitors to are mobile-friendly as well. You run the risk of losing out on a lot of affiliate revenue if your loyal readers click on a link that they cannot easily view on their tablet or mobile phone.

Lindsay Liedke – WPKube.com

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We are using affiliate marketing for some content based websites we run. Affiliate marketing is still one of the best ways to generate income online. We have had some success with growing affiliate revenue for large content sites in Education and Tech areas see a case study here where we grew traffic by 400,000 visitors a month. Overall if you still invest in quality SEO, Paid and Content campaigns you can still drive great levels of traffic to affiliate sites you just have to ensure you are not ad heavy with the design.

James Norquay – ProsperityMedia.com.au

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We use Impact Radius to connect us with all kinds of affiliates. We engage and incentivize them to continuously actively sell Mailbird Pro licenses. Affiliates help us with advertising Mailbird as well as selling our full-featured version of our software, Mailbird Pro or Mailbird Pro Lifetime. We focus on the buyer journey with our affiliates and they all funnel through our same payment gateway, allowing us to monitor and track goals and milestones with our affiliate partners. We use data to optimize our partner relations and therefore gain further distribution and reach of our software. Affiliate marketing allows us to get Mailbird Pro into the hands or more people around the world. Our affiliates vary from direct partners to media partners that simply help with advertising Mailbird Pro on their platform with access to thousands to millions of shoppers who are ready to buy.

Andrea Loubier – GetMailbird.com

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Right now, I focus on providing value in my content and complement it with relevant products and services I trust or use personally. To make things easier and measurable, I use the following services.

Pretty Links. WordPress plugin that allows you to create clean, simple URLs on your website that redirect to any other URL.

Rebrandly. It’s one of the easiest ways to create and share short links with your custom domain name. I got tomaslau.net and installed the Chrome extension so I can not only have my brand in every link I share but also get extensive analytics.

Amazon Associates. It’s one of the biggest affiliate networks in the world with more product than you can imagine and plenty of ways to discover and promote relevant products to your audience.

Email list. I curate Life Designed, a weekly lifestyle design newsletter where I share book recommendations, tools and articles I find useful. Some of the products, services, and books I recommend are affiliate links.

Tomas Laurinavicius – TomasLau.com

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As is evident from my websites’ URLs, my focus niche is technology. So I am using affiliate marketing to promote relevant technology products and services in this niche. The kind of products/services I have been promoting ranging from software solutions to tech gadgets and everything in between. Today, technology penetrates almost all aspects of life. So the limitations on the fields I can cover have been eliminated in the recent past.

As my sites have built-up traffic, it becomes increasingly effective for me to generate more targeted traffic (and sales) for the businesses. I have built some excellent business relationships with several tech-related product/service providers over the years.

Eventually, it comes down to the quality and volume of traffic you are able to generate. I have been constantly working on increasing both the traffic and the number of businesses I tie up with. Sharing site analytics reports is an effective way to reach out to businesses with my site potentials.

Nisha Pandey – SEOTechyWorld.com

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With a focus mainly on content writing and gathering information online to create powerful resources and guides, the affiliate marketing model has worked very well for my network of sites. The important thing to remember is to have a problem that your audience is looking for an answer or solution to, then be able to provide them with such a solution — while also having a monetization plan in place. Many of the products on Clickbank work very well for this, as they are digital ebooks and courses that help people find a solution to their weight loss, financial and health improvement issues.

Brandon Johnston – BlogReign.com

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I have made use of affiliate marketing since I started online and I find it a great way to supplement my income.

I do two main things to generate affiliate commissions.

1. I write reviews on my two main websites (my marketing/personal site and a niche site).
   For my main website (Mad Lemmings) I recommend and review products I have used myself and recommend to my readers and clients. Occasionally I also look at other tools in the market, but not very often.
2. I discuss and demonstrate tools I love with friends, readers, clients and on my Youtube channel (madlemmings).
   This has the added benefit of not making affiliate income but also teaching people and showing them how to use these great tools too. Places like Youtube are also a great way to market yourself and your services because people get to know you faster.

If you don’t have products and services yourself, affiliate marketing is a great way to get some side income. And there are so many ways to add value to people’s lives and recommend great products at the same time. Give it a shot!

Ashley Faulkes – MadLemmings.com

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I’ve always been more active as an affiliate than as one to sell through affiliates. I’ve usually created an email marketing campaign about a topic that ties directly to an affiliate offer. For example, I might send emails about how successful online courses are built and sold before pointing people to a product that teaches all the details about it.

This isn’t a complicated or advanced. But it works. It also doesn’t feel annoyingly promotional, which leads to fewer unsubscribes. Another nice benefit is that it gives me ideas for content—if I know I’ll be talking about topic X for the next week or two in emails, I can write the content much faster.

Peter Sandeen – PeterSandeen.com

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I’m using affiliate marketing quite successfully in WordPress Plugins. By offering a WordPress plugin for free, I’m able to push people to affiliated products to get the best use out of my plugins. This has been quite successful for me over the years. One tip if you were to copy me would be to focus on solving the need, rather than focusing on the software. So rather than create integration for WordPress, create a plugin that does what the service does, and then push it to your affiliate. Take a look at WP Email Capture as an example. It captures email, but to send it you have to use a mail sending service, I push Aweber (a service I use), but there are plenty of other services out there to use, but by recommending one I have a focus for users to use. That is how I’m mainly using Affiliate Marketing for my sites to make money online.

Rhys Wynne – Winwar Media

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I run over 30 authority blogs in different niches and most of them have affiliate marketing as one form of monetization. I am monetizing mostly via pay per lead, Amazon affiliates, CPA programs and some company specific affiliate programs like Chewy.com.

Mohit Tater– Mohittater.com

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I have been using Amazon Associates Affiliate program for quite a while now and it is one of the best, easiest and reliable ways to generate revenue online. All it takes is having a responsive website with good content and high-quality relevant images, wherein, you can link to recommended products.

For those interested in Affiliate marketing, this is a good program to start with, as Amazon has a wide range of products that you can choose from and review.

Based on your preference, you could create a site that is niche specific like ‘Best Headphones’ or ‘Best Wearable Devices.’ Or you could broaden your scope and include other lucrative products like Kindle eReaders & eBooks, Gaming Accessories, etc. Moreover, the Affiliate payout offered by Amazon is pretty good and for each referral that leads to a sale, Amazon will pay you a specified amount.

The key to a successful Affiliate marketing strategy is to write in-depth and honest product reviews that are relevant and provides valuable information to your readers. This will help you generate more traffic and improve your ranking, leading to better conversion rate.

Also, to improve your site’s visibility, ensure that you make use of SEO and create social media profiles for your site across various social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest etc.

Nirav Dave – Capsicum Mediaworks

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My answer is simple. Create a complete, lengthy product review about the item you’re promoting as an affiliate and start driving traffic to that page.

Offer bonus items as well to boost your conversion ratio.

Ensure you optimize your review page for Google as the main search engine to get free residual traffic and not depend on FB ads or other methods of paid advertising.

You could try both techniques obviously if you like and have the budget.

Codrut Turcanu – BestExpertRoundups.com

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Affiliate marketing is one of the most certain ways to generate a solid stream of revenue from a blog. But there are many ways to get it wrong, too!

One of the simplest ways to get into affiliate marketing is to use Amazon’s Affiliate program. You get access to over a million products, and you earn commission based on whatever was purchased as opposed to just the single item you advertised.

The biggest mistake to avoid in affiliate marketing on your blog is picking the wrong products. You need to pick relevant products to your audience — I have seen many affiliate marketers lose out on revenue because they rushed through this process.

And the last bit of advice I’ll share here is that you should be inserting affiliate links as textual links into relevant blog posts. If you’re a men’s fashion blogger, link to watches or suitcases through contextual links in the blog post! If you’re a Christian “stay at home” mommy blogger, link to Bibles and homeschool supplies contextually.

Good luck – these tips will take you to the Next Level in your affiliate marketing!

Andrew Lowen – NextLevelWeb.com

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As TimeCamp, we have long been thinking about creating our own affiliate program for bloggers. After all, companies such as Basecamp or Toggl do not have such an affiliate program and they are doing quite well. Ultimately, our affiliate program came into being and gave unexpected results. I would like to mention those which have contributed indirectly to the development of our marketing and the product itself, which has certainly generated additional income. Here are some of them:

• Your affiliant will give you a fair description of your product

Over the years, the affiliate program market has evolved along with the SEO industry. At present, in the era of the highest value offered by content, bloggers placing affiliate links often do so in their reviews of software. Affiliates are reliable marketers who can not only assess the value of your product and the best way to use it, but also assess the advantages and disadvantages of your software and compare you to your competitors.

• Affiliates generate links

In the case of our market – time tracking software industry – the marketing activities are based on SEO-focused activities. One of the ways to get links to promote web applications is through links obtained from “Resources” sites. As soon as we find good quality pages which touch upon the topic of time tracking or project management software, we send an email to their webmasters whether they would be eager to put us on their subpage, often offering the possibility to place an affiliate link.

Pawel Kijko– TimeCamp.com

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There are a ton of ways you can choose and pick to generate revenue through affiliate marketing and I’ve probably tried most, if not all, of them. I’ve written and sold ebooks with my affiliate links in them. I’ve published videos on my YouTube channel where I dropped my affiliate links in the description (or links to pages on my website — following the rules so I wasn’t banned).

Nowadays, I’m doing paid advertising (including social media ads) where I direct people to landing pages, get them to sign up to my mailing list and then bet on email marketing to make money from my promoted affiliate products.

Katy Manniche – TattooOy.com

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If you have a website, you want it to receive traffic. So, how do you get traffic?

The first step to affiliate marketing is to understand your audience extremely well and to create content they want to consume and share. In our case, the best content is our SEO Auditor that currently receives roughly 20,000 requests each month. By creating a web asset that our visitors need, we’re able to monetize the traffic into affiliate channels and generate revenue. However, creating a web asset like this takes time and a well-thought out plan to implement.

Our website also has outbound links to many websites that have affiliate programs. Other ways to generate revenue are to sign up to the top affiliate networks and start to look around for merchants in your niche. It’s a great way to see what merchants are paying to help you determine the best niche. It really comes down to spending the time needed to create highly authoritative content or assets, then making sure to promote your content through outreach or even paid channels if the ROI is there.

Again, know your audience and spend the time to have the best content for them.

Dario Zadro – ZadroWeb.com

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To generate, increase and scale up the amount of revenue per month I make online through affiliate marketing from my niche and authority websites, I’m currently writing and publishing a greater number of that top-10-best-products-of-a-specific-category kind of pillar articles.

That’s just like ten percent of it, though, as I am also publishing related informational posts that link to my pillar articles in order to build relevancy in Google’s eyes and other review articles focused on analyzing each one of the top-10 listed products. Besides the written content, I’m also coming up with video product reviews that I post on social media and on my websites as well.

Mike Martyns – SoccerGearHQ.com

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I have a few different methods I use to generate affiliate revenues.

Amazon Affiliate

Probably my most popular one is with Amazon Affiliate websites. I have several sites in different niches and each generates its own revenue on auto-pilot. It takes a fair bit of work to get the site up and running and some in-depth keyword research to get the information to rank in the SERP’s, but once you rank non-competitive terms that drive people to Amazon you can pretty much leave it alone.

One of these sites I have taken from a basic affiliate site and build out an authority site that performs very well in quite a competitive market so will continue to work on that.

Social Media Targeting

Another process I use is to promote affiliate offers straight to Social Media. For example when I get a solid offer from one of the hosting companies I promote this with my link straight out to Social Media. I made a nice amount of sales on Black Friday last year with a single Tweet. This process can be replicated once you find suitable offers. You can run ads on Facebook and drive visitors to landing pages on your site that lead to affiliate offers.

Facebook can be a great source of cheap traffic if you get your targeting right.

Gary Evans – Yourweb.ie

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To find the most success with affiliate marketing, you need to make sure your recommendations and advertising is always relevant to the type of content and audience found on your site. We’ve found that this works very well along side the original infographic content we create, but we do have to put in the time and effort to match up the content with the right ads. We’ve tried Google Adsense, but it didn’t prove as effective as we would have liked. What worked best was finding individual affiliate programs that matched the content focus for each article. It definitely takes more time, but in the long run, the ROI is much better.

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As my blog is focused on graphic & web design, I tailor my affiliate recommendations to this audience which means I promote all sorts of design resources such as online courses, fonts, design bundles, software and any sort of tool that would make their life easier, and at a discounted rate. I only ever recommend resources that I would use myself, which promotes trust & transparency.

Jacob Cass – JustCreative.com

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We develop relationships with people who have influence in the digital marketing space. We have a couple of consultations with them and then decide how we can best offer value to their audience. This value generally comes in the form of a guest post that will either teach them how to do something themselves or share really interesting data analysis projects that we’ve done. Then, we’ll offer some sort of promotion and give our affiliate a percentage of every sale driven from their audience. This helps us reach different audiences and drive revenue from them using our affiliate relationship.

Madeleine Taylor – ContentRefined.com

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I am helping a friend who has been doing affiliate marketing since 2011. I am focusing on the SEO aspect, and he’s paying me a commission based on his profit.

He has a few websites, and I am on board as a consultant. I give him tips and instructions on how to build links, and this has proved beneficial for him, as his sites have had their ranking improved for some significant keywords and also many long tail keywords.

The links that he’s building are strong links from guest posts, roundups, resource pages, etc.

In the beginning, he tried to outreach to blog owners, offering them a mediocre article with a link to his affiliate page. Wrong approach! Most of the webmasters would not link to a sales page or an affiliate website. That’s why I made him create a blog to his affiliate sites. We hired a few talented writers who are also passionate about the niches they’re writing for. They’re writing fantastic articles, and we publish these for our affiliate sites blogs. After that, it’s not that difficult to link to these useful and detailed articles in your guest posts.

Georgi Todorov – DigitalNovas.com

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Although I always support creating and selling your own products, no company regardless of size will be able to solve every problem their target audience has.

Our goal is to provide the best possible solution to our visitors, regardless of whether or not we even earn money from it. The idea behind this is that even if we can’t offer the solution ourselves, our visitors will at least know they can come to us to get on the right path.

Although Amazon is our top affiliate program, we also promote products like tools, software, and courses when it makes sense. Having gone through or used all major products on the market, we feel confident knowing we’re only promoting the absolute best value, all of the time.

There is still plenty of money to be made through affiliate marketing as long as you look at it with a long-term, value-focused perspective with everything you promote. Our entire strategy is based around identifying problems, and making the solution known through blog articles, banner ads and hyper-targeted email campaigns.

James McAllister – Starlight-Baby.com

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There are a few main areas to focus on to create a winning digital strategy:

Upfront Plan: Before you create your first social media or blog post, you need to have your strategy set and this is where all of your upfront efforts need to be directed towards. For instance, should you and will you be focusing on SEO or organic growth? If so, you need to make sure you budget and plan appropriately because this is a long-term plan and if this is not realized up-front, you might bail from your plan before everything takes form which alongside not properly planning is one of the main reasons marketing plans fail.

And if you go with a content marketing plan, you must think thru how you can provide the most value to your marketplace. And this strategy will take form from a combination of online research (i.e. What are people search for already online) and knowledge gained from your understanding of your marketplace. You will then need to plan out how often you will be producing this content and create your editorial calendar. You will also need to decide on the channels you will be pushing your content out thru as well as look to create as many collaboration partnerships as possible to help further your reach. Also, a persona building exercise needs to be conducted so you know who you will be speaking to and how you should be speaking to them.

Team/On-going Execution: Consistency is key in marketing and as previously mentioned, if not carried thru all your marketing efforts and dollars will go to waste. So before you get going, make sure you have the bandwidth or budget (i.e. hiring outside help) to execute the plan you have in place. At our firm, we always get at least 1 or 2 months ahead on content because work and life has its ebbs and flows so you will always want to be ahead of the game so you don’t lose your consistent approach.

Tracking/Evaluating/Adjusting: Marketing is all about testing, tracking and improving on what is working best and discarding of what isn’t. There is a very small chance you will hit the target right on the nose out of the gate, so you must always be analyzing what is happening along the way and do more of what is working. Setting up your Google Analytics is the minimum amount you should do here but we highly suggest you get your conversion pixels set up so you can see what is driving the sales. And if you are concentrating on SEO or organic growth, it is a great idea to invest in higher level software to track your keyword rankings.

Have Fun: And don’t forget to have fun with your marketing. People respond to emotions more than anything else so we always so to go for it and try to hit some sort of emotional button. So we say go for it and try various messages/images/taglines to see what might just do the trick. And not to mention that your staff will be much more engaged if you give them some creative liberty.

David Reimherr – Magnificent.com

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I’ve found the best affiliate marketing tactics work when you get a targeted niche of potential buyers and when the offer is too good to pass up. Finding these can be difficult so I turn to affiliate marketing agencies and individuals to help me find these places. I’ve had really good success for myself and clients with email newsletter affiliate campaigns with a focus on conversions for contests, content marketing giveaways and other low barrier to entry campaigns. I think you get less success when you try and ask too much – large purchases, etc… If you can combine affiliate marketing with also social media and adwords retargeting, then I think you’ve got a good recipe for marketing success.

Chris Kubbernus – ChrisKubbernus.com

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For LighningRank.com, we are using affiliate marketing by creating guest posts on sites that have audience who would be interested in our services. We then provide affiliate commission to that site owner for any referrals his site brings in. Guest posting allows us to get our services in front of other audiences besides our own which helps to generate more revenue.

Kelley Jones – LightningRank.com

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We run a digital magazine app and media platform and believe that affiliate marketing is a great opportunity to support brands you believe in. At the same time, it’s a way to start building revenue before you invest in your own product development. Being focused on social enterprise we offer gear and tools we love and believe in as product recommendations in our magazine. We also offer affiliate opportunities to influencers and businesses who have an audience that might benefit from our magazine. They sell the magazine to their audience as an affiliate.

Adam Force – ChangeCreatorMag.com

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Till last year, we were promoting direct affiliate products and the niche was web hosting. We promoted different hosting services: Bluehost, HostGator to name a few. From the starting of this year, we switched our focus from web hosting related affiliates to Amazon affiliate. Due to the field’s competitive nature, it won’t be possible to share the niche on which we are working right now.

Amazon affiliate program is same as many other affiliate programs. You can create a free account, get your links and start promoting products from Amazon. If anyone buys a product using your affiliate link, you earn a commission. If you search for Amazon affiliate success stories you will get thousands of articles all around.

Rajesh Namase – TechLila.com

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Simply sharing products and descriptions doesn’t work anymore if you hope to rank. You have to provide something of value if you hope to be found.

I share reviews and how-to guides for interesting products on my site. These are detailed write-ups and great step-by-step guides to products people are interested in. They provide a great value for visitors and don’t come across as pushy or sales-heavy in nature.

The idea is to build trust with your audience. Providing them with something of value is a great way to build that trust. Then when they’re ready to buy, they’re more likely to go to someone they trust. They click the affiliate link I’ve provided to a product I personally recommend and they’re happy to make a purchase.

Not only does this method build trust with my readers, but it creates content that ranks well with Google too. Great content drives great traffic and that traffic then buys. Win-win.

Ben Brausen – BenBrausen.com

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At a high-level, I’ve seen the most success with affiliate marketing by having a clear understanding of who my target market is: Who am I writing for? Who am I trying to attract? Who is reading my articles and subscribing to my newsletter? (Frequent surveying helps with this!)

Once I have that clear understanding of my target market in my mind — the ‘who’ that I’m selling to — then I want to understand what their needs are. What ‘expensive problems’ are they experiencing?

Once I know who I’m selling to (my market) and what they need help with (the expensive problem), it’s a matter of picking a product that is designed for this audience to help them solve that problem and then presenting them with that offering, typically through a combination of a 3-7 email long campaign and 1-2 webinars.

What I’ve found is that affiliate marketing works best when the product you’re an affiliate for is a product that you love and would recommend even without any affiliate commission. When you have a natural enthusiasm for the product, it shows through.

As part of my 30-day daily email on-boarding sequence for my list, subscribers are exposed to multiple affiliate offers — but they’re presented casually, not in an overly sales-y manner, and it helps introduce subscribes to the fact that I will suggest products or services they may benefit from, but that other parties are providing.

Kai Davis – KaiDavis.com

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I teach people how to start a blog and optimize it for maximum conversions. I am in the final stage of converting my current site into a full-blown membership site. The majority of my website revenue is currently driven by affiliate relationships.

I’ve found being selective with the brands I work with to be the best strategy and the few products/services I recommend are vetted and in the vast majority of cases are products/services that I personally use in my own business. I have found that by only working with and recommending the best quality services I’ve seen the greatest conversions. I focus on a very specific niche instead of “casting a wide net” and this has been the winning formula for me.

I use affiliate marketing throughout my website and drive people to landing pages via email automation for greater conversions. The more knowledgeable you are with a service the easier it is to convince other people of its value. It also helps to only recommend and promote the highest quality services, this makes the work 1000+ times easier.

Affiliate marketing does require a great deal of knowledge in search engine marketing. If you are reading this article because you want to generate profits with affiliate marketing you must learn how to engage in keyword research and make yourself an expert in search engine optimization both on site and off site SEO is critical to your success as an affiliate marketer.

Mike Brown – TheBloggingBuddha.com

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We mainly use affiliate marketing to generate income at Bloggers Passion. We use a wide range of affiliate products to promote which are ranging from SEMrush to WPX hosting to Bluehost and a lot of other blogging and SEO related tools.

The #1 way to get more affiliate sales is to educate your audience about the products instead of hard selling.

Writing in-depth case studies around the products that you use is also one of the incredible and most effective ways to boost your overall product sales. Not only people get valuable information but they also give a try (if you provide them right reasons and free trials to the products that you recommend).

Anil Agarwal – BloggersPassion.com

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As a publisher, I use affiliate marketing relationships to create what I think is a win-win-win business model for my business, my readers, and my advertisers. I use affiliate partnerships to generate revenue from my long-form, deeply researched content. I have a wide range of partnerships that I match to hyper-relevant long-form, engaging content on my websites.

All my readers come via organic sources such as social, search or email. These traffic sources grow with the higher-quality, long-form content that I can focus on due to affiliate partnerships. Using affiliate partnerships allow me to not only achieve a higher RPM than typical display ads, but they allow for a better reader experience (and provide it for publicly for free). Additionally, my advertisers get hyper-relevant exposure and take on less risk than they would with blanket display ads.

There are plenty of challenges, though. As a publisher, you have to keep your readers trust and never let short-term gains influence editorial content. You also have to really work with your advertisers to craft a long-term, sustainable relationship. But overall, generating revenue with affiliate marketing is the same as it has been in the past. Create relevant content for your target audience, and find partners who are interested in a long-term relationship to partner with.

Nate Shivar – ShivarWeb.com

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Affiliate marketing is one of the single most important pieces to my business, and what keeps me motivated to grow my blog(s). I don’t consider myself an affiliate marketer, since I do a lot more in my business than just that – but I find that it guides every aspect of my business because what I’ve learned is that I make the most money when I promote things I’m very passionate about. So I find the affiliate programs behind my favorite products, and I build content around that – because I love doing it!

When I was a Web Developer I worked on a lot of landing pages and sales pages for affiliate marketers, and I really wasn’t into it back then, mainly because the products they were passionate about were really boring to me. Once I got over that slump and realized that “Hey, the stuff I love also could be a commission earning product!” I implemented it into my daily blogging, and eventually built content strategies around particular products I enjoyed, or felt were going to really become popular. I pepper in affiliate products here and there that fit with what i’m doing – if you stick with it long enough, it works – and you HAVE to be passionate about it, or you won’t do it. You also don’t have to be the best at it, something that has always stuck with me is the saying “Sloppy success beats perfect failure”.

Andy Sowards – AndySowards.com

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With my main business, we have about 10,000 subscribers on our email list, so when JV opportunities or other good affiliate opportunities arise, we email our list and it goes pretty well. This is mostly because we make sure to only promote people we know, and people our audience would love. We also review tools and software.

With my personal affiliate sites, I’m not doing anything special. Amazon reviews, clickbank products, the usual affiliate stuff.

Dom Wells – HmanProofDesigns.com

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I take a slightly different approach when it comes to affiliate marketing on my workup blog. I only review and pair myself with products/services I actually use and support. While I probably make less money than those jumping on the affiliate programs with the highest payouts, I’ve still had great success. And I think it’s because I have developed a trustworthy relationship with my readers. They know I won’t just publish a tool that is low-quality to make a quick buck.

With thousands of bloggers and affiliate marketers out there, I think establishing yourself as a trustworthy affiliate marketer is a challenge, yet can be very rewarding. How do I do it? It’s pretty simple. I write long-form content around the best products and services I use on a daily basis. I make sure to keep these updated so they become evergreen content. I’m a big fan of SEO, and so I focus on keyword research to rank my reviews. Adding a personal touch to your reviews is also good. Engage with your readers, don’t just tell them what to buy.

Brian Jackson – Kinsta.com

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How to Make 2018 Your Most Profitable Year Ever!

With a new year on the horizon, right now is the best time to start pre-planning for your affiliate marketing success. As you can see from all of the expert tips above, affiliate marketing is here to stay and it’s simply one of the most effective ways to make money on the internet today. As with all forms of content creation and online marketing, it’s always best to niche down your focus as much as possible. This not only makes the content creation process easier and more valuable to your audience, it also helps with promoting your content and getting it in front of the right audiences.

While there are many different components to affiliate marketing, the core basics are always the same — which is to provide a solution to someone’s needs and finding a way to market to that right audience while turning a profit. To help with that process, be sure to follow some of my best affiliate marketing guides and resources below.

• Make Money with a Blog – A complete guide to starting a blog and turning it into a successful business.
• The History of Affiliate Marketing – Understand where affiliate marketing came from, to see where it’s headed.
• Chatbots and Lead Generation – As more brands and busiensses start to implement chatbots and automation into your business, are you exploring those options as well?
• 50 Ways to Make $100 Today – A fun and interesting list of ways to start making money today. Great for inspiration!

I hope you enjoyed this expert round up and additional resources above. Be sure to contact me with any questions or new opportunities you might have.

Amazon is the ultimate beast for buying and selling anything in the world today. With their massive reach and billions of customers, it’s no wonder they are quickly becoming the number one destination for everything. What started off as just books, quickly turned into movies, DVD, music and now consists of pretty much everything else you can think of. Not only is the site a dream for anyone looking to make a purchase, it’s also become an opportunity of a lifetime for entrepreneurs and business owners who are looking to sell through Amazon and their marketplace in the process.

While the concept of Amazon is simple enough (buy products through their site), what most people don’t realize is that a huge portion of the products and sales done through the site are actually from outside parties, dropshippers, and independent sellers. Amazon is simply providing the customers and platforms to such sellers.

With all of this in mind, it’s important to make sure everyone is as well informed as possible when it comes to selling on Amazon. To help with this process, I’ve hand selected some of the best Amazon dropshipping and selling guides out there to help you get started.

Free Amazon Dropshipping Guide – How to Dropship on Amazon

When it comes to selling anything online, Oberlo has become one of the ultimate tools for importing and fulfilling product orders on e-commerce sites, as well as an actual marketplace for researching and selling products. With that being said, they also have one of the best blogs out there for walking users through the process of how to sell more online and set up new accounts and businesses through the likes of platforms like Amazon and Shopify.

In their Amazon dropshipping guide, you will not only get to walk through the process of creating a Seller Account on Amazon, you will also find everything you need to know about drop shipping and how it applies to Amazon sales, marketing, and fulfillment of orders. Once live with your Amazon account, Oberlo recommends you focus on your seller rating and keyword research, while not expecting Amazon to simply start sending a flood of sales your way. The customers are there, but you still need to put in the time, work and effort to get your products in front of them.

In addition to Amazon drop shipping, there are also many other alternatives to selling online with different drop shippers and wholesalers. This can be done by setting up an online store of your own, then simply finding the right supplier for your product. Unfortunately, this is the hardest part in the process. To learn more about such options, you can see more dropshipping tips here.

How to Make Over $10,000 a Month Selling on Amazon

Not all resource guides need to come in the form of long-form content and with the intention to sell an individual product or service. In the case of Quora, the question “How can you make over $10,000 a month selling on Amazon and through drop shipping?“.

The end result was over 42 different in-depth responses that break down a number of winning methods for making serious money with Amazon. Ed Tyson, Author of “How to Sell More on Amazon” broke his answer down to three simple rules for finding success on Amazon.

1. in making lots of cash: sell a ridiculously good product.
2. in making lots of cash: find cheap, effective and cheap ways to market your product. Then do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
3. in making lots of cash: give ridiculously good service.

Jan Steen also had three recommended tips of his own, which were:

1. Sell something nobody else sells or ensure the customer thinks you are the cheapest and the best.
2. Drive your traffic and conversion. It’s all about GOOD numbers.
3. Try to automate even yourself.

Be sure to check out the full Quora page, as it’s loaded with useful information on not only how to get started with an Amazon dropshipping business, but also how to scale it in size and hit that nice monthly five-figure mark.

Debate: Drop Shipping vs. Amazon FBA

When it comes to selling products online, there are plenty of options to choose from. You can create an e-commerce site of your own where you physically create and ship your own items, you can dropship, or you can sell through Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon). Everyone has their own preference on which is best, and in this recent article on Empire Flippers we get to hear two players from both sides debate the issue.

In this exciting piece, two industry experts and successful entrepreneurs share their own expertise and history of what’s been working best for them. Anton Kraly has years of experience in the dropshipping, while also generating over $1.8 million in sizes by the age of 24. On the other side, they have Mark Brenwall, who has found some great success with Amazon FBA. Both players started their business from scratch and focus on providing their audience with the best products and sales process possible.

By the end of this article interview, you will have a good idea of what it takes to start an online business through both dropshipping and Amazon FBA. Be sure to read through til the end of the article to see if both Anton and Mark would stick with the same business models, should they get to start from scratch all over.

How to Make Millions Selling and Dropshipping through Amazon

When you think about a million dollars and the massive volume of customers and sales being generated on Amazon today, that number really isn’t that big at all — especially if you are trying to hit that seven-figure mark in sales. It only takes $2,740 a day in sales to generate a million dollars over the course of a year. When you factor in the reach, marketing and automation possible through Amazon, this definitely looks more attainable than ever before.

The toughest part about selling on Amazon is finding the right product to sell. The platform and marketing are already in place. Be sure to read through each of the Amazon dropshipping guides above and see how you can get started with your own e-commerce/dropshipping business today.

A few days ago I released my first post on “How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months!“, along with the picture of my $306,373.24 check. Due to the massive exposure and questions generated from the post, I thought I’d bring you the second installment to How I Made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 Months! This time we will go with a Q&A theme.

What is the web site you made all this money with?
The site I was able to have so much success with is MySpaceNow.com. There is no programming on the site at all, and it’s made up of over 10,000 pages of content, such as images, myspace layouts and social networking applications/flash. Yes… you can imagine how long that took to put together. However, when you are seeing results, you just want to keep making your project bigger and better!

What is the current status of your site?
My myspace resource site is still running and still turning a decent amount of profit each month. The traffic is lower than it used to be, but that’s expected. I was one of the first to get into the “myspace resources” niche, and now it is more saturated than ever.

What is/was your site traffic?
I first started the site from scratch and with no traffic. The first method of advertising, were a few text links on a couple of my other sites. Next was to get the word out on MySpace and other social networks. Once the users started to grab content and link back to my site, it was golden. The high point for site traffic was around 185,000 uniques per day. Currently the site receives around 15,000-20,000 uniques per day. Yes, this is quite a drop… but as mentioned above, I haven’t focused on this site in over a year now.

Having Multiple Dedicated Dell Servers to Manage Traffic was a Must.

When was the last time you updated the site?
I’ve been quite busy with many other projects, so realistically, I haven’t touched or updated the site in nearly a year. Meanwhile the site still receives several thousands of visits per day, while also earning several thousands a month. My only maintenance is monthly servers fees, which are much lower than they were back when I was working on the site full time.

How did you make so much profit over costs?
The myspace site I created was a huge viral success. Once a few sites picked it up, the traffic was tremendous, and search engines were sending me a ton of traffic as well. Since I did not have to worry about marketing costs, I could focus on providing content, managing ad space, and making sure the site was always accessible. The main costs in running a site like this (outside of the hundreds of hours of time spent), are server costs. Over $100,000 was spent on shared hosting, buying new Dell servers and hiring a server management team to make sure everything was always running.

What were your advertising and hosting costs?
As mentioned, the site was pretty much all viral. After running the site for several months with no advertising costs, I decided to give Google Adwords a shot. I was able to target towards some pretty cheap traffic, since my Quality Score was super high, and this was a niche market that wasn’t oversaturated (yet) and click prices weren’t insanely high. Marketing through Google Adwords brought in over an additional MILLION clicks. Even after $27,721.89 in adwords cost, the site still had no problems clearing seven-figures. Hosting costs ranged per month from $300 (when first starting out), to up to $10,000 a month, before buying my own Dell servers and hosting myself.

I was able to generate over 1 MILLION clicks using Google Adwords!

What other ad networks did you use on the site?
In my last post, I focused on some of the big earners from the site, which were Yahoo Publisher Network, NeverBlueAds, CasaleMedia and ValueClick Media. Other earners on the site were Interclick (which is another cpm banner network), Miva (which provides screensaver/wallpaper downloads), Google Adsense (generated nearly six-figures in revenue), AuctionAds (I posted multiple times on my earnings with them), WidgetBucks (another new program, which I also posted earnings on)… along with a few other networks. All of these advertisers combined generated over seven-figures in revenue for the site… which clearly covered the hosting costs, making this a seven figure profitable site.

You made a lot with Yahoo, but what about Google Adsense?
Originally I had no expectations for the success of this site. I was providing a service and it exploded quickly. Once the traffic was flowing through the site, it was time to test different ad placements and to see what worked. Luckily, the Yahoo Publisher Program had come out (and accepted my site), just a few weeks after my site went live. I was originally running Google Adsense, then started running Yahoo Publisher Network instead. After comparing numbers, Yahoo was providing much better numbers. I would continually rotate advertisers on the site and see which performed best. While Yahoo earned nearly seven figures alone on the site, Google Adsense accounted for nearly six-figures in revenue as well.

Google Adsense in itself generated almost $100,000 in Extra Revenue.

Would you have sold your site if you had the chance?
The opportunity to sell this cash cow of a web site did come into play around the 7th or 8th month of it’s existence. I wrote a post about this a while ago, which was called “To Sell or Not to Sell“. While I was offered nearly a seven figure package deal for the site (more/less depending on performance), I’m still glad I never accepted their offer. The parent company that was interested, was purchasing up a bunch of Social Networking Resource & Entertainment sites… which they then all turned into crap sites. I also heard that this company screwed many of their “partners” on payments owed from their buyouts.

Why did you wait until now to post your check?
I’ve never been one to look for attention, or brag. The intention of posting my check was not to impress anyone, but to stress to everyone the possibilities before you. Yes, the check was received back in 2006. However, keep in mind… this blog is still less than a year old. I have literally spent the last year debating on whether or not I wanted to be put in the spotlight, if I was to post this check. But I decided to take the risk… my intention is the same as always, I want you to succeed, make money online and live the dream that us affiliates and ppc marketers are living.

Why didn’t you post your resource site in your original post?
The main reason why I didn’t like my resource site in my original post is because this is a blog, and it’s purpose is to keep people coming back and giving them more. A lot of people were leaving comments, asking what my site was. You were not being ignored… you were part of the process. Not only have I released my site information, but also how I promoted the site, my advertisers and actual earnings numbers.

Is this your only big and successful web site?
I’ve been making money online for over 11 years now, since I was 15… and have never had any other job. A one-hit-wonder I am not. Over the years I have adjusted to every market change there has been. I’ve done freebie sites, permission based email marketing, ran my own ad network along with my own network of entertainment sites. Was this site one of my biggest and fastest money makers? Yes! I saw an opportunity here and made the most of it. I am now focusing on several other different niche areas and projects.

Aren’t you worried people will copy your site idea now?
They say being copied is one of the highest forms of flattery… well, when you own a web site, and you’ve been copied… IT SUCKS… but, I’ve been copied plenty of times before. There is still plenty of money to be made in this market, but it’s also plenty saturated! You want to make a resource type site? I say “Go for it!”.

As mentioned before, I’ve been making money online for over a decade now, (since I was 15!) and have some close friends that advise me on what I should post and what I should not post on my blog. There are risks associated with everything. Some have warned me about giving away too much information. However, if I didn’t meet up with these people in the past, that took their time to help me along the way, I wouldn’t be where I am today… I only wish to do the same for you and all of my blog readers. Yes, it may be risky providing the amount of information that I do, taking risks and trying different things is how I got to where I am today. I’m willing to take that risk to benefit my blog readers.

First off, I would like to make it clear that this post is NOT to impress you, but to impress upon you what’s possible! This is a quick review on how I went from one of my worst years of making money online to my best year, and all it took was one big idea, one web site and several hundred hours of effort along with many sleepless nights. This is “How I Made $860,538.38 Profit in 4 Months!“.

MARKETING EXPERIENCE & RIDING THE WAVES:
Time and time again, I talk about how you must change your marketing niche every once in a while to continuously make new money online. Over the years I have done everything from content web sites, to sweepstakes and freebie type sites, to running my own affiliate programs and even permission based email marketing. In early 2004 I had one of my best years with making money online, then later on in the year things started to slack off and this continued on through most of 2005. At the time I wasn’t making much money and it was quite depressing. It’s very tough to get back into the groove when you hit a few underachieving projects in a row. In short, I was in a dip… and at the bottom of my latest successful wave. It wasn’t until October 2005 that I came up with my next big idea that would soon bring me my best months and year!

FIND A NEW IDEA & TAKE CONTROL OF IT!
Social networking was just starting to catch fire and for months I knew there was a way to profit from it, but I just hadn’t come up with an idea yet. MySpace had millions of users on their network 24 hours a day, there had to be a way to take advantage of this. Soon enough I realized, instead of trying to sell to all of these users, why not offer them something for free. I ran through some ideas and came up with my own site to provide free content for social network users. To make a long story short, my site and my content went viral extremely fast. Instead of having users upload their own content or have to search around for what they were looking for, I provided everything for free. In no time I was receiving thousands of users to my site daily. At max points I was pushing up to 180,000+ unique visitors per day, while pushing TERABYTES of data bandwidth. Imagine hosting thousands of images, viewed by millions across several different social networks!

MANAGEMENT OF MASSIVE GROWTH:
Just two months after going live with my new site, I was starting to accumulate some amazing hosting costs. Imagine the cost on hosting thousands of widgets, text applications and images, which are loaded millions of times a day across social networks like MySpace! The only reason why I was able to afford these insane hosting costs, was because of the massive volume of users I was receiving back to my site, not only through social networks, but also from Google and other search engines. You only need a small percentage of a very big number to click on ads, fill out surveys or take any action, to make money. In two short months I went from having a single dedicated server to having over TEN, then with the insane bandwidth costs added in I was paying up to $12,000 a month. At this time I was currently with EV1Servers.net, and leasing all of my servers. Since I’m not a tech/programmer type guy, I also had a server management team watching my servers constantly to make sure they were always running, just being down for a few minutes would have lost $100s of dollars. This server management team was not part of EV1Servers, and cost $1000 a month to manage all of the servers, and keep the servers balancers in place. By the end of the third month, I talked with my server management team and we decided it was time to for me to invest in my own servers and take out the middleman for hosting. I went on to order 17 servers from Dell, which are all held and managed in a data center now.

MONETIZATION IS KEY:
On average, my site was receiving around 100,000 unique visitors per day, and I was generating most of my ad revenue through Yahoo Publisher Network, ValueClick Media and CasaleMedia. It wasn’t until a year later that I would start testing CPA offers on the site. To my surprise, the CPA offers from networks like NeverBlueAds worked extremely well. Originally I had stayed away from promoting a few of their offers because I thought they were over saturated and wouldn’t convert. I finally took their advice and listed a few on the site and to this day they are still pushing some great earnings through the site.

TO EXPAND, SELL OR STAY THE SAME:
Back in April, I wrote a post asking the question… “To Sell, or Not to Sell?“… This was a question I had to ask myself when I was approached by a company that wanted to merge/purchase my MySpace resource site. I not only turned down their seven-figure deal, but I was lucky enough to not be one of the many sites screwed by the company, as they tried buying many other sites as well. Once acquired by the company, they would wreck the site with adult-like video content and I heard from several people on how they got screwed out of their owed money and contracts.

SUCCESS IS FOUND:
Two years, and over seven-figures later… my little site idea that rapidly became one of my most profitable ideas yet, is still running strong. Despite the fact that I really haven’t touched the site in several months, it’s still receiving over 25,000 uniques per day and still making a decent amount of change.

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EARNINGS DETAILS:
As I mentioned earlier, three of the main initial revenue sources I monetized my site with were ValueClick Media, CasaleMedia and Yahoo Publisher Network. While I did use other programs such as NeverBlueAds and Google Adsense later on, these three programs were heavily used during months of peak traffic. As for promotion costs of the site, during this three month period, there were none. No PPC Advertising either, everything was viral traffic and a couple links off my other sites. This write up focused on how I made $860,538.38 PROFIT in 4 months. The site is now well over two years old and has since earned over seven figures in profit/earnings.

ValueClick Media is a company that buys your web site advertising space on a CPM basis. From my stats chart below, you can see the monthly increase in revenue went from $243.63 to nearly $30,000 a month.

CasaleMedia provides the same type of service as ValueClick Media, but are more strict with acceptance into their program. They also have higher CPM rates, but usually purchase a smaller percentage of your ad space. Peak earnings with CasaleMedia were around $7,000 a month.

One of the major reasons for my dramatic increase in income, was due to the release of the Yahoo Publisher Network. This program, run by Yahoo, is basically their response to Google Adsense. Like Adsense, you are paid an unknown percentage for each click you send to the contextual advertisements displayed on your site.

It wasn’t til about a year after launching the site, that I would start testing with CPA offers from NeverBlue. To my surprise, the majority of offers I listed on the site performed extremely well. Even though I thought the market was over saturated on these offers, there was still a high demand. With the new revenue generated from NeverBlue, the site was able to pull in another $60,000+.

For any of the doubters, or photoshop addicts… Just to prove my legitimacy, take a look at the video below!