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Finding the best affiliate marketing program can be confusing because of all the hype associated with most affiliate programs. Hype may not be the best term to describe many affiliate programs because many of them down right lie about what their product will do. I’ve said it before and it is worth saying again, the sales page for many affiliate products are better than the product itself.

I won’t stick my neck out by telling you what the best affiliate marketing program is. I will tell you what the best affiliate marketing program type is and what to look out for when determining which is the best affiliate marketing program for you and hopefully will help you make a more informed decision when choosing an affiliate program.

Watch out for affiliate program’s that claim that they are the best affiliate marketing program or the pitch page makes outrageous claims about the product because that is nothing but hype to get you to market their product. Those who truly have the best affiliate marketing program will never have to say they are the best because their reputation will speak for itself.

Keep in mind that your name and your reputation is everything when it comes to marketing online. Because your customers will only know you by your online reputation it is really important that you are known as someone who helps their customers and can be trusted. The only way to know that you have joined the best affiliate marketing program is by the product or products they sell. Your reputation is only as good as the products you sell. Take the time to find the best affiliate marketing program that sells products that will be beneficial to your customer.

I think I’ve said this before in another post that the best affiliate marketing programs are those that sell physical products because you will be selling a product that the customer is looking for and it is more likely to do what the customer expects it to do and is generally much easier to target your customer base.

In my opinion affiliate programs that sell digital products are generally not the best affiliate marketing programs to promote because it is very difficult to know whether or not the provided information or software is any good or just a bunch of hype. Sell people garbage and they will never buy from you again.

The best way to determine for yourself whether the affiliate program that you are considering joining is the best affiliate marketing program is by asking yourself if you would buy the product or products they sell. If your answer is no, the affiliate program in question is probably not the best affiliate marketing program to join.

Take the time to do some research. The best places to get info about a product are from forums or comments posted on blogs because these people are more likely to tell the truth about the product and whether it is garbage or not. Forums and blogs are the best places to determine if the affiliate program that you are considering is one of the best affiliate marketing programs and whether it is a good fit or not.

I found a guide that teaches affiliate marketing. The guide is free and teaches the very basics of affiliate marketing.

If you are a knowledgeable affiliate marketer this guide is probably not for you. If you have little or no knowledge of the process this guide may be a good place to start.

Here’s what you will learn from this guide.

1.) Affiliate Marketing in a Nutshell

2.) The Affiliate Marketer Defined

3.) Are Affiliates in Demand?

4.) The Age-Old Question Do You Need a Website?

5.) Creating Multiple Streams of Affiliate Marketing Income

6.) Don’t Make These Common 4 Affiliate Mistakes!

7.) Google Adsense Profits Mixed In With Affiliate Marketing

8.) How To Best Select An Affiliate Program

9.) How To Continually Grow Your Affiliate Checks

10.) How to Set Yourself Apart From Other Affiliates

11.) How You Can Become a Super Affiliate

12.) Overachieving Your Way to Super Affiliate Stardom

13.) Search Engine Optimization for Affiliate Marketers

14.) Protecting Your Commissions

15.) Have a Mailing List of Your Own

16.) Telling Good Traffic from Bad

17.) Why So Many People Fail In Affiliate Marketing

18.) Other Notable Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

19.) Further FREE Resources

If you think that this affiliate marketing guide can help you get a better understanding of affiliate marketing, you can get the free guide here.

Before you join any Internet marketing affiliate program you should take into consideration how competitive the Internet marketing affiliate program is and if the product or products they offer are any good.

You don’t want to join an Internet marketing affiliate program that is too competitive because the competition will be fierce and it will be very difficult to compete with affiliate marketers who are more experienced and are better at it than you are.

There are generally quite a few super affiliate marketers in very competitive Internet marketing affiliate programs and they generally can offer a more attractive deal for their potential customers and will almost always be able to beat out the less experienced affiliate marketers.

If you are not an experienced affiliate marketer you are much better off trying a less competitive Internet marketing affiliate program rather than a competitive one because you will have a much better chance in this type of affiliate program because you will be on a much more level playing field than with the more competitive Internet marketing affiliate program.

Just because an Internet marketing affiliate program is less competitive doesn’t mean that it isn’t as good. It just means that less people know about it which is good for you. You want to find Internet marketing affiliate programs that are low in competition and offer a good product.

A great place to check is clickbank. The clickbank marketplace is a place where different Internet marketing affiliate programs are listed.. Clickbank only offers digital products. The nice thing about clickbank is they list the affiliate programs by most popular on down to the least popular Internet marketing affiliate program.

What you want to do is go and find the less popular programs on the list and run a google search on the affiliate program to see if anyone is making any negative comments about the affiliate program. If you find only positive comments about the Internet marketing affiliate program then the product that they offer is probably good and will probably be a good choice. You can find clickbank here. http://clickbank.com

I read an article over at ezine articles called how to get rich online. While I agree with some of the points in this article there are some things that I don’t agree with.

One of the points of this article states that you need to find a problem and solve it or improve on a product that is already out there. Let’s face it, most of us are not capable of doing this and it is totally unnecessary. You can make a lot of money online without having to reinvent the wheel.

Another thing that the article says is to start an affiliate program of your own so that others can promote your newly created product.

While all of this sounds great it’s not very realistic. As I said before most are not capable of creating their own products on their own. Unless you have a lot of money to invest so that you can hire someone to create a product for you, this is something that you probably don’t want to consider.

Staring your own affiliate program is a lot easier said than done. I ran my own affiliate program several years ago and can tell you that there are a lot of headaches associated with running your own affiliate program. The biggest problem is that you have absolutely no control over how an affiliate will promote your product. You can set all kinds of guidelines on what an affiliate can or cannot do however, it is the final decision of the affiliate marketer as to whether he or she will follow the guidelines of the affiliate program or not.

The problem is that many affiliates will do anything to make a sale. You will have to deal with your affiliates spamming people. If the spamming problem gets back to your hosting provider you will be shutdown without notice. There are many other problems with running an affiliate program, spamming happens to be the biggest problem.

The article goes on to say that you can’t make a lot of money without the help of others. That couldn’t be further from the truth. If you find a product that is not very competitive that pays a high commission you most certainly can make a great living online.

Research, dedication, and hard work are what it takes to do well online. You absolutely do not need to depend on other people to get you there. No one will take better care of your business than you will. The biggest problem is that everyone is looking for the easy way out. Do a little bit of work and you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in a relatively short period of time.

You have a website and it now is starting to get some traffic. It has been a long grueling haul but finally some visitors are beginning to find you. Your number one priority is to make sure that they keep coming back by providing them with great information. Your number two priority should be how they are finding you.

It is very important that you know where your traffic is coming from so that you can keep growing that traffic. The more that you know about the origin of your traffic, the more traffic you will get.

The whole idea of evaluating the traffic to your website is to find whatever consistencies there are and build on those that you find. There is an absolute goldmine in doing this as it will allow you to build on what you already have many times over.

For example; let’s say that you suddenly have a big increase in traffic from the search engines. The first thing that you will want to check is to see what keywords are being used to find you. If you find that the majority of your new found traffic is coming from one or two keywords, or keyword phrases, you will want to make appropriate decisions as to how not only to keep that traffic coming but what changes are needed so that you can potentially increase the traffic that you are already getting.

Here are a couple of things that you might do to increase your traffic with the keywords that you find. The first thing that you would want to do is to make those keywords more prominent on your website by using them more often throughout your site. Add it to your title tag, description tag, and keywords tag, and more often in the body, if it’s not already in those places. Just don’t overdue it. Never use your keywords anymore than 3% of the time throughout your website. Anything more than that, will hurt your rankings with the search engines. If your website is a blog or forum writing something that relates directly to the keyword or keyword phrase will help boost your prominence in the search engines as well. You should be able to write quite a few different posts that will relate to the keywords that you find.

You may find that a big chunk of your traffic is coming from a particular blog or forum that you comment or post to. If that were the case, you certainly would want to go there more often and comment or post. However people are finding you, there is always a way to make it better so that you can get even more people to your website.

I have written about the traffic evaluation tool Statcounter before on this blog. If you already have it, start using it. If you don’t, get it. Statcounter works on all websites, including blogs. This is the best traffic evaluation tool that I know of. If you can think of it, statcounter can do it. If you don’t have statcounter, you can get it here. http://statcounter.com Don’t worry; I’m not trying to sell you anything. There is a free version as well as a pay version of statcounter. I recommend you go with the free version because you probably don’t need the pay version at this point in time. Down the road you may need it, but for now, chances are you don’t need it.

You will be amazed at what you will find when doing a quick ten minute traffic evaluation of your website. Since all websites are different and there is no clear cut answer to driving traffic to any, one, website, makes traffic evaluation essential.

We as webmasters tend to look at things on a grand scale when it comes to marketing online. We seem to want to sell to the whole world and ignore other opportunities that lay before us.

The problem with this outlook is that there is a lot of competition and because most of us think this way we tend to go in that direction. It’s not all our fault though because most of us learned this from self-proclaimed gurus. While it sounds like the best way to make a lot of money fast and get the word out about our online business it generally doesn’t work out that way because everyone else is doing the same things as we are and we tend to blend in along with all of the other millions of online marketers.

To do well online you need to do what most others are not doing. If you do what everyone else is doing there is no way that you can be distinguished from every other guy on the net.

A very ignored place of marketing on the web is local web marketing. Most local websites promote their business on the Internet but sell their products in the offline world. Most of these businesses do very well because they are promoting their business from a specific location so the competition is very minimal if at all.

For example: Let’s say I were to promote my restaurant in the town or city that I live in. If someone were to run a Google search for restaurant they would get millions of results but if someone were to run a search for restaurant in a localized area of the country the list of results that they would get would be very small.

Click each link below to see the difference between a global search and a local search for the search term restaurant.

Google local search for restaurant

As you can see, the global search resulted in over 300,000,000 web pages that use that search term while the local search has less than 15,000 web pages that use that search term. Which search term will you have the better chance of being found with? Common sense should tell you that you will be more likely to be found with the search term restaurant in Manomet Massachusetts.

While the second search term won’t get anywhere near as many searches as the first search term you will more than likely get more traffic from the second search term as you would with the first because you will be much easier to find because of the lack of competition of the second keyword.

Granted you probably are not willing to start an offline business in your local neighborhood. You don’t have to. What you can do is check out local merchants to see if they offer a pay by referral program. While my restaurant example on restaurant probably won’t have such a program in place other types of businesses will.

Here’s a couple to get you thinking a little.

Travel Agencies

Real Estate Referrals

Using the 2 examples above you should be able to setup a local website using local keywords.

For the travel aspect you could setup a website using a theme of a specific vacation spot in the world. You would use keywords that would target that particular vacation spot.

Here’s a keyword example you might use. ‘Vacation on Martha’s Vineyard’ or ‘visit Martha’s Vineyard’.

You can do the same with real estate as well using keywords such as ‘real estate on Martha’s Vineyard’ or ‘homes for sale on Marta’s Vineyard’.

For each referral that you send that results in a sale you will be paid a commission.

You may be thinking that you won’t be able to make enough sales due to the lack of people that you will be able to refer. If you were to use just the one theme you won’t get enough referrals to be worth your while but if you were to setup say 50 to 100 themes using either of the two ideas above you will do very well. In other words take the main theme such as vacation and apply different vacation spots around the world and setup separate local websites for each. Do you still think that you can’t get enough referrals?

There are plenty of other ideas that will work well using a localized website you just need to find them.

Here are some things that you should consider before you decide to sign on with a merchant as one of their affiliates. You really should check some things out to keep you from wasting your time and effort promoting someone else’s product or products.

Check out the merchants pitch page and view it as if you were the potential customer. You need to know first hand if the sales pitch is convincing enough that it could entice you to buy. If the answer is no, move on because chances are everyone else will respond the same way as you. Besides, it’s pretty hard to sell something that you don’t believe in yourself.

If you think that the product is good but the sales page sucks check with the merchant and find out if you can use your own sales page to sell the product and whether or not you can bypass the merchants sales page altogether. This may or may not be a problem. Many merchants want their affiliates to send their potential customers to their website. To be honest most affiliate merchant sales pages are terrible and the fact that most of the big guys will make you send potential buyers to their sales page really cripples most affiliates.

It seems like every affiliate marketer jumps on whatever product is hot at the time. The fact that these products are very hot makes them very attractive. The problem is there will be a lot of competition and a lot more super affiliates selling these hot products. It is almost impossible for the average affiliate to compete under these circumstances.

It may be better to take a look at the not so hot affiliate programs that are out there. Just because a product is not as hot as some of the others doesn’t necessarily mean that it is not a good product. There could be several reasons for it such as the product may not be as well publicized as the others. The big name products generally have a network of big name gurus promoting it while the smaller guy doesn’t have that luxury.

It seems to me that it would be better to fish in a smaller pond where success is more likely and there is not as much competition and will give you a much better chance of making money.

With an affiliate program that is not so popular your chances of being able to promote the product the way that you want to will be more likely because the merchant is probably not making that much money and will be more willing to bend than the big guys.

Do some research over at Clickbank and Commission Junction to see if they have any little gold nuggets sitting there. You may find some great products that no one has taken notice of.

I don’t look at the smaller guys myself. I do intend to some time in the near future when I’m not so busy to see for myself what they have. I figure that it is much easier to be a big fish in a small pond than it is to be one in a big pond.

I just stumbled upon this site and found it so ridiculous that I couldn’t help but post it here. They sell an ebook called The Fall Of The Gurus. If this isn’t a scam then there are no scams. I have never heard of this site and can’t find anything about it when I run a search. I have to say that this person can’t be making any money because I don’t know how anyone would be able to find the site. I don’t remember how I found it myself.

Basically this manual claims to show you how to get any ebook online for free. Come on! How can that be possible? Does it teach you how to hack the ebook owners ftp site? Maybe it’s something as stupid as asking for a refund.

The comical part of the sales page is where the gurus supposedly sent him some nasty emails telling him to take down his site. I say him because he calls himself Mr. Anonymous.

He has one testimonial on his sales page telling you that he doesn’t want to bore you with countless testimonials. My guess is that he got lazy after he wrote the first one.

He puts the standard, it could be $197 it should be $97 but for now I am only going to charge you $47 for this valuable information. Act fast because I may raise the price at any time. He can raise the price all he wants because he isn’t making any sales because no one knows anything about him or how to find him.

Here’s the link. http://www.fallofthegurus.com

Since November of 2006 I have gotten nothing but product launch after product launch emailed to me with promises to be the next big thing on the Internet that will change your life forever. The newest one of that long list is Day Job Killer that was launched today at 11:00 AM EST.

Day Job Killer is supposed to help people quit their day jobs (hence the name) and promises to teach you sneaky and underhanded techniques that only the Guru’s know about. It goes as far as saying that the ebook will teach you how to steal traffic right from under their noses. There are a bunch of supposed unknown strategies in there that you would need to get the ebook in order to find out about them.

The ebook was written by Chris McNeeney the author of Adwords Miracle and Affiliate Project X. I have read Affiliate Project X and will say that it is very informative and well written.

I generally like the stuff Chris sells but I have real doubts about Day Job Killer as it sounds too good to be true. I’d have to say that it probably is. People have been sucked into this thing big time. The fact that you can’t even get to the order page to order this thing tells me whatever strategies that are in there will be saturated within a day and become useless.

The fact that Clickbank is so overloaded with traffic from this thing tells me that this product will be useless come tomorrow because so many people will be using the same strategies in the ebook that those strategies will be so diluted that they probably won’t work at all. Of course who knows if they do in the first place.

I’m guessing that Chris will make more money on this product than he has made on all the products that he has sold combined and will do it soon. That’s saying something since he is over a million dollar a year marketer. I’m not surprised by the success this thing is having because just about every big marketing name with huge lists are promoting this thing.

I know that Chris has been legit to this point. I question if he is with Day Job Killer. I hope it is because there aren’t many out there that you can trust. I’m definitely going to pass on this one. There is too much competition. Besides the only secrets to being successful in any business are hard work, a great attitude, and a lot of motivation.

I don’t know where I’m going with this post but hopefully it will come to me by the time I finish writing it. I haven’t written anything for a few days now because I have been promoting my blog with a vengeance.

I have also been doing a lot of research to get some ideas to post here. While reading through a lot of information on Internet marketing I kept on coming across the same thing over and over again.

It’s no secret that I actively promote the Rich Jerk Ebook since I have his banner on the sidebar on this blog. This post is, and at the same time isn’t, about the ebook and some of the strategies that are in the ebook.

I’ve read the Rich Jerk ebook and there are some great ideas in there but that isn’t what this post is about. I’m getting clearer to where I’m going with this but am not quite there yet.

What kept on jumping out at me is how people were using the ebook, and how they were trying to sell it online that was really bothering me. There is a section in that ebook that tells you how to write effective ad copy. Now this was just a simple example of a certain technique that is a little different than your typical hyped up sales pitch. What a lot of marketers were doing is taking that exact example and using it for their sales page.

The problem with doing something like this is that if you thought of doing a copy and paste to use the example pitch page, you can bet a lot of other marketers have too. I found this same example ad popping up all over the place. Now understand, I wasn’t searching for anything about the Rich Jerk. I was looking for topics on Internet marketing. If I found all of these phony ads without even looking for them, I can only imagine how many times it will come up when someone is looking for information on the Rich Jerk ebook. The sample ad is just that. It’s not based on anything real at all. The fact that the sample ad was signed Jane Doe lets you know that this is not real. The only thing that these marketers changed was the signature from Jane Doe, to their own signature.

If you know about the Rich Jerk then you know that he comes off as an arrogant S.O.B. He likes to talk down to his potential customers by using words and phrases like, ‘loser’, ‘I’m better than you’ just to name a couple. He also uses foul language and uses an asterisk in the cuss words. I guess he figures it’s not so bad if he doesn’t completely spell the cuss words out. His real niche is his Rich Jerk signature and his arrogance. It has worked so well for him that it has made him millions and the distinction of being one the Internet’s biggest gurus.

The whole facade of being the way that he comes off to be along with the Rich Jerk name in my opinion is his marketing strategy. That’s what makes him stand out from the rest. You can bet if that strategy had flopped in the very beginning there would be no Rich Jerk and he would not be the arrogant person that he portrays himself to be.

What else I came across was these very same marketers who are using the example ad that I mentioned before are also trying to become mini Rich Jerk’s by being as rude and arrogant as the Rich Jerk himself.

As I said there is a point somewhere to this and it just came to me. God gave you a mind. Use it!

I agree with the advice to find out what the successful people are doing and then duplicate it. That doesn’t mean to become that person. It means to conduct business the way that they do. Not to take on that person’s personality.

Be your own person. Be your own marketer. Do business that shows who you are, not how someone else is. It will show through big time if you try to be someone that you are not. I found that these sites were nothing but an annoyance and I know that at least, 9 out of 10 clicks will be immediately clicked away.

I don’t like the Rich Jerk as a person and find him very annoying but I do like his strategies. I don’t think coming off as a common thug is necessary because his marketing ideas speak for themselves.

Do copy what the successful people are doing. Just don’t become them. It will destroy your chance of becoming successful because people will see through you.