A Beginner’s Guide To Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing allows people to sell a variety of products online through their blogs or website. If you are looking for an easy way to monetize your website, you can easily implement affiliate marketing into your site.

The basic concept is signing up for an affiliate marketing network and finding products that are within your niche. Once you find the product that is within your niche, you click on the hop link to add your affiliate ID to the product link. When a reader clicks on your hop link and buys the item, you get a commission for the sale. Although this sounds simple, there are a few things that you need to know before you get started.
Here is a simple guide for affiliate marketing beginners.

Choosing Your Affiliate Network

The affiliate network that you choose will have a lot to do with the type of products that you are selling. Different affiliate networks will focus on different items. Some affiliate networks like Commission Junction mainly focus on selling website subscriptions and services while Clickbank will focus on digital products like eBooks and software packages.

Determine what affiliate network is going to fit best into your niche. For instance, if you’re running a website that offers advice on insurance, you can use a lead based affiliate network to promote insurance quotes. Some affiliate networks are known for late payments and other bad business practices so do your research before hand.

Choosing Products

When you’re first starting out you’re going to be inundated with different products for marketing. There first thing that you need to do is research on the products that you’re going to promote. Unlike your niche where you are focusing on a small market, you can expand your product base and offer a wide variety of products or lead generating links when you’re marketing to readers.

Don’t go overboard, but have a couple of items that are relevant to your niche. Whether these are eBooks or software packages, your readers have broad based needs within your niche so you should appeal to every aspect of their need. Click on the “Gravity” or “Network Earnings” options on the affiliate network for stats on what products are selling the best.

Buy The Product

How are you going to give real information about a product if you have never used it? When somebody comes to your website they are looking for information on the product. If you don’t give them detailed information then they are going to leave the site and probably never come back.

Buy the item so you know the ins and outs of what you’re trying to sell. Never give broad information about a product. You will be glad that you bought the product instead of just trying to fake your way through a review to do online marketing for it.

Be Honest

Affiliate marketing is all about being honest with a product. If there are things that you don’t like about the product, tell your reader. This will differentiate you from the other marketers trying to sell them a product based on the features.

When you explain what you don’t like about the item you show that you actually know what it does and what it doesn’t do. You can easily build rapport with your readers and establish online trust. This will bring them back to your website when they need a new product or are wondering about different websites that you’ve tried out.

Cloaking

Almost everybody knows what a hoplink looks like. When you put hoplinks on your website, a reader is going to know that you’re trying to sell them something. These links are not only telltale signs of a sale; they are not aesthetically appealing to your websites. Cloaking your links is the best way to keep the website looking professional while not coming off as a hard sell.
You can use cloaking tools or you can use an anchor text link. This allows you to embed a link within a certain phrase. For instance, if you’re trying to sell an eBook on acne you can add your hoplink to “Acne Ebook” so that when the phrase is clicked the reader is taken to the product page.

Viral Media

Viral media is an easy way to drum up traffic to your site or blog. If you are going with a hosting plan then you will be able to easily host videos on your site. If you don’t have a hosting plan, head over to HostGator and buy one.

This is very cheap and will give you the freedom to upload and house your videos per your website or blog. Record yourself going over the product or take screenshots of the product to show the different features. Also talk about what you don’t like about the item to keep your readers informed. Video marketing is a great way to generate traffic.

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My Devotional – Healing for Your Grief

One of the most moving scenes in Scripture is Jesus weeping at the graveside of Lazarus. It’s not that He was powerless to change the situation, which He did, bit that He empathizes with us in our time of loss. “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” The Lord didn’t promise to protect us from pain and loss, but to bring us through it. Perhaps these suggestions will help:

1. Don’t isolate – Expand your “family.” “better a nearby friend than a distant family” (Pr 27:10 TM). If you don’t have a family nearby, reach out to caring people who are close at hand. As part of a group you discover that you’re not alone, that mourning isn’t sickness or self-indulgence, and that sharing brings healing.

2. Don’t deny your loss – “The memory of the just is blessed” (Pr 10:7). When you’re around friends don’t hesitate to talk about your loss. When you do, you’re saying it’s okay for them to share their memories too. A burden shared is a burden lightened.

3. Don’t try to do it all – “There is a time to cry” (Ecc 3:4 NCV). Because grief is draining, you’ll need more rest than usual. So while your ability to function is reduced, let others help with the everyday stuff like cooking, cleaning and shopping until you feel stronger.

4. Don’t neglect your legitimate needs – Respect your body by using the acronym D.E.E.R. (drink, eat, exercise and rest) to help you stay focused and set healthy boundaries. Nobody knows how you feel better than you, so give yourself permission to say, “no thanks” or “I’ll take a rain check” without feeling guilty.

I hope this devotional message is inspirational to you.

Where Are America’s Wealthiest Communities?

If you aspire to the good life, you’ll find company in these three areas where wealth is concentrated.

Want to know where America’s richest people live?

Between 2006 and 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau tracked where the wealthiest five percent of Americans are living. Defining high-income households as those that earn about $200,000 a year and above, the Census Bureau determined that the greatest concentration of wealth is in three main areas. These three areas are located near, but not directly in, large metropolitan areas along both coasts.

New York suburbs

According to Forbes, while New York City, NY, boasts the largest amount of wealthy residents of any city in the country, the concentration of wealth is higher in the surrounding suburbs of Bridgeport, Norwalk, and Stamford, Connecticut. These areas are located along Long Island Sound about 60 miles away from the city. Here, nearly 20% of residents are considered wealthy.

What draws so many rich people to this area? For one thing, there’s proximity to the city. The Fiscal Times also notes that it’s a lower-tax region.

Silicon Valley

California boasts the nation’s largest population of billionaires, so it should come as no surprise that you’ll also find plenty of wealthy people living in the Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area outside of San Francisco, CA. This area is also known as Silicon Valley and is home to many of the world’s technology giants like Apple, Google and Hewlett-Packard — plus thousands of start-ups.

Unfortunately for the wealthy, it’s also home to some rather steep tax rates. The rich in Northern California can expect to pay about 12.3% in taxes versus the 6.7% rate that wealthy residents pay in Connecticut.

Washington, D.C. suburbs

Back on the East Coast, the third-largest concentration of wealthy Americans is settled around the Washington, D.C., metro area in the Virginia suburbs of Alexandria and Arlington. In these northern Virginia suburbs, 14% of households represent the country’s highest earners. The economy here has been shaped by proximity to the nation’s capital, and the majority of residents either work for the government, the military or for private companies that contract to the federal government. In Alexandria, for instance, the biggest employer is the U.S. Department of Defense.

Curious about the opposite end of the spectrum, as well? The southeastern states of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana reported the lowest concentrations of wealthy residents.

For more details, check out the Census Bureau’s complete report:

http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-23.pdf