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One of the easiest ways to earn money online is affiliate marketing. We consider it one of the easiest ways because it doesn’t require a website (although it is recommended to have at least a very simple one) or any sophisticated preparation or specific knowledge; mainly you should understand the idea of affiliation which is very simple. By “simple” I don’t mean that you don’t have to do anything, it only means that it doesn't require much preparation before you can start, and that you don’t have to spend a lot of money. You can start right away. The idea of affiliate marketing is that there is a publisher/vendor (or the owner of a product) who wants to sell his product. The affiliate marketer promotes the product and sends customers to the publisher/vendor sale's page through his specific link. If the customer actually buys the product, the affiliate receives a commission for that sold product. In order to know where the buyer is coming from, each affiliate has his individual link to the vendor/publisher sale’s page. To make things easier for both vendors and affiliates there are some websites that facilitate affiliate marketing by connecting between sellers and affiliates. There are ClickBank, PayDotCom, CommissionJunction just to mention a few. These websites give the affiliate marketer a list of products that product owners want to sell, they supply personalized identifying links for the products that the marketer chooses to promote and they also inform both parties with the stats of the sales. Some of the vendors/publishers also supply the affiliate with ads and banners and even promotional texts that can be used in solo ads, in ezines, or as a letter to subscribers (for those who have leads or subscribers). Some of these websites process the payment, in others the product owner will pay the affiliate marketer directly. Some of these websites pay twice a month and it generally depends also on a minimum sum of commissions to be reached. To all of these affiliate marketing websites you can subscribe both as a vendor/publisher and as an affiliate. Subscribing is free but each of these websites takes a very small percentage of the commission for following all the process and processing the payment. While subscribing you will have to choose a user or nick name, whatever you choose will generally appear in all your links, so be careful while choosing your user name. After getting your personalized link (which is the easy part) you should promote the product and send traffic to the product sale’s page using your personalized link. In addition to this kind of websites you can also find vendors/publishers that have their own separate affiliate marketing programs, they, also, provide the affiliate marketer a personalized link to promote. Methods for driving traffic are specified in another page, since it’s the same to drive traffic to your own website or to someone else’s. However a very useful book that explains about affiliate marketing using google adwords is Google cash. It explains very elaborately and clearly how to use PPC (pay per click) advertising on google using affiliate links without having to have your own website. Since it was first published in 2003 it was revised several times to keep it updated in the dynamic world of internet marketing. If you don’t want to buy the book you can subscribe to the newsletter, and hopefully you’ll find it useful to some extent as well. Of course the book teaches you how to use PPC very efficiently, and that can be useful not only for promoting others' products as an affiliate marketer but also when you will decide to have your own website and products. If you choose this kind of business and really want to succeed with it, I would seriously recommend a great tool that I found extremely useful. This tool is Brad Callen's Affiliate Elite. This amazing tool helps you choose a winning product, shows you under which keywords this product is advertised by the most successful affiliate marketers, what is the advertisement content and many others details that will help you build a successful campaign. This tool is provided along with very clear and easy to understand videos, that explain how to use it and how to get the most out of it. Another efficient affiliate marketing method is using CBmall. Clickbank is one of the most popular and reliable affiliate marketing websites connecting between sellers and affiliates. It deals with virtual products, and it is so popular that there are some affiliate marketing websites that are based on it, just like CBmall. Unlike Clickbank which is meant for affiliates, CBmall is a kind of a readymade store, meant for people that are looking to buy products of their interest. CBmall is especially useful for a beginner. A beginner who doesn’t have a website of his own and no experience in promoting can own a website with over 100 different selling pages, and can either have it promoted by CBmall for a payment or promote it by himself according to the guidance provided by CBmall. It is good for several reasons: Instead of wasting time and money promoting different products separately the affiliate can promote only one page that contains different products of the same niche. Along with the website you also get entrance to the member’s area where you're provided with valuable instructions about internet marketing that can help not only in promoting CBmall but also in promoting products of other affiliate programs. CBmall enables joining and promoting other money making programs along with the other products on the affiliate website. CBmall give you the possibility to use their experience in promoting your store until you become experienced enough to do it yourself. Your links are cloacked (I will explain it later on this page).
The only deficiency that I found in CBmall is that the website is a standard website, equal for all affiliates who use it. The affiliate marketer doesn’t have a way to make it personalized in terms of content and looks. Still I think that it is very good for beginners who don’t know how to change the website. Later on if an affiliate wants to have his own website he may promote in his personalized website, pages of his CBmall that are related to his niche market. When you click on this link to CBmall and are taken to CBmall homepage, you can see how your store will look like (if you choose), you can click on "Free open a store!" (in the menu under the website name and the title) and see the complete offer, and you can also subscribe to a free newsletter with useful tips on marketing. One of the greatest problems of affiliate marketing is theft of commissions. That means that a person comes to know about a product through a promotion of an affiliate, but then instead of buying through the affiliate link he or she changes the nickname of the affiliate and put instead his own affiliate user name (of course if he is an affiliate himself). Unfortunately that is especially common between affiliates (since only they have affiliate user names). To avoid theft some of the websites do not enable the users to buy through their own links. Clickbank though, enables to buy through one’s own link, because in this way a person can check the product before promoting it without having to pay a full commission, but such a person will not receive his payment if he doesn’t promote products to other people as well. Nowadays Clickbank is cloaking his products, and the link you receive for the products are already cloaked. If you want to sell other's affiliate products you can use a cloaker. A cloaker makes the link look differently than what it is and in this way hides the real link in a way that sometimes it doesn’t even look like an affiliate link. Here is a link to a free cloaker software. We never tried it personally but we hope it will work for you. CBmall has a cloaker of its own in the members area, and this is one of its advantages.
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