CashBack Affiliates

Welcome!

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:34:05 +0000

If you’re new to the world of affiliate marketing or even if you’re experienced, this site provides valuable information from industry experts that will teach you everything from the basics to advanced marketing techniques that will allow you to truly excel at making a living on the internet. Plus, you can read expert reviews of ad networks. All for free.

Everyone knows that in your online business, the more people who visit your site and participate in your service or purchase your product, the more successful your online business will become. In particular, many service-based online businesses rely heavily on ad revenue as the lion’s share of their income. But where do these ads come from, and how do you make money through them? We’re here to provide the answers to these questions and much, much more. After reading our expert reviews, you can decide which network is the best fit for you.

As an added bonus, we offer cash back services when you sign up to many affiliate ad networks. You can earn up to 50% back of the referral fee each month! Read more information about how to sign up here.

So begin your education and start earning money today!

Marketing: A Shift Towards Creative Thought

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 03:41:36 +0000

In the year AD 1512, when Michelangelo was applying the final brush strokes to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, one can only imagine his satisfaction upon completing a painting that remains one of the most famous works of art in human recollection. Massive in scale, this monumental endeavor is a testament to Michelangelo’s skill—though not necessarily his creativity. Art, which most of us would label as one of the most creative fields of study, was not always so.

Before art exploded to encompass the “everything can be art” mantra commonly heard today, the rules governing painting were just as strict as those concerning carpentry. Paintings had to look a certain way, and few artists strayed far from the religious ideologies underlying the practice. Skill and ability were key to success, while creativity only took place within the confines of a limiting world.

Since 1512 and long before, the western world has been steadily eliminating the boundaries that confined art. Now, art can be anything. Bleeding edge technologies (many of which are enriched and surrounded by the internet), are applied in new and increasingly interactive ways, leading to never before seen works. This level of creativity, which springs forth from the minds of free thinkers unrestrained by common know-how, has bled over into industries tangentially located to the art world—namely the advertising industry.

Before the internet, the ad industry was somewhat stagnant. We had print, television, and radio as our big three ad mediums. Now, the internet has opened up fresh avenues of thought, quickly becoming the new force of growth in the ad industry. What type of mind does it take to make a great work of modern art? I’d argue that the less constrained the mind is by traditional thinking (while still maintaining a deep knowledge base in the art world), the more likely the mind will bring forth something new and compelling. While the flowering of creative thought brought on by the free-thinkers is only just starting to be applied towards internet marketing efforts, there are already some promising efforts.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be delving into several innovative advertising campaigns and methods that were made possible by the internet. We’ll take a look at why they were successful (or not), and how you can use them to your advantage.

If you have any stories of successful ad campaigns you’ve run or even noticed recently, send them to contact@cashbackaffiliates.com, and we’ll post the best ones.

Freeing Yourself: The Internet as a Means Towards an End

admin — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 20:37:12 +0000

Every few years, a prominent thinker or optimistic politician will call for an overhaul of the education system—not an improvement of the current system but a complete re-imagining of the way we teach our children. After all, the basic principles of teaching have remained surprisingly stagnant in a world accelerated by technology. Our children go to school, they learn what society has deemed important, and many of them spend their lives working for a diluted purpose. Though students are told to focus on themselves, grades, by their very nature, are comparative scores that only hold meaning when ranked against other students. Many argue that this system of judgment homogenizes students and prepares them for working towards an external purpose.

After moving into the working world and becoming integrated into a company, you become a small cog in what can sometimes be a very large wheel. You perform a specific task, becoming highly specialized with a small range of skills. Your human potential is funneled towards the goals of a much larger organism. What, then, are your possible motivations for adopting this lifestyle?

First, you need a source of reliable income to live comfortably in the vast majority of the world. A company is safe. The bigger the company, the less likely it will suddenly fail—though the bigger the company, the worse the result when it does fail (think Lehman Brothers). Second, you actually enjoy the type of work the company performs, or this genre of work is simply not possible to perform by yourself. Third, you don’t really think too much, and joining a large company is the path of least resistance. There’s lots of other reasons, but I think these are the big three.

It’s inevitable for a company to become more structured as it grows. A company has certain needs, and it wants to fulfill these needs as efficiently as possible. Visionary individuals tend to play less of a role in the direction of a company as it chugs along towards massiveness. It’s hard for one person to make any sort of overwhelming impact because the thousands of other employees usually cancel out any movement by an individual employee. And yet, throughout history it has often been individuals who stand out as achievers.

Edison, Darwin, Bell, and countless other individuals were able to remove themselves from the system (or the way in which they were educated) enough to think outside of the box. They ignored many of society’s preconceptions of the way things work and were able to pursue their personal thoughts and ideas. The question then becomes: how do you place yourself in a position from which you might meet your personal goals or even have a greater impact on the constantly changing (yet hard to define) state of human progress.

If you’re a reasonably intelligent individual, the Internet opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. You can quickly earn money, you can educate yourself for free, and you can focus on your individual life goals. If the education system is geared towards creating a homogenized batter, you need to retrain your thought process to separate yourself from the mixture and become your own separate ingredient. For many people, it’s hard to be passionate about a profession when your individual will is quelled under the framework of a larger company/system. My point is straightforward: make money via the internet (CashBackAffiliates.com is just one way to do this) so you can discover and then focus on your individual passion.

Making Money Online: The Generation Gap

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 03:04:00 +0000

I’m an internet marketer, but I don’t tell my family. The older the relative, the less likely I am to discuss my career. You see, I don’t think they’d quite understand. If I told them I swing an axe to chop lumber and make $100 per day, or heal grievous wounds for $1000 per day, I’m fairly certain we’d be on the same page. Those professions—lumberjack and doctor—have been around for hundreds of years, so they’ve become well established as things to do in life. “Internet marketer” not only sounds vague, but also it is a completely opaque field to most people. When I mention my profession to the uninitiated, all I get is a blank stare, because there’s no obvious association with a widely understood means of support. Many older folks would consider it a weird profession. And I can’t entirely blame them.

Perhaps the lack of a physical product is what’s so troublesome. Money is being constantly pushed around, but for the most part, nothing physical is produced. You’d think that people would be accustomed to this notion—after all, Wall Street has been pushing money around for decades—but there’s still something intrinsically new and uncomfortable about the absence of physical product. One industry after another struggles with how the lack CD, VHS, DVD, or printed book affects the value of the material. What’s the value of a song download? How about an ebook? These are questions most people have never even considered.

Generating (a lot of) money online calls for some different skills and ways of approaching moneymaking than are widely understood. You need a solid understanding of both traditional human desires along with a grasp of the ways in which these desires have been modified and twisted by our online existence. First and foremost, we operate extremely quickly online. Click, click, click. If a web page doesn’t load in three seconds, 90% of us will just move on. If a page is not immediately captivating, tab closed. We’re fickle, and we love it. In order to capture the attention of a web user long enough to make a sale or generate a click, we need to submerge ourselves in the motivations of a specific group of web users. And that’s only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

When you reveal that you make your living online, it sometimes becomes an uncomfortable admission. What skill set do you need, and how can your mother brag about her son’s accomplishments to her friends when she herself doesn’t even understand them? Make no mistake: the internet is still newborn. It’s just taking its first tentative steps into our lives, and puberty is years and years away. As with any new profession, that of internet marketer will take a while to seep into our collective mind. I think it’ll be different in ten years when making a living online will be easy to understand, but by that time, it’ll likely be far less exciting.

Using Facebook to Drive Traffic

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:56:48 +0000

Social networking sites — such as MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook — seem to be the fastest growing entities on the Internet these days. Whether you’re a fan of them or not, they will continue to grow for the foreseeable future, and as all marketers know, we must go where there are lots of people. Of all the social networking sites, Facebook is probably the most effective way to drive traffic to your site. With personal profiles, the ability to search by city and school, applications, and Facebook groups, there is no shortage of marketing opportunities. In fact, a large number of marketers have grown very rich just by using this platform alone. If you’re not already using it to gain traffic, it’s time to get started on Facebook.

How to Use Facebook to Drive Traffic to Your Website Today:

• Sign up with Facebook – If you haven’t done that yet, go to Facebook.com and sign up to become a member. Signing up with as a girl’s profile and using a major city will help you gain friends like wildfire. Guys will want to try to hookup with hot chicks in their city and girls might “find a new BFF” which means you’ll have no trouble gaining friends.]

• Fill out all your profile information – if you’re looking to make an impact, you need to seem like someone people would want to know. Try to think of what people are into and hot shows/topics and put that into your profile. If you can’t think of anything to say, just try to seem like you’re a real person (and a chick)… “I don’t know what to put here, I just know what I like when I see/read/hear it and like to have a good time” or “I like hanging out with friends, going to the mall, etc.”

• Add as many friends as you can so more and more people will see what you’re posting. Post to walls related to the city “you’re from”(the one you used in your profile), popular TV shows, breaking news stories, etc. If your post is interesting and/or provides helpful information people will view your profile and give you friend requests much more frequently.

• Join Groups – Now ask yourself, what’s your niche? Or who are you trying to target with your website? Answers to these questions will tell you which groups to join. To some extent, the effectiveness of using Facebook to drive traffic to your website actually depends on how many groups you’re a member of. Make useful posts in the group from time to time to make yourself known to to your friends and groupies(and get more people seeing your links and checking your profile for more links).

Updating your personal wall and posting on new topics in your groups will help you really drive traffic from Facebook. Keeping your friends list as keyword targeted as you can it will help drive conversion rates up and give you better returns from fewer posts. If you avoid spamming your friends and instead make quality posts from time to time, you’ll soon see your website traffic skyrocket and profits soar!

Using Chat Rooms to Drive Traffic

admin — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:36:19 +0000

If you’re around my age, you’ll remember growing up with AOL chat rooms. After school, you’d jump on your computer, wait for your dial-up connection to catch up with your enthusiasm, and sign in to a topic-specific chat room. Well, chat rooms are still very much part of the internet, and–if you offer premium content–chat rooms are actually very good places to garner traffic.

Most sites that have free chat rooms (such as Yahoo, Wireclub.com, TalkCity.com, etc.) are sectioned off into certain areas depending upon interest: you’ll have a room for movie talk, TV talk, gossip, etc. It may be even more specific than that. The good thing is, these rooms are ripe for the picking when it comes to promoting your website, because the users are already “pre-targeted” – that is, they fit into your target market, depending on the room they’re in. You have a good chance of finding someone interested in watching Gossip Girl online if they’re in an “young adults girl talk” chat room that focuses on television. Therefore, a higher ratio of people who go to your site will actually fill out the surveys, and thus you’ll make more money on fewer visitors.

What do you actually say in the rooms? Well, the main point is not to seem like you’re spamming your link. You don’t need to necessarily participate in the discussions (this becomes difficult if you’re promoting 15 products in 15 different rooms at the same time), but come up with a few phrases that sound good but aren’t intrusive. If I wanted to promote the previous example of Gossip Girl, I might say “hey ladies, don’t want to barge in here or anything but they have the gossip girl shows over at gossipgirlonline.com if you miss it, just wanted to let you guys know.” This way it doesn’t come across “spammy” and you’re very unlikely to get banned/kicked from the room.

Many of the rooms have thousands of people who go through all day long, so if you’re able to find a reliable person (or program) to do the promoting of your links for you, you can get a very considerable amount of targeted traffic and make over $100/day easy using this method.

How to Find Writers

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:31:01 +0000

NOTE: We recommend (if you have the time and the talent) to do your own writing. You’ll cut costs this way and, more importantly, eliminate another variable in your business. The below article assumes that you’d like to hire writers.

Finding yourself quality writers seems like it shouldn’t be too hard, but, man, can it be a hassle! Having quality writers on your staff can turn an average campaign into a real money maker. Quality content not only brings users to your site, but also it entices users into seeing what other information you may have available. In this article, I’m going to give you some of my secrets for finding quality re-writers that will both help take your campaigns to the next level and keep you from wasting countless hours having to review and fix grammatical errors.

If you’ve never tried to hire writers before and have absolutely no idea where to look, a good place to get a feel for who’s available is getafreelancer.com and elance.com. Both of these sites have hundreds, if not thousands of people, just looking for an online gig. The problem is, as with anywhere, there’s a lot of people who have no business writing claiming otherwise. Weeding out the good from the bad isn’t necessarily hard, but it can be time-consuming.

Save yourself as much time as possible by being extremely explicit in your ad(s). Tell them how much you’re going to need written, how often, and the absolute maximum you’re willing to pay. If people can’t follow the simple guidelines you lay out (and many won’t) just ignore them and don’t waste your time. Even if you say you can only pay $2/rewrite people who won’t accept less than $5 will respond to you. Just keep moving.

After you receive a message back from someone saying they can do the job for such and such a price, submit your keyword or niche that you need the article from so you know that it’s actually them writing and not just some pre-prepped response from someone who’s English is terrible. You want to require a sample to be written on a specific topic and not just an article that they submit to you. Be very clear that the sample article will not be paid if quality is not up to par so you don’t wind up paying people to audition for you.

If you are using Getafreelancer.com it costs $5/job submission so make sure you have people contact you OUTSIDE of the program through a private email. If you don’t do this you’ll be paying for every writer you decide to hire instead of using the same $5 to hire multiple writers. ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING you get back from writers make sure to pass it through copyscape so that you’re not buying stolen articles which can cause you a headache later.

A great tip for paying people less per article is to search for article re-writers and not just flat out writers. This also helps you know that what you get back will be both with a faster turnaround time and also perfect for your niche. Go to an authority site in your niche and find the three most popular articles related to your keyword. These are the articles you want to give to your re-writers to have re-written. It doesn’t matter that the articles are scraped because they will be rewritten. Because they are such popular articles, you know they’ll help your site out.

Having a quality article written can cost from $4 up to $10. Having a great, already popular article rewritten will only cost you a few dollars ($2-$4) which is decent pay for re-writers. You can even pay people $1/rewrite and have amazing quality. Although it takes a little longer to find writers willing to write for $1, it pays off in the long run.

There’s one more source of writers. Craigslist in the US is a spammy mess with flags, PVA’s, and scammers racing to stay one step ahead of the small Craigslist staff. Craigslist in other countries, while still spam-ridden, has amazing hiring potential with people willing to work for FAR less than their U.S. counterparts.

There’s two places where the writers speak top-notch English and return amazing quality work for extremely low rates. When looking overseas for writers, focus your attention on the Philippines and Vietnam. Oftentimes you can find English teachers willing to supplement their wages with online writing. Even if you’re not dealing with a teacher, the person’s English is oftentimes great. At least, much better than you’ll find elsewhere. Add this to their lower cost of living and you have the perfect environment for cheap, quality writers.

Craigslist works great in cities like Manila (manila.craigslist.com.ph) and Craigslist Vietnam (Vietnam.craigslist.com). I know I said it earlier, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to run anything you have written by another person through CopyScape or plagiarism detect. You DO NOT want somebody claiming you stole their article later on because of a shady rewriter.

Once you find a potential writer, read through their article and make sure the grammar is understandable and punctuation is where it should be. If there’s one or two problems, just point them out to the writer so they don’t make the same mistake twice. But if the article is littered with problems, it’s not worth taking your time to try to train that writer.

One last great tip for your writers is to teach them the importance of SEO and keyword placement. Explain to them that you need your keywords used in the first and last sentence of your article and a few times throughout. Generally I try to aim for a keyword density of about 2-3.5%. DupeFreePro is a free program that will help you stay on track with this as it can tell you how many times your keywords were found, VERY convenient.

Welcome to All

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:22:22 +0000

The articles in “The Basics” section are intended to get you up to speed in the world of affiliate marketing. Each of the topics covered will be—or already has been—explored in much greater depth in the “Advanced” article section. (Note: if you’re already an expert, you’ll probably be at home reading our more advanced articles or skipping directly to our affiliate network reviews.)

If you’re a beginner, this set of articles can serve as the baseline of your knowledge. They contain information derived from actual experience in the world of affiliate marketing, and we’re always updating the site with new, useful information. Once you’re done learning, you can head over to our review section and start earning cash back!

Don’t Pick a Niche!

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 01:19:18 +0000

This article was derived from one by Stephan at adinventive.

First let me break it down. There are 8 things that humans are biologically programmed to desire. Survival, good eats, no pain/fear/danger, sex, a comfy home, to win/succeed, to protect those that they love, and social approval. Tap into any of those with your method of advertising and you will be off to a great start. Hit them on multiple levels? Even better.

This may all seem like marketing 101 to some of you, but if you ever sit back and watch what goes on where marketers congregate, you will quickly realize that these are some of the most asked questions:

What’s your niche? What’s a good niche? What niche should I promote?

Let me just tell you straight up right now, it’s not about picking a niche. No, it’s all about picking a market. You’re a marketer, after all. Most people fall into the trap of trying to choose a niche but that is just putting an artificial limitation on how successful they can be. In order to really monetize your traffic, you need to pick a market that you can market to. Picking a market allows you to advertise a variety of products or services that appeal to the market, rather than just attempting to sell them on one thing. Niche selection implies product selection. Market selection on the other hand means you’re picking a market that you’re able to send multiple different products to. This will of course require a couple of steps to pull off, but lets start with finding a market.

To begin with, marketing is all about offering up a timely solution to someones problem and profiting off of it. So the absolutely best place for market and idea research in my opinion is: http://www.ehow.com/how-to.html There you literally have all the questions people can concievably ask. You also receive the added luxury of having virtually everything categorized and segmented perfectly for you to comb through for the perfect idea. Every single one of these how to articles is an ebook waiting to happen. They address a problem people have and describe how to achieve their desired results.

If you have done any sort of marketing on Youtube, I 100% guarantee you have stumbled across one of their videos at some point.

The best way, in my opinion, to find a good market from this place is to pick a sub category from any of the main categories. The deeper that you go in, the more targeted you obviously get. The added benefit is that you also get all of the questions AND answers that apply specifically to any chosen category. You have the ability to know everything that people are trying to find an answer to when it comes to XYZ-subcategory. XYZ-subcategory is your market. As a result, the majority of the how to articles you see in any given sub category, are potential products/services that can be marketed to all those type of people that fall under it.

It’s much easier to come up with solutions to problems (in the form of a product or service) if you know what they are to begin with. Especially if these problems are the type that people have consistently. Someone that’s into work out exercises from home, will likely be susceptible to fitness products/services and someone that’s looking for wrinkle cream will likely be open to trying more than one skin care product. So how does one consistently manage to market multiple products and services that give them multiple chances for sales? Well there’s a few ways of doing this but the most accessible way is by…

Building a list!

How else do you think PPC and PPV marketers make bank long term? How do you think they can afford the cost of a couple dollars a click for the competitive stuff? Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of unknowing newbies out there who will just pay a few bucks a click and drive it directly to a landing page, thinking they’re going to make bank (they very well may). There are also plenty of businesses out there with a ton of money that can do it just because they can. The fact of the matter is that this is a poor business model and it’s far from sustainable. The people who can truly separate themselves from the amateurs are the ones that understand the value of building a relationship with their visitors. Unless you have some way of getting in touch with your visitor in the future when the moment occurs that they leave your website you may never see them again.

So instead, you should always attempt to initiate a relationship with your visitors in order to re-market to them over and over again. The better your relationship to your target market is, then the more likely you will get repeated sales from the same people whenever you suggest a new product.

Don’t feel as if you have to be an authority in the field in order to sustain a relationship with your subscribers. Just keep offering up relevant content and hit them with a good offer regularly.

How does this fit into an incentive gateway network?

Hopefully at this point you should already understand how this fits together with at least picking a market. Unfortunately, a lot of people are fixated on TV/movies (which is fine), even though it’s far from sustainable and riddled with potential problems. That’s another conversion entirely, though I’ll simply say that there’s a massive amount of opportunity out there beyond that ‘niche’ that a lot of people are missing out on.

What’s the point of an incentivized offer? What IS an incentive offer? Clearly, it’s something that someone is willing to do in order to get what they want. That’s all you need to know. Now, it’s just a matter of determining what market has consistently desperate people in it. How do you know what people are desperate for? By finding out what questions they need the answer to. Either combine that with–or make it one–of the things that they are programmed to desire (like I mentioned at the start of this) and tell them how to achieve it…as soon as they fill out an offer from your gateway.

Just remember that a gateway set-up gives you the ability to lock any content on the web. Any content, not just video…something like a written guide can be equally if not more effective than offering the ability to see a TV show.

So how can you tie everything together?

This depends on many variables and how you decide to approach your market. Here’s one suggestion and perhaps some of you can spin this into something even better. It’s simple. Ready?…okay:

Find yourself a question that can apply to anyone in your market that they desperately would like the answer to. Take a few articles from the how-to site and have someone rewrite them into a small guide. Give away the guide for free when they sign up for your email list. Now, add a gateway over the download page for them to unlock to gain access to. You can go beyond this by also including a related CPA offer below your download link and make sure the guide has affiliate links in it as well.

This can even apply to those who mess with TV/Movies, although you would approach those people differently. Building an email list would typically be the most beneficial to those that are doing straight CPA. You, on the other hand, have an entertainment portal. Make it entertaining, and people will come back and even tell their friends. So give them the ability to. Add a refer a friend widget to your unlocked pages, and get them to market for you. You should also create a mailing list to inform them about new episodes, movies, sites, whatever. You get the idea.

So there you have it. Pick a market, not a niche. Turn your visitors into long term buyers and visitors at which point you will have created a long term model for success that will over time grant you the ability to print money at the push of a button. I don’t want this to be misconstrued as me saying there’s no money in niche CPA marketing. There obviously is, but it’s short term, a constant battle, and if you slip once you risk losing out a lot…and all of this over 1 sale from someone. Why not instead tap into a market that you can access over and over again?

Finding Your Niche

admin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:55:37 +0000

NOTE: The information in this article falls into the category of “conventional wisdom.” Look here for a counter-argument.

At first, you’re not going to be a big ad company. There is no way for you to cover a broad range of topics, so the best thing for you to do is find something that’s not being completely over-covered. If there are hundreds of very good sites with which to compete, it’ll be extremely hard for you to get yourself on the first page of Google search results.

If you decide to create a site focused on ski gear, for example, you’ll probably want to type “ski gear” into Google, along with a whole host of other terms relating to skiing. This is the best method to quickly find your toughest competitors. The sites that come up in the top rankings on Google will likely have been going at it for years. If you do succeed in finding an under-covered topic, you’ll have a much easier time attracting visitors to your site.

A service like “Wordtracker” might be worth your while so you can get a detailed look at what keywords are popular. Alternatively, Google’s own tool here could do the trick. When you search for the popular terms on Google, you can also get a sense of the quality of the top search results. If the top pages are executed beautifully, it’ll be hard for you to offer something that they’re not. If you see all sorts of problems with the pages, you’ll then be able to go ahead create a better site. The point here is innovating in ways that these sites do not. Knowing popular keywords will also help you improve your page ranking in the search results (by integrating these words into your site).

Profitability is another key concern. The space you’re looking into might not be very profitable. This is a bit harder to pre-determine than the likelihood of your site being popular. There are some general rules, however. Your niche should not be too general.  If it is, targeting your audience becomes too difficult, which carries with it a host of other concerns. Being too specific, on the other hand, limits your options. You need to strike a middle ground.

Let’s take clothing as an example. Building a site around clothing is far too general of a topic, so we get more specific and call it winter clothing. This is probably still too general, so we limit ourselves further to a review site about winter coats. You probably don’t want to limit yourself any further than that or you’ll become too confined in what sort of information you can include. From here, we Google “winter coats,” along with a host of other phrases like, “buying winter coats,” “best winter coats,” “warmest winter coats,” and dozens of others. We can also look into popular keywords and phrases related to winter coats.

That’s just an example to illustrate how you might go about breaking down your chosen category. Finding a sparsely populated field in which to stake your claim is by no measure an easy task. Just take your time and be thorough. Don’t become frustrated when the answer is not immediately obvious, and you’ll eventually hit upon a good topic. Unless you’re really lucky, you’ll likely fail several times before you succeed, which is really the best way to learn. You need to actually get your feet wet!