NOTE:  The following is a guest post from one of my favorite internet marketing mentors.

Why I Love Affiliate Marketing – Part 1
By Jimmy D. Brown of “Affiliatenaire”

Do you find yourself “starting” to create your own product to sell online, but never “finishing” it? 

One of the things I love about affiliate marketing is –

    ** You don’t need to create your own products **

Many people find the idea of creating their own products to be an overwhelming and even paralyzing task.

* I don’t have any good ideas!
* I’m not a writer!
* There’s too much competition!
* I don’t know how to set everything up!
* I can’t figure out where to start!
* It’s too hard!

These are just a few of the valid reasons many people give when it comes to not creating their own products to sell. I’m sure with a few minutes of brainstorming, we could come
up with a list of many more.

With affiliate marketing, you don’t need your own products. You simply promote someone else’s already proven successful offer for a commission.

And, truth be told, even if you ARE a writer and you DO have lots of ideas and you CAN figure it all out…

  ** Nobody wants to create new products all the time **

As good as you may be, you don’t know everything!  Why try to create a product on every topic imaginable in your market when you can earn just as much money by simply promoting someone else’s really good offer as one of your
profit streams?

That’s why I love affiliate marketing.

You don’t need to create your own products.

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Jimmy D. Brown is the author of “Affiliatenaire”, teaching you how to create big-time affiliate commission checks in only 1-3 hours each week.  Discover how you can get cash in the bank without a website, experience or even an idea!
Visit http://avcbi-businesscenter.com/go/affiliatenaire

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One of the excuses we hear most often from struggling online marketers is that they don’t make more sales because they don’t have a list. We even hear that excuse from marketers who have been online three, or even five years.

My question to them is always, “What are you waiting for?” “Why not start a massive list-building effort today?”

When I look at how I built my database, I used only a few primary methods. Here are the most effective ones that I used:

1) On many of my content websites, in many niches, I simply have an opt-in form in a prominent location on practically every page. That opt-in form is usually in the upper right corner of the page. I typically offer the potential subscribers a gift as an enticement to join my list — perhaps a PDF special report or an audio recording.

I also assure the potential subscriber that I will protect their data and only send them appropriate email. I also tell them that there is a handy one-click link in every email that I send that makes it super easy for them to remove themselves from my list if they ever get tired of my communications.

This has worked beautifully for me for more than a dozen year, and steadily grows my lists.

2) I have numerous affiliate programs. Many of these affiliate programs sell inexpensive products and pay the affiliates 100% commission on the front end product. The real purpose of those affiliate programs is to build a list of proven buyers interested in a specific topic. The commissions incentivize others to go out and send me traffic AND build my lists.

I most often use a script called Rapid Action Profits, which allows me to pay affiliate instantly, depositing the payments directly into their PayPal accounts. This is so powerful because affiliates often need the funds TODAY, and don’t want to wait 30 – 60 days for their commissions. When they can sell one of my inexpensive products, that are almost impulse buys for their customers, and get those funds instantly, they trip over themselves sending me customer… and building my lists.

3) I often participate in quality list-building giveaways. In these events, numerous marketers ban together to drive traffic to a centralize website where gifts from each of the marketers are listed. In order to download a specific gift, the website visitor must typically visit the site of the marketer offering the gift and join his list.

If you offer truly useful gifts, thousands of new subscribers can sometimes be gained from just one of these free giveaways. I usually offer PDF ebooks (transcripts from interviews that I conduct), MP3’s or inexpensive but useful software.

I often announce free giveaways that are looking for contributors on my blog, and to my Twitter followers.

4) Software that displays your subscribe box on other’s site, and automatically builds your list for you. There is software that allows you to participate in a cooperative effort, where partners display the boxes on each others’ webpages. This is a good way to share the wealth since your website visitors are joining others’ lists anyway. You may as well send your traffic to someone who is reciprocating.

There is also newer software that allows you to display your subscribe box superimposed on affiliate websites, social networking sites, etc. You still tell your visitors to go to sites such as YouTube, Clickbank, Amazon or Ebay, but the software shows them a subscribe box and asks them to join your list BEFORE doing anything else. This is very powerful, and is largely hands free.

For example, I can mention affiliate sites, or perhaps my profile page on one of the social networking sites, and build a list in the process of just spreading the word.

With so many easy ways to grow your list, there really is no excuse for anyone who’s been online for more than a few months not to be aggressively building a list. You do need that list to inexpensively spread the word about your business.

Now that you see how REALLY simple and easy it is, get started building your list today!

If you are seeking online success with your business, then SEO search engine optimization is essential. Without adequately optimizing your website for search engine spiders or algorithms, you have little chance of your site receiving visible listings on the search engine results pages. That spells death to most online businesses.

Free traffic is by far the best, and if you are unsure how to use pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords properly, it could cost you a lot of money to correct inadequacies in your SEO. Only 1% of those that start in internet marketing actually make any money: largely because they do not know how to promote their website. There are other reasons of course, and a website is not always necessary, but if you have one then you must learn how to optimize it to attain as high a listing position as possible.

SEO search engine optimization is about telling search engines exactly what each page of your website is saying, and that it is highly relevant to the keyword, or search term, for which you have optimized it. Having a great looking website with a lot of well writen content on each page is not sufficient to earn you a listing on Google, let alone a high one that will bring you free traffic. It is essential that manipulate the search engine algorithms to calculate a high degree of relevance of your page to the requirements of those using Google and other search engines to find information.

Algorithms are mathematical formulae with no eyes. They are blind to your fabulous graphics and fantastic web design skills. They read the source code of your site, including the text. The way you format your text gives weighting to certain pieces of text, and lets the algorithm know what your important keywords are.

The spiders that crawl your site should be led to where you want them to go to, and good website design, site navigation and internal linking structure is part of achieving that. It is also a component of your SEO. THere is alot more to SEO than just soem H heading tags and keyword meta tags – much more. The majority of people do not understand what SEO is or how to optimize their site, even if learning how to do so could immeasurably improve their chance of online success.

However, there is more to search engine optimization that simply reading about it. You have to see it in action, and fully understand what you are doing when optimizing your website. There are still professionals who believe that you must have 2% – 3% keyword density on your page. They have disagreed with me strongly yet I know that what they say is rubbish: contextual relevance is what search engines are seeking these days, not interminable repetitions of keywords that will achieve nothing but get your site lost in the supplementary results that nobody sees.

There have been a large number of changes in search engine optimization over the last few years, and SEO is no longer what it once was. However, what won’t change is the benefit to you of having a full understanding of the principles behind the actions you are taking when optimizing your website form search engines such as Google.

SEO search engine optimization wil make all the difference to the success of your site, and likely even that of your business. Don’t just read about it: see it in action and understand it.

Click here to find the best SEO solutions!

There is nothing more frustrating than checking your website’s analytics and realizing that, although a visitor has just spent over 10 minutes reading through a single webpage, they have not made a purchase. Sometimes it can be almost heartbreaking, because no matter how hard you try to increase sales, turning a prospect into a customer can appear to be a near impossible task.

Sometimes the key to turning a prospect into a customer is not a change in your website content, but rather a change to your purchase page:

• Is it easy to find?
• Is it easy to use?
• Can your visitors trust you with their credit card information?

One of the reasons that it is difficult to turn a prospect into a customer is because the customer may have a difficult time locating the final sales page, gets frustrated, and eventually leaves your website to search for a better purchase elsewhere.

In order to increase sales, you will first need to check and make sure that your order form is easy to locate. Sometimes the best way to do this is to write a small paragraph that tells your visitors exactly where and how to find the order form. Also, try placing the link to your order form in an attractive, noticeable box at the top and bottom of your webpage, so that no matter what part of the page the visitor is looking at, they can find it easily.

Offering multiple payment options is another way to increase sales. Some visitors to your website may be uncomfortable providing their credit card online and may instead want to pay with PayPal. Others may not trust PayPal and instead choose to pay with check or credit card. Whatever the reason, the more payment options you have available, the easier it will be for you to continue turning your prospect into a customer.

It is also a good idea to improve your website’s credibility. One of the ways to do this is to offer secure encryption technology on your website’s order forms. In addition, offering a money-back guarantee (and sticking to it – something that many merchants have a problem with) is a good way to increase sales and offer a better user experience.

Finally, increase your credibility by offering a method of contacting you, whether it be by email or phone number or both. And make sure that this method is easy to find on your webpages and is easy to use. Providing your contact information can be doubly effective, because if a visitor sends you an email asking you a question about your product, you will be able to remind them of your product when emailing back. Reminding a visitor of your product is an effective way to increase sales.

Turning a prospect into a customer is no easy task. If you have noticed that although you are continuously tweaking the sales pages, but you are still not getting sales, following these guidelines can help offer another way to effectively complete the transactions you’ve been waiting for.