CloudBlueprint is a 100% free video course on how to make a living online. 

CloudBlueprint Video Course

I make a point of learning as much as I can from people I trust.  Here is a course that is just out and I know there is going to be some really great information about making money online.  Not BS but useful actionable information.

I follow Glen on all matters about affiliate marketing and blogging and always come away with something new.

Now if you want to find out more about this guy just go to Viperchill and check him out.

For now here is what he is offering and all it will cost you is your time and effort.

Go for it.

CloudBlueprint: Intro from ViperChill HQ on Vimeo.

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Affiliate Marketing Is More Than 9 Simple Steps

In my previous post I put up a great graphic offered by Rae Hoffman Dolan that shows 9 basic steps in the affiliate marketing process.

The graphic is a easy way to understand the basics in getting your head into affiliate marketing. And in that sense it is helpful in getting the newcomer to the business thinking more clearly about what is involved.

I thought I’d take a stab at filling in some of the blanks, given I have been at this for three years now and can shed some light on how to set up your expectations of what it takes to learn affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing: Early Learning Phase

I think before you do anything you should do a lot of reading and observing.  That’s because affiliate marketing is a sophisticated and tricky business that calls for technical knowledge of how the internet works along with business common sense on how to set up and run a real business.

The temptation is to dive right in and start launching sites and stuff online.  While that is a noble instinct, I think you are better off just watching how the game is played before you get on the field and try out a few shots.

How long should you wait?  That’s up to you.  You will find plenty of people ready and willing to teach you for a price and I found it real hard to figure out who was right for me and who was just interested in taking money off my hands.

With some time just watching and seeing what people are saying about products and services, you will find out soon enough who is the real deal and who you should avoid.

Whatever you do, pick a program that fits your level of understanding.  Move to more sophisticated programs once you get a grasp of the basics.  For example I stayed away from Pay Per  Click at first because it was way over my head and it can cost a lot of money if you don’t know what you are doing.  You might want to do the same.

I have a list of people listed in my sidebar that you can take a look at.  I wish I had known about these folks in my first few months and that would have saved me time and money.

So there is my rant about the early learning phase.

[Image provided courtesy of the Sugarrae affiliate marketing blog.]

Let’s look at the steps of the How Affiliate Marketing Works graphic.

Affiliate Program Sign up

This first sounds simple enough, but it really is the last step in a multi-step process.

Before you can sign up with an affiliate program you have to decide what you want to sell.

Before you decide what you want to sell you have to do some market research.  More specifically you want to do some keyword research to determine the level of demand and the level of traffic your keywords can gererate.

All of this requires some experience and knowledge of what keywords are; how they work; where they are in the buy cycle and how you can use them to your advantage given the competition there is for them.

You are going to want to learn how to register a domain name. You are also going to want to learn how to set up a web site to go along with that domain name and you are going to want to create articles and content to put on that website in a way that optimizes what the search engines are looking for.

You get the picture?

This is a real business that takes time and effort to master.

Now we are still at step one.

The thing is this is a crucial step to get right because it makes a lot of difference in whether you stand a chance to succeed at making some money.

Affiliate Link

When you get through all the steps in phase 1 and succeed in getting approved, then you get your product or service affiliate link from an affiliate program.

This is a piece of code that has an identifier on it that is specific to your account with the merchant.  It tells the merchant that the traffic it is receiving with that code on it is traffic you have sent to the merchant.  If that traffic buys you get a commission.

You put that affiliate link on your website.  Your link can take different forms.  Sometimes it is a visual banner display that a visitor can click on. Other times it can be a product image that is clickable. Or it can be a text link in the copy of your site content in an article or in the product description.

Whatever the form, it is a link that sends your visitor to a merchant’s site and with some luck or good pre selling you get that visitor to buy the product or service.

There is a whole body of information about masking or cloaking your affiliate link to prevent bad guys from stealing your link but that is something for another time.

Customer Visits Your Website

The next step is pretty straight forward.  You set up you website, get traffic and visitors are coming to your site.

Customer Clicks Your Link

You have a visitor arrive at your site. He/she reads what you have to offer and clicks on the banner, text link, product image and is sent to the merchant site.  Bravo! You got a click.

The Cookie

When the visitor clicks on one of your links, a piece of code is put on his/her computer with your identifier on it.  It is called a cookie. It tells the merchant who belongs to the link and who should get a commission. It also tells the merchant that the cookie is good for 30-45-60 days so that if that visitor doesn’t buy right away you still have a shot at getting a commission.

Vistor Buys on Merchant’s Site

You luck out and the visitor buys a product or service and your cookie is still on his/her computer.

Merchant Checks Cookie

When someone buys something from the merchant and the transaction goes through and is confirmed, that merchant looks for an affiliate link and a cookie to find out who referred the sale.

Merchant Confirms Cookie

When the merchant finds the cookie and ties it to the confirmed sale, that sale generates a commission for you the affiliate.  The amount is determined in the affiliate agreement which you have read and are familiar with.

Commission Report

A record of all your sales and commissions is filed in a report kept by the merchant in your affiliate account.

Payment Period

At the end of the payment period specified in the affiliate agreement, you will receive a payment by check or direct deposit or by whatever means agreed to in the affiliate agreement.  This payment reflects all the commissions generated for that period of time, usually on a monthly basis.

Conclusion: The Affiliate Marketing Process

This whole process takes time to learn and digest.

As was mentioned earlier, the research and set up of an affiliate relationship takes time and effort. You have to learn a whole bunch of things about keywords, domain names, web site set up and design and content creation.

There is the issue of getting traffic and getting links to your site that haven’t been covered here but that you will also learn how to do.

Take Your Time

The whole point here is to take your time and learn to take in information in small digestible pieces.

It took me just about a year before I began to put things together and the next two years of trial and error to feel confident I could work in this business.

Now my experience was starting from total ignorance and going in the wrong direction more than once.

So just give yourself plenty of time and plenty of slack in learning how to do affiliate marketing online.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Here is a graphic that shows how affiliate marketing works.

The diagram below is a visual rendition of the process that unfolds when you sign up with a merchant to sell his or her product/service. It takes you through the various steps that occur and lead to your receiving a commission.

It was commissioned by Sugarrae, aka Rae Hoffman Dolan, a professional online marketer – ( I’m really tired of the term super affiliate since I’ve been taken by a few) – who is happy to see it propagate far and wide.

It’s a great short explanation of the essence of affiliate marketing.

Sugarrae is the real deal and you should read what she has to say. You’ll learn more in one paragraph from her than in some 80 or 100 page ebooks. Her site can be found at  http://www.sugarrae.com/

This graphic is one sample of that.

Enjoy

Click here to view a larger version.

[Image provided courtesy of the Sugarrae affiliate marketing blog.]

Index problem

Google Webmaster Homepage

I was checking out my website to see what Google was indexing and had a research tool return that I had only one indexed page in Google.  I was really surprised so I went to the browser and typed in  site:www,affiliatestartingline.com.  Sure enough, the only return was one indexed page.

I really got worried and tried to figure out what was going on. Then I remembered I sometimes use my domain without the prefix www.  So I tried the same command without the prefix site:affiliatestartingline.com.  And boom, there were all the indexed results.

Lesson learned is this.  Google sees your prefixed domain and your un-prefixed domain as two separate domains. So you might find yourself with indexing one or the other or a mix of both.  You don’t want that.

Index Solution

The solution is found in Google’s Webmaster tool.

You need to have a Google account and then you need to sign up in the Google Webmaster area.  Register both your prefixed and unprefixed domains.

In my case I had already signed up the prefixed domain in the Webmaster tool for my account so I added the unprefixed domain.

Once you have registered your accounts, click on one of your domain names to go to the Webmaster tool dashboard for that account.

On the sidebar on the left select the Site Configuration tab.  Scroll down and select Settings.

This will take you to a screen with the preferred domain function ready for your use.  Select a domain as your preferred domain.

When you do that, Google will index all pages to that preferred domain regardless of whether the prefixed or unprefixed domain is used.

Redirect Your Domain

There is one last step Google wants you to take.  Go to your Web host, go to the domains panel in your cPanel and select the Redirect icon.  This takes you to the input screen where you will select the domain that is not preferred and redirect it to the preferred domain.

Complete that step and you are done.

Now all your indexing will be directed to one domain and your data will truly reflect the latest status of your site.

If you want to see this in a video, check out my video on Preferred Domain set up, that should make it easy for you to take the steps to solve this problem.

I hope this has been helpful.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous.

Read a nice article about brevity.  It comes compliments of Copyblogger and you should check it out.

Looking to build some back links.  Try this tool it’s called BackLink and it’s an incredible way to build back links.  It costs $20 and it’s worth much much more.

That’s the Tip of the Day.  Enjoy.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

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Google Instant Preview

Google Instant Preview – What is it and what does it mean to the Internet Marketer?

Google has a feature called Instant Preview and I made a video review what it is and what it means to you as a marketer.

You find the Instant Preview icon in the search results at the right hand end of title line in the form of a magnifying glass.

When you click it, it renders a page of the website for that result.

What this means is that you want your website to be optimized for the Instant Preview.

You want your titles and headlines clearly visible and easy to read.  There has to be instant recognition of what your site is about and what it can do for the reader.

It also means that results in the lower listings may have a better chance of getting looked at because I found myself checking out the sites on the first results page.  It was so easy to do I went right down the page in no time.

So there you have it. Check out the video below and see how Google Instant Preview can work for you.

Stay with it, stay well and may your travels be prosperous.

• LOVE

• MAKING MONEY

• BEAUTY

• ENTERTAINMENT

• HEALTH

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

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Claude Pelanne YouTube Channel

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners- A Great Source of Free Tutorials  – YouTube

Over the past week I have received two emails from a membership site that I have paid to join. They both offered video tutorials.  One on setting up a confirmation page to capture names and email addresses before sending prospects to a merchant’s landing page and another explaining why your should use a robot.txt file to streamline search engine indexing of your blog or site.

The content of the videos was useful and certainly something I wanted to learn.  The only thing is I had already found these tutorials on my own some time ago.  The place where I found them was YouTube.

The lesson here is a short one.  Why pay for content that you can get for free?  So before you go out and pay good money, try going and doing a search on YouTube to see if a video tutorial exists there.  There is a reason why YouTube is now the second most active search engine on the Web.

If you want to see how to create a robot.txt file and upload it to your root directory of your site or blog, I’ve posted the videos on my YouTube Channel.  Check it out it’s free.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners  -  Tip of the Day

Hope the New Year has started out on  a good note.  Thought I’d let you know of a great WordPress plug in I found called reposter.  It takes posts from your blog or web site and re-posts them on a schedule of your choosing.

For example I had 30 or 40 postings from my first blog that I imported to my new blog.  They were articles and tips that had run once but had been archived and never used again.

This plug in allows you to pull them from your archive or category and schedule them in for reposting unassisted.

It’s a great way to keep content flowing without the need to actively be there to do it. This comes in real handy if you are going flat out and are short on time to post fresh content everyday.

It’s called Reposter and it’s free compliments of Kathy Burns-Millyard at Reposter Plug In

Enjoy.

Claude Pelanne

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Image by TaopaiC via Flickr

Organizer Tip

Having trouble keeping track of your affiliate links along with all the other important information? Set up a spreadsheet or try out Affiliate Organizer to keep track of all your affiliate business information. It will make things easier and prevent any slowdowns in your business growth.

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Need a logo?

Ctrl-A Select all

Ctrl-B BOLD

Ctrl-C COPY

Ctrl-D BOOKMARK

Ctrl-E CENTER

Ctrl-F FIND

Ctrl-G GO TO

Ctrl-H REPLACE

Ctrl-I ITALICIZE

Ctrl-J FULL JUSTIFY

Ctrl-K HYPERLINK

Ctrl-M INCREASE INDENT

Ctrl-N NEW DOCUMENT

Ctrl-O OPEN DOCUMENT

Ctrl-P PRINT

Ctrl-R RIGHT JUSTIFY

Ctrl-S SAVE

Ctrl-T TAB

Ctrl-U UNDERLINE

Ctrl-V PASTE

Ctrl-W CLOSE DOCUMENT

Ctrl-X CUT

Ctrl-Y REDO/REPEAT LAST ACTION

Ctrl-Z UNDO

Tags: affiliatemarketing, affiliate marketing for beginners, online affiliate,

To find independent merchants for a product you want to sell add the + sign in front of your Google search term. That will bring up sites in the search list pertaining to that specific term. For example to search for independent merchants for remote control airplane you would type +remote+control+airplane into the Google search box.

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Image via CrunchBase

One of the hardest parts of getting started in affiliate marketing is deciding what to pick as a niche or product. Don’t let this slow you down. You don’t need to feel a passion or dire need to excel. What you need is the desire to find something you can build interest in. Everyone has that ability to find a point of interest and build on it. So go to Amazon, pick through the magazine or book section and choose whatever strikes your fancy. That’s all you need to start.

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Here is a list of 8 Great Resources that I use to find out what people are searching for online today. In the spirit of sharing and giving back I offer you the following:

1. Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

2. Yahoo! Buzz Index
http://buzz.yahoo.com/

3. Lycos 50
http://50.lycos.com/

4. AOL Search <<Hot Searches>>
http://hotsearches.aol.com/

5. Ask.com Top Searches

http://about.ask.com/en/docs/iq/iq.shtml

6. Amazon.com Hot New Releases
http://www.amazon.com/gp/new-releases

7. eBay What’s Hot page

http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/whatshot.html

*** Make sure you click on eBay Pulse and eBay Pop

8. Google News – Most Popular

http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=po

BONUS:

Also take a look at the most popular sections of digg.com, netscape.com, reddit.com, and del.icio.us.

Enjoy!

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Market Reasearch Resources

www.commscore.com

www.forrester.com

www.jupiterresearch.com

www.online-publishers.org

www.clickz.com

http://prweb.com

http://pages.ebay.com/marketplace_research

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Look for products and services at affiliate network sites, affiliate directories and in house merchant sites. Make sure your Web site is functional and running because merchants are looking for pros.

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Don’t overdo postings to social sites. Their like delicate flowers to be treated with care. Linking  to yourself is spam…Google doesn’t like that at all.

Tags: affiliatemarketing for beginners, internet marketing program, article marketing

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Keep your data and information organized by using a spreadsheet like Excel, Neoprint (for the Mac, it’s free) or Opensource (free for PC users). Use a system that makes sense to you. If you are not familiar with excel, Neoprint or Openoffice, you can find ebooks online to teach you how to use them.

Market Research and Planning Online can be time consuming and tedious.The payoff is that you will offer what the visitors to your site are looking for. This will mean great conversion rates and great income.

To help you with your research you can use a variety of tools.  A place to start are the Google tools, Google trends, Google Insights and many of the options tools available in the organic search window.

So give it a try.  Experiment with them and see what works for you.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous.

Tags: affiliatemarketing for beginners, internet marketing program, market research

Before you approach a high end merchant to sell his/her product for your affiliate marketing program, make sure your Web site or landing page is ready and fully tested. The top merchants will check to see if you are up to professional standards.

Tags: affiliatemarketing, affiliate programs, internet marketing program, affiliate marketing programs

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Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

When I first started my business, I attended a class at the Small Business Administration on “Starting a Business”. The instructor, a professor from a nearby business school, came into the room, introduced himself, and then told us we would begin with a little exercise.

He asked the first two rows of the class to remain seated. He then asked for the remainder of the class to stand up. That was about two thirds of the people in attendance.

He then went to tell us that those standing represented the number of businesses that would fail in their first year.

With that sobering point well illustrated, he went on to discuss the importance of developing a business plan. Get all the information you can possibly think of and put it all on paper. The most important being your market research.

As the saying goes a failure to plan is a plan for failure.

So before you go to all that trouble of designing and loading up your Web site. Do your keyword research, set up a test blog, and see if there is any interest. You will be glad you did.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

This is a great tool for building backlinks to your blog or web site.

Backlink Agent.com