Many times, when you think about making money online, the phrase Affiliate Marketing crosses your mind, may be because we associate the word marketing with money. Is not a secret that you can make hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month with affiliate marketing but that is not too easy as many people say on Internet.

Myth #1 – It’s easy to make money

So if I’m telling you that is not too easy, you may be wondered why. Many people lie to take advantage of, that’s a fact! Let’s be honest, when someone says that it is easy to make money with X affiliate network and it shows you checks of thousands of dollars, is because it wants you to register on that network under its name, this way it could get commissions for what you make.

Of course, it is easy to make money when you have an army of referrals behind you.

Myth #2 – Low capital required

Remember that everything has a cost, if you want to make thousands of dollars you will have to spend thousand of dollars. Is fairly impossible to make thousands by investing lower amounts, remember that affiliate marketing is mainly based on traffic, so if you want to drive many people to your website you need to invest on PPC campaigns such as Google Adwords.

In addition of that, if you are promoting a campaign with 3% of conversion rate it means that 3 of each 100 visitors will (or could) buy the product. Of course that a good web design helps but that’s basically what it means.

You need to make your plans to compensate the invested (and wasted) capital for driving the other 97 persons to your website.

Myth #3 – You will get money fast

This is the most false myth ever. Before you start making real money and not a few bucks, you will need to try many different things in order to optimize your promotion. You will need to be changing the theme of your landing page, changing its keywords, its title and redistributing the things on your website. After then, you will find what is converting for you! So how much you will need to wait until the first check? That’s up to you, it depends of your work.

Myth #4 – Work just 2 hours a day

Huh? another false myth. Affiliate marketing is mostly carried out by entrepreneurs, people who like to experiment and look for new ways to meet their goals. It is completely false to say that working 2 hours per day you could get thousands of dollars. Well, may be after many years when you have all your campaigns already optimized, you could stop working if you want, but that’s not true. Internet changes and people too, so you need to be constantly changing your promotion and keywords too!

Setting up a website with marketing purposes could take you many time, you will fall asleep after midnight trying to do your best, checking you traffic statistics and optimizing what you have done.

My Personal Recommendations

In order to make your affiliate’s life easier and avoid to be consumed by it, I suggest you to put in practice the following things:

• Make backup plans: Is something is not working for me, I try to put in practice another concept in order to improve the performance of my work. Always is good to have backup plans, when something is going wrong that kind of special plans could safe you! And I’m not telling you this just for affiliate marketing, you should apply this for everything in your life.
• Set goals: May be the most important thing. If you don’t know your goals you will be doing things without sense.
• Set a schedule: Take a calendar and fix your hours of work, this way you could take off the shackles and do another activities beside working on your promotions.
• Be patient: Remember that money won’t flow through your account immediately, and it will take days, weeks or may be months to see real money in your accounts.

In my eBook The Affiliate’s Start Guide I talk about all the basics things to create a website and make money with it, so I invite you to sign up for my newsletter and get your copy for free now!

Hello bloggers, some weeks ago I signed up to Motive Interactive Advent but I didn’t use it until now because they were upgrading their platform. My affiliate manager recommended me to wait because the new changes would be awesome, improving the platform and making it much better.

In spite of his recommendation, I entered to my publisher panel in order to meet the platform and to check the available campagins. Basically, I entered just to take a look around, and I have to admit that I found a really slow platform.

The platform was easy to use but its slowness was terrible. I have for you a screenshot of the old interface:

What is new on Advent 2.0?

Loading times have been reduced! The platform is based on AJAX, which means everything load on the same page. Before continuing, let’s see a screenshot of it:

They have optimized the platform, reordering the left sidebars to make easier for the publisher to navigate and explore the campagins. If you see the first screenshot you will see a picture of my manager (with his contact information) in the second leftbar. In the new theme they have moved the picture to the top-right and in the second leftbar you can see an Offer Spotlight.

The Campaigns

You can explore the different campaigns by offer types, distribution types, categories and payouts. I have tested this to find some specific offers and it works very fine, it’s very accurate.

As other affiliate networks, Motive covers several categories which you can work with in order to make money. I saw some well-known campaigns there which you can see in other networks, but also I saw another ones which looks great.

Something I really liked about Motive is that you can preview any campaign in order to know how will it looks when the people click the banner. In other networks I couldn’t do this with the campaigns because most of them are restricted to US. So if you are not from US (as my case) it doesn’t matter, you could check the campaign and see how it looks!.

Other thing I liked which is related with the campaigns is the navigation. It is very user-friendly and if you click on one of them, a detailed description of the offer will roll-over, as you can see in the following screenshot:

The Statistics

Sometimes we don’t like to see statistics for some reasons, either they could be difficult to understand or may be they could NOT be friendly or just because they show something that we were not expecting . Whichever the case, it won’t apply this time. The statistics provided by Motive are very detailed and friendly, giving you information about the impressions, clicks, ECPM, ECPC, revenew and the most important, coversion rates and payouts .

Affiliate Commission Rewards Program

With the affiliate commission rewards program you will get extra commission rewards a month, whose payout starts at 1% then increases to 2% the higher the tier. Here’s the current structure:

• $1,000 – $10
• $2,500 – $25
• $5,000 – $50
• $10,000 – $100
• $15,000 – $150
• $20,000 – $200
• $25,000 – $250
• $30,000 – $300
• $50,000 – $500
• $100,000 – $1,250
• $150,000 – $2,000
• $200,000 – $3,000
• $500,000 – $10,000
• $1,000,000 – $20,000
• $1,250,000 – $25,000

The Highest Affiliate Referral Commission

The Motive Network offers 5.5% of lifetimes referral earnings for those you refer, making them the network with the highest referral commission!. But the good things have a catch too: ‘The referred publisher must continue to generate commissions without a lapse of twelve (12) calendar months in order for the referrer to continue receiving the 5.5% commission from that publisher each month‘, which means that you will only get extra commissions for active affiliates.

Conclusion

Motive Interactive Advent have improved the platform to make it more comfortable and easy to use. Now it is really easy to use and loading times are really short, it has everything preloaded and ready to display whatever you click.

The feature of SIDs and AIDs tracking are really important for every publisher, as well as the advanced tracking and reporting!

I encourage you to try Motive Interactive Advent and check out what it has for us.

Many people think that creating a website and placing ads on it is an easy way to make money online. The only thing they are right with is that certainly, displaying advertising on your website or blog is a good way to make money online, but it’s deeper than they think.

Placing banner ads is like an art, depending of your website you will have more success in certain positions than in others, so you need to try and see what works for you. For our luck, the act of displaying advertising is not a new thing and there are some strategies which you can follow in order to have a start mark.

Before start displaying ads in your website you need to ask yourself some questions:

• What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
• What do they do when viewing a particular page?
• Where is their attention likely to be focused?
• How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users’ way?
• How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?

Remember that is very important make the visitors feel comfortable in your site. If you place banners everywhere, they will not find content to read and they will automatically leave. So where should you place your ads? Let’s analyze the following heat map:

 

In this heat map you can see that some locations tend to be more efficient than others. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance), which normally are those  placed bellow the fold – banners, i.e. when you need to scroll down to see the banners.

A banner near from rich content tends to be clicked because the reader has its eyes focused in that area. Also those banners which are in the bottom of the content are clicked for the same reason. At the end of the content many websites have bookmark buttons, which make that area a good point to display a horizontal banner.

Talking  about the sidebars, you can see that people tend to watch the left sidebar more than the right one. The reason of this is simple, the most of the languages are read from left to right and unconsciously, the eyes catch better the banners of the left more than the banners of the right.

Remember that is really important to try different positions and banner sizes in order to know what works for your website. Depending of the structure and layout this heat map may not be applicable. In the case of blogs, in almost all of them you can see a sidebar on the right, but in absence of a left bar and due to the blog’s nature the people tend to watch the right sidebar.

So be creative and remember to not disturb your visitors with plenty of banners.

It is almost finished! Yes, this series that talks about building an online business using blogs is almost done. This is the last article which talks about something really important and something skipped in the previews lessons, making money! If you are building “a business” you should want to see money flowing through it, so let’s talk about some useful ways to earn profits from your blog.

5. Make Money

First of all, remember when I said in the preview lessons that you can promote your own products or services on the blog, well it’s time to do it! You can build banners in order to let your visitors know about what can they find in your blog.

Depending of your product or service, you can offer some basic features for free and then charge for some “premium features” which the users can get a better experience of your service. This is usually a good way to get money, once the users are familiarized with your product they will pay to get a complete version of it (if they need those features).

Besides by selling your product or service, you can also get money directly from your blog by using other services like the following ones:

• Google Adsense: This is may be the most common way to earn money on Internet. With Adsense you can display relevant ads on your website or blog and get paid for each click the people make on that links. The minimum payout is $100.
• Bidvertiser: This service is very similar than Adsense, you can display banners which you can personalize to make them look similar than your blog’s theme. The advantage of using this program is its minimum payout of $10.
• SponsoredReviews: With this service you can earn money by writing reviews about services or products on your blog. This is a perfect way to make money just by writing an article of a product or service related with yours.
• Text-Link-Ads: This is an excellent way to make money passively. With TLA you can earn money by selling text links on your blog’s articles. It works completely automatized and you don’t need to contact anyone to sell links. You only need to install a plugin on your blog and when someone buy a link on your blog it will be displayed automatically.
• Market Leverage, NeverBlueAds and PepperJam: These three services are affiliate networks which you can find many products and services that you can promote on your blog. Excellent way to get checks with good amounts.

There are many other ways to make money with your blog, for example you can sell banners and keep 100% of your earnings with the awesome OIOPublisher plugin for wordpress. There should be many undiscovered ways to make money and it’s up to you to discover them.

The most common Internet business is the affiliate marketing. Many entrepreneur and bloggers, use this Internet business to get an extra income. But many of them, don’t get a little income, by the contrary, they get huge commissions from these programs. Before to continue with this post, let’s read the meaning of affiliate marketing:

Affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Source: Wikipedia

In other words, it is to promote other company’s products and services on your website. When a sale is made, you get a commission. Some advertisers offer multi-tier programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-partners. Snowballing, this system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others’ existence, yet generate income for the higher level signup.

The affiliate programs can give you a great income. In fact, bloggers as John Chow, Zac Johnson or Darren Rowse, make thousand dollars a month with them, but the question is How they have that success? They are normal people like you and me, how can you get high incomes like them?

They make thousand dollars with these programs for a reason, their brand. Think about it, they are elite-bloggers, the top bloggers on their niche. When a new affiliate program is launched, they are the firsts testing it. So, they make a post reviewing the service, inviting to the people to join to the program with their referral link. A week later, they have hundred dollars just with all the people who joined to the program with their links.

It is very easy for them, because they don’t need to do anything. In addition of the post, they just place some banners in their blogs, as everybody does. A month later, their accounts are full of money cause by all these referred people. Easy isn’t it? The problem for the regular bloggers, is to catch all these people to join in the program under your name, with your referral link. Being a regular blogger, you will catch few people, I’m talking about 10~30 persons. As a elite-blogger, you will get hundred of people referred.

The difference between you and them, is the brand, that’s all! To get their popularity level, you need to be persistent, participate as much as you can in the social media networks and make friends as much as you can. I know that I have told you this before, but this is the key to be successful with your blog. Establishing your presence on the web will give you the credibility that you are looking for, attracting more and more people to your blog and signing up to these affiliate programs with your referral link.

I have to admit that I really don’t know the exactly key to be successful in these programs. I have referred many people to Pepperjam and Chitika for example, but I don’t have made thousand dollars as other does. That’s why I ended the title of this post with a question mark. If you think that I missed something or you consider that there’s another important factor besides the brand, please comment your idea here to share these information with me and all my visitors .