Now, each year, millions of people make their living by applying this concept called affiliate marketing. Think of it as the modern version of a finder’s fee, where people who introduce a new client to a business are compensated. But in this case, online merchants work out a deal with publishers of independent websites to promote their product and in return, the publisher gets paid for each person that goes to the merchant site and makes a purchase or fills out a form. It’s been touted as “a low-risk, high-reward environment for both parties” and represents the the best online home business opportunity for most people.

In Affiliate Millions, Anthony Borelli and Greg Holden introduce readers to this concept and show them how to join an affiliate network and make it work for them.

Merchants like affiliate marketing because they don’t incur an expense unless results are realized. This model is called pay for performance, and business like Amazon.com have succeeded because of it.

Affiliate marketers like what they are doing also because, it’s a way to earn lots of money and they don’t even need a product. All they need to do is find a product that they like to promote, get some promotional links, and start getting traffic to affiliate links.

MyNetMarketingland.com says “nothing is easier than starting affiliate marketing,” and that it can be done in less than five minutes. You just need the following ingredients:

• Determination, Motivation and 2 Hours a day.
• Website (or Blog) : Free, to less than $300
• Domain Name : Less than $10 / year
• Web Hosting : Less than $10 / month
• Autoresponders : Free, to less than $20/month

If you decide affiliate marketing is something you would like to do, start by choosing a topic you know about. It makes it easier for you to build a site and draw people in if it’s a subject you know about and are interested in. Think of how challenging it would be if you tried to sell something you know nothing about.

Use multiple merchants in the same niche. Use your knowledge to promote three to four merchants on the same site and it gives your visitors a variety of destinations to choose from.

Consider an affiliate network, but remember there is no best network. Just make sure that whatever network you join, it has the merchants you want to work with. You may also want to try a merchant from all the main networks, see what works for you, and then focus your time accordingly.

In an overcrowded market, small niche products, although they don’t get a lot of traffic, might still be a good option because they are less crowded and it’s easier to make a quick sale.

Finally, don’t make the mistake of thinking that this will be easy work. Not only are you going to have to constantly update your site, you will need to keep educating yourself, doing market research, reading stats , and the pay-offs aren’t instant. It can take a few months before you’re even making enough to cover your costs. Many affiliate marketers struggle to get their first commissions, and a majority give up before making any sales.

This is a field that takes perseverance and dedication. Hold onto those two qualities and you will succeed.

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Yahoo! Publisher Network is an advertising program by Yahoo! where website publishers allow Yahoo! to place ads on their sites. Each time these ads are clicked on by visitors, the web publishers earn a share of the revenue that Yahoo! makes from charging that particular advertiser.

Basically it sets up your site to operate like a magazine or newspaper would. You have content/articles mixed in with ads.  Only instead of an advertising department generating the ads for you, Yahoo! provides the ads and share part of the profits with you. The ads would also correlate with the specific keywords or subject matter of the site.

A lot of web publishers use it because it’s free and easy to join. All you have to do is paste a code into your pages, and as mentioned earlier, you don’t have to find the advertisers, so you are free to concentrate on providing the content. It’s suitable for beginners or marketing veterans, and it provides simple easy to understand stats.

However, the challenge for the web publisher will be getting people to the site, which goes back to using the right keywords, finding a niche market and improving your search engine optimization, web building, web linking and copywriting skills. Yahoo! Publisher Network just makes it easy to make money once you start attracting readers.

For these reasons, first concentrate on your website’s content and design. Sites accepted into the Yahoo! program are usually easily navigable, have an adequate quantity of text based content. It suggested that you have your website up for a few months before signing. In that time work on building up your web traffic and readership, which takes patience and hard work.

Ways to attract more traffic include:

• Linking to other sites and blogs. Usually these sites will link back to you, hence drawing more traffic your way. More traffic means a monetizing website, thanks to Yahoo!.
• Optimizing your site for search engines.  Making it so search engines put your website in the first two pages of results is a surefire way to get more visitors to your website, and that’s more people who would click on those Yahoo! ads.
• Add a signature with your website to your outgoing email. It’s a simple and effective marketing tool.
• Start a newsletter; put an option on your website where readers can subscribe to the newsletter.  The good thing with newsletters is that they are frequently forwarded from one person to another, drawing more traffic to your site.

When you finally have a good number of people visiting your webpage and you are ready to participate in Yahoo! Publisher Network, take a moment to read their policy. There some obvious stuff such as forbidding sites containing profanity, pornographic, illicit drug use and other vices, but it also warns against invalid clicks, such as clicking on your ads, using robots or automated clicker.  These are reasons to get banned from the program.

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