Well it’s been a while since I’ve made a post and I feel like I need to explain myself.

You see this blog is not my full time job. It’s also not my only online project. I have some other websites that I built. A few I am letting go and I’m not going to do anything with them, others I am working on.

I’ll post in a couple of days at least one of my other websites that is active, and I’m thinking about posting the address for one that I am about to start developing.

For now let me explain why its been 7 days since my last post. (Update: I made this post on 1-30-09, but for some reason it is showing a posted date of 11-29-08)

I mentioned above this is not my full time job. In addition to the other online projects I have going, I also am a sheriff.

I’ve had a lot going on with that recently. I am a Sergeant and have had several projects recently.

Every year we have evaluations to document our job performance. I’ve been working on those and it’s been pretty time consuming.

I also have 2 other projects related to that job that I am working on that are due on Feb 2.

So my time has been extremely limited, but I hope to be able to invest more time into this site again in a few days.

So in the next few days look for a post about at least one of my other websites, I’ll even give you the address so you can check it out if you want.

I’m also going to be changing the catagories on this site after reading something about how important they are to search engines.

If you’re like most affiliate marketers, you are itching to get some sales and start seeing money coming in. Some marketers spend hundreds of dollars on their ezine advertising, hoping to make a large profit. For some it works, for others they loose big. If you want to win with your ezine advertising efforts, you need to take into account the following strategies:

1. Who is your target market?

The product that you decide to market in any ezine must be related to the ezine’s readers. That might seem like an obvious statement, but many affiliates forget this. Not everyone is interested in what you have to offer. So make sure you keep it related.

For example, maybe you want to promote a product about obedience training for dogs. You want to make sure that the ezine you target has readers intersted in that topic. So if the ezine is related to training hunting dogs, it will probably not be a good match. That doesn’t mean you can’t try it, but you probably want to wait until you are making good money already before you test it.

2. What are you going to advertise?

What kind of products are you going to advertise to the readers of the ezines you want to target? Are you going to promote your own product, an affiliate product, an ebook, some sort of course?

When you are thinking about what to promote to an ezine, you need to think about the following:

Is the product geared toward my target audience?
Does the product have any value to the audience?
Does the sales page look professional or like a 3rd grader made it?
Does the sales page make you want to buy?
Is there a money back guarantee?

These are all elements that you need to evaluate in order to make certain you have an offer that will produce results.

3. Where do you find an ezine for your niche?

I have some directories listed below where you can search for an ezine related to your niche. When you do your search you want to keep in mind that the more tightly focused the ezine is to your niche, the more sales you are likely to receive.

www.ezine-dir.com

www.ezinelisting.com

subs.zinester.com

4. Determine your advertising budget.

Don’t spend all the money from your advertising budget on one ezine. You will have to decide what price is comfortable for you to pay for one ezine, but you need to be careful.

The price will depend on several factors. How many people are on the ezine, how effective is the ezine, etc. You also want your ad to be the only one shown. This is called a solo ad. If there is more than one ad in the ezine, the effectiveness goes way down. You might ask the owner for references from previous advertisers also.

Now I mentioned the number of subscribers will effect the advertising rate. You should not get hung up on numbers only. The number of subscribers is not as important as the quality of the ezine content. If the ezine publisher send too many ads to the list, they are more likely to ignore your ad. If the ezine has a lot of content with only one ad, you will have more luck with making sales.

5. Write great ad copy.

Great ad copy is the secret to getting people to buy your product, but how do you write great copy? I’m going to give you a sneaky way to write effective ad copy.

First you need to understand what makes people buy. People buy because of benefits, not because of features. When you look at good ad copy it will be fill of bullet points. The bullet points focus on the benefits of a product.

So to write great ad copy we want to do three main things. Capture attention with a great headline. Rewrite the headline of the products copy, don’t simply copy it this is illegal. Just rewrite it in your own words. Grab a couple of benefits and do the same thing. Finally you need a call to action. Tell them to do whatever it is you want them to do. Most likely that is “click here for more information” or something like that.

These are some of the worst affiliate marketing mistakes that people make. They are made by both new affiliates and seasoned pros who just have not had the benefit of coming across an article like this. Some of these i have learned as a result of my own experience, and other have been shared with me by other affiliate program marketers.

1: Too much Flash

Using a lot of flash can be a huge mistake. People typically come to websites to get information, not watch your flash presentations. While high speed internet is becoming more common, there are still a lot of people that use dial-up.

Think about your actions at sites with a flash animation on the home page. Do you sit and wait for it to load, or do you click the skip flash button, most people skip it. Keep your website simple. Look at Google. They have the money to do whatever they want, but they don’t use flash. Why? They know people want information, and do not want to wait for the flash to load. Keep your website simple so it will load quickly for everyone. You will loose people who have to wait.

2: Difficult Navigation

If your visitor has to try and figure out how to navigate your site, they will leave. It’s easier to click the back button then it is to try and figure out how to get around your site. Don’t use animated buttons, or cute pictures to get people to navigate around your site. You are ultimately asking people to purchase a product. You want people to know you are a professional business, not some kid trying to scam someone out of their money.

3: Not writing your own text

There are companies out there that allow their webmasters to write the text for their website. Most webmasters are programmers and not marketers. They know how to try and make your website relevant to the search engines, and that is their main focus. Your main focus is making sales. Simply finding your website is not enough, the visitor needs to take action when they are there by clicking through to the sales page.

If you lack the confidence to write a copy that will make visitor click to your sales page, you have a couple of options. First you can hire a person who is a copywriter. They get paid to make people want to buy, that is their job. They make people want to buy. The second option is to learn copy writing yourself.

No one is more interested in seeing you succeed than you. You can get e-books and e-courses over the internet that teach you copy writing. Writing copy is not easy. That’s why those who do it well get paid so much for it. If you want to learn you do it yourself, become a student of copy writing and take this aspect of your business into your own hands.

4: Playing it cheap

Nothing says cheap and un-professional like a free website. Look at the sites that people put up at places like Yahoo’s geocities.com. They scream free and cheap when you look at them. There’s nothing wrong with free and cheap when you are building a personal page about yourself. But when you are trying to run a business and makes sales, it just doesn’t work because you don’t build any confindence in the visitor.

In this video Internet Marketing legend Joel Comm explains what affiliate marketing is.

So, you want to start making money with affiliate marketing programs, but you don’t have any money to get started. The good news is you do not have to invest any money to get started. There are ways to get started without spending any money upfront.

That said, I recommend you spend a little money. For less than $9.00 you can register a website name. After doing that you can get hosting for a website for as little as $5.00 a month. While you can use the techniques I am going to tell you about, you will have better luck if you are willing to invest this tiny amount into your business.

If you have the money to invest you can still use free these techniques and you will probably get better results. To learn more about why I suggest you invest a little money into your business, read my post Why Your Own Website Is Critical To Affiliate Marketing Success.

But if you do not have any money, or don’t want to spend any, follow the free techniques I give you here and you will still make money, it just might take a little longer and you won’t enjoy the same benefits as those who get their own domain name.

The first secret to getting free traffic is using a blog. Blogs are just diaries people keep on the internet for others to read about whatever area they want to describe. Real-estate, investing, photography, computers, affiliate marketing, whatever you can think of, someone probably has a blog dedicated to it. You can go to BlogCatalog.com to see examples of things that people write blogs about. Or simply choose a topic you have interest in, go to a search engine and search by typing in your topic followed by the word “blogs.” You will be able to find blogs that way also.

How do you make money with a blog? You can create a blog or a few blogs about topics that interest you. Then sign up for affiliate programs relating to that topic, and include links to your affiliate programs on your blog site. You can include the links on your blogs home page, and in each article you write in your blog.

Don’t think you can write articles about anything? No problem. If you go to BloggingProfitsBlueprint.com you can learn some ways to get content for your blog. This is a membership website, and right now you can join for free.  I also cover anothe method later in this post.

If you choose an affiliate program that is related to your topic, your visitors will be pre-disposed to the products you recommend once they trust you, and as long as the things you recommend are good quality. They will begin trusting you after they have come to visit your site a few times, respond to your posts, and then see you respond to them on the blog.

How do you do it?

1. Create a free affiliate account at Clickbank.com, or CommissionJunction.com, or search for others. Choose your topic that you want to write about, then research these sites to see if there are any programs you can market relating to that topic. If you want to write about home security, search for security related products. If you don’t find anything, choose a new topic until you find one with programs you can market.

Once you find a topic that you can market to, it’s pretty easy from there. There will be a link that says “Click here to get your link code” or something similar to that. When you click, you get a unique code that identifies only you to the website where the sale is made, and when one is made, you get a commission.

2. Go to Blogger.com and create a free blog account. This will get you set up to start posting you blogs. They will walk you through the process. Create your first article and post it without any links to marketing programs. Your first blog post can be as simple as telling people what you hope to share with them by creating your blog. This will allow you to get some practice at the process of posting your articles.

Now I want to say again, I recommend that you get your own domain name and hosting account. After you buy the domain name all you have to pay each month is he cost of hosting, which you can get for about $5 a month. Also if you do that you can use wordpress to run your blog, which is probably the king of blog platforms. It has a lot of support, and is a really good program.

3. Once you have practiced posting a couple of articles, start posting articles with your affiliate links on them. Put the link at the end of your article so anyone who found the article interesting is more compelled to click it. You can also place banners or buttons on the sides of the articles. Do not rely on the banners and buttons alone. Many people do not like them, and will not click them. So include a text link in your article.

What if you do not know how to write an article, or can’t think of what to write? You can go to one of several sources that provide articles covering a large variety of topics. The following is a list of a few I recommend:

http://articlescity.com

http://ezinearticles.com

http://www.goarticles.com

Each of these sites will allow you to use articles they have, free of cost. The articles have a link to the authors site which you must leave in tact to use the article.

4. You need to promote your blog. There are hundreds of blog directories that you can submit your blog to. These directories are places that publish a link to your blog for their readers. These directories are where readers go to find blogs to read.

Most blog platforms have an RSS feature you should use. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. Using this process you can post to all the directories you choose in one easy step, instead of having to select the directories each time you submit. RSS allows people to subscribe to your blog as well. Then they do not have to come back to check for new articles, each time you submit a new article, it’s sent to them automatically. It’s like mailing the article to them, instead of them having to go search for it.

5. Each time you post a new article to your blog, go to PingOMatic.com and submit your article. You will enter the name of your blog, your blog web address, and select which blog services (directories) you want to ping to. This will send your new article out to several of the more popular blog directories. The more articles you post to them, the higher you rank. The higher you rank, the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the more chance you have to make commissions.

Although you can build an affiliate marketing business without building a website, it is generally more difficult than if you have one. The fact is, having a website today is inexpensive and people now have a harder time trusting a business that does not have their own website.

I’m not going to try and go into and explain all the different reasons for having a website because they are vast. What I will do is tell you to just ask yourself, if you were selling watchs would you want a store to sell them in? It would be possible to sell them without a store. You could stand on the street corner with them hanging inside your coat and sell them to people walking by.But ask yourself, do you think that method of doing business would encourage people to trust you?

The same applies to affiliate marketing. There are ways to build an affiliate marketing business without a website, but it is becoming more difficult. When you build a website and someone buys a product you recommend, if tey are happy with that product there is a good chance they will come back to see whatelse you recommend. If you don’t have a website, they have no way to find you, and you loose the chance to make money from them in the future.

There will be people out there who tell you that you can make money without a website. But remember, actions speak louder than words. Do they have their own website? If so, why do you think that is. It’s because despite what they tell you, they recognize the importance of having a website.

So how do you get a website? Well the first thing to do is decide what domain name you want, then go buy it. I recommend that you use NameCheap.com to purchase your domain name. Go to their website and you will find a box where you can enter your desired website name. When you click the search button, NameCheap will tell you if the name you want is available. If it is you can click a few buttons and have your domain.

After you get your domain, you will need hosting. A hosting account is required for people to see your website. I recommend HostGator.com. You can get a hosting account for your site for about $5 a month. This is about as cheap as you can get it.

One word of caution though, don’t think you can go get a free account somewhere and try to shortcut this. Every free account is hosted on the providers account with their domain name in the search bar.

So lets say you want a website about loosing weight and you want the name LoosingWeight, and you go to get a free website from GeoCities. Your domain name would look like this: LoosingWeight.GeoCities.com. Everyone knows that website is free becase of the domain name.

With your own domain name and hosting account your website address would be LoosingWeight.com.  Which do you think looks more professional? People will judge you on this. If you can’t afford to have your own domain name, how trustworthy can you really be? That is what they are going to be thinking, and they will move on to another site.