Is it ethical to use a blog format for a niche site?  I think a clearly defined goal for your blog will avoid any confusion.  What do you hope to accomplish with your new blog?

There is nothing worse than a fake authority site where countless promotions take place.  That is why it is important to establish the flavor of the blog at the very beginning.  What do you think?  

You can catch the original article here.

Rosalind Gardner is against all the hype floating around on the internet. She can be depended upon to tell it the way it really is. Her book, “The Super Affiliate Handbook” is required reading. Save yourself a lot of money and get this first. It is a real handbook on affiliate marketing. You will want to print out a hard copy as well as keep it on your desktop for all the valuable links.

The second product, “Affiliate Elite” is a real gem. It is hard to describe this service. You have to try it out to see what it is all about. Brad Callen is so confident that once you try it you will stay, that he offers a $2.95 trial.  Do not miss out on this strategic advantage for your affiliate marketing success.

I will be recommending more tools in the future but this is a good place to start. I bought a lot of junk before I found these two winners. Take it from me, this is a good place to start when you purchase products.

Click here for more information

20 Free eBooks About Social Media

1. The New Rules of Viral Marketing – David Meerman Scott
2. Marketing Apple – MarketingApple.com
3. Masters of Marketing – Startup Internet Marketing
4. Podcast Marketing eBook – Christopher S. Penn
5. Google Adwords Secrets – SEOBook
6. Get Viral Get Visitors – Stacie Mahoe
7. Marketing With Case Studies – Dynamic Copywriting (Bad Link)
8. How to Write a Marketing Plan – Geisheker Group
9. SEO for WordPress blogs – Blizzard Internet
10. Social Web Analytics – Social Web Analytics
11. Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter – Geekpreneur
12. The Zen of Blogging – Hunter Nutall
13. What is Social Media – iCrossing
14. A Primer in Social Media – SmashLab
15. Effective Internet Presence – Effective Internet Presence
16. Introduction to Good Usability – Peter Pixel
17. Increasing the Response to Your Email Marketing Program – CRM Transformation
18. We Have a Website. Now What? – Craig Rentmeester
19. Blogs & Social Media – PRSA
20. The Podcast Customer Revealed – Edison Media Research

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/20-free-ebooks-about-social-media/

This article presents 12 steps to help you succeed in affiliate marketing and earn lots of commissions.

1. Take the initial time to choose a niche that you are interested in and that you would like to promote as an affiliate. Do not try to be a jack of all trades and sign up for too many programs on different topics. At first keep your affiliate marketing targeted to a single market, and then promote products that relate to that market.

2. Research and select the best affiliate programs for your niche. You must choose the most rewarding, reliable and successful affiliate programs either directly from the merchant or through an affiliate network. The merchant or affiliate manager must also supply you with plenty of marketing tools that you can use to promote the products.

3. Make sure the affiliate program and products are of the highest quality and a good deal. This will make it much easier for you to sell these products or programs with conviction. Stay away from the quick buck and gimmicks.

4. Build a web site focused on your niche, and have high quality and unique content that is rich with your key words and phrases. If this is a niche that you are passionate about then you will have no problem updating your site regularly.

5. Use pay per click advertising but have a clear budget for promoting your website. If you stay away from the gimmicks and focus on good content you should have no problem with google slapping you. (banning or raising your cost per click through the roof)

6. Drive traffic to your website. Your website will need traffic for you to earn affiliate commissions. Write articles, submit online press releases related to your niche and submit your website to search engines. You can also exchange links with higher ranking websites related to your niche.

7. Review your affiliate programs or products on a blog, and include your affiliate links. This is very important and the wave of the future.

8. Build an email list with an auto-responder and offer free e-courses, articles or e-books. When you have a list, you can keep in regular contact with your prospects and recommend your affiliate products to them.

9. Be available to answer any questions from your prospects and customers. Customer relationship management is very important in online business. Make sure that you provide your real name and an email address on your website so that potential customers can contact you with questions, and know there is a real person behind that website. This is important for your credibility.

10. Always include a privacy statement on your site. Look at the statements on successful sites and adapt one for your specific purpose. Do not copy it verbatim.

11. Once you are consistently making money as an affiliate consider building your own network of sub-affiliates. Keep in touch with your sub-affiliates and motivate them to succeed because their success is your success too. Your job as a super affiliate is to manage those under you. Do not allow the tag “super affiliate” to go to your head.

12. Work hard consistently in promoting and adding content to your website and have patience. Have clear vision and work your plan.

These 12 steps can help anyone succeed in affiliate marketing, achieve success, and earn lots of affiliate commissions!

There are three types of affiliate marketing methods of payment – either pay-per-click (generated by actual clicks or referrals to the merchant from the affiliate’s site), pay-per-action or pay-per-sale (very similar, in that the affiliate receives payment, either a fixed amount or commission, based on the sales or subscriptions that have come through referrals or adverts on the affiliate’s site.) The last two methods of payment are generally preferred by merchants, due to many fraudsters taking advantage of the click system and setting up sites with forced clicks, pop-ups, adware, spam, false advertising and many other “black hat” techniques.

Affiliate marketing is not limited to only display-adverts on an affiliate site, but also comes in the form of email, blogs, rss feeds, content and niche sites, loyalty sites, comparison sites or shopping directories, and other forms. It is an extremely low cost, but highly effective form of marketing and advertising, presenting little to no risk for both the merchant and the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing began just four years after the world wide web was launched, originally popularized by well known companies such as CDNOW or Amazon.com. Google’s Adsense is also a very well known type of affiliated marketing, but is not really considered as true affiliate marketing as the adverts usually centers around the theme of the website they are displayed (known more as contextual advertising.) Google does not also directly sell a specific product, but generates money in other ways.

Affiliate marketing is highly cost-effective, and in effect costs both the advertiser and the affiliate nothing, while having the potential of bringing in a very large form of income for both parties. While pay per click (or cost-per-click) mentioned above can present a risk to the advertiser, the cost-per-sale (CPS) system has very little or no risk at all for both parties, and is therefore preferred.

Online merchants find affiliate marketing highly advantageous due to the fact that it presents little to no risk both for the merchant and the ‘affiliate.’ The way it works is that the affiliate earns a type of commission or fixed amount based on the number of sales the affiliate brings to the merchant, either through on-line links on the affiliates website – or through email, blogs, rss feeds and many other kinds of on-line communication. Some merchants (only about 1% of affiliate marketing) use a cost-per-click remuneration system, which simply means that the affiliate earns every time an internet searcher clicks on an advert on their site or email. However, due to fraudsters taking advantage of this method (creating ad-ware, sending spam, or useless indexing sites) this form of remuneration is not preferred and becomes too risky for merchants to use.

Affiliate marketing also bears no cost on the merchant in the original set-up – in other words, it costs nothing to place advertising banners on affiliate’s sites, and there is only a cost if a lead or sale has been generated (which is advantageous for all.) Merchants also get to set the parameters, and decide on the incentive schemes. Thus, it is a very inexpensive (but highly efficient way) to grow a business.

When an affiliate joins in with an e-commerce merchant of some sort (be it a subscription service, a shopping site etc…) payment is received through referrals done from the affiliate’s website – done through the following methods

1)Pay-per click systems basically, the affiliate displays adverts on their site and is paid when a customer or internet user clicks on that website

2)RSS feeds or blogs – even personal sites can sit under this category. Blogging is fast becoming a staple form of marketing and promotion, and affiliate marketing partners well with this form of online communication

3)Comparison sites and shopping directories – such as review sites or legit advertising sites

4)Loyalty sites – this is when a reward system is in place via a cash back or points back system (or charitable donations)

5)Coupon sites that focus strictly on marketing and promotions

6)Email lists – legit email lists to subscribers of the affiliate’s website etc – NOT spam

7)A registration path – when a person registers with a specific site, be it for a newsletter or subscription, offers from other companies are represented and advertised

8)Networks – there are many affiliate marketing networks. Some even function on a multi-tier or multi-level marketing sort of set up.

It’s a form of revenue sharing or commission based advertising. The term “affiliate marketing,” however, is often associated with network marketing or multi-level marketing and therefore many companies prefer to use the term “performance marketing”. Affiliate marketing is the most cost effective sort of marketing there is, and is actually incredibly efficient. For this reason, many companies (especially those that started in the early days of e-commerce) owe a tremendous amount to affiliate marketing (amazon.com is a good example) and it has now become normal for companies to include affiliate marketing in many of their plans.

There are three types of compensation methods that are associated with affiliated marketing. The first type is Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per Mil (CPM.) Basically, the affiliate earns by how many clicks the advertising on hisher site generates, or by just having the advert published on the website. But because of click fraud and many other questionable tactics, CPC is no longer the general form used for affiliate marketing. Generally, companies now either use CPA (Cost per Action) or CPS (Cost per Sale.) The first is based on how much the advert generates interest by the clicker to actually buy or register at the advertised site, the second is based strictly on sales. In other words, an affiliate is paid if the clicker actually purchases something on the advertised site.

All affiliate marketers are constantly looking for the ideal market that gives the biggest return on investment (ROI). Sometimes they think it is a secret formula that is available to them for a price. Actually, it is a little more involved than that. The way to success is tried and proven marketing practices involving dedication and hard work.There are strategies that have worked before in online marketing and they are continuing to work in the affiliate marketing scene of today. With these three top marketing tips, you should be able to able to increase your sales and thrive in affiliate marketing.

What are these three strategies?

1. Use unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Whatever you do, don’t lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding of what the product can do for them if they buy it. Also try to include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more or even to contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and they will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. If possible, position them at the very top right side of your page so that they simply cannot be missed. Try to create auto-responder messages (E-mail) that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box (Opt-in). According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen on your web page: either a closed sale or the prospect leaving the page. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified periods (auto-responder), you will remind them of the product they thought they wanted a little later, and this result in a closed sale for you. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life more easier and enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dump emails containing certain words into the spam folder before they can be read (Change the spelling of free if you use it – for example fr*ee or f*ree).

Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something valuable if they do not take advantage of your products and services. Remember to always over deliver on content and you will build a good reputation.

3. Get the right kind of traffic that is targeted specifically to your product. If a person who visits your website has no interest at all in what you are offering, they will make a hasty exit and never come back.

Write articles for publication in e-zines. Do a google search for article directories and e-zines. Make sure you put your area of interest in the search. That way you can locate publications that are focused upon your target customers and what you write just may grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.

Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or sign up for your services. If you can generate 1,000 targeted hits to your website daily, then you should make around 10 sales.

The strategies given above are achievable if you are willing to put in the work. It just requires a little time and effort on your part.