Using Chitika

By lakeerieartists on March 7, 2010

Are you using Chitika on your websites and blogs? Chitika works very much like Adsense, except that it is meant to work together with Adsense. Chitika creates ads around the search term that the searcher typed in, while Adsense creates ads related to the text on your webpage.

Chitika is a great revenue earner by itself, and it pays out via PayPal once you reach a $10 threshold. It is a lot easier to reach $10, then Adsense’s $100, so there is more immediate gratification.

If you are familiar at all with Adsense, you will find Chitika extremely easy to use. If you are not, Chitika does a good job walking you through the instructions. They also do a great job answering questions, one thing that Google is not that great at.

Chitika also has a referral service, so if you refer anyone to Chitika, you will earn a small percentage of whatever they earn. Passive earning and another revenue source from the same work that you are already doing.

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It Takes More Than One Link

By lakeerieartists on March 6, 2010

Successful affiliate marketers put hundreds or thousands of links to one company in order to increase their chances of getting more sales.  If you only have one link on one page to a company, then chances are you won’t get too many clicks and sales.  Remember, only about 4% of all the people who read your page will click on a link.  And only about 4% of the people who click on a link will buy.  Now, there are ways to increase those percentages, but especially as a beginner, it is good to remember that you need a lot of clicks to get a sale.

Once you are getting a lot of traffic to your page, you also need to provide your readers with several chances to click out to your vendor.  A person needs an average of twenty reminders before they will act on something.  So why not give them at least ten chances to click on a link to your vendor.  Not all the reminders have to be a link, so make some of your reminders pictures or descriptions.

You can also have links go to other pages that contain links to the same vendor.  For instance, if you are on a site that restricts how many links you can have, you can just make several pages that all go to the same vendor.

If you are using your blog to draw sales, then you can repeat links in more than one post, and on the sidebar so that your reader keeps the vendor that you want them to buy from in the forefront.  If they are a regular reader of yours, then they will eventually buy from that particular vendor if you keep recommending them.

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Things to Know About the Amazon Affiliate Program

By lakeerieartists on February 25, 2010

One of the first affiliate programs that most people sign up for is Amazon.  It is easy, and they sell EVERYTHING.  For vendors, Amazon is simply one of the easiest and best ways to get your name out there.

Amazon has presence, and authority.  They are the masters of the affiliate world.  They started a model, and everyone jumped on the program.

But what is the reality of earnings potential from Amazon.

In order to earn more than 4% commission on any products, you as an affiliate seller need to sell at least 7 items a month.  That may not seem so difficult, except that Amazon changed their terms last year, and their cookie is only 24 hours long.  Essentialy that means that if a customer does not buy an item immediately from clicking through your link, you do not get the sale.

So you need to have a lot of targeted traffic to earn a real income from Amazon.

Does that mean that you shouldn’t direct your traffic to Amazon?  No.  But be aware of the realities.  It is much easier to sell an item that you have at least 30 days to sell.  Most people browse before they buy, so having affiliates that allow you to retain the referral sales for customers who browse then come back is a much easier sales conversion than 24 hours.

One of the great benefits about the Amazon website is their shipping policy.  For someone who shops there a lot, they can get free second day air shipping if they sign up for Amazon Prime.  They also have a great bridal and baby registry, and they continue to experiment with new programs.  So don’t discount the Amazon affiliate program, just be aware of its limitations.

For a comparison, if you go to shareasale.com which is an affiliate program that is great for beginners, and you search through their vendors, you will see that 30 to 60 days is common for a cookie, and some vendors even go to 90 days. Granted, they are not Amazon, but for niche marketing, you may find that a smaller vendor is a better income earner even in the short run.

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Dominating a Niche

By lakeerieartists on February 14, 2010

No matter whether you have your own website, write on Squidoo, Hubpages, or a variety of websites and blogs, you will do better  at selling any affiliate marketing product or service if you dominate a niche.  By dominating a niche, I don’t mean that you will be the only person who is going to sell in a particular niche.  That will probably never happen.

But what you can do successfully is show off your expertise on a subject by writing numerous articles about the topic.  Each article can tell a slightly different approach or part for that particular topic.  The more articles you have on one particular topic, and related topics, the more you will appear as an expert, and the more people will be apt to take your advice.

By being a respected authority on a topic, you will build a reputation that you know what you are talking about.  Your reputation is what people will respect, and be much more likely to buy products that you recommend, or read books that you suggest.  You can continue to build on this indefinitely, just add updates and newer innovations in your field.

What will happen is that when people research your topic on search engines like Google, your articles will come up often under the keywords that you have chosen for your topic, because you have so many articles.  Thus creating more traffic to your articles, and more traffic to your affiliate programs, and more income for you.

This plan will work even better if you link your articles to each other, so that people will roam from article to article.  As we all know, the longer someone stays on any of your articles, the better the chance is that they will buy something.

If you want to see what I am talking about in action, here is a niche that I am currently working on:  retro, vintage, kitsch

Blogs:

Retro Vintage Kitsch

Steampunkary

Squidoo:

Allee Willis

Kitschy Christmas Kitsch

Authentic Vintage Style is Practical and Fashionable

Retro Bowling Shirt-The Perfect Gift for Him

I’m Dreaming of a Pink Christmas

Hubpages:

Vintage Prom Dresses

Authentic Vintage Heart Charms–Glass, Silver, Gold, Puffy, Engraved Hearts

Authentic Vintage Lockets | Genuine Antique Lockets-Heart Lockets, Oval Lockets, Locket Necklaces

Buy an Authentic Vintage Cocktail Dress Online

Vintage Bowling Shirts for Men

How to Make a One-of-a Kind Found Object Necklace for Valentine’s Day

Buy Vintage and Antique Buttons Online

Buy Authentic Vintage Keys Online

Gold, Sterling Silver, or Costume Vintage Necklace

Vintage Swarovski Jewelry and Vintage Swarovski Beads

Vintage Steampunk Clockwork Jewelry

Collectible Vintage Salt and Pepper Shakers

Buy Vintage Christmas Ornaments Online

Buy Vintage Cookie Cutters Online

Vintage Cross Necklaces | Crucifix Necklaces

Retro, Vintage, or Kitsch?

Buy Vintage 1960’s Chairs Online

Vintage Lunch Boxes 1970’s – 1980’s

Steampunk Culture

Buy a Vintage Lunch Box 1940’s – 1960’s

Vintage Earrings

Antique and Vintage Glass Jars–Depression Glass, Apothecary Jars, Canning Jars, Hazel Atlas, Anchor Hocking

Buy a Vintage Christmas Tree Topper Online

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Earning Income with Adsense

By lakeerieartists on January 29, 2010

Just like most other Squidoo lensmasters, Squidoo is not the only place that I earn income from online. One of my best revenue sources is one that I really did not understand very well until about six months ago, when it really started to take off. And that revenue source is Adsense.

Adsense is the ads that you see on just about every web page that you go on anywhere with the text and picture ads. Under the ad bank you will see in very small type “ads by Google”. Adsense is an ad program run by Google, that just about anyone with a website can take part in.

Adsense is free to sign up for, and is a pay per click program. That means that you get paid anytime someone clicks on an ad on your page. On Squidoo, Squidoo takes the Adsense money earned on the site as a whole, and divides it up by lensrank for lensmasters. On your own website pages, you get 100% of the Adsense money earned, and on other websites like Hubpages, YouSayToo, Xomba, and others you get a percentage of the revenue clicked on your pages.

The best way to earn significant income with Adsense is to have several websites that you earn Adsense income from. The way to maximize Adsense earnings is to know where to place your ads, and what keywords pay best.

Keyword research is a topic for another day, but when it comes to placement of Adsense on your pages, the best place is on the very top of your page, and the top right. Once you get “below the fold” as they say in the newspaper business, you are much less likely to get clicks.

I get regular Adsense income from two of my blogs, intermittent income from the rest of my blogs, and steady income from Hubpages, Xomba, YouSayToo, and and I have recently been told that InfoBarrel is a good source as well.

If you already have a blog or more than one, Adsense is a good strategy to include with your other affiliate income. It is easy to set up, and takes little or no effort.

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Affiliate Marketing Network

By lakeerieartists on January 18, 2010

Once you have decided what your area of expertise is, and what affiliate companies you want to work with, now it is time to set up a network of affiliate marketing pages or sites.

Using Squidoo as an example, you can start by creating 10 to 20 lenses about your niche topic, all written in a keyword dense fashion with a minimum of 800 words, focusing on your affiliate products.  You can do this by teaching about something or just talking about the products.  For instance, if your niche is cooking, then recipe lenses will work if you teach the reader why your products are the way to get the best results from the recipe.

The next step is to create backlinks for each lens.  Some of those backlinks can be to social bookmarking sites, but even more effective backlinks are articles related to and supporting your promotion of the affiliate products.  You can create several one page blogs for free on Wordpress, or Blogger that are backlinks to your selling pages, and you can sell from them as well.  Once you have enough of these established, you will have a network of interlocking webpages, blogs, and websites all driving traffic to your affiliate links.

As this network grows, through additional sites, and pages, it will also gain Google page rank status.  For backlinks to work best, they need to be one way links to your work.  All of this can be done without paying a penny, although there are backlink services that you can pay to make it work faster.

I also recommend creating at least one Wordpress blog or website that you self host.

If you want to get an idea of what I am talking about, you can follow this link: Eco-Chic Green Fashion to my website that I am building to support and promote my Eco-Chic niche.  However, it is also a place to create backlinks to other pages.

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Don’t Spread Your Affiliate Marketing Too Thin

By lakeerieartists on December 22, 2009

For those of us just starting out with affiliate marketing, sometimes it is easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices out there. There are many companies looking for help marketing their businesses, and many third party companies offering to sign you up as an affiliate for free.

I would like to make a recommendation on how to get started as an affiliate marketer, and how to market effectively from day one. And I can tell you that I have learned this the hard way.

First of all, I recommend that you sign up with Shareasale. There are several good affiliate companies on the internet, but for a beginner, I like Shareasale. The reason I like Shareasale is because they are reliable, they pay on time, and they work with many smaller companies that are easier to understand and market.

Shareasale also has some terrific tools that anyone can use. My favorite is their “Make a Page” tool which gives you a template to make a webpage of clickable items for any vendor that you have been approved for.

My next recommendation is that you find about 5 or 6 companies on Shareasale to market and stick with those companies. Market the heck out of them. Set up hundreds of links on varying pages on Squidoo and anywhere else you have sites. Focus your energy on your 5 companies and create niche lenses, articles, blog posts just on them. This will get you your best result. Even better if the companies have items that work well together, or are from a niche that you love to write about. Let your target market learn to trust your advice and product recommendations by establishing yourself as an expert on your niche.

You may say to yourself that you are NOT an expert on anything, but that is not true. After, for example, if you are a mom, then you are an expert on what it is like to be a mom. If you are an accountant, then you are an expert at being an accountant.

This is the way I recommend that anyone start with affiliate marketing. Once you are comfortable and have really focused on your first few companies, then you can begin to spread out to more companies and more affiliate companies.

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Deciding What to Sell

By lakeerieartists on November 21, 2009

How Successful People Think by John C. Maxwell is a great resource.

How Successful People Think by John C. Maxwell is a great resource.

Just to give you some background to start off, this post is going to be written from my experience as a retail business owner, retail seller of 13 years, and my own online and face to face selling experience. For most people, we are best at selling stuff that we ourselves use or want ourselves. This is because we have vested emotions in these products or services. We have a connection to the product that is personal. There are some people who can sell anything at all, but most people are not like this, so my recommendation is to look around your life, where you shop, what is in your house, what you dream was in your house, and what you would buy if you had all the money in the world, and make a list of things that you want to sell from that.

Then look for companies that you respect who sell those things that you love and want. Now pair the two together. You can now write believable articles with emotion about things you already know about. You can tell people why you believe these products are great, why you love them, what you use them for, and why you recommend them. You may also be able to tell people why you chose them over a competing brand or product.

When you write your article, you need to picture the audience of people that you are writing to. For instance, if I am a mom praising the mobile I have hanging over my baby’s bed, then the audience I am writing for are other moms, moms-to-be, and grandparents-to-be. Pretend that you are talking to those people when you write your article. These are the people who are the most interested in what you have to say about this mobile. And they are the people that you will target when you start to promote your article.

Online selling is all about selling a product to a customer who already is looking for that type of product or would be if they knew about it. You are not pushing, or scamming. You are helping someone find something that they already need or want. You are offering your opinion and recommendation. If you use the product, you should say so. You should also make clear that the company you are writing about did or did not offer you compensation for recommending this product. Don’t lie. If you have to lie to sell a product, then it is not worth selling. Find something that you feel good about.

This is an article I wrote about a book I really like How Successful People Think by John C. Maxwell. I tell the story of why I like this book and other books by the same author. It is my personal experience. This is the best way to sell any product. Involve the customer in your feelings and experience.

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What is an Affiliate Marketer?

By lakeerieartists on November 20, 2009

Learning about marketing

Learning about marketing

In simple terms, an affiliate marketer is a person or company that promotes another person’s or company’s products or services, and receives compensation for doing so without being an employee for the company that you are promoting.
So if your best friend starts a t-shirt company, and tells you that if you sell 10 of his t-shirts, he will give you $2 for each t-shirt sold, then that makes you an affiliate marketer. You are marketing his company.
Online affiliate marketing is exactly like this example except that it is much bigger, and you are marketing to anyone who will read your information. The value of this marketing for the company who is selling is priceless. Never undervalue what you mean to them. They are essentially getting hundreds or thousands of mini commercials for their products or services for free. They only have to pay when a sale is generated unless they have a different arrangement. But truthfully, they would have had to do all this marketing themselves anyway or pay someone to do it for them, because as any seller knows, you have to go through a lot of “no’s” to get to the person who is going to say “yes”.
The more experienced you become at affiliate marketing, the better you will do with it, because you will come to know what works, and what doesn’t, and how to reach your target market. Affiliate marketing is still marketing. You are marketing to your audience. You are the most crucial piece of the puzzle here, because customers will buy based on your voice, your referrals. You need to build that audience, and learn while you do.

If you would like to understand how marketing works for a small business, a good book to learn from is 101 Ways to Market Your Business: Building a Successful Business with Creative Marketing (101 . . . Series). You can see real world ways to market a company that have worked and use them to market your online business.

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Learning to Be an Effective Affiliate Marketer Online

By lakeerieartists on November 19, 2009

Lets get started earning some $$$

Let's get started earning some $$$

Welcome to this brand new blog on Squidlog.net. I am still setting it up, so it will probably take a week or so before I become comfortable with it, and you should see new stuff popping up over the next several weeks as I figure out how to use it.

This blog is going to be focused on learning what affiliate selling is, how to become an affiliate seller, reviews of different affiliate programs, and just plain old how to make money selling other people’s stuff. I invite you to offer your experiences and insight at all times, especially those of you who are not in the United States, as you may have experienced affiliate marketing differently.

I will be talking about affiliate marketing on Squidoo primarily, but also on blogs, and other sites, so again please chime in with your insights.

I have now been an online marketer since June of 2008 and in that time I have learned loads of information. Since I started out without any knowledge of how to do any of this, I have come quite a long way. So I am approaching this from the perspective of how hard I found affiliate marketing to learn, and my goal is to save other people some of the time that it took me.

Like any other legitimate business, online affiliate marketing is hard work. If anyone ever tells you different, they are just flat out lying to you. You have to pay your dues, and spend your time. There are a lot of misses before you get some hits. You do not have control over a lot of factors, so you need to be able to control well the factors that you can.

We will go on this affiliate learning journey together and all come out in the end as hopefully, richer in both information and dollars. I invite you all along for the ride.

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