Do you find the process of affiliate marketing a bit confusing? Do you wonder if it’s even possible to make a living through affiliate marketing? Maybe you’ve spent countless hours setting up marketing strategies for your affiliate products, such as blogs, articles, Squidoo pages, websites, and so on, only to find that you’re not making the kind of money you need to justify your effort.

Sure, if affiliate marketing was easy, everyone on the internet would be making a living this way. Of course, this isn’t the case. Most people who try their hands at affiliate marketing fail - sometimes because they spend themselves into a hole, and sometimes just because they get burnt out from working hard without making any money, and they give up. So how can you rise above and succeed where so many have fallen?

A clue lies in the 2nd chapter of the Tao Te Ching, the mystic explanation of “the way” written by Lao Tse over 3 centuries ago:

For “is” and “is not” come together,

Hard and easy are complimentary;

Long and short are relative,

High and low are comparative;

Pitch and sound make harmony,

Before and after are a sequence.

Now, what the heck does this “new age ballyhoo” have to do with affiliate marketing? How could this mysterious passage help you become a better affiliate marketer, so you can finally get paid fairly for your time?

It turns out, The Tao Te Ching contains quite a few insights that can help you on our path to affiliate marketing success.

See, most affiliate marketers concentrate only on selling - that is, focusing their efforts on nothing but getting visitors to buy their products. Their efforts come off as blatant sales pitches, and it turns potential customers off. No one wants to be sold to - when was the last time you visited a website, hoping for a pushy sales pitch?

The most effective way of selling through affiliate marketing is to “not sell”. That is, to educate your potential customers, and make your affiliate products seem like logical solutions for their problems, needs, and wants, without making it obvious that you want your visitors to buy your affiliate products.

How do you do this? Well, mot importantly, you should make your marketing content have value. Whether you’re promoting your affiliate products through website content, articles, email marketing, or blogging, your readers should take something of value away from your content, regardless of whether they ever buy. It could be a tip they can use to make their lives easier, a recommendation that helps them become wealthier, or an idea that sparks them to be more productive.

Here is where the “is” and the “is not” come together. Of course, your affiliate product will be the ideal resource for your readers. But while you’ll mention your product as a “recommendation”, you won’t overtly push readers to buy. If your content is engaging, informative, and useful, they’ll decide to buy on their own.

Affiliate marketing, like the Tao itself, is full of dichotomies, and can seem nearly impossible to figure out. Yet its complexity lies in its simplicity. And this simplicity is the one thing that 99% of affiliate marketers fail to understand when planning and executing their marketing strategies. Once you understand this, you can easily place yourself ahead of the vast majority of affiliate marketing entrepreneurs out there.

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Many newcomers to affiliate marketing are anxious to start earning commissions and often think that the internet marketing industry is a scam since they have not made any money from it. The truth is the results from internet marketing are the same as with any other business, nothing comes easy and you get what you put into your business.

If you are working with someone elses internet marketing program and simply duplicating what they have done your results may vary. People may tell you that systems work and people fail but that is not always the case. Many of these internet marketing programs have not been updated for years and are encouraging people to enter saturated markets where it is impossible to turn a profit.

On the other hand there many internet marketing courses that have been updated many times and offer a wealth of knowledge. If working with these your commissions should be top notch and it should not take that long to reach a good income level. The trick is finding the perfect, duplicative system for you, if you want to have a successful affiliate marketing business go to a successful affiliate marketer, plug into their system and watch the profits start rolling in.

In the beginning this is the best and most proven way to get into the internet marketing business quickly with the least amount of effort. This will also allow you the time to learn more advanced strategies while still pulling in an income. This will let you experiment more and try out different things without being held back by a lack of funds.

Eventually you will get to a point when you know enough to release your own product, and that is when the real money starts pouring in. When you have your own product to sell you can recruit an army of affiliates to sell for you. That means they are doing all the hard work promoting your product for a smaller percentage of the commission.

Once you see some commissions start trickling in it is important to wisely spend that money. A lot of people believe they can take that first profit and start spending it, which they can if they want to put their affiliate marketing business on hold very quickly. The smart internet marketers see the big picture and reinvest those profits back into the business to keep it growing.

You cannot have a get rich quick mentality; otherwise you will be running in circles chasing one opportunity after another wasting your time and money. There are no real secrets to making profits online you just need to do simple things over and over to grow your business.

In order to take your commissions to the next level you simply need to follow these three valuable tips. Work with a proven product that has shown to sell well for many affiliates. This will help because if you are not seeing sales you will know that something is wrong with your promotional efforts and not the product itself.

Next you want to make a clear and simple marketing plan and stick with it, you do not want to be falling for gimmicks that promise you free leads or traffic boosts. And finally you want to reinvest your profits back into your internet marketing business. By following this pattern you will ensure success and increase your commissions.

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“So, what do you do for a living?”

I frequently get this question asked of me and surprisingly, I find a hard time answering it in a way that is easily understood by the poser of the question. When I reply that I am an affiliate marketer, I usually get a blank stare. Of course the next question is - “What the heck is that?” I then attempt to go into a very elaborate and profound explanation of what affiliate marketing is and more often than not this proceeds to confuse the person even more.

Recently, I decided to keep things simple these days when asked this question. Now I just say - “I sell other people’s stuff online.”

However you want to define it, affiliate marketing is my full time profession and it is something that is not only very lucrative but also a great passion of mine. In my journey to get where I am today, I learned a few things along the way about what it takes to become a successful affiliate marketer but the most important secret of them all is a very simple concept known as commitment.

Affiliate marketing is a business and just like any other business, it needs to be taken seriously. It takes a major commitment to become successful, which is especially difficult for most when they start off because they are also working a full time “offline job”. I made a decision that I was going to make a career out of this awhile back and that meant I had to make some major sacrifices. To me it didn’t matter what activity I was giving up because I knew the reward down the road would eventually be freedom to do whatever I wanted to do.

Now by no means am I saying that you need to sacrifice your family time - this is still has to be the most important thing in your life (assuming you have a spouse and/or children). I am referring to things such as - instead of sitting around drinking beer with my buddies, I chose to work on my online business. When there where times when my wife was working a weekend shift or if she went shopping, I’d be glued to my monitor and keyboard instead of lounging on the couch watching the tube.

Every bit of extra time I had that didn’t interfere with my family relations, I would be learning more and more about affiliate marketing.

Commitment - That’s it in a nut shell. Of course there is a learning curve and you need to have a game plan in place , but if you stay committed and focused to this business or anything else in life for that matter, then you will eventually succeed.

If your frustrated with your lack of success in making money online or looking for a mentor program to assist you in doing better, go to http://www.wealthy-affiliate-reviews.com/. Once you check out the Wealthy Affiliate University, you will wish you had found it sooner.

If you plan to be a successful internet marketer one of your strategies will no doubt include the promotion of other peoples products. In that respect one of the leading networks to join is Clickbank. Clickbank is a one stop shop for high margin e-books and courses with more than 10,000 products available for you to promote.

The problem with this number is of course how to find hot Clickbank products. There are a lot of products past their sell by date, a lot of poor products and a lot of great products that simply don’t sell.

So how do we find hot Clickbank products to promote to our target audience? I’m glad you asked. First you need to develop an understanding of the Clickbank marketplace rankings and what these figures mean.

Marketplace products are ranked according to a productivity score which takes account of 4 principal factors:

$ Earned/Sale - This is the average net amount earned by an affiliate (internet marketer) per sale. It is important to realize that this is the net per sale and therefore affected by refunds, charge backs and taxes.

% Earned/Sale - This is the percentage earned by an affiliate on each sale made.

% Referred - Pretty self explanatory this one as it represents the percentage of the promoters products sold by affiliates.

Gravity - This is a weighted score reflecting the popularity of the product. A low gravity means there are very few affiliates promoting the product. A high gravity points to a competitive market with many affiliates promoting the product.

Putting this information to use to find hot Clickbank products.

When entering the Clickbank Marketplace I first of all choose a niche I am interested in promoting say home and family. I will then sort by Gravity to establish demand and competition. I like to identify products with a Gravity of between 100-150. This means it is a popular product that is selling but the market is not saturated with competitors.

I will then check out how much commission is being paid. I am looking at a range between $75 and $25. More than $75 is a tough sell because potential customers may not be willing to take a risk on a higher priced item. If it is less than $25 I will generally leave it alone because it can be difficult to make a profit. It does of course depend on your promotion strategy.

The next thing to check is refunds. If the product is suffering a high degree of refunds i.e. more than 15% I will keep clear of it. Do investigate the cause though becasuse sometimes the figures can be misleading. Actually you should query any anomaly you see cropping up. Spend some time in the Clickbank Marketplace and these will become apparent as you become more familiar.

Finally I’m going to check out the sales letter - would I buy based on the copy. You also want to check that a refund policy is available to those not satisfied with the product.

So there you have it. Follow this strategy and you will find hot Clickbank products to promote from which you can profit - assuming of course that you fully understand the other pieces of the internet marketing jigsaw puzzle.

Mike is a full time internet marketer who loves nothing more than helping others to succeed.

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Deep linking to achieve deep indexing has become an obsession with SEO experts and novices. Just do a Google search on the term, “deep indexing” and you will see the energy that is going into this area of SEO.

To achieve deep indexing, affiliate marketers are creating multiple “inner site maps”, submitting multiple pages to search engines, adding a “popular post category” to their blogs …and so it goes on.

Well the great news for Squidoo lensmasters is that Google automatically deep indexes Squidoo lenses.

I found this out by watching the daily stats of each of my Squidoo lenses over a number of weeks. By way Of example I will discuss one of my Squidoo lenses on digital-storytelling. The focus of this lens is to help people turn digital photos into digital stories or digi-stories as they are sometimes called. It also provides links to resources to sell digital photos online.

The amazing revelation is how deeply Google indexes my lens, so that I not only receive visitors who search on my primary keyword but now I am getting visitors who search on the most unlikely “long tail keywords”.

I know for a fact the Google is indexing all my Squidoo module headings, text within modules, video titles in the YouTube modules and links in link/list modules.

Here is a sample of the 50 long tail keywords that have been used in Google, MSN and Yahoo to find my digital storytelling lens:

* 50 ways to improve your storytelling
* camera dollars income system ebook download
* companies to get paid for submitting photos
* digital stories by primary school kids
* digital storytelling imovie education
* dreamtime story about how the world was created
* earning income from digital photography
* education histroy digital story telling
* examples of online storytelling videos kids
* free software to turn my pictures into movie
* how to make an income with digital photography
* how to turn your digital photos into film
* mapping photos into digital form
* photos into movies with sound
* program for making digital pictures to movies
* programs that turn your pictures into cartoons
* story about your sister in korae movies
* storytelling and “autism” and “kit”
* take digital pictures and sell online
* telling digital stories and digital arts alliance
* turn pictures into movies on computer
* turn pictures into pixels online
* turn your eyes into animation
* turn your pictures into model pictures for free
* turn your pictures into moving animation
* turn your still photos into movies
* turning my pics into movies for free
* turning still photos into movies
* youtube digital bath hawaii

What you can do is build your Squidoo lens in a way that encourages the search engines to deep index your lens but that is another story!

Ron Passfield, PhD, Top 100 Squidoo Lensmaster, provides fr^e resources to build and market Squidoo lenses for affiliate marketing. Visit Ron’s Squidoo lens for more information:
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