MLM Success Strategy – What is Affiliate Marketing?
One MLM success strategy with your network marketing and internet home based business comes from funding yourself via outside means.
Since the internet exploded onto the scene a decade or so ago, advertisers were exceptionally quick to realize the potential in exploding their products and services. One major way they have added to their profits is by offering incentives to people out there to sell their products. This is called Affiliate Marketing. To the novice, Affiliate Marketing, simply put, is a way of making a little money (a commission) for giving a company the opportunity to promote its product or service on your website.
It happens like this. ABC company has a product or service they want to market and sell. In exchange for placing an advertisement on your website (that they create), they will pay you a commission (anywhere from 10% upwards to 75%!) if someone clicks on that advertisement and buys their product or service. That’s it. For the time it takes to copy and paste some simple code into your blog or website, you could potentially reap hundreds, if not thousands of dollars from your affiliate company.
Many companies out there allow you to join their affiliate program with no questions asked. All you do is click a button to sign up as an affiliate and in less than a second you become approved. Other companies want to qualify your website or blog first and will get back to you with approval if they feel your site is appropriate for them to partner with. Still other companies will do further checks to find out how much traffic your site generates. And therein lies the key! For obvious reasons, the more people that visit your site, the more opportunity there is for someone to click on the advertisement you’ve posted and the more opportunity there is to make money. Not just for yourself, but for the ad company themselves.
How do you get started with Affiliate Marketing? One major resource is a website called, Commission Junction. There are other affiliate websites out there such as Linkshare.com, Pepperjam.com, AffiliateBOT.com… CJ.com, is one service I use and am comfortable with so we’ll use them as our demo company. CJ.com, as with the other companies, host-sponsor thousands of companies and corporations that want to do business with you! What’s great is it’s typically very easy to get set up with your affiliate (in this case, CJ.com). When you go to their website, click on the “Publishers” menu link. From the drop down menu, click “Application”. Begin filling out the required information and read and confirm the service agreement specifics they ask for. After you’re approved, you need to confirm the account by going to your email and retrieving the password they send you.
Once you’ve logged into CJ.com, go to the Account tab and check over your admin settings. You’ll also need to fill in some tax information, too. If you don’t have a company name of your own, simply use your personal name in some of those required boxes. No fake info here! This is the IRS you’re dealing with now… After you’ve set this up, go the menu tab called, “Get Links”. Here, you’ll see the hundreds of advertising categories to choose from and within, you’ll find the thousands of companies that you can choose from to work with. If there’s a particular company (“Advertisers”) you want to work with, put the company’s name in the search bar and see if it comes up. If there’s an industry you want to work with and don’t care which company you select, choose one of the “Advertiser Categories” and see all the different companies you can select.
So let’s do an example! You’ve probably seen on my blog, http://www.aworkingmlmblog.com, that I sponsor Host Gator. I like this company for many reasons; I like their customer service, I like their credibility and I like the fact they are located where I grew up, Houston, Texas. So, from the “Get Links” menu tab, we see a search bar that says, “Advertisers”. Type in, “Host Gator” into the search bar and click, “Find”. Host Gator now comes up for you. Underneath the small Host Gator graphic, you’ll see some highlighted text there called, “View Links”. Click this link. As you now see, all the different sized graphic and text affiliate links are now available to you to choose from. You’ll also see the colomns, “3 Month EPC” and “7 Day EPC”. These are the monetary values this particular ad has generated over the past 3 months and 7 days.
Once you’ve selected which affiliate link (ad) you’d like to use, simply click on it. For our example, we’ll choose the first Host Gator affiliate link; the 468×60 Full Banner ad:
Once clicking on this link, a new box opens on your screen with some detailed information regarding this link. At the bottom of the box, click “Join Program”. After this, since Host Gator is a company that accepts everyone, you now see a congratulatory statement that says you are now an affiliate for Host Gator. “Close” this box and you’re now taken directly to the html screen. Simply click “Get HTML” at the bottom of the box. Another box now opens for you and you’ll see the appropriate affiliate code that has been generated for you. Click “Highlight Code”, and now copy this code. Close the box, go to your website or blog and insert the html code into the appropriate area on your site. Refresh your web or blog page to make sure it appeared and voila! That’s it! You’re done! How simple can that be?
IMPORTANT NOTE: Do NOT, repeat, do NOT click on your banner advertisement or link after you’ve inserted it. In your agreement with CJ.com and the advertiser, you specify you will not personally click these advertisements yourself, OR get your friends to do it to drive up the number of clicks. These advertisers have ways of checking up on you and they’re able to tell if you personally have been tampering with your new affiliate button. If they catch you, they’ll ban you – “they” meaning CJ.com. Don’t do it. It’s not worth sacrificing so much money out there that is to be made so easily.
Be sure to sign out of CJ.com when you’re finished locating and adding advertisers to your sites. One final note, be aware of how your affiliate advertising appears on your website. Personally, I get turned off when someone’s site is clogged with ads flashing at me from all different angles or when I can’t find what I’m looking for because there are too many. Use discretion. By incorporating affiliate marketing into your website so it neatly blends in with what your site is all about, your guest will be more apt to find you a trustworthy source and will then, in turn, trust your affiliate link as well. Hopefully, the next thing you know, CJ.com will be making a deposit into your bank account!
Will Your Blog be Deleted?
You’ve built up a successful MLM network marketing and home based business for yourself, but all the hard work you’ve put into your blog is now…gone?!
A slightly disturbing fact came up the other day… Something I was totally unaware of that could have some potential serious ramifications! The question came up, “Do you own your blog?” Re-phrased, do you “host” your own blog, or, as most of us do, are you simply “using” a blog from a blog website? Recently, I discovered I was in the latter group and to my horror, I found out that at any time, on any day, if the owners of my blog deemed that for any reason, whatsoever, my content was inappropriate, ZAP! My blog could disappear in the click of a mouse.
It’s absolutely true! If you’re not personally hosting your own blog, you stand the chance (albeit a very minute chance - but a chance just the same) at having your blog deleted. All of your hard work, all of your time invested, all of your followers (your leads!) and their comments, gone. Years and years of work and your number one Google ranking, gone. Did someone at the blog company not like you anymore? Did someone complain? You’ll never know and there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it. For me, the fact was too much to fathom and the idea that all of my articles and all the help I’ve given to my fellow MLM’ers could disappear was simply inconceivable.
Fortunately, the solution to avoid this potential disaster is fairly simple. Host Gator and Go Daddy offer blog hosting. I was disappointed to hear that the ISP I’ve used for years (1and1.com) does not WordPress blog host and if there are other ISPs out there that do host, my apologies, I just don’t know who you are at the time of this writing. The only catch for hosting your own blog is; just as you would pay for hosting a domain name of your own, you also have to pay for your blog hosting on these ISPs. However, perhaps your peace of mind is worth about $60 a year… Host Gator and Go Daddy both offer Fantastico; an easy to use auto-installer for WordPress style blogs.
What’s key about this, is WordPress style blogs offer you a myriad of amazing plugin features that strangely enough, don’t show up via their own website. That is, when you sign up at the WordPress.com website for one of their .com blogs, you are not allowed to add any plugin features to your blog. But, when you host your own blog using a WordPress style blog, you can add as many as you would like. Interesting…
It’s these plugin features that truly make the monthly/yearly expense worthwhile. A few plugins I found out about include auto-responding, delayed thank you note style auto-responding, multi-site plugins, Twitter updater, Digg This, social networking plugins, the list goes on and on.
Obviously, the power of blogging is just that, powerful. Creating a blog following is just as important as having a large social network following in terms of your business and the larger your crowd, the more attention it receives from those who have advertising dollars and those who want to open their wallets. The affiliate link possibilities are endless, the business exposure is grand (and FREE!) and most importantly, your peace of mind remains intact.
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