Dan Roberts II asked:


Based on the popularity of Casino Affiliate Programs and how they effectively benefit the online casino operators and the webmasters as well, the question nowadays is not whether to join one. The more pressing issue is how to choose a Casino Affiliate Program to join. Webmasters should not be mistaken to think that there is no difference among all the Casino Affiliate Programs available. The truth is, every affiliate program is different, and some of them are actually better than the rest.

For starters, there are a lot of Casino Affiliate Programs. Luckily, there are some websites that provide information about each program so webmasters can compare them to one another. These websites put each program through a review and evaluation process, so they can relate the performance and reliability of the Casino Affiliate Programs in terms of a rating process. The ratings will determine how high up in the list of reputable programs the Casino Affiliate Program in question is. In choosing which Casino Affiliate Program to join, check out these ratings. You will definitely be safest and more successful when you go for the more reputable ones with the highest ratings. If the ratings don’t mean anything to you, there are actually some websites that even give awards to the top Casino Affiliate Programs. These awards are the real test of a program’s performance and reliability.

Aside from the ratings, as a webmaster, you can also find out the experiences of real webmasters who have tried out the programs themselves. Online forums are a rich source for such testimonials. Before joining any affiliate programs, webmasters should join forums about these and find out which ones are the best, by popular real-world demand. This is also a great way to find out from actual members themselves whether the Casino Affiliate Programs pay competitively. The importance of this is to ensure that the time you put into joining and the valuable ad space on your website are maximized to the best of their potential to make you some money.

Another very important thing to look at is the rules and regulations that surround online gambling in your area, if you are a webmaster. Online gambling has been met with quite a number of rules and regulations, and these rules may also apply to any affiliate programs concerning online casinos. It pays to take into consideration the arena that you are entering into.

On the side of the online casino operators, they can also go through a selection process of which Casino Affiliate Program to partner with. The main thing is that they should look at the statistics of the Casino Affiliate Programs and how they have helped other online casino operators in the past. You don’t want visitors to simply visit your online casino, right? You want them to stay. Some Casino Affiliate Programs are better than most at making the visitors register and stay for a long time. Of course, as a casino online operator, it will be foolish to just go with any Casino Affiliate Program that may or may not yield favorable results, since you are cashing out a considerable amount once you join a program.

Choosing which Casino Affiliate Programs can be a bit challenging and, of course, confusing, considering the huge number of programs online nowadays. Stick to the statistics and the testimonials, and you won’t go wrong.

Egidijus Andreika asked:


The affiliate program is also known as associate program and is increasingly becoming popular form of online marketing, where you pay a small commission to your affiliates for promoting your business. To make this affiliate program successful you have to recruit the right affiliates. If you run your own affiliate program you know that it’s not very easy to find good and performing affiliates. However, there are some tips that will help you recruit much more active affiliates and keep them happy, so they will promote your products even more. Here are the 8 best ways to recruit affiliates:

1) Use Article Marketing to Recruit Affiliates

One of the very cost effective and simple ways to recruit affiliates is article marketing. You can either write the article by yourself or recruit someone to write attractive and promising article focussing on the product or service that you provide and post them on article submission sites like Ezine, Submityourarticle and much more. The main advantage of article marketing is that only those who are interested in your product or service will read those articles and if you have successfully attracted them then you have gained a right affiliate for your business. This method can even attract potential customers.

2) Write Reviews about Products to Attract Potential Affiliates

Writing reviews is another very effective way to attract affiliates. All you have to do is write some reviews about the products you promote. You can generate a large traffic to your site by this way. While writing reviews try to make it unbiased i.e., you shouldn’t advertise yourself too much. The review should be very interesting and it would be even better if you do some comparison between similar products. Finally you can post the link of your affiliate page at the end of the review. So, the interested candidates will follow it and become your affiliate.

3) Post Comments in Related Forums to Signup Affiliates

Another very easy way to attract affiliates is to post comments on public forums where people discuss about your product and/or are interested in your product. The public forums have discussion groups where they post ideas and their opinions on a thread. Usually these forums allow you to add your signature below your comment. You can use this portion for advertising your product or can link it to your website’s affiliate page. If the comment that you post is interesting then you can expect more affiliates for your program. This method is very simple and less time consuming where you can attract the affiliates by just writing some three or four sentences.

4) Empower Social Networking Websites to Grow Your Affiliate Database

Social networking sites have great potential for attracting right affiliates for you. Today more or less who ever have access to internet has membership in any of the social networking site like Orkut, Yahoo groups, Myspace, etc. So, you can have large coverage by promoting your business on social networking sites and you can find the right affiliates for your affiliate program. On such social networking websites you can find friends of the similar interests, etc. This way you can even make business contacts and recruit affiliates for your online business.

5) Social Bookmarking Websites Can Be Used to Your Benefit

Social bookmarking like digg, del.ico.us and others are an excellent way for affiliate marketing. When a visitor visits your site and finds it interesting then he can bookmark it. Then others do the same and it creates an exponential amount of visits. In this large group of visitors there will be some right affiliates for your site. This way you can recruit a lot of affiliates easily.

6) Make Your Affiliate Program Page Attractive and Appealing for Affiliates

Now you might have attracted potential affiliates to your site successfully using any of these methods but making them to sign up as your affiliate depends on the quality of your site. The site should be appealing and shouldn’t make them feel that you may be a spammer. Otherwise you risk losing the potential affiliates hence, make your site more appealing and attractive. Keep the content well organized and make the sign up procedure simple and less time consuming. Try to explain them the benefits of your affiliate program in a polite manner, using bold letters or yellow background for the text nowadays are used mostly by spammers so, your affiliate may move away. If your website is good in all means then all the visits made by potential affiliates will increase your affiliates count. If you don’t know how to properly design a good looking website, just hire a freelancer and he/she will do all the work for you really cheaply.

7) Have You Considered a 2-Tier Affiliate Program?

To make your affiliate program more successful you must at least use 2-tier affiliate program. Where an affiliate will get more benefit for recruiting another affiliate. This type of program will encourage your affiliates to great extent and you can get more affiliates without wasting any resource, it will be done by your affiliates themselves. Empower your affiliates to recruit even more affiliates for you!

Find Out Your Competitors And Attract Their Affiliates

The best affiliates for your affiliate program are the existing affiliates of your competitors or other successful sites. But unfortunately there is no secret technique which can help you to get them. Instead you can try to trace out the methods used by your competitor and there is a large probability that these affiliates may be even visiting those areas like articles or social bookmarking sites and others. Just try to pin point the areas like the thread used by your competitor on a forum and post your comment as a reply to his post, hence you can get the attention of those potential affiliates.

These are some of the very potential and best ways of getting affiliates for your affiliate program. You may do some research based on your own experience on these methods to get even better results. We at Click2Sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) always ready to help. Sell your products online, recruit affiliates, accept payments instantly. Recruit affiliates successfully and skyrocket your income!

Mitch Van Dusen asked:


Depending on your service or product, this is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal: get other people to market your product. They promote your product or service in exchange for a commission that you decide upon.

There are many different ways to set up an affiliate program. You can give a fixed commission rate across the board. However, I recommend giving a good commission rate for the new affiliate, and giving a raise to those affiliates who drive a lot of sales. Most affiliate programs offer their affiliates a 2-tier system whereby an affiliate ears extra commissions if they refer other affiliates to your program.

First you have to decide how you are going to host your affiliate program. You can either promote your affiliate program through an affiliate network, or you can host your affiliate program on your website with your own software.

The advantage to using an affiliate network is that your affiliate program will be advertised in their databases. Marketers searching for businesses to associate with will search through these databases and choose products that they want to affiliate with. However, most of these databases are quite large, and the most popular affiliate programs with the highest conversions will be advertised the most.

This means that if you are just starting out, your program will probably only be found by people who are searching for a niche product or service to market. In order to get around this you have to market your affiliate program like you would market your product or service. Here is a list of possible affiliate network that can host your affiliate program:

1. www.clickbank.com (digital products only) 2. www.cj.com 3. www.reporting.net 4. www.linkshare.com 5. www.performics.com 6. www.websponsors.com 7. www.shareasale.com 8. www.clickxchange.com 9. www.clixgalure.com 10. www.fineclicks.com 11. www.fastclick.com 12. www.affiliatefuel.com 13. www.darkblue.com

If you are interested in hosting your own affiliate program, you need to do some research and decide what kind of affiliate manager solution fits your business or shopping cart system. You can do a side-by-side comparison of different programs at http://www.affiliate-software-review.com.

Promoting your Affiliate Program

As previously stated, you have to market your affiliate program just like you would market your product or service. Keep in mind that unless you find the “super affiliates” who are already set up to drive massive sales to your website, the overwhelming majority of the affiliates that sign up will never make any sales. This is normal so don’t be surprised.

Start by finding complimentary websites that sell products or services that are not competitive with what you offer, but are closely related. For example, if you sell plant seeds, you would want to approach a site that sells books on how to grow a garden.

You should approach as many websites as you can, but it’s wise to focus on the websites with the largest amounts of traffic. You can do this research by using Alexa (www.alexa.com).

When you enter a website address, Alexa will tell you their traffic ranking (the lower the better), how their traffic has fluctuated over a period of time, how many websites link to them, and what websites their visitors also go to. It also provides contact information, including an email address.

When it comes to these email addresses, I’ve found that they are not always accurate. Sometimes they are outdated, and sometimes they are email addresses for the website’s hosting company. To be safe, you should send an email to that email address along with any email address you can find on the website. Another great option is to approach content sites. Websites that mostly post free content usually make their money through affiliate programs and advertising. If you have a good product or service, these could be your best champions.

However, the best affiliates are ezine publishers. If you can find an ezine publisher with a large subscriber base that will promote your product or service, you will find a huge amount of new sales coming in. The reason is that these publishers have an ongoing relationship with their subscribers.

There is usually a stronger loyalty-factor with ezines rather than content sites alone. And often these ezine publishers will also have their own content sites, so they can promote your product or service in both platforms.

It is a good idea to give your affiliates the right marketing tools. Most likely your best affiliates will have their own approaches, however everyone will appreciate getting help from you, especially since you know your product or service better than anyone else. These marketing tools can include sales letters, articles, ebooks, special reports, solo advertisements for ezines, short advertisements for ezines and search engines, banners and graphics, and any marketing ideas you might think are key to your affiliate’s success. Party Poker, the online poker site, gives their affiliates a poker dictionary to put on their website. This is a brilliant idea, because they are giving their affiliates quality content for their website, which their visitors will appreciate. And since their name is branded on the dictionary, the visitors will associate the quality content with Party Poker. If you can think of anything like this, you will find that marketers will be more likely to join your affiliate program.

Jonathan White asked:


Affiliate programs are very popular right now and have been for a while. While you might have heard of many people making money with affiliate or associate programs as they are often called, you may not know exactly what an affiliate program is. A very simple way to explain an affiliate program is that it is an arrangement between an online merchant website and an affiliate website where the merchant website pays the affiliate website to send them traffic.

The Details

The details of each affiliate program really vary from affiliate program to affiliate program. Generally the affiliate website posts links to the merchant website and is paid according to how many people go to the merchant program via the affiliate link, or the number of people that buy something as a result of the affiliate website or website link. Payment arrangements vary and can be based just on traffic, on purchases, as well as getting other people to join the affiliate program. If you work hard and post links on all of the pages of a website you can make a lot of money through affiliate programs.

Why Merchants Develop Affiliate Programs

Many merchants develop affiliate programs because it is one of the best ways to sell products or services online. Affiliate programs work because they get the word out to the world about a company, what it is about, and why consumers should check it out. Affiliate programs are also quite cheap to start up as they are based on affiliate members future actions so there are no funds to be paid out ahead of time so these programs are cheap marketing for the merchant! If you think about it, affiliates are basically advertising for the merchant all over the Internet and if they do not generate any traffic they do not get paid. For the affiliates that do generate traffic and sales they will get paid after the money has come in, so the merchant is always ahead of the financial game and the affiliate will be guaranteed payment.

Affiliate History

Affiliate programs are everywhere these days, but they weren’t always so prevalent. It wasn’t until 1996 that the marketing trend came to be when the CEO and founder of Amazon.com came up with this strategy. If you take a look around Amazon you will see that they are essentially one big merchant with a bunch of small affiliates advertising on their website. The way that Amazon works is that affiliates post information for products and then Amazon gets a cut of the profit as well as collects the money and ships the product. As you can see, affiliate programs can really pay big and Amazon is a good example of that.

A Growing Trend

It’s important to note that you do not have to have a business such as Amazon to be successful with affiliate programs. You can be a merchant of any sort and create an affiliate program just to create some noise and some interest in your website, your products, or your service. Affiliate programs have now been around for more than ten years and they continue to be used because they work. Whether you are the merchant or the affiliate there is a lot of money to be made with a relatively simple program, so why not give it a shot? You’ve probably wasted more time doing things that have made you less money than you will make with one of these programs.

Mario Churchill asked:


Affiliate programs have been around for a decade and have remained one of the most popular ways of earning money on the internet using your own website. Affiliate programs require very little from affiliates and a little investment on affiliate network members, but in the end, it is really about business - creating an opportunity to allow everyone to benefit.

Playing cupid

Being involved in an affiliate program is like playing cupid, except that you get paid through a well-placed business opportunity. What an affiliate does is to provide links on his website that lead his visitors to a merchant’s site. This arrangement directs traffic to the merchant’s site and the affiliate gets paid for his efforts.

Basically, it requires a little matching on your part as an affiliate. If the products and services of your merchant site meet the needs and interests of your visitors, you’ve made a profitable match.

How to join

Joining is a breeze. If you’re a site owner, you can apply with an affiliate network and become a member. Once you’ve been approved, you can now choose the affiliate programs that are right for your site. Once the merchant owners who own these programs approve of your application, you can then post a link on your site that leads to the merchant owner’s site.

If you’re an online business owner, you might want affiliates of your own. You can choose to recruit them yourself, or save your effort and resources by joining an affiliate network. They will virtually do the job of recruitment, tracking and accounting for you. All you have to do is pay for their services.

Where the money is

There are several ways you can use as an affiliate to earn money from affiliate programs. These programs are Pay-Per-Click, Pay-Per-Sale and Pay-Per-Lead. Each program’s arrangement varies and so do payment schemes. For a PPP, for example, you will be paid for every visitor who clicks on the merchant owner’s links from your website.

For a PPS, you will earn either a fixed amount or a percentage of every sale made by a visitor who linked from your site to the merchant’s site. For a PPL, you will earn for every visitor who agrees to fill out an information form on the merchant’s site to become a ‘lead’.

Who profits from these programs?

Everybody. Other than you, the merchant owner profits from your arrangement from the sale or traffic he generates with his website through your affiliate link. The visitor also profits from your arrangement by getting the information, goods or services that he needs from the merchant’s site through your site. And lastly, the affiliate network who handles your program and that of your merchant also benefits, since they also get a percentage from the pay that affiliate merchants make to their affiliates.

What makes an affiliate program a success?

Probably one of the most successful affiliate programs that offer business opportunities is that of http://Amazon.com. Already a popular site for reading materials, Amazon already had a sizable audience just from reading enthusiasts, but there was a market that they wanted to capture: the internet visitors who don’t usually shop for stuff at http://Amazon.com. These are the people who probably have never heard of the site or those who don’t find books very interesting.

However, these same internet visitors may find some other subjects worth checking, like gardening or bodybuilding, for example. When a favorite website dealing with plants and herbs recommends a book that’s available at http://Amazon.com, that visitor is likely to click on the link to check out the book and probably buy it. What results is a mutually rewarding experience: Amazon gets a customer and the affiliate site gets paid. And, the visitor gets the book he never knew existed.

As you can see, a successful affiliate program is directly affected by the popularity of the affiliate website. It will also help a lot if the affiliate site owner knows his readers well enough to choose the kind of merchant sites that would interest them greatly.

A successful affiliate program is one that invites everyone into a business opportunity - the visitor with the information or product he needs and the merchant with his desired traffic or sale. On top of it all, the affiliate site makes a profit by being an intermediary to both parties. Everybody wins.

The only danger about joining affiliate programs is that you could get carried away with so many choices. Since the programs are free, you could be tempted to join a lot and in the process, make your website look like a big advertisement site.

Remember that your drawing power is your site’s content, along with the number of visitors you have and their interests. If you stray too far away from this, you might end up spreading your site’s appeal too thinly and turn off many of your loyal visitors.

As long as you choose wisely and maintain consistency, you can be sure that your affiliate program will continue to give you a business opportunity that can be very profitable. It may not make you rich overnight, but it can earn you money that you otherwise wouldn’t get your hands on if you hadn’t joined. So if you want your site to generate income or expand your business further, why not check out affiliate programs today?

Some recommendations

If you’re interested in a business opportunity using affiliate programs, check out VMC Satellite, Snapshot Spy, Investigator Pro and YesAsia. You just might find the right affiliate program to start your very own online business without really trying.

J. Stephen Pope asked:


How To Start Your Own Affiliate Program by J. Stephen Pope

1. Why Start Your Own Affiliate Program?

Multiple web sites and distributors selling your product can result in increased sales and profits. Unlike conventional advertising, affiliate programs pay only for performance. Commissions are not paid out unless sales are made.

Also, with many more web sites linking to yours, your link popularity is sure to increase in search engines, resulting in additional traffic and income.

2. Combine a Merchant Account with Your Affiliate Program

If your product is downloadable (such as electronic books or software), you might consider ClickBank.com. For a $49.95 initial fee, you can process credit cards and on-line cheques for $1.00 per transaction plus 7.5% of sales. As an added bonus, you have your own built-in affiliate program.

ClickBank gives you a listing on their web site and visitors can buy your products and join your affiliate program. You choose the commission rate you are willing to pay. All commission payments are handled by ClickBank. One downside is that you can`t run a two-tiered program.

To learn more about ClickBank affiliate programs, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/cbap.html

3. Use an Affiliate Program Script

If you are comfortable with running CGI scripts, you may wish to install your own affiliate program on your server and administer the affiliate program yourself.

Be forewarned, though, that this is a lot of work. You will be responsible for all the testing, security, commission payments, promotion and so on. Another downside: Will your potential affiliates trust you since their commissions are not tracked and paid by an independent third party?

You will find an example of an affiliate script program at http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/buy/simple-affiliate.html

4. Use a Hosted Solution

There are good reasons for not hosting your affiliate program on your server. Perhaps you don`t have the time to administer all the aspects of an affiliate program. Maybe your time could be used more productively in other areas of your business. Additionally, an independent third party tracking and paying affiliate commissions inspires confidence in prospective affiliates. Finally, you just might benefit from the additional exposure that an affiliate network brings you.

ClixGalore.com is an example of an affiliate network. You will need to pay a $75.00 deposit to cover affiliate commissions. They charge 25% of any affiliate commissions paid. For example, if you paid an affiliate a 10% commission on a $100.00 sale, you would pay the affiliate $10.00 and ClixGalore $2.50.

With ClixGalore, you can also have a two-tier program. Taking the above example, if you paid affiliates for finding other affiliates, you might pay 2% on your second tier. That would be another $2.00 commission and $ .50 affiliate network fee for a total of $15.00 in commissions on both levels.

To learn more about ClixGalore affiliate network, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/clixgalore.html

5. For All Affiliate Programs

Setup your own web page (or pages) outlining the benefits of your affiliate program. Offer articles, suggestions, text and banner links, and other useful support for your affiliates.

Offer a generous commission so that others feel motivated to sell for you. Obtain the e-mail addresses of your affiliates so that you can keep in touch with them to aid them to sell more.

For increased traffic, sales and profits, start your own affiliate program.

For more information about affiliate programs, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/affiliate.html

RESOURCE BOX

J. Stephen Pope, President of Pope Consulting Inc., http://www.popeconsultinginc.com/ has been helping clients to earn maximum business profits for over twenty-five years.

For valuable Work at Home Small Business Ideas, visit http://www.yenommarketinginc.com/

Pino Tedesco asked:


To those who are not familiar with affiliate marketing, two-tier could be a new term to you but to those who are involved in this kind of money-making experience; it could mean a stream of income.

Two-tier is an enticing feature of a particular affiliate program wherein, affiliates are allowed to sign-up additional affiliates below them. So that when the sub-affiliates otherwise known as second tier affiliates, earns a commission, the affiliate above receives a commission too.

In two-tier system, the first tier of commission is just like in the usual affiliate program. The sole difference is that it has an additional tier/s or sub-affiliates, whereby marketers also gain a commission once the people that the additional tiers referred to the program generate sales.

Theoretically, affiliate programs can have multi-tier program with infinite number of tiers, however, there are practical limitations. As tiers increase, the affiliate program draws more webmasters who are mostly interested in gaining profit from other’s work and effort.

Two-Tier affiliate program is also recognized as multi-level marketing (MLM). When you sign-up for an affiliate program, you are identified as the first tier and the person that you have recruited or encouraged to sign up is the second tier.

If there are additional tiers, then the system can now be regarded as multi-level marketing (MLM). But today, MLM isn’t as effective and successful as it was several years ago. It is because at present, affiliates can freely select from thousands of affiliate programs and they can quickly switch from one program to another.

You could probably go wrong if you’re thinking that you can depend on your second tier to do the job for you. So if you want to use two-tier affiliate program to your advantage and generate more income by encouraging sub-affiliates to sign-up below you, make sure that you carefully choose your affiliate merchant.

Pick those merchants who generate stable stream of high quality products, give high or just commissions, offers real time tracking, furnishes you with a proven and tested advertising arsenal and treat their affiliates very well. You can also sign-up for the merchant who gives high visitors-to-sales conversion rate.

It is also advisable if you engage yourself with a web merchant that has a user-friendly website which you can access anytime so that you can monitor your statistics including visits and sales. And if possible, choose the one with powerful marketing tools which you can use in promoting their products.

You’re just wasting much of your time and effort and worse, damaging your integrity once you promote poor affiliate program because your visitor will surely presume that the product or service you are reselling must be dreadful too. That’s the reason why it is important to pick first-rate affiliate programs. Through these, you can not only build up a good relationship with your visitor, but also, you can easily get more tiers to sign-up under you.

You should also be cautious of some affiliate programs that give more importance on the profits to be earned in taking on other affiliates than on the income from sales, because you’ll just eventually find out that someone has already close those sales without informing you. Usually, this kind of affiliate program offers a very low first-tier payment but a sky-scraping second-tier commission.

If you want to start an affiliate program of your own, you surely have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier affiliate program. Who am I to say which of these two programs are better? But let me tell you the benefits you could get out of two-tier affiliate program.

First, your profit will increase due to increased sales from the customers that your second tier has referred. Second, you have a much broader customer base to which you can sell your products and services.

Then, you gain more and stable income because the customers referred by your affiliate and sub-affiliates could probably develop a lifetime loyalty on your site and your products. Plus, you have an army of sub-affiliates who will promote and resell your products and services to their visitors and subscribers.

Two-tier program has been a proven winner and should be the number one choice for the budding affiliates as well as for the affiliate program managers. When you start gaining profits from your site as well as your tiers, this is now the right time to say that you have used two-tier affiliate program to your advantage.