Affiliate Marketing- A Freelance Affiliate Marketer's foretaste on Home Business Opportunities!!

Ezines or Newsletters are relatively a cheap method of online marketing. Ezines are just like real life magazine. It provide free articles and resources that could be of benefit to the readers. Subscribers receive the articles through e-mail. Everyday a large number of surfers join these Ezines for some free staff of their interest. The subscribers joins willingly and agree to receive mails from the Ezine, so this method of email marketing is more safe and spam compliant. The best thing about Ezine is that, unlike many other marketing tools that work only ONE TIME, your articles published in ezine will continue to pull in profits month after month just like a web site. Michael Southon ( one of the most successful technical article writers) sought the example with his first article "10 Tips For Successful Ezine Advertising" being published among 500,000 subscriber in a week.

Publishing to hundreds of ezines a day will definately increase your CTR (Click Through Rate), but it invariably doesn't indicate that ROI (Return On Investment) will be proportionate. Unless you take some care while publishing your article in an ezine directory, you are taking risks to your reputation and financel. If you are yet to publish your first Ezine, I would suggest you to give a glimps to the following basic points for better results-

• Write simple sentence so that everybody can understand. Never exaggerate.

• Make shorter paragraph, provide quality presentation and content. Remember content is the king in internet marketing. Make proper home work before you publish. Repeat your title keyword more than thrice in the body of ezine.

• Don't commit suicide by making a direct sales pitch, rather redirect your audience to your home page,  capture their email id and then try to follow up. People don't buy at their first visit.

• Do not blatantly advertise in your ezine, but offer advice and support to your follow ups. Your signature will do the advertising for you. Don't forget your business is on the heal of your reputation.

• Title of your ezine add should not be all in capital or all small characters. Rather use a regular sentence with less number of exclamation marks. The title of your add is very very much crucial as the surfer get interested to you through your title only. Using numerical numbers in your title can be more beneficial sometimes.

• Before publishing your article in an ezine directory, collect the information about the number of subscribers the ezine directory presently has, the interest and age group of the subscribers and write accordingly. Suppose, you publish your article on Affiliate Marketing in an sports ezine, I think hardly your article will be seen by a visitor. So, select the perfect one according to  interest of the subscribers, not by popularity of the  ezine directory.

• Tracking of your adds is as important as it's to publish. Use a good add tracking system to monitor which of your adds working more than others. No one is perfact, man learns more from his past failures. If some of your adds are not working properly, try to recognize the pitfalls and rectify. I will love to personally recommend you to use Terry Dean's NetofficeToolbox, which comes out with a bagfull of free resources including a good add tracking system.

To publish an ezine, I don't think you necessarily have a huge barn of knowledge, but most crucial point - how you present your little experiences in a manner that anybody will endorse. Be optimist and research on how the sucessful netpeneurs write and present their ezines and encase therefrom. Stay informed.

Below is a list of 25 Ezine directories where you can submit your articles-

EzineDir ; NewsLetterAccess ; Ezine-Universe ; Freezineweb ; EzineArticle ; MyFavoriteEzines ; Ezine Locater ;  SearchEngineBase ; EzineHits ; NewsletterLibrary ; EzineDepot ; EzineCenter ; EzineSeek ; BestEzines ; Ezine-News ; EezineHub ; HomeIncome ; List-City ; OpenDirectory ; NetterWeb ; EmailUniverse ; Site-City ; ProfitInfo

Ezine Award Sites-

E-Zinez ; AwardSites

Overall, publication of Ezines in   directories almost a tedious job as I think and its lots time consuming. So, you can lessen your turmoil a little bit by  deploying an Ezine announcer. It saves your precious time. NewsletterPromote ; EzineAnnouncer provide good ezine promotion services. With one more step ahead, if you think to add more values to your ezine, I think submition of your article to more and more ezine award sites will be a novel one. By this you will knock the target in two ways- one being the opportunity to divulge into an avalanche of traffic and other being to increase your reputation over night. Don't indulge any hit or miss idea. Do something rock solid from the start up.

About the author:

Purna Borkotoki is a part time Affiliate Marketer and blogger. His blog Referral Demagogue is a daunting job from the self-styled blogger, where he unveils every tip and trap of online marketing. His real life online journal is his mouthpiece, where he unveils every facet of online marketing he learnt throughout his three years of online venture. For more Free Affiliate Program resources and articles,Syndicate The Feed.

Affiliate Program is a more advanced kind of MLM ( Multi- Level-Marketing) program, where an affiliate is remunerated against his service to refer others or making a sale of the respective product or service. On average about 60 Million people around the globe surf Google on money related matters everyday, and a proportionate amount of people search for a legitimate Home Based Business. Jupiter Research forecasted that U.S. online retail sales will reach $65 billion in 2004, and will continue to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 17% through 2008 and sales will top $117 billion by that time. Obviously, internet-based home businesses (specially affiliate programs) will only comprise a fraction of that total, but the growth trend is certainly applicable.

The Rise of Affiliate Program-

Late Corey Rudl probably the most influential net guru of all the time, who deceased on 2nd June this year on a pathetic car accident might rightly coined out traffic as lifeblood to a website. There are billions of websites in the net with different subjects and topics. But whatever the subject be, every webesite need traffic to live up to its full potentials. By the mid 90s, there were only a handful of web sites in the net. But with advent of new technologies and shifting of market to net way, a large number of webmasters jumped recklessly into the foray. Invariably, a cut through competition among the websites cropped up for traffic and publicity. The webmasters started to adopt new ploys and maneuver accordingly everyday to allure more visitors to their site. The concept of Affiliate Program mooted out of such an maneuvering, as I think.

Its really tough to earmark the inception of the concept of Affiliate Programs, as there is no clear documentation on the first Affiliate Program. But roughly the history of Affiliate Program can be traced back to 90s, as a manifestation of cool marketing strategy borne out by some of the Adult Sites of that time. Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon.com, came up with the idea of an online referral commission system. Amazon.com launched their affiliate program in July 1996. Though a handfull of web sites were operating with the idea, but Bezos introduced the modern look and flavour of affiliate program and popularized it, so often he been mistaken to have launched the first ever affiliate program.

However, Affiliate Program is proved to be relatively low cost method of online marketing. Even the most successful and sought after web gurus like Ken Evoy, Corey Rudl, Tery Dean have used and recommend the power of affiliate program. The net giants like ClickBank, Amazon, eBay already have set their examples with respective Affiliate Programs. Forrester Research reported a record $64 billion in online sales during the first half of 2004-a 32% increase over 2003. And they predict that figure will hit $184 billion by the end of the year. You believe or not, 45% of the total online sales are generated by the Affiliate Programs alone. For more feedback and future of Affiliate Program please review the free article by Elena Fawkner.

• Selecting the best Affiliate-
  There are hundreds of Affiliate Programs in the net making a bit zimig with liar and fraudulence. A third of them either phichers or email- grabber. So it will be prudential to be extra cautious in selection of an Affiliate Program and trying to stay aloof of the hoax.
  In selection of an Affiliate I particularly keep in mind the following criterions-
  
• Product/Service: If you let me to point out the most common blunder that every new netbie commit at their first endeavour of affiliate marketing, my answer is failure to filter out an Affiliate Program with a unique product. With a product that is ontravening to the theory of price to value, with a neggardly back-end support you can't go ahead in long term as you are dispersing probable customers with dejection from your site. Promote an affiliate program that is in lineage with the theme of your website. Otherwise no matter howsoever fierce your marketing strategy you deploying, you are doomed.
  
• Credibility: Try to go through the history of the Affiliate Program you are about to join.. How old it is, what is daily traffic statistics and its trend etc. Older the Affiliate, more the reliability. A hoax site often changes its name or will not survive more than three years. Alexa and LinkPopularityCheck provide good web report on a web site's link popularity, daily traffic status and google rating. I prefer Alexa web report to know the reliability and consistency of a web site . However, you can use Copernic as an alternative to Alexa or both in selection of an Affiliate Program.
  
• Security: A quality Affiliate Program never asks for your secrets (like Pay-Pal account, credit card number etc) at least on sign up. Often they use HTTS url or secured connection for transaction purposes. Use eBay Toolbar as a safety guard to protect your Pay-Pal and eBay accounts. Don't disclose your secrets to any ananimous program before judging their authenticity.
  
• Training: Any Affiliate Program that focus to excel in long term, never and never can ignore the importance of quality training and education to their affiliates. A quality Affiliate Program generally provides 24/7 training and help desk facility. Before joining any affiliate program, I use to put a mail to the help desk asking for their suggestion and feedback on a certain topic that their FAQ skip. This way I can judge their promptness of service delivery and their value to customers. Proper trainig session is so crucial to a newbie at their startup that no affilate program can overlook it.
  
• Referral Matrix: Prior to join an Affiliate Program, ensure how deep the matrix level goes. Deeper Affilate Matrix = More Residual Income potential. A good Affiliate Program generally offers at least 5 levels deeper matrix. Recently, I have noticed some of the Affiliate Programs, which have impletemented Forced Matrix System, where every new comer earns from the advertisement of their upline as Spill Over.
• Tracking System: Another critical thing you must ensure that, whether the Affiliate Program you are going to join provides a quality down-line management and tracking system or not. If yes, then try out it in the trial period instead. Don't believe in fluffy guarantees.

About the author:

Purna Borkotoki is a part time Affiliate Marketer and blogger. His blog Referral Demagogue is a daunting job from the self-styled blogger, where he unveils every tip and trap of online marketing. His real life online journal is his mouthpiece, where he unveils every facet of online marketing he learnt throughout his three years of online venture. For more Free Affiliate Program resources and articles,Syndicate The Feed.

Articles from the Blogger-

• Affiliate Resource: List of 25 Ezine Directories- by Refdem
• 6 POINT PRINCIPLES OF AFFILIATE PROGRAM SEARCH
• The Trivia behind Google # 1 Ranking -Keyword Density Vs Link Popularity
• "Contribution of Weblog As A Tool Of Online Marketing"- A Panorama
• More Article Submission Websites Require Authors to Register and Use Passwords
• "Affiliate Resource: List of 25 Ezine Directories"
• WANT GOOGLE RANKING? INCREASE YOUR INBOUND LINK POPULARITY !

My Favourite Articles-

• JupiterResearch Finds That Deployment of Corporate Weblogs Will Double in 2006 (New York, NY, June 26, 2006) -- JupiterResearch, a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer technologies on business, reveals that 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.

• Online Ad Spending Still Growing in the US and UK-Figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), show that US spending on Internet advertising set a record in the first quarter of 2006, reaching $3.9 billion. That represents a healthy 38% increase over Q1 2005, when the total was $2.8 billion, and a 6% increase over the Q4 2005 total of $3.6 billion......In fact, the report predicts that online advertising will overtake national newspaper advertising in the UK by the end of 2006, when the Internet will account for 13.3% of the £12.2 billion ($23 billion) UK advertising market, compared to newspapers with a share of 13.2%.

• Web Marketing & Sales- This presentation is filled with essential statistics, charts and advice about marketing websites online. Find out about: a) Search Engine Marketing b) Conversion c) Reporting
  DIY Resources. Just fill out the form below and we'll email the presentation (1MB in PDF format) straight to you.

• The Ten (not quite) Commandments of Marketing With Business Blogs and New Media- When marketing with business blogs, podcasts, social networks, or any other type of New Media Marketing tools, there are some commandments that must be followed. If you break them, you’ll die a horrible painful death being ripped apart by a gang of midget Ninjas, then you’ll spend eternity burning in hell!

• Top 10 Tips for Blogging - ...In order to attract the attention of search engines, you will need to develop content and substance. A headline or simple sentence is not going to generate the interest of readers or help with search engine ranking. Be sure to archive old blog posts to develop a large portal of similarly-themed content.

• How PPC Advertising Works -The first step to designing an effective and profitable ppc advertising campaign is to determine your budget. Budgeting for ppc advertising involves not only determining how much money you can spend on your ppc advertising campaign, but basing that on the monetary value of a click to your website since you are paying per click.

• How to Become an Affiliate Master and Make the Big Bucks - If you want to sell products online, you can either get a storage house and keep your own inventory, or just sell someone else’s products. Which one sounds easier to you?

• Topic Selection - A Key to Profitable Blogging - Blogs may have originated as a means of online journal writing and community building, but the use of this model won’t accomplish much for the online entrepreneur. Unless your cats are far cuter than every other bloggers’ or unless you are an amazingly interesting person with some tremendous writing talents, your personal blog will get lost in the chorus of voices that crowd the world of blogs. In order to making blogging profitable, one must select a good topic upon which to focus.

• Tips For Selling More Online - So you’ve set up a fantastic online shopping website and are all set for the cash register to start ringing? But nothing seems to be clicking? Selling online is an art and as with selling goods in the real world, you need to learn the art of selling on the Internet as well.
  Here are some great tips for selling more online.

• Marketing Tips From The Tag And Ping School of Marketing - Now, you will hear the magic words 'Tag and Ping' till you're sick of hearing them. This is a method I have been using for some time. It's basically the same thing, only you're using the tag or tagging system of such sites as Technorati to draw attention to your tag or keyword.



• SEO Elite SEO Software Sitemap - SEO Lite produces some of the articles and Tools to boost your website traffic. Tips that are useful to grasp!!



• How to Steal to the Top of Google- One of the first tools that article talks about is the Crawler Simulator. That tool lets you see what a search spider will see. What you want to do is take our example website, http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/dog/dog.htm, and plug that URL into the simulator.



• The Secret To Getting Listed In Google In Under48 Hours- Getting listed in Google in under 2 days is quite easy! First let's talk about what NOT to do. This drives me absolutely crazy when I see people doing this, and is actually what I did at one time as well. After you read this lesson, DO NOT waste your time doing this. I repeat... DO NOT waste your time doing what I'm about to tell you.