Bill McRea

The Amazon Associates program is Amazon’s affiliate program that offers you the opportunity to make money by sending some of your website visitors to their website. When your visitor clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase at Amazon.com, you get paid advertising fees, which is a percentage of the purchase price. These advertising fees are pretty low by industry standards, but there are many people who have been able to generate plenty of income with the Amazon Associates program. The trick is that you have to be willing to put in the time and effort to learn the program and then stick with it until you create the results you are looking for.

There are many common mistakes that people make when it comes to trying to make money with Amazon associates. These are three of the more common mistakes that people make, and how to avoid them.

1. Not offering product reviews

Offering honest, straightforward product reviews adds an incredible amount of value to your visitors life. They are on your blog because they are looking for something specific, and if you can answer their questions and provide the value that they are searching for, they will be happy to follow a link from your site to the resource that you are pointing them to because they trust you.

Write book reviews on books that you have read and enjoyed, but even for those that you did not like as much as you thought you would. Both your positive and not-so-positive feedback will be helpful to your visitors.

2. Not using several tracking IDs’s

In order to see which campaigns are more effective you can set up several Tracking ID’s within you Amazon associates account. Go to the ‘account settings’ link at the top of the page, then in the ‘Account Information’ section, click on, ‘Manage your tracking IDs.’ You will see a button, ‘Add Tracking ID,’ which will return a field where you can give your new tracking ID a name. You might give it the name of the campaign, or the website. If you are in North America, this your IDs will always end with ‘-20.’

Once your tracking IDs are in place and you have made a few sales, you can run a report to see how each one is performing. Click on, ‘reports,’ and then, ‘Tracking ID Summary Report’ form the dropdown menu. Select the date ranges for the report and you will be able to see how each channel is doing and where your clicks and sales are coming from.

It’s been said that you can’t improve what you don’t measure, so track your clicks and sales and focus on improving the campaigns that are falling behind.

3. Choosing low priced products

With referral fees as low as 4% in some cases, it makes sense to focus on higher ticket items with the Amazon associates program. If you are going to put in the effort to get the traffic required to get clicks on your ads, you might as well offer products that you will gain higher advertising fees for.

There are lots of other ways that you can make money online with niche affiliate marketing. Check out, http://www.passivenicheprofits.com, to discover how you can generate passive income online today.

The Amazon associated affiliate program is one of the biggest online affiliate programs online, and because of Amazon’s tremendous selection of products, and all of the banners, images and widgets available to affiliates, it’s pretty easy to start making money online as an Amazon affiliate.

Once you’ve got your blog setup and you have joined the Amazon associates program, the next thing you’ll want to do is to start adding your affiliate links to your website or blog. Let’s take a look at how easy it is to get started adding links.

How to customize and add links

The regular way to add links is to go to Amazon Associates Central and log in. Right on the home page you will see the option to ‘Quickly Add Links.’ You have the option to either search for a product or browse for a product. Type in the keyword in the search box, or browse until you find a product you like and click on the, ‘Get link’ button.

You will be brought to a page where you can customize your link and then grab the HTML code to add it to your website. You will be presented with the option of, Text and Image, Text only, Image only, or you can add the item to a widget. Then you’ll see your options for customizing the link and a live preview of the changes you are making as you customize it. When you are finished tinkering with the appearance, you can highlight the HTML code, which already has your Associates ID embedded in it, to your website.

Turn on Site Stripe

Site Stripe is a cool feature that allows you to create affiliate links from whatever page you happen to be on while browsing through Amazon.com without having to be inside of associates central. When you land on Amazon, make sure that you are logged in with your associate account credentials.

Here are some of the things that you can do using Site Stripe to create your affiliate links:

• Share a link on Twitter

You can quickly tweet out a link to a product that you find on Amazon using the ‘Share on Twitter’ button. You will be given the option to customize the message before you hit ‘send.’

• Add a product to a widget

Whether you are adding a product to an existing widget, or creating a new one, you can click on Site Stripe and add it quickly.

• Link to the current page

You can create a link to the page that you are browsing on within Amazon. Share links to items that you discover on the fly.

• Add item to your aStore

If you’ve got an aStore and you see an item that you want to add to it, click on the, ‘Add to aStore’ link on Site Stripe and you will be presented with a list of your aStores so that you can choose which one to add that product to.

That’s how easy it is to add affiliate links from Amazon to your blog or website. There are lots of additional ways that you can generate passive income online with niche affiliate marketing. Check out, http://www.passivenicheprofits.com, to discover how you can generate passive income online today.

The Amazon affiliate program, called, ‘Amazon Associates,’ provides a free, easy way for bloggers to monetize their Blogger blogs. Blogger, which is a free blogging platform, is owned by Google. It provides users with a free blog that they can use however they like.  You can create a blog for free on Blogger to blog about those topics that you are passionate about, and then add in some links to related products from Amazon that might be useful to your readers.

If you have already got a Blogger blog up and running, you would just need to join the Amazon Affiliates program, and then choose a mix of image and text ads for items that are relevant to your content and post them on your blogger blog.  Blogger makes it easy to create an Amazon Associates account directly from your profile  so that you can get up and running quickly.

Amazon associates can earn advertising fees when their visitors click on their special affiliate link, go to Amazon and make a purchase. These fees can range from 4% to 15% depending on volume and the kinds of products you are promoting. A good thing is that if your visitor clicks on one of your links and goes to Amazon, you get a commission on the product you were linking to as well as whatever else they purchased in that transaction.

Let’s say that you have a blog about chocolate. You write blog posts about what new offerings your favorite choclatiers have to offer, you might share recipes and sources where your readers can find the fine chocolates that you are raving about in your posts. On a blog like this you might link to books on Amazon that contain chocolate recipes, the various chocolates that they sell, kitchen gadgets that bakers might use, etc.

You have an array of options for displaying related Amazon products such as sidebar widgets, product carousels, gadgets that actually play mp3 clips, and Amazon search boxes, but you want to make sure that you integrate the ads tastefully and that everything you are offering is related to your content.  You do not want to turn your readers off because they get the feeling that all you are trying to do is push these products on them.

It is also important in light of FCC regulations to disclose that some of the links on your site are affiliate links, and when users click on them and make a purchase you will be compensated. You can post a site-wide disclaimer or identify which links are affiliate links. As an online business person you should familiarize yourself with the regulations related to Affiliate Marketing.

Posting book reviews and product reviews are a great way to pre-sell Amazon products from your blog. When you add your unique point of view—whether you loved the product, or found some shortcomings with it, people appreciate the value you add.

Amazon associates makes it easy and fun to monetize your Blogger content. It’s free to sign up and you can start making money with it right away.

There are lots of other ways that you can make money online with niche affiliate marketing. Check out, http://www.passivenicheprofits.com, to discover how you can generate passive income online today.

Every business needs leads—qualified leads in order to stay in business. As an online business and information product publisher, you are looking for business opportunity or ‘biz-op’ leads, which are people who have expressed an interest in finding a business opportunity.

Lead generation is a very competitive space on the Internet right now. You know that this is true if you have ever been in the position of buying leads. In this article we are going to explore a strategy that you can use to generate your own biz-op leads using affiliate networks. This is a method that requires a few steps, but if you are willing to put in the effort you will reap the rewards.

What is an affiliate network?

An affiliate network is simply the matchmaker of sorts between affiliate marketers and merchants who offer affiliate programs. They help affiliate marketers find the best programs to promote to their audience, and they help the merchants find the best audience for their programs.

In an affiliate arrangement, the affiliate earns a specified percentage of the sales price of the product that the affiliate’s leads purchase using their link. CPA networks offer CPA, CPM and CPC-based Marketing programs.

CPA works by affiliates generating leads. The affiliate attracts visitors to their website who are already searching for what they have to offer. The affiliate makes money when the visitor clicks on an offer that appeals to them and takes the desired action (the “A” in CPA). This action can be anything from putting in their name and email address, to signing up for a free trial membership.

Creating the offer

The first step is to create an offer for, “how to make money online,” and then pay your affiliates $1.50- $2.50 for each lead they send to you. You can market this offer using an affiliate network.

Here are some examples of affiliate networks:

• Clickbank
• Click2Sell
• Commission Junction
• Share a Sale
• ClickBooth

Creating a sales funnel

The next step is to create a sales funnel that will generate the income needed so you do not lose money on the incoming leads. This is called a “Self Liquidating” lead source. Self liquidating leads simply means that you generate leads that cost you some amount of money, but then you quickly turn around and turn an immediate profit from those leads.

Inside Tip:

Be aware that as with any other business model, there is the problem of fraud. There are less than scrupulous affiliates who try to cheat the networks by generating fake leads. There is a platform called Direct Track, which is an affiliate marketing and tracking platform that has a focus on affiliate fraud prevention.

In the end, your goal is to generate a sizzling hot list of people who are already searching for what you have to offer—information about how they can make money online—and keep them on your list so that you can create a community of biz-op seekers and present them with offers that provide them with what they are searching for and make you money.

Are you ready to learn more about generating biz-op leads and other online marketing topics? Visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, where you will find tons of tips and resources for making money online and having some fun in the process.

Flipping blogs can be a fun way to make some extra money or even create a business, but there are a few common mistakes that newbies often make that can easily be avoided with the correct information. Let’s take a look at those three common errors and what you can do to avoid making them yourself, thus increasing your chances for making more money flipping blogs.

1.       Your blog is in the wrong niche

The popularity of certain niches ebbs and flows. Some niches can be strictly seasonal. Some may be based on a product or a topic that was once hot, but no one is really talking about them anymore. Regardless of the reason, if there are no buyers searching for the content of your niche. Then your blog is in the wrong niche and it will be challenging, if not impossible to sell such a blog for decent profit.

Make sure that when you are flipping blogs the niche and the topic are in demand with buyers searching for that topic. If you find that the popularity of your blogs niche has waned. You can make some revisions and change the primary keywords, and maybe some of the graphics before you try to flip that blog.

2.       The presentation is lacking

Another mistake that people make when flipping blogs is that they don’t pay attention to how the blog looks. First impressions are important both with buyers and with visitors. When flipping blogs you want the blog to look its best. Does the blog have a run-of-the-mill, free theme? Consider hiring a graphic artist to tweak a theme for you, create a nice, new, custom header image and buttons, or better yet, create a whole new, unique theme that is suited to that niche and topic. Go in and make sure that there are no broken links, out of date offers, or anything else that might detract from the site’s ‘curb appeal.’

3. Insufficient proof of the blogs statistics.

When a buyer is interested in purchasing your blog they are interested in learning about the blog statistics right away, so it helps for you to provide lots of clear documentation of the sites Alexa ranking Google page rank. Traffic statistics, and how much income the site produces monthly. If you have Google analytics installed or any other analytics package, you can supply screen shots to illustrate how much traffic the site receives now.

These are just three of the common mistakes that those who are new to blog flipping might make in the process of trying to sell a blog. As you become more experienced you will learn more about what makes a blog more appealing to buyers, and what kind of amenities you can add to increase the value and appeal of the blogs you are selling.

Another way to find out about what blog buyers are looking for is to research the ‘Just Sold,’ pages on Flippa.com. Look at the blogs that have sold recently. Look at the topic, what extras were included, etc. to get ideas to help enhance your blog flipping efforts.

When you are ready for even more tips and strategies for blog flipping, visit, http://www.nicheprofitblogs.com, to get more information about how to get started with niche profit blogging today.