There are hundreds of legitimate ways to earn an income as an affiliate but there are various reasons why certain ways are not manageable for some people because they lack experience, don’t have the financial capacity or just don’t have the confidence to let their creative juices flow.

Here is a 3 step viral marketing formula you can start working on or perhaps tailor it to your comfort level:

STEP 1

This would probably work best for an affiliate product or service that pays recurring commissions. Getting paid monthly after just one sale is the ideal way to earn a long-term affiliate income without having to spend on the overhead and administrative efforts of owning your own product or service.

Usually when you make a sale that person will also have the opportunity to earn money and if they do you will make a commission off their sales so the best way to motivate your team is by showing them step by step how to make those sales. The simplest way to do that is by creating a report and have it passed on to their team and have their team do the same and so on.

STEP 2

For this to work you would have to make sure you get the right tools in place to ensure the person who referred you is getting credit for the sale. An excellent way is to create a PDF report which everyone has free access to these days and invest in a PDF brander.

Depending on how much you want to spend you can always set up a mini-site but that could be way above your means so keep it inexpensive. Do your research because there is always something available to make your marketing a lot easier. The key is to find unique ways to promote and help others do the same.

STEP 3

Making sales is obviously the end result we all want but the best way to succeed is building a list of subscribers that either will help you grow your affiliate income or buy products from you. Promoting without capturing, at a minimum, names and email addresses is going to hurt you in the long run.

Investing in a quality autoresponder service will set you back less than twenty dollars a month but if you think of the big picture the earlier sales will pay that cost multiple times over. So create a lead capture page offering the report for free and you will be building a list of subscribers and increasing your chances of making sales dramatically.

As an affiliate you will encounter a lot of competition, so below are 3 key ways to separate yourself and become a successful affiliate marketer:

1. Promote Yourself First -- a lot of people’s first mistake is to promote the affiliate site without promoting themselves first. These days potential customers want to know who is behind the product and service so self-branding is crucially important.  You can show your affiliate site until you are blue in the face and it will be real tough to make sales because prospects have short attention spans but a memorable brand or person is harder to forget.

2. Build A List -- a list of active. loyal and targeted subscribers can make the difference between sporadic affiliate sales and long-term multiple streams of income.  Building a list will allow you to maintain communication with your customers and prospects, build relationships and generate consistent traffic to your promotions.  Using autoresponders to build your list is a perfect marketing tool for growing your brand and following.

3. Provide Quality Content -- holding on to your subscribers will depend on the information you are providing and how often you give it to them.  Quality content is essential to bridging the gap between apprehension and trust.  You can easily turn off your subscribers by sending them overwhelming sales messages but you can build an army of buyers if you treat them with respect and give them answers, educational content or solutions to improve their situations.

Here are the 3 steps you need to follow to make your life as an affiliate marketer simple:

Step #1

Find a product or service that you can build a strong campaign around. Make sure you understand what you are promoting, but more importantly be prepared to compete with some great affiliate marketers who may promote the same things you have chosen to market as well. That’s okay, because the third step will help you make this easier for you.

Step #2

You need to generate traffic but more importantly it is crucial for your success to bring in targeted traffic. It makes absolutely no sense for you to spend maximum effort, time, money or all of the above bringing in the wrong group of people to your promotions. Targeted traffic will ensure you are giving your message to people who are interested in what you have to say.

Step #3

Converting sales is the toughest of the three steps, but it is undoubtedly the purpose of being in this business. The key to your affiliate marketing success  will be based on your relationship with future, past and present customers. That is why it is essential to build a list of subscribers. Investing in an autoresponder service will mean the difference between failure and success if you are looking to have a long lasting business on the Internet.

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1. Referral Based Purchases -- you can make commissions by referring visitors from your blog to an affiliate product or service you are promoting. If the visitor buys something through your referral link you will earn a percentage of the sale and it’s free to join.

2. Accept donations -- give your avid readers a way to donate some money without pressuring them. If you are providing value when they visit your blog you will be surprised how many will donate a buck or two. It adds up.

3. Set Up Shop -- sell fun products like magnets, mugs, t-shirts and personalize them with your logo and website URL. It’s a great way to make them feel part of the team. It is also another way to put your blog business marketing on steroids.

4. Sell Your Blog -- build a blog with a large consistent following and you will be able to sell your blog to people who rather buy one that’s already built and successful. If you plan to sell your blog try not to personalize the blog too much. You want it to be generic but valuable.

5. They Hate Writing -- most Internet marketers will tell you they hate writing but without content there is no business. Content is king and if you can write people will be knocking on your door (I mean blog) asking “how much do you charge?”

6. Do You Like The Spotlight? -- there are some major players who make a ton of money doing speaking engagements. Blogs are a perfect platform to showcase what you can offer of value. If you are an expert at your niche they will come calling.

7. Advertising -- there are thousands of opportunities to add promotional banners, links and widgets to your blog and earn pay-per click or sales commissions for free.  My best advice here would be to make sure you keep it as relative to your niche as possible.

There you have it, 7 clear-cut ways to make money blogging. Are those the only ways you can earn an income with your blog? Absolutely not, but focus on 1 or 2 of those tips consistently and you will do just fine, but if you want to take it to a whole other level make sure to:

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Tip #1

Building a list of subscribers -- this will be the driving force in the success of your business. Investing in a quality autoresponder service is crucial as well. To succeed online as an affiliate marketer you have to establish a relationship with customers and prospects. Using an autoresponder to send messages to your list will allow you to do that.

Tip #2

Protect your affiliate links -- unfortunately there are those individuals who prey on those working hard to earn a living by cheating their way to your hard earned cash. Cloaking your links with the right tools is a great head start. Remain vigilant and always keep up with the new preventive measures because there will always be people finding ways to steal other’s commissions.

Tip #3

Residual income products and services -- signing up to be an affiliate that pays you monthly commissions is a smart way to go. If someone subscribes and agrees to pay the monthly fee to join a membership site you get a percentage of that payment every month. It is without question the best way to succeed at affiliate marketing because of the residual income factor.

Tip #4

Expand your promotional funnel -- there are dozens of ways to advertise and market the affiliate products and services you have decided to promote. The key is to try them one at a time, stick to it until you are absolutely sure it doesn’t work, and more importantly keep working the ones that do. You must also consider what you can do for free which will demand your time or what can you afford to invest in financially.

Tip #5

Follow successful affiliates -- in this business there are many successful people you can learn and get some great affiliate marketing tips from. You can subscribe to their lists, subscribe to their blog’s RSS feed, or invest in one of their products and services. The key to learning the right way to succeed at affiliate marketing is to choose one or two people you can relate to and understand.

It doesn’t make sense to try learning from a person who makes a ton of money but you have no idea what the heck they are talking about. Those that care about your success know how to teach. Stick to those people and a great place to start is Affiliate Funnel where they show you how to build your business not someone else’s!

Affiliate Funnel offers you a platform to build that business and they make sure the program you are promoting is the central part of your growth at this membership site. They give you all the marketing tools necessary to succeed and there is also a free level you can join in.  The Gold Membership upgrade cost very little if you want to go ahead and really explode your income streams.

There is also very valuable training provided whether you upgrade or not.  If you are struggling with your Internet business building and have been searching for someone who honestly cares about your success then AF has a bunch of people that do including me so swing by!

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3 Key Components To Start Building A Monster List:

1. Autoresponders -- it goes without saying that you need a quality and reliable autoresponder service to build your list, so to start you off on the right foot here are some you can look into if you don’t have one already:

• Aweber
• GetResponse
• TrafficWave

There are many more, but as far as stability, quality and price you can’t go wrong with the three above.

2. Ethical Bribe -- more than likely (depending on the niche) you will be competing with a lot of other people to get the same people on to your list so you will be have to give away an enticing freebie to convince them to sign up.  Don’t panic if you don’t have something.  These days creating a quick mini-report is so simple that it’s a shame not to make the attempt.  Here is one I use to build one of my lists:

===> FREE Viral Traffic Automation Guide

It’s not a work of art, but it gives people some helpful information without giving away too much.

If you don’t want to create your own report why not join Viral E-book Explosion and give away their e-books with your affiliate links in them. This will not only help you build your list but you can make some extra money too.

3. Relationship Building -- in my opinion here is the toughest part but the most critical so be genuine and it won’t be so hard.  Once people sign up to your list how do you keep them from leaving?  Give them quality information and build a relationship with them.  Your goal should be to make your subscribers feel special because they are.

These are just some basic list building tips to get you started.  It’s really not complicated.

Stop Digging For Gold and Start Selling Shovels

The first time I read about this concept was through Stan Stuchinski’s The Secrets of The Big Dogs Program but much later in my Internet marketing career did I really grasp the concept and have made it a point to do business using it.

In a nutshell, try selling something that helps people get what they want instead of being in the majority trying to get it.

I’m not implying you should stay away from Internet businesses that focus on competitive niches but you should integrate ways to expand your customer base so you can have a better chance of making consistent income online.

Let’s just take the business I’m currently a happy member of as an example.  TrafficWave provides me with a handful of ways to earn money just by being a customer and affiliate of their system.  It also gives me a product I can take off line and make sales too.

Let me explain what I mean and then you can get ideas with the product or service you are involved in or at the very least it will give you ideas on what to look for when you are ready to join a program to start making money using the Internet.

In TW I found a system that allows me to earn money in various ways.  I can promote their unlimited autoresponders which is essential to any business online and can be very helpful to those off line business owners lacking visitors.

Their affiliate program is set up to earn me fast track bonuses, recurring monthly commissions and a percentage of the earnings from my referrals.

I can promote TW’s Guaranteed Visitors packages which gives me an extra avenue to earn some commissions.

I also can build unlimited lists to promote other programs and services so I can continue earning multiple streams of income.

TW also offers a variety of marketing tools, such as ad trackers, lead capture pages, and more.

Most importantly, I’m not bound to any one target group because there are so many people in different niches that I can target and I have access to unlimited autoresponders so I can build multiple campaigns targeting each of those niches and offering them this service allowing me to maintain a solid balance with my own niches.  Priceless.

and by being a TrafficWave member I am able to provide people the tools to help them earn money online or make more money using autoresponders.  Today’s Internet marketing tips goes very well with yesterday’s post:

Home Based Business -- It’s Not the System It’s You

Jeff Dedrick who has been an entrepreneur and self employed for over 20 years has a great membership site where you can brand e-books with your affiliate links, give them away and profit while building your list.  He also has an array of affiliate tools to ensure you earn money and the best part of all this is the membership is free to join.

Viral E-book Explosion now gives people the opportunity to have some quality e-books in their marketing arsenal to give away and start building their Internet business making it a huge time saver for those who just don’t have the skill or time to write e-books themselves.  You will also find e-books at VEE written by some high-powered and very successful Internet marketers to give to others at no cost to your or the recipient.

Although I highly recommend you learn to write your own e-books or at a minimum write mini-reports because you want to brand yourself and not continue to grow other people’s business but VEE allows you the opportunity to get a much faster start because it gives you the education, the tools to grow your list and a great chance to make some money.  You can also get a first-hand look at what you can do to get your own e-book marketed when you decided to do one yourself.

Now here is a solid tip about giving away these free e-books with your affiliate links in them.  Not only do you give them away to ensure you build your list, but also encourage your subscribers to give them away too, so that it becomes viral.  This is where catching a virus is a good thing and you want people to pass it on as far as it can go to increase your chances of monetizing your Internet business.

Through the Part 7 finale, I will be focusing on traffic generation.  Today will focus on ways to jump start your Blogger site (which I hope you have up and running), Part 6 will cover article marketing and in Part 7 I will reveal some of my other favorite ways of generating traffic and I will also show you where to get a step-by-step guide to generating massive traffic which is a FREE $97 VALUE.

Before I go into today’s third phase of the plan I want to make sure you understand the following:

Content is a valuable commodity in this business!

So if you are wondering how is it that you are going to write all this stuff don’t worry because you can take one article and convert that into an autoresponder series, a blog post, a mini-report, a podcast, a video -- the possibilities are endless.

Always remember, whenever you write an article or a blog post you will have the opportunity to re-purpose that content so don’t go nuts thinking ahead about what to write because you can take advantage of the one article you have already written.

Today, I want to cover 5 things you can do with your Blogger site to start getting traffic to it but the ultimate way will always be the content so the next part will get into that a lot more.

Reminder: If you missed any of the previous entries there is a link at the end of each post to the previous part of this series.

Phase 3

1. RSS Feed -- an RSS (real simple syndication) is used to publish frequently updated content, such as blog entries and other announcements. You should encourage people to subscribe to your RSS feed.

When people have access to your feed this gives them instant access to your latest entries and it gives you a great avenue to bring in consistent and returning traffic. To maintain that flow of traffic continue to provide quality content.

2. Badges, Buttons & Widgets -- using certain components can help your traffic generation but it’s up to you how many things you want to throw on it.  I would focus on a few weeks of content before adding too much stuff but when you do build content here is just a few things you can add afterwards:

AddThis -- The AddThis button spreads your content across the Web by making it easier for your visitors to bookmark and share it with other people, again… and again… and again. This simple yet powerful button is very easy to install and provides valuable Analytics about the bookmarking and sharing activity of your users. AddThis helps your visitors create a buzz for your site and increase its popularity and ranking.

BlogCatalog -- BlogCatalog is more than just a social community for bloggers; they are one of the largest blog directories on the internet. Whether you are looking to search blogs, connect with bloggers, learn more about blogging, or promote your own blog, BlogCatalog is for you.

Feedburner -- FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

MyBlogLog -- Discover who’s visiting your site, and connect with your readers.

SocialTwist -- SocialTwist brings ‘Widget Applications’ that can add a twist to the way visitors use a website or a new way employees of a company collaborate at work.

There are a lot more out there, so do your research and see what will work for you.  More importantly Blogger offers many gadgets to make it easier for you to add things, so if you want to keep things simple go to Edit Layout and click on Add A Gadget and you will get a list of all the things Blogger offers.

3. Bookmarketing, Sharing & Social Networking -- I mentioned adding all the fun stuff above but it is important to understand the power behind those gadgets.  Bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, search and manage websites they have bookmarked. Sharing these bookmarks with other people gives you exposure because others will share their bookmarks containing your content.

if you use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or any of the hundreds of social networking sites offered today you must have realized how powerful these sites can be to your exposure. These platforms offer areas to add information about you, your business and interests which will all lead to your Blogger site and an increase in traffic.

4. Viral Marketing -- these days it’s so easy to create your own audios, videos, podcasts, e-books and mini reports. What does this have to do with your blog? Well, how about using one of these marketing platforms to promote your blog?

The key to viral marketing is getting people to pass your content along to others and have them pass it along to others, etc. Just imagine that happening multiple times over. You can use platforms available to submit audios, videos, etc., so others can pass your content to others freely without spending any money, if at all.

Remember what I said about re-purposing your content earlier;-)

5. Blog Carnivals -- a blog carnival is simply a post that contains entries from other blogs. Links from other sites that have similar content is a great way to bring in visitors, so submitting a content rich article with no sales pitches or affiliate links from your blog is a great way to get traffic.

You can either set one up yourself or submit your entry to a handful of carnivals weekly.  Again, wait until you have a few weeks worth of blog entries before you that. When you are ready visit Blog Carnival to submit your first entry.

Once again, I’ve given you a lot of information but hang in there and try piecing this stuff together the best you can and send me an email to ask@jimmyadames.com if you need me to help you with anything (Don’t waste your time spamming me).

If you haven’t seen the Blogger site I’ve set up as an example for this plan -- CLICK HERE…We will start adding articles to the blog for Part 6 so tomorrow I will be blogging about something else and start next week with Part 6 allowing me to add an article or two so we can wrap up the series.

Here is the link to the previous entry:

Internet Marketing Tips -- A Killer Plan For Internet Income -- Part 4