Affiliate marketing is essentially the process of promoting someone else’s products or services in exchange for a commission on the final sale. It really is a new spin on the traditional form of selling that has been around for ages. The new part of the process though is that technology has made it possible to track a single sale back to the person who made the referral.

Imagine that you could get a nickel for all the times you recommended a restaurant, a movie, or a car to one of your friends. You’d be rich right, if not at least a little better off financially than you are today. Well, online it’s possible for you to get a commission on referrals you make to someone.

Now, I’d like to tell you that the process is as simple as just telling your buddy to go see the new James Bond movie, or telling them to order the steak at your favorite steak house, but there’s a little more to it than that. Just as you build up trust with your friend through small daily interactions, so do you build trust with your online audience. It’s only once you have that trust that you can turn it into referrals that make commissions.

But don’t fear the process of building a site, publishing content, and gaining trust. It isn’t rocket science. A lot of people have done it and so can you. All you have to do is be willing to believe that you can do it and then actually spend the time doing it.

Here are five things you can do to get started.

1. Pick a topic to write about – choose a topic you are passionate about so that you’ll have the strength to continue writing about the topic even when things get tough.
2. Start a blog – start capturing your thoughts so that you can share them with others. Blogs are the replacement for traditional sources of publishing. Writing on a blog makes your words available to millions of people all around the world. That’s a big audience and if you only capture one percent, that’s still a lot of people.
3. Write about what you know – every one knows something and has something they can share with others. If the information you publish helps someone else solve a problem or save time by short cutting a process then all the better. If you don’t know how to do something, then interview someone who does. Expert interviews are the best way to learn something new while creating content for your website at the same time.
4. Identify products and services you want to promote – be sure to promote products and services that you truly find valuable or think your audience will find valuable. Promoting something just for the sake of promoting it won’t get you anything.
5. Be consistent and seek to add value for your readers – Stephen Covey say we should seek first to understand and then be understood. Take the same perspective with your readers. If they find value in what you share with them, they will want to know more about you and what you have to say. This will lead to more sales and better conversions. So, make everything about them and then they will reward you.

The rest is rinse repeat with a few tips and tricks picked up here and there along the way. What’s really important to remember is that you can do it. You already do it for free offline. The only difference is that online you can get paid to do what you already do.

If you’re stuck on how to choose a topic, then take the plunge and enroll in a course that teaches you step by step how to become an affiliate marketer. It will be well worth the money. In most cases, all you need is one idea to make the course worth the admission fee. Of course, you can always join the other members of Open Source Marketer who are getting the information they need to succeed with affiliate marketing.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at selling products and services directly off of your website. Sometimes that means having a physical inventory, and sometime it means having a digital library of products to offer. What you sell is really up to you, but then we’ll talk about all that tomorrow.

Dig it, grove it, own it,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Do what YOU want and get PAID for it!

To help emphasize this point, here are some of the ways we’ll discuss as part of a new article series on making money online.

• Affiliate marketing – promoting and selling someone elses services online is one of the easiest way to earn a commission for your sales efforts online.
• Direct sales – selling products or services directly off of your website is a solid way to make money online.
• Drop shipping – selling products or services that someone else offers and then having them ship orders to your customers is an easy way to make money online without carrying an inventory.
• Membership sites – we have transitioned from being a manufacturing economy to an information based economy. If you can turn what you know into what someone else will pay for then you have a nice formula for success.
• Ad networks – advertisers are eager to get their products and services in front of the right audience. The easiest way for them to do this is by creating ad campaigns using ad networks. You’ve seen examples of this in the form of banner ads on websites.
• Text link ads – search engines see links as a way of determining website value. Selling text links on your website has become an easy way to make money on your website.
• Paid reviews – writing a review about someone’s products or services is an easy way for an advertiser to buy the trust of your audience. Selling paid reviews is an easy way to make money online.
• Direct sponsorships – selling ads directly on your website is a profitable way to make money from your online efforts. This is different than having ad network banners on your website, because unlike ad network ads, you get to keep 100% of the ad revenue that comes in from selling ads directly on your website.

In the next series of articles we’ll talk about the pros and cons of each of these revenue streams and we’ll discuss ways you can implement these money making ideas into your website to start making money online.

To kick off the series, tomorrow’s article will discuss affiliate marketing and how you can turn your blog into a publishing empire that makes money just by using the words that are commonly found in the dictionary.

Let’s do this thing,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Read Part 1 – How To Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing

Do what YOU want and get PAID for it!

If social media has become the driving force behind the people driven economy, then how exactly does that make a difference in the world? To answer that question, you have to look around and see what people are doing with their time to benefit others. Take for example what Stacey Monk is doing with TweetsGiving, a movement to improve the lives of children in Tanzania by giving them access to the Internet.

Last year TweetsGiving raised over ten thousand dollars to build a computer lab in Tanzania so that the kids would have access to the Internet and all the information that it provides. This year they are on the march again with Tweetsgiving 2009 and they have already raised over thirteen thousand dollars as of the writing of this article.

Consider for just a moment that this money has been raised without a marketing budget, without an ad campaign, without billboards, radio spots, or television ads. The money has been raised solely using one “word of mouth” transmission at a time and the dollars raised continue to grow each day as that word of mouth marketing passes from one personal social network to another.

How do these things pass from one person to the next? Well, last year when I was asked to help out with TweetLuck, another social fund raising event, I said yes because a friend asked me to help someone they knew. I didn’t know that this year I would be asked to help build the TweetsGiving.org community website from the ground up or that I would have the awesome opportunity to work with an incredible team of social entrepreneurs that span the globe. I didn’t know that I’d get to work with a project manager from California, an East Coast User Interface developer, a Harvard graduate, a Georgia based graphic designer, or a Dallas based web developer. All I knew was I was being asked to help kids in Tanzania and it sounded like something worth doing. Someone I knew ask and I said yes.

That’s exactly how social media works. Someone asks you to do something and you say yes because their social capital is deposited in your social bank account and as they ask for something, they either add to the balance of that account or withdraw from it. This is the same online as it is offline. We are all motivated to action by something. Social media simply provides the communication channels we need to get things done fast. It’s not the technology itself, but the fundamental social psychology that drives things forward.

So how does social media make a difference to a school in Africa? That depends on you and what you do after you read this article. Tweetsgiving has already raised thirteen thousand dollars, but you can help them reach even higher. Help them spread the word about Tweetsgiving and contribute financially to the great things that are going on with this grass roots movement right now. That’s what social media is all about.

What will you do next with social media?

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Become an OSM Member.

Well, thanks to the folks at Aweber, all that wasted time and frustration is gone. Aweber provides email newsletter and email auto-responder services to a lot of website owners. They are really good about responding to their customers and providing them with the tools they need. They just came out with a new web form tool that makes creating email signup forms so easy, it almost made me tear up.

Watch this 2 minute video and you’ll see what I mean. It’s all point and click. Saweet!

I’ve already used the web form generator to create lightbox signup forms for three of my sites and this weekend I plan to site down and create some more. The whole process takes about 5 minutes each and I can customize every part of the form, even the background image.

If you’d like to try the editor for yourself, head over to Aweber and scroll down to the bottom of the page. They’re offering $1 trial accounts so you can try the service risk free. Sign up for a month and try the web form editor for yourself.

In a future article, I’ll walk you through some of the other Aweber features and show you how I use the service. Until then, let me know what you think of the editor and share how you’re using it.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Do what YOU want and get PAID for it!

When I posted the question, I was thinking about how most people wake up one morning and find themselves working a job that they never planned on. At some point we realize we are tired of the boss, tired of the traffic, tired of being tired. And in between our moments of being full up of it all, we have flashes of what we would rather be doing.

I believe these flashes are single frames of a much bigger movie that is privately playing in the back room of our minds. We don’t get to see all the film so we don’t really know how the story plays out, but we have enough pieces to think that we would enjoy watching the whole thing. What stops us though is the ticket cost.

You see, most people think that if they only had a million dollars, they could go off and do the things they really want to do. I thought this myself for a long time. That’s a marvelous idea, so long as we really know what those things are.

I believe the reason we don’t do the things we really want to do in life is because we don’t actually know what those things are. We haven’t taken the time to define them. We have flashes of them, but we haven’t spent the time to really sit down and think about what those things would be.

The other reason we don’t do the things we want is because we think the cost is too high. We have the belief that we need lots of money before we can even think about doing the things we want. We tell ourselves that our job, our family, or friends, and our money all have to be in line so that we can be free to really express ourselves through our actions. I hate to tell you this, but the traffic lights of life will never all be green at one time. The universe isn’t going to send you a text message to let you know when it’s okay to really start living.

What we need to do is let go of the idea that we are waiting on something and just lean into doing what we really want to do now. We don’t earn any more time in our lives. We only get to spend time. We can spend it doing what other people want us to do, or we can spend it doing what we are meant to do.

Here’s an exercise to show you what I mean. Follow along if you’re interested in doing what you want to do with your life. You’ll need a piece of paper and a pencil for this part.

Spend some time being totally honest with yourself about who you are and what you would really like to be doing with your life. Don’t rush the process. It’s not a race and the answers are to important to be hurried.

Once you’ve spent time thinking, write down on paper those things that you would most like to do. Don’t worry about if they’re possible, or how you’d actually accomplish them. Just write them down. Don’t let reality get in the way of this part of the process. Just brain dump your ideas and see what comes out in writing. And yes, you must write it down on paper. Writing things down has some major effects that we won’t go into here, but just know that writing down your ideas will go further in making them real than any other activity.

If you don’t feel you can get all your ideas out in one session, then keep the list in your pocket and add on to it as you are inspired.

Here’s a portion of my own list as an example:

• I own my own business
• I read lots of old books
• I teach people how to do things
• I run three miles a day
• I go trail hiking every year
• I go rock climbing
• I teach kids to play chess
• I have been to New York City
• I travel abroad
• I have laid on a beach in Hawaii

Be sure to write your list in the present tense as if you have already do these things. You don’t want to think of them in some foggy distant future. Write them down as if you are going to do these things today.

Oh, and don’t worry about writing down stock answers like working in a soup kitchen or helping the homeless. If you want to do those things great, but don’t write them down if you only think that you should. That won’t do you or the homeless any good if they aren’t sincere. Look for honest ideas.

Now that you have your list, or even a portion of a list, ask yourself. Do you really need a million dollars to do half of these things? How about a quarter of them? What about one of them? The real answer is no. You don’t need a million dollars to live your life. We are not defined by the balance in our bank accounts. We are defined by the things we actually do. I understand that time is a factor, but that’s a whole other discussion.

So here is today’s challenge.

I dare you to start your own list by writing down three things that you would like to do in the next six months. Listen to this audio clip.

Listen

Then write down three things that immediately come to mind. Don’t spend hours thinking about it for this exercise. As I said earlier, you don’t want to rush the process, but for this part of the list we are trying to capture just a few items that are sitting on the top of your brain. These are the ideas that you think about most often. These ideas can probably be easily accomplished, if you will let them happen.

Once you have three ideas, write them on a piece of paper and then post them here in the comments. What you would do if you had a million dollars?

Share your list with me.

I want to hear what’s you have to say.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

• What keywords do you plan to target?
• What is your advertising budget?
• Who are your competitors?
• What are the demographics of your customers?
• What time of the day should your ads display?
• What day of the week should your ads display?
• Do you have an optimized landing page?
• What do you want people to do when they visit your landing page?
• Does your landing page do any lead capture?
• How do you plan to measure effectiveness of your ad?
• How will you track conversions?
• Do you have a list of negative keywords?
• Do you have a list of negative qualifiers?
• Do you have a plan for formatting your ads?
• Do you plan to split test your ads?

Of course, each of these questions has a lot more behind them, so before we could actually get down to setting up the ads we had to spend time covering what each of these questions meant.

So after we spent about an hour going over these concepts, and he spent several more hours thinking about the information I gave him, we were ready to actually place the ads. Setting up Adwords ads is fairly easy, if you have all of these questions answered before you start. Having your ad text ready and knowing which keyword you want to use saves you a lot of time.

Next, I’ll be working with the business owner to help him come up with a list of keywords that he can target with different ads to bring more traffic to his website. That part takes a good bit of analysis both on my part and his. I’ll come up with a list of keywords that have high search volume and low competition, and he will have to determine which of those keywords are relevant to his business.

It really is as much of an art as a science.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

At some point in time you have to ask yourself where is the value. Most businesses want to use the Internet as a way to market (or directly sell) their goods or services. Their business is usually not about the Internet. It’s about something else and the Internet is just another tool for success.

People sometimes stop working on their million dollar idea in order to save a few pennies. I’ve seen several businesses save their way into bankruptcy, when spending a few hundred dollars could have tripled their sales. It always seems to track back to a value proposition. How much time will I spend doing this and what’s the value of spending the time in that way?

If you knew that an expert could get your business up and running on the web in less than a week, would you want to spend 2-3 months figuring out how to get your message into a webpage, or would you rather spend those months focusing on the actual message?

The tools and systems on the web are getting bigger, better, and faster. The small percentage cost difference between “dipping your toe in the water” and truly diving in, is more a matter of your commitment than the money.

To give you  an example, someone recently asked me about building them a website and helping to get ranking on Google. Here was my reply:

I host and build a Content Management System that allows anyone to login from any computer and update/add information with no coding needed on their part. I looked at your competition and I think we can do much better (photogallery, contact form, blog, RSS feed, podcasts, video, and analytics).

Google, on the other hand, is something that takes time and effort on your part to build your website up. At least that’s true if you don’t intend to pay Google $400-$1000 per month to be in the top listing. Your content is the main factor that Google looks at when ranking your site. Your content has to be relevant, highly valuable, and full of the keywords that you want people to be looking for. Then, you get to shift into marketing mode with online articles, podcasts, videocasts, webinars, etc.

The more valuable the your content is, the higher Google will rank you. By creating these articles, podcasts, and videos, and placing them in different places online, you can have them point back to your website. The more content you have pointing back to your site, the higher Google will rank you. The more people who like your content and link to it, the higher Google will rank you.

So, you can either pay Google to get ranking, or you can self-market your site and obtain the same results without the horrible cost. It takes time, effort and a willingness to build up an audience of interested people (this means starting a blog on your site to get your thoughts down and allowing other people to interact with your posts).

Yes, all of these features and more are there with any site I build. Since I build with a system, the number of pages and how they are organized is up to you and how much you want to write.

I am currently building a site for someone with a PR company who is wanting to get into the website side of things. I see her site as being similar to your needs. Here’s what I did for her PR website:

• Static Pages – Informational pages are always needed on a website. Home, About Us, Contact (the form that people can use to send you their contact information) are part of the basics, but a page could be created to present any part of your business.
• Home page video – This can be a video you make, or just a collage of photos that express what your business does.
• Photo gallery – usually linked from home page to show off your work. People love photos, especially good ones that tell a story about your business and how it relates to your customer’s needs.
• Blog topics – This is a listing of topics on the right side of the site that lets you give good information about topics related to your business. This is also where you will create and place blog posts. The idea is to give out good information that people will want to keep coming back to read (i.e. new posts every few days). People should also be able to comment on those particular posts in order to make the site interactive (you can create the blog separately, but Google REALLY likes blogs, so its a good idea to have the blog as a part of your site).
• Analytics – This is a way to monitor the traffic on your site and see where people are going and where they are not. It can help you figure out how well your content is doing.

The time frame for getting this done is usually around two weeks. That’s highly dependent upon the design and content, but once the design is finalized and the content is written, then the website can be built much faster. I can also point you in the right direction for building your own podcast and videocast (its not nearly as hard you might think and it is a content type that your competition doesn’t have, so it will make you a cut above them). There are a lot of good articles on Open Source Marketer that can help with your site, so take a look and see if you find some more ideas.

Let me know if I can help in any way,

Christopher

While that was simply an email reply, I always try to stress to people that CONTENT is where they need to focus their efforts. CUSTOMERS want more content. GOOGLE loves content. ANYONE interested in your topic wants to read more about it (or listen to podcasts, or watch video, etc.). When web technology is continually getting cheaper and faster to implement, why, oh why, would you want to focus on a business tool when you REALLY need to focus on what you do best……CONTENT.

What do you think?

Christopher “Toff” Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Are you getting at least 100 new visitors to your blog everyday?

If not, it may be that your blog is not optimized for the search engines, which is where people begin their search for products and services online.

Some “search engine experts” would have you believe that search engine optimization requires a lot of advanced techniques to rank well. But the truth is that even a little simple optimization can go a long way.

Here are five things you can do right now, on your own, to make sure your website is optimized for the search engines.

1. Page Title – Make sure to use relevant keywords within the title tag of each page of your blog. The title tag is the first thing a search engine discovers about your site. The keywords you use in your title should be carefully chosen to describe what your page is about.
2. Meta Tags – Be sure to inlcude a useful description in the description meta tag that’s located in the head of your document. The meta tag is still used by some search engines as the description that will show up as part of the search engine listing. Completing the description tag doesn’t take very long and it’s a good way to exercise control over what appears to searchers in the search engine listings.
3. Use H1 Tags – Make sure the headline of your blog post is displayed within an H1 tag. The H1 tag is considered a notation to highlight important parts of your webpage. The search engines use this to determine which parts of your document are emphasized. The headline of your blog post is different than the title of your document, so don’t confuse the two things.
4. Post Titles – Also, ensure that the headline of your blog post includes keywords relevant to your post topic. Be careful not to overuse keywords though or the search engines will think you are keyword stuffing, or trying to game the system. Just be sure to use keywords when it makes sense, and make sure your titles are friendly for your visitors.

Tip: If you use run a WordPress blog, a good SEO WordPress plugin is The All In One SEO Pack. It gives you the ability to tweak the page description, page title, and associated keywords.

5. Write For Humans First – Most importantly, when writing articles for your website, be sure to write for the human reader first and the search engine second. For example, don’t just use the word “player” when you could be more descriptive by saying “music player” or “MP3 player”. Just make sure that your keywords don’t disrupt the flow and meaning of your sentences. Including the same keyword in back-to-back sentences can be very distracting for human reader and can be something a search engine can penalize you for doing. So be natural in your writing, but use relevant keywords where they make sense. This will make your articles work for both search engines and your blog readers.

A good free SEO analysis tool for analyzing your website can be found at WebsiteGrader.com. Website Grader measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

For more information on ways to optimize your website for the search engines, check out the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

Remember, even a few simple changes can make a world of difference for your blog. Just be sure you cover the basics first.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Here are five reasons why you should still be collecting email addresses today:

1. Establishing connections – You work hard to attract website visitors and you should be be trying to capture and retain a connection with as many of those visitors as possible. Think about it, if you started a mailing list today and captured just one lead you would be dramatically increasing your ability to establish future communications with that website visitor.
2. Continuing conversations – Remember that your website is just part of an ongoing conversation between you and your website visitors. When you ask for and collect their email address, you are establishing a channel for continued conversation that is much more personal and direct. Now you can talk directly to that person on an ongoing basis even if they don’t visit your website on a regular basis.
3. Sign up offers – One of the most tangible benefits of acquiring email addresses is that you can provide the visitor with a signup offer that is only available to newsletter subscribers as a reward for joining your newsletter. Since that visitor has already shown a willingness to actively share information with you, they are just as likely to respond to an offer during the process. Keep in mind that the offer must be extremely relevant to your visitor and offer them high value to be effective. If done correctly, newsletter signup offers can result in an additional revenue stream for your website that wasn’t being realized before.
4. Repeat traffic – There are numerous benefits to maintaining a newsletter like driving repeat traffic to your website. Your newsletter should offer value to your audience and it should function as a vehicle for transporting readers back to your website. If you’re running impression ads on your website, then a newsletter alone can increase your impressions for the month and there by increase your revenue. If the intent of your email is to make an offer, don’t try to sell in the email. Use the email to invite the visitor back to your website where you can do the necessary selling activities.
5. Promotional Surveys – As part of the ongoing conversation between you and your visitors, surveys offer an effective way for you to learn more about your audience. But remember, people don’t fill out surveys, unless they have a reason that makes it worth their time. One of the most effective ways I’ve seen to combine surveys with mailing lists is to run a give away that requires the completion of a form to participate. On the form you ask for necessary details like name or email address, and then you ask the questions you’d like answered. People are much more likely to answer the questions if they think doing so depends on their being entered in a contest or give away program.

So, if you’re still not sure if you should be collecting email addresses on your website, just consider that taking action because of any one of these reasons will transform your relationship with your website visitors from a passive relationship to an active one, which will help to extend your conversation beyond the one time visit.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

As you can imagine, that was definitely a pleasant thing to see and since I’m all in favor of encouraging positive behavior, I started thinking back on the different ways that the sale could have taken place. Did I write an article? Was it an affiliate banner placement? Did I send an email out that included a link? How did this sale happen and how could I make it happen again.

For most people ten of these sales a month would more than pay their bills. If this is you, listen closely because this could be the thing that puts you on the road to making good money online. To be clear, I’m not saying this is the only thing you should do to make money online, but it would be a great addition to your other efforts.

What I realized was that I had written an article six days earlier that had included an affiliate link to ShareASale.com, the affiliate network my sale was made with. In the article I had written the reasons why you should start an affiliate program.

The article included information about different affiliate solutions. One of the named solutions was ShareASale because they offer affiliate program management services and I’ve had a very good experience with them as an affiliate.

I made sure not to sell anything in the article because I didn’t want to jeopardize losing reader trust. I also made sure to offer solid information about which software packages had what features and to highlight their pros and cons. It wasn’t for me to decide which solution would be best for the reader, but I did try to bring all the facts to light so the reader could make their own decision for their situation.

The overall goal of your article should be to provide your reader with as much value as possible by bringing well balanced, relevant, information to their attention. That means you should know what points matter most to your reader so you can correctly highlight the most important aspects of the topic.

The potential for this type of affiliate marketing is endless. Good quality articles can be written for just about anything and these days a lot of products and services offer affiliate programs that will pay you a handsome commission if you can send them qualified customers who need their products and services.

It certain worked out in my case and you can be that I’m already thinking of new articles to write to attract more interested readers so I can get a lot more $500 dollar emails from my affiliate manager.

Sharpening my pencil,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com