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2 Tier Affiliate Programs Explained

How will refering new affiliates to an affiliate program make me money in the future? Thats where a 2 tier affiliate program works like magic!

 Affiliates are getting cleverer by the day. So these days, affiliates know the difference between the different types of traffic they can get paid for. There are a lot of definitions though – CPM, CPC, CPA, CPL, CPD and many more.

 CPM is impressions, when the publisher (the website owner) gets paid every time a banner is shown.

 CPC is clicks, where the publisher (or email marketer and other marketers) gets paid every time a banner or text link is clicked upon.

 The other ways of getting paid are grouped together under the term performance marketing – and this is where the term affiliate is most commonly used as well.

 An affiliate is a marketer who sends visitors to another site using a variety of methods (such as placing banners or text links on their own site, buying sponsored listings on search engines, email marketing and many other different methods) and gets paid when an action happens. This action can be a lead (CPL stands for Cost per Lead), a Sale (CPS stands for Cost per Sale), a download (CPD stands for Cost per download) and many other variations.

 Some in the Internet industry refer to performance based marketing as CPA (cost per acquisition), although the term is also sometimes used for specific types of campaigns such as leads or sales.

 Now that we’ve got over the hard part, the rest is easy to understand.

 The affiliate gets paid for sending visitors to a specific landing page where an action happens – either a lead, a sale, a download or some other sort of action that the advertiser requires. As an example, some advertisers are looking to build up their databases, so they pay for each opt in email address they receive, others want leads from specific locations, so they pay for zip codes, and then try convince the visitors after they fill in their zip code, to fill in a more detailed lead form.

 The common denominator is that the affiliate gets paid when an action happens.

 A 2 Tier affiliate program is simply finding new marketers to sign up under you to do EXACTLY what you are doing – sending visitors to different offers and getting paid when the visitors perform some sort of action. So why would you want other marketers to sign up under you to promote the same offers? Simple – you get paid a percentage of the amount the affiliate you refer gets paid? Sounds complicated?

 Don’t worry, it’s not hard to understand. As an example, say John promotes 5 different offers on a single affiliate network. He gets paid for every lead, sale, email and zip code he generates from these different offers. John now tells Mark about the Network and gets Mark to sign up using a banner or text link that has John’s referral code built into it. Mark now signs up to the Affiliate Network under John and starts promoting various offers and advertisers from the Affiliate Network. These offers DON’T have to be the same offers that John is promoting. Mark can promote ANY of the offers on the Affiliate Network.

 And this is the best part…

 For any amounts that Mark gets paid, John receives a percentage of the amount over and above what Mark gets paid. So if Mark gets paid $1000 in Month 1, and the 2 Tier Affiliate program is paying 5%, then John would receive $50 just for referring Mark.

But it gets even better…

Some 2 Tier Affiliate Networks pay LIFETIME commissions. So John wouldn’t get a referral commission just for a month or a year – he receives it FOR ALL TIME.

 If Mark becomes a super affiliate and starts generating HUGE commissions every month, John can just sit back and collect the checks as he referred him.

 There are 3 important things to know when finding affiliates to sign up under you on 2 Tier Affiliate Programs:

 Is the affiliate program or affiliate network credible, has proper tracking so your referrals are correctly tracked, has good campaigns and offers for the affiliates to promote so they actually do make money, and do they pay timeously? Assuming that the affiliate program or network is good, what percentage do they pay you on amounts that your referrals get paid? All programs vary so compare different programs to see what the industry standard is.

 How long do you continue receiving referral commissions for? Some pay for a month, some for the lifetime, and of course there are many variations in between.

 So do your homework and find a 2 Tier program that can make you money long in the future for the work you’re doing today.

2 Marketing Strategies to Make Money Online with Affiliate Programs!

Thefirst strategy to make money online is building a list.  

This strategy is the most important step to continue tomake money long term. If you do not already have some type of autorepondersystem you need to get one. Don’t be cheap here either because your entirebusiness will hinge on this one piece of software.

 You can build your list many different ways. You can buyleads from reputable list building companies and get them into yourautoresponder. Most good list building companies will have an option to send anemail to your autoresponder so you don’t have to manually input the lead’sinformation.

 Another effective way of building your list is from thetraffic that visits your website. This step, which is probably the most effective,does require you to have a website in order to implement an opt-in list form. Of course if your Affiliate program does offer a list management service thenyou can send traffic to the affiliate URL, but I don’t recommend it as you willusually not be able to email the entire list with special offers.  

To make the most of your opt-in form and get the mostsignups, you should place it in your sales page text. It should bestrategically located in the sales text after you present a problem. The titleof your autoresponder email series should address the problem by offering asolution. In the example below we will assume that I am selling a hostingpackage and I want opt-in subscribers to my email course for back-end sales.  

Example: You can use the pre-built websites or build yourown. Many people think that building a website is hard, but I can show you howeasy it really is. Take my 10 day email course “Build a Website with Ease”[signup form here].  


Thesecond strategy to make money online is driving traffic to your website.

When I say traffic, I don’t just mean any old traffic, Imean targeted traffic, people who are motivated and ready to buy can and willmake you money. You can use programs and techniques such as Google Adwords,bloging, article writing and linking to drive targeted traffic to your website. GoogleAdwords is a resource offered by Google in which you can payfor your site to be show when certain keywords are queried in their searchengine.

The secret to using Adwords is not to bid high on popular keywords. Instead,what you do is find similar keywords that still describe your website, but are usedmuch less frequent. These keywords will cost much less to bid on and will allowyou to spread your money out over many different keywords, getting the most bangfor your buck. You can use this handy little tool to find similar keywords:http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/  

Bloging is another greatway to drive targeted traffic to your website. To get the most out of this techniquethe blog should be hosted on the same website as the sales page witch links toyour affiliate program. Once its setup all you have to do is fill your blogwith good quality content.  

I recommend writing your own content which specificallyrelates to your affiliate program and or products. Once you have some contentyou will need to submit your RSS feed to the as many blog search engines as youcan. This will put your blog out there for other webmasters to use as content feeds on their websites.  

This win-win situation allows webmasters to have qualitycontent on their website, which increases the value of that website whiledriving targeted traffic directly to you.

This is done by the URL link that youconveniently placed under your name after the blog was written. That means that your link is on a blog feed that is onthousands of websites. Not only do people click those links but Google seesthese links pointing back to you and thinks that you’re popular and you arerewarded with a higher page rank.  

Articlewriting is basically the same as bloging except theinformation in an article will need to have more useful content and be pepperedwith keywords that the webmasters are looking for. After completing yourarticle you will submit (syndicate) it to content sites as opposed to blogsearch engines.

Content sites are places where webmasters go to findspecific content to offer their readers. If you are a good writer you may atsome point build up a name for yourself and finagle a deal with a webmaster towrite exclusives for his site. His readers get great exclusive content and youget highly motivated targeted traffic.

Linking is perhaps themost widely used form of increasing traffic and page rank. However, if doneincorrectly you could end up hurting your Google page rank and ultimatelyloosing potential buyers. You will need your own website for this technique asyou will need a ‘links’ page to place your reciprocal links on.  

Many people go and submit their URL links to link farms inan attempt to trick Google into giving them a better page rank. This does NOTwork; in fact Google has been known to penalize websites for engaging in theseactivities.  

The secret to linking is to find websites in your nichemarket which have a Google page rank of 4 or above and enticing the webmasterto list your link on their website. You may think that you would be helpingyour competition, well you would be. But your competition would be helping youas well. It’s better to send leaving traffic to a partner than just having themclose their browser window, and remember that works both ways.    

The strategies listed in this article do work and they willincrease you sales and residuals it done correctly. Reciprocal linking, Blogingand Article writing are great ways to bring massive amounts of high qualitytargeted traffic to your website. Those strategies combined with an effectivesales page with an integrated opt-in email list can make your business soar tonew heights. You can and will make money with this system, Guaranteed!

Mailing List for Affiliate Marketers

If you are an affiliate marketer who wants to make a comfortable living from referring your prospects to other people’s product or service for decent commissions, then you must consider building your own mailing list.

Building your mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best investments you will ever make, as it is time and effort worth spending on. When you strike on a Joint Venture and have a new product or service to endorse, you can look no further than your own mailing list.

Granted, that most affiliates, as in more than 90 percent of them, are not making money from affiliate programs, but this often results from the same amount of effort focused on least effective methods.

While having your own mailing list is, by a long mile, not the only effective affiliate marketing method, you can make affiliate sales very quickly even in the next few hours after sending a sales message, provided that your mailing list is huge and responsive.

This is often true, because owning your own mailing list for you to endorse products and services to is one of the fastest-producing results, beating other affiliate marketing methods imaginable.

In a nutshell, the affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who owns a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.

Are Affiliates in Demand?

Is there a demand for affiliate marketers today? Yes, there is a huge demand. One of the challenges faced in the affiliate marketing industry is that it sometimes sounds too good to be true: advertising that's guaranteed to work or it's free! Newcomers wonder if it's possible, and skeptics claim that the cost effective prices of affiliate marketing lower the bar for online advertising. But there is a good reason that affiliate marketing has experienced steady growth throughout the ups and downs of online advertising—it works. And affiliate marketing has evolved to become a reliable source of sales for a wide range of marketers.

Affiliate marketing has evolved from the early years when some touted it as the future of online advertising, and others claimed it was the downfall of the medium. It's now a sophisticated channel that generates anywhere from five to 25% of online sales for many of the world's biggest brands.

Almost all major multi-channel marketers have an affiliate program of some kind. The important thing to remember is that affiliate programs now come in all shapes and sizes. The concept of a wide-open affiliate program with an unlimited and uncontrolled number of affiliates is a thing of the past. Nearly all marketers agree that affiliates add value to an online marketing effort, but the program must be tailored to meet the marketer's objectives.

Affiliate marketing did not bring an end to other, higher priced forms of online media advertising.  The success of the affiliate marketing in delivering sales cost effectively by way of a pay-for-performance model paved the way for other forms of performance-based advertising, such as CPA-based search and portal advertising, to create acceptance among direct marketers. Affiliate marketing has evolved, with affiliates and marketers becoming more sophisticated and programs more integrated with other forms of online marketing.

Top 3 Ways To Boost Your Affiliate Commissions Overnight

The ideal world of affiliate marketing does not require having your won website, dealing with customers, refunds, product development and maintenance. This is one of the easiest ways of launching into an online business and earning more profits.

Assuming you are already into an affiliate program, what would be the next thing you would want to do? Double, or even triple, your commissions, right? How do you do that?

Here are some powerful tips on how to boost your affiliate program commissions overnight.

1. Know the best program and products to promote. Obviously, you would want to promote a program that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time.

There are several factors to consider in selecting such a program. Choose the ones that have a generous commission structure. Have products that fit in with your target audience. And that has a solid track record of paying their affiliate easily and on time. If you cannot seem to increase your investments, dump that program and keep looking for better ones.

There are thousands of affiliate programs online which gives you the reason to be picky. You may want to select the best to avoid losing your advertising dollars.

Write free reports or short ebooks to distribute from your site. There is a great possibility that you are competing with other affiliates that are promoting the same program. If you start writing short report related to the product you are promoting, you will be able to distinguish yourself from the other affiliates.

In the reports, provide some valuable information for free. If possible, add some recommendations about the products. With ebooks, you get credibility. Customers will see that in you and they will be enticed to try out what you are offering.

2. Collect and save the email addresses of those who download your free ebooks. It is a known fact that people do not make a purchase on the first solicitation. You may want to send out your message more than six times to make a sale.

This is the simple reason why you should collect the contact information of those who downloaded your reports and ebooks. You can make follow-ups on these contacts to remind them to make a purchase from you.

Get the contact information of a prospect before sending them to the vendor’s website. Keep in mind that you are providing free advertisement for the product owners. You get paid only when you make a sale. If you send prospects directly to the vendors, chances are they would be lost to you forever.

But when you get their names, you can always send other marketing messages to them to be able to earn an ongoing commission instead of a one-time sale only.

Publish an online newsletter or Ezine. It is always best to recommend a product to someone you know than to sell to a stranger. This is the purpose behind publishing your own newsletter. This also allows you to develop a relationship based on trust with your subscribers.

This strategy is a delicate balance between providing useful information with a sales pitch. If you continue to write informative editorials you will be able to build a sense of reciprocity in your readers that may lead them to support you by buying your products.

3. Ask for higher than normal commission from merchants. If you are already successful with a particular promotion, you should try and approach the merchant and negotiate a percentage commission for your sales.

If the merchant is smart, he or she will likely grant your request rather than lose a valuable asset in you. Keep in mind that you are a zero-risk investment to your merchant; so do not be shy about requesting for addition in your commissions. Just try to be reasonable about it.

Write strong pay Per Click ads. PPC search engine is the most effective means of advertising online. As an affiliate, you can make a small income just by managing PPC campaigns such as Google AdWords and Overture. Then you should try and monitor them to see which ads are more effective and which ones to dispose of.

Try out these strategies and see the difference it can make to your commission checks in the shortest of time.