Affiliate marketing programs are one of the most popular ways to make money online. The concept is simple enough. A company hires an affiliate to sell its products and services. When the affiliate sells a product successfully, the company pays him a commission. Since affiliates have no inventory of their own, the company pays them only for actual sales they have generated through the efforts of the affiliates.

Affiliate marketing is essentially a kind of performance-based promotion in which a company compensates one or more affiliates per sale or lead generated by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Because these types of programs have a direct relationship with the products and services of a company, the ranking of that company is critical to the success of these programs. To keep its ranking high, a company wants its affiliates to be knowledgeable about the products and services it offers. This is why companies offer affiliate’s free newsletters and tools that can help them market the company effectively. Most companies also reward affiliates for achieving certain ranking goals.

With the popularity and profitability of affiliate marketing programs, there are many different programs offered by different companies. These vary in both scope and length of involvement. Some companies offer limited affiliate marketing services for a limited time period, while others provide long-term contracts with Stealth Secrets extensive marketing business model. Depending on your needs and requirements, you should choose the affiliate marketing business model that best suits your circumstances.

There are many ways for a company to promote its products and services through affiliate marketing programs. One such way is through social media platforms. For example, if a company wishes to promote its products through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms, then it must build a social media account and engage in relevant discussions. To get a commission, the company must convince these users to click on the affiliate link or the affiliate ad in order to gain a commission.

Another way through which affiliate marketing programs give commissions is through flashlights. Companies may choose to place small or large flashlights in public areas such as streets, sidewalks, etc. to attract people’s attention. The LED light attracts people and they stop by to take a look at the flashlight. Once there, the user may then click the affiliate link or the affiliate ad to gain commission.

The third way through which affiliate marketing programs give commissions is through Pay Per Click or PPC campaigns. Companies that run pay per click campaigns use affiliate links to direct internet traffic to their websites. When a visitor clicks the affiliate links, the website receives a certain amount of commission from the advertiser. It is important to note that the commission rate is influenced by the volume of traffic that the site receives.

To improve affiliate marketing programs, companies need to set certain acceptance criteria. For instance, if an affiliate marketer wants to place a flashlight on the top ten web sites for his/her product, he/she needs to abide by accepted guidelines. Some of these guidelines include the amount of traffic the site receives, the number of sales made and the number of clicks led from the flashlights placed on the top web sites. Companies also have to set a minimum sales price for their products. The minimum price may be a percentage of the sales volume or a fixed amount.

Each of these three methods has proven successful in earning cash flow from affiliate marketing programs. However, the most important factor of affiliate marketing programs is to ensure that the company using the affiliate link is legitimate. Since the affiliate link is from a third party web site, it is essential to verify that the website is authorized to act as an affiliate. The Better Business Bureau is one way of verifying the legitimacy of a web site. The Better Business Bureau can provide reports on the reliability of the affiliate marketing program.

How to Use Social Marketing to Change People’s Behavior

Social marketing is the main objective of advertising: It brings together large numbers of people from different locations, including clients and customers. Traditional commercial advertising aims at creating awareness, which is in turn beneficial to the business. In the case of social marketing, social good is also an important consideration. In the general context of public health, social marketing will promote community health, increase awareness and induce positive changes in behavior among customers. The term “social marketing” refers to any form of advertising that makes use of social norms. This includes participation in social events, like parades, charities or clubs, and so on.

This form of commercial marketing principles is often used in a wide variety of contexts. For example, the campaign against smoking received a great deal of media attention and changed several behavioral patterns. The campaign promoted awareness of the serious ill effects of smoking, through the message that “this stuff doesn’t taste good” and by making smokers aware of the fact that smoking is not a healthy activity. These methods are considered acceptable in most cases, since the goal is to inform people of behaviors that are hazardous to their health. Social media can be a great support for this kind of campaign.

The main advantage of this marketing technique is that it targets the individual, rather than changing behaviors of large groups. People are more likely to change their behavior when it comes to other individuals. However, because this type of marketing relies on personal observation, this technique may have limited effectiveness when it comes to changing behaviors of large groups. There are some companies that have employed social marketing as part of their campaigns; however, these efforts seldom succeed at altering large-scale consumer behavior. These campaigns rely on the idea of influence marketing, in which the advertiser tries to create a feeling of trust and reliability in the consumer, which influences the choice of the consumer. This means that, for the social marketing techniques to work well, you need to provide genuine information about the subject.

In addition to influencing the decision to purchase, social marketing campaigns also influence the decision maker about whether or not to purchase a product. Since the product is chosen based on the recommendation of others, they have the potential to shape how the decision is made. It is important to remember that, before any behavior change takes place, the social marketing campaign needs to be supported by strong compelling messages and examples. Most experts recommend that you plan your social marketing campaign before you even start trying to sell something.

The key to a successful campaign is creating the right connections. If you want to make a good impression on the priority population, it is recommended that you avoid creating a flashy ad, and instead focus on the benefits of the product or service. A catchy slogan may be necessary, but the focus should be on the key advantages. Also, this will increase the likelihood that they will click on your link and enter the priority population.

When you use social marketing techniques to influence the buying behavior of the primary and secondary priority populations, you need to be aware of the secondary priority population. Unlike the primary population, these people don’t usually shop, so you don’t want to waste your time convincing them to buy. The best strategy is to convince them of a need for the product or service, then present a solution. They will be more receptive to your message if you offer to give them a free gift as a way of saying thank you for their patronage.

Social marketing is the perfect way to persuade people who are unwilling to change people’s behaviors. If you choose the correct target population, you can significantly increase the sales of a business. Social marketing uses four Ps to influence people: Proactivity, Processing, Persuasion and Identification. Although there is no 100% guarantee that every effort will be a success, there is an excellent chance that all attempts will be much more effective than attempts that do not use these four Ps. It all boils down to your willingness to change people’s behavior to take advantage of these 4 Ps.

Your social marketing plan should include activities to address the four Ps, because if you can increase your success rates by just changing one thing, then you have greatly reduced the amount of energy you would need to invest in the campaign to achieve your overall goal. Changing one thing can make the difference between a partially successful campaign and a fully successful campaign. Just make sure that whatever you decide does not violate any of the categories of acceptable behavior listed above, otherwise, your campaign will be a complete flop.

Considered to be the most effective way on how to determine whether your website is capable of reaching your target audience is by deciding if it’s ‘engaging’ enough or not.

Though, most people believe that this can only be based on how good the web page is.

The truth is, engagement is more than that– this can range from how convenient it is to use the site, to how helpful and interesting the contents are.

Listed below are some of the best ways to make your website more engaging:

1. Do You Know Your Audience?

As a web owner, you ought to know that what can be engaging to one person may not be engaging to the other.

That’s why it’s important to figure out what kind of audience visits your site regularly.

This can also help you create a content that your visitors are going to like.

2. Simplicity Can be Beautiful

There’s a lot of things that can be done on a professionally-made website– the choices are endless, and that’s the reason why a lot of organizations take advantage of this.

This can be an issue that will affect the website negatively.

Obviously, web users prefer websites that are easier to navigate and scan.

Thus, you don’t need to stuff your website with too much apps that you don’t even need.

3. Utilize Copywriting That’s Casual and Friendly

Engagement can also be the tone and quality of the contents being posted on a website.

You should write for the loyal visitors and try your best to edit things in a way where it’ll be easy to read and understand.

4. Faster Loading Is a Must

Gone are the days when people use dial-up connections.

Today’s Internet connections have allowed us to surf the web with ease.

However, there’s still a number of sites that take forever to load– especially on mobile devices.

Your website visitors wouldn’t be willing to stay and wait for the page to fully load.

This can result in a loss of audience.

5. Come up with Relevant and Valuable Content

The contents posted on your website should be simple, but valuable.

Your readers should find these materials engaging and would motivate them to visit your site on a regular basis and check out your postings daily.

6. More Visuals

People are visual creatures and they love looking at ‘unique’ contents.

That’s why you should dress up the web page with more visuals that are compelling and interesting– something they’ll enjoy looking at.

7. Have a Persuasive Call to Action

Try to figure out what your visitors would do on your website and create a web content, such as images, buttons, and even written materials that can help them fulfil it.

8. Larger Images are Preferable

Like what they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

That can be applied in creating an engaging website as well.

If you’re in search of a way on how you can make your site more lively, then you should consider updating the website with bigger photos that can improve engagement.

9. Add New Contents Daily

The virtual world is dynamic and in order stay on top, you should make it a point to update your site regularly and post new contents as often as you can.

10. Don’t Forget the Visible Live Chat

In case that your site is offering a Live Chat support, you should see to it that the chat button is visible on every page and it’ll allow your visitors to contact you whenever they need to.

Aside from that, you should also make your audience feel that you’re always available to answer their queries.

11. Active Social Media Presence

Almost everyone is a part of the social media– including your future customers and visitors.

In order to increase the visibility and reach of your site, you should promote your website on various social media platforms.

Likewise, you should also be active on your social media account.

This will increase the credibility and improve your relationship with the visitors.

No doubt, engagement is a serious topic especially in creating a website.

The key is, you should ensure that the potential visitors will find it simple to navigate the site and everything they’re looking for are carefully organized in a way where they can easily find it.

By following these steps, you can ensure that your website will be more engaging that how it originally was.

Creating an affiliate website is only one option (and just the beginning) when it comes to marketing affiliate products.

The best affiliates let the world know about the product they are promoting by leveraging the best marketing levers the internet has to offer.

The good news? They are straight forward and most of them don’t cost a penny!

But make no mistake, it does take some time.

There are many things affiliates need to do well in order to succeed.

Look at the list below and start getting the word out.

1. Create an Affiliate Website

By knowing how to market affiliate products via a website, an affiliate marketer opens the door to a wide range of other tactics that can be tied to their site (such as video, podcasts, eBooks and more).

But the most important element of a website is it allows affiliate marketers to become a trusted voice in their niche.

Once trust is created with a prospect, product recommendations convert at dramatically higher rates.

2. Find and Join Discussion Forums Related to the Niche

By providing links back to the affiliate website, the affiliate should eventually score high in the organic search results from the search engines (such as Google and Bing).

Discussion forums are a great place for this, but make sure the forum provides do follow links, otherwise the search engines will ignore the “linking value”.

If possible, insert links in each post made in the discussion forum.

At an absolute minimum, make sure your signature has the ability to link back to your website.

Secondly, provide value in the forum.

Answer questions and ask thought provoking ones.

Become a trusted voice in the forum and people will want to see more of you.

So much so, they will eventually follow the link to your affiliate site.

Once there – you have them where you want them; now you can capture their email address, sell them an affiliate product, get them to click on Google Ads and so on.

They may even link to your website from theirs.

One last key item about the links back to the affiliate site; point them to the money pages.

For example, affiliates will post in a forum and post the link back to the page that is most likely to make them the most money (such as a product review of an affiliate product).

3. Write and Distribute Articles

Personally, we would rather capture the traffic directly to our own affiliate site than simply providing a link to a 3rd party website (even if it is the affiliate product site).

There is much more you can do with a visitor at your own site than simply sending them directly to a vendor.

There are hundreds of these sites and some of the best are;

Ezinearticle.com
Ehow.com
Articledashboard.com
Ideamarketers.com
And many many more…

Remember, a do follow link is just as important here as it is in the discussion forums.

A great way to see if a website provides a do-follow is to download the Mozilla Firefox do-follow utility and then browse the website to see if the outbound links are “do follow”.

Just like the discussion forums, make sure the links are pointing to your money pages.

4. Social Networking Websites

By interacting with people via Twitter, Facebook and the many other social networking sites, the relationship with a follower becomes immediate.

It is a two way communication street that often turns into a conversation.

By creating trust and showing people the affiliate is a true expert in their niche, it puts them in a terrific position to increase affiliate revenue by providing a credible recommendation for a product.

Learn how to market affiliate products via social media and you can take your income to a whole new level.

But it takes time to build a credible reputation.

Be patient.

Just like in the forums and article distributions you must provide value.

Fine your voice and value proposition and start sharing your ideas.

Conversations with followers will happen before you know it.

5. Email Autoresponder

People have grown tired of those approaches and have tuned them out.

However, the best affiliates know how to market affiliate products with an autoresponder effectively –and they make some very good money.

Building and maintaining websites is one of the most important tasks you will face as Affiliate Marketer.

So, it is a good idea to develop and constantly enhance skills in this field.

The reason behind that narrows down to obtaining and keeping good search engine rankings for your website.

Not only should you aim to get your site on the first page in Google, Bing and Yahoo, but also secure your high ranking with them permanently.

This is achieved by constantly adding fresh content to your site.

If you stop adding new content – your ranking will get hurt.

But what tools to use for website design,  creation and maintenance?

Can WordPress be used for that?

There are also certain SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rules to follow in order to get and stay more visible on internet.

It may sound like hair-raising, technically challenging task, which almost requires a university degree.

In fact it is not, thanks to modern technology.

Let’s take a closer look at Content Managing System called WordPress, and how it can help to simplify those tasks.

If you were to build a website from scratch, you would need to learn at least basic web technologies like HTML, CSS, perhaps JavaScript.

You would need to get familiar with moving files from your computer to a web server using File Transport Protocol client.

There are quite few technical details to take care of in order to put up and run a web site online.

However, all those things are automatically done behind the scene by Content Management Systems.

WordPress is the most popular CMS used by bloggers and affiliate marketers.

It helps you to concentrate on content, instead of fighting with technical issues.

Literally, with few clicks of your mouse, and half a minute time you could create an amazing framework for your website from free WordPress templates called themes.

The result of that “hard work” would be fully functional website with public access and basic functionality like comments engine.

It means that anyone could access it from any web browser by typing in the web address of your site.

The visitors can also leave comments on your site.

Not much of technical skills involved so far!

How about customizing the look of your website the way you like it.

Perhaps you need to have one or two side bars, one to three columns in the body, footer and header.

Perhaps an image for the header would work better than simple text.

All this customization and much more can be done using intuitive Graphic User Interface.

Again, no technical skills required.

All starts with selection of a theme, or layout template.

WordPress is an open source project, which means that any developer can get access to the source code and contribute.

As a result, there are lots of themes available for free.

Most probably you will find a theme in the free section, which would fulfill your web site design requirements.

There are also premium themes that are not free.

Those claim to be easier to customize, have better support, be more optimized, and most of the time they are responsive.

Responsiveness means that they automatically adjust the display format to a device your site visitor use; PC, tablet, mobile phone.

Some free themes have responsive behavior as well.

You need to read description to find what is offered with the theme.

My personal choice goes to eleven40 Pro Theme on Genesis Framework.

No specific reason why, it just most of the details came in one package.

Again, because WordPress is very popular open source tool, there are loads of add-ons available to you free of charge.

Plugins installation is pretty simple and intuitive process, which does not require specific technical skills.

Adding plugins could help enhance functionality and performance of your site, as well as considerably simplify its maintenance.

On the other hand, there are lots of awful designed and coded add-ons, which could harm your site.

It is wise to do some research before installing a plugin, to make sure that it was tested and has no bad reviews.

Most trustful sources for this kind of information are discussions in online forums and communities of internet marketers.

Those are users with real experience, who would tell you which plugin to use, and which to avoid.

Personally, I like very much community of Wealthy Affiliates.

As a member, I can do a quick search for desired keyword in all categories of discussions, trainings and posts.

If this does not deliver satisfactory answer, people are very helpful and friendly to answer your questions in forums or live chat.

The plugins could be added or removed at any time in WordPress.

No need to worry about them from the start.

Other thing to remember is that adding too many plugins could worsen site performance; decrease initial loading time or cause unpredictable conflicts.

Here are few plugins that I use.

All In One SEO Pack

Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress  blog.

Basically, helps you to comply with some Search Engine Optimization techniques

Akismet

Claims to be used by millions, and is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam.

It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog

WP Super Cache

Helps to speed up your page loading

WP Edit

Enhance text editing options

In this section I just want to mention that plug-ins could become a security breach for your website.

Having those inactive and outdated plug-ins on your site is asking for trouble, it could give a way for hackers to access and control your site.

Two things to remember in this respect:

-Update your plugins regularly
-Delete all unused plugins

I hope this information was helpful.

Please, leave your comments if you have something to share, or have any questions.