Business Philosophy

The purpose of affiliate marketing is that through the promotion of outside companies' products, an affiliate gets paid. In a Pay-Per-Sale setting like ours, every time a surfer comes from your site to ours and buys a product, we give you a monetary kickback. In a way, you're an internet broker. 2 major features go into affiliate marketing and they can be broken down into a simple equation: Internet Traffic + Product Promotion = A Paycheck for You

Internet Traffic
The first part of the equation, internet traffic, is possibly the most fought over and hardest part of affiliate marketing. It is best summarized as the quest to get those elusive surfers to your site. Traffic is the foundation of e-commerce and no website is successful without it. There are two fundamental ways people can find you online. The first and most popular is through a search engine.

Search Engines
When most consumers go online to find a product or service, they use a search engine. Popular search engines include Google, Yahoo, and Msn to name a few. Generally, the consumer will go one, maybe two pages deep in their search for a website they'd like to visit. Logically, the better your rank in a search engine, the more consumers that will come to your site. Because surfers won't go 10 pages deep in a search engine's results, site ranking is VERY competitive.

SEO
There are two ways to get ranked with a search engine. The first is referred to as SEO (search engine optimization). This is by far the most competitive (and profitable) route. Google, for instance, places a great amount of emphasis on your website's links. The more links you have going out and coming into your website from other “like” websites, the more “relative” your site becomes. Consequently, the more relative your site is, the higher your page rank. There are numerous other ways to optimize your site for SEs. Our team will be happy to give you with this and point you to more resources.

PPC
The second method by which a website can get ranked with a search engine is using a pay-perclick (PPC) campaign. Above, you can see the PPCs on the right side of the google page. Instead of competing for page rank, these listings pay to get listed here. PPCs are beneficial, because the owner of the ad ONLY pays when someone clicks on their listing. So you're only paying for surfers to come to your site who's interests were sparked by your ad.
Most PPCs allow you to write your ad and bid on different keywords of your choice. For example, if you are running a cocaine addiction review site, you might choose keywords like “cocaine addiction solution” or “cocaine addiction symptoms”. You could then bid on the keywords, specifying that you'd be willing to pay $0.20 per click. Submit your ad and away you go. Again, a word of caution. Read up on PPC
campaigns and learn as much as you can. Done well, they can be cash cows, done poorly; they'll take you to the cleaners.

Alternative Traffic Marketing
There are virtually no limits to where you can get traffic for your website. You can set up reciprocal links with other like websites and trade traffic (this also helps your SEO). Email campaigns, as long as they are targeted and are not spam, can work well. Snail mail mailers, flyers, and traditional advertisements can also work. Just like building your site, be creative in its promotion. This helps you stand apart from the crowd and will lead to more traffic to your site.

Product Promotion
So once you have the surfer in your site, what do you do with them? Your task is to get them to want to click on the links to our sites. Different affiliate programs have different ideas on how to do this. A lot of it depends on the products or services that they offer. With our sites and products, there we've found a few ways to be very successful.

Product Matching
A big part of affiliate marketing is matching the products you promote to the site you run. If you can do this well, you'll convert.