WebHostingBuzz.com Launches Affiliate Program

Avoiding problems and growing the business is what web hosting is all about and WebHostingBuzz.com was able to achieve both in the past 12 months. To further their reach as a hosting company WHB announced today that they will be providing affiliate incentives, competitive to their market.

Commission Type	Pay-Per-Sale: 40% for all sales you deliver.
Free Bonus	$10.00 USD - We will pay you just for signing up!
Payout Threshold	$100.00 USD - Minimum balance required for payout.
Payout Duration	Payments are made on the 15th of each month, for the previous month.

Get started with your own hosting affiliate program now, it's free, and they give you $10.00 just for signing up. WebHostingBuzz.com Affiliate Program

Top 10 Affiliates

AffiliateThing.com has announced it's top 10 affiliates for October and the list is quite impressive.

1. GameTap.com
   
2. Lillian Vernon
3. Payless ShoeSource
4. Hydra Network
5. eHealthInsurance
6. Orbitz
7. Art.com
8. zZounds.com
9. Advanta Bank Corp
10. Scholastic Inc.

The list contains enough niche's that you should be able to pick one to match your site. Although, better yet, check out a new industry and see how your site does, perhaps some untapped revenue hiding in the corners of the net. ;)

AvantLink Launches Affiliate Program

AvantLink Network starts new affiliate program for ProBoardShop.com, the premiere shop for serious boarders. If your site focuses on skateboarding, snowboarding, or wakeboarding then this affiliate program should be right up your ally.

On top of affiliating for top name gear AvantLink is also offering some seriously high payouts, up to 13% of each sale. The average sale size is over $240 and all commissinons honored on return sales. The real kicker for this affiliate program, that more need to adopt, is it's 120 day cookies. This means that if your referred visitor comes back for a purchase up to 120 days after clicking...you still get the credit!

Get going here.

Finding The Right Stuff

Super Wal-Marts and eBay have way too much in common for me to use them, I prefer niche stores and market places. Mega sites that offer a mix of stamps and cars cannot provide me the best service when it comes to either and that’s why I’ve started checking out MotoYard.com If it’s not a Motorcycle, ATV, or parts then you can’t find it at MotoYard.

MotoYard can is a great source for New and used motorcycles, motorcycle parts and motorcycle apparel. As a veteran of eBay and other auction sites I feel right at ease navigating through their listings. Listed on the front page was a 2003 Black & Red Limited Edition Yamaha Raptor 660, something I’ve been looking for all summer. Hmmm, may have to break down and start placing some bids. ;)

Google Forecast, Cloudy with a Chance of Confusion

Matt Cutts, in all his SEO rockstardom has posted on his blog the supposed Google forecast. Cutts is an artist that is able to dance around topics of concern and disappears when comments start floating in.

Nevertheless, he does attempt to make webmasters feel better about being in supplemental results. In addition, Google won't steal as much of your bandwidth next time it decides to crawl and cache your site. ;)

PPP on Today

PayPerPost.com stormed the Today show on Sept 27 in an attempt to steal airtime and get some ...sorta free... publicity. If nothing else, as evidenced by the video, they attracted attention of 10's of 20's of individuals on the street.

New York is great for finding individuals looking for free stuff like shirts, hats, signs...etc. lol I saw the video produced by the boys and girls of PPP and I have to say looks like they were having fun. Hey, if you can't have fun Guerilla Marketing what can you have fun at doing?

I'm still waiting on the exact statistics of how many advertisers/bloggers the Today Show attention brought in. However, I'm more concerned with how many others will attempt to emulate such a simple and brillaint idea, Kudos to the PPP team!

SERP Positioning & Percentages

From time to time certain forum posts get my attention, if not for their unique perspective, but their inability to be properly answered. The most recent post from DigitalPoint covers the probability of result pages and their click throughs.

I want to know out what percentage of clicks the 1st position gets vs the 2nd position vs the 3rd position, ect. for the top 20 SERPs

example:

1st position 68%
2nd position 52%
3rd position 55%
4th position 31%

Does anyone really know?

Unfortunately this post was made at the beginning of September without any responses and has recently been bumped. Still no response...does anyone have any better evidence of click throughs?

List'd Ebay Marketing

I remember the first taste of making money felt on the internet and it originated from eBay. This was during ebay's infancy, when there were mainly a community of niche sellers and the bigboys hadn't signed on yet, therefore pleasant looking auctions were not the buzz...so to speak.

However, times have changed and there is a lot of competition when selling anything on ebay(Or rather "it", as their advertisements go). For those of us looking to place items fast and make them visually appealing our options are limited to what ebay offers, unless you check out what Listd.com has to offer as a eBay listing tool.

Listd.com allows for quick and easy listings and geared towards the casual seller. Setting itself apart from other similar services is their easy user interface, multiple template choices, and unlimited photo hosting! With the backing of of Photobucket its hard to go wrong, start making your listings stand out and check out Listd.com.

In addition to offering phenomenal listing services Listd.com also serves up a phenomenal ecommerce blog. GetListd.com is a blog that covers the industry news and information to become a a success on the net.

Financial Literacy Affiliate Program

Are you familiar with Dave Ramsey? The National Financial Literacy Network offers similar products to help individuals rid themselves of debt. The package, which I always thought this was comical, costs an amazing $149.95. So explain to me how a company can be concerned with your financial well being and still be interested in taking 150 bones out of your pocket?

At any rate, financial mangement is big money, therefore NFLN has launched an affiliate program. The program is available to webmasters, bloggers, and newsletter producers are encouraged to help sell this Do-It-Yourself product.

The Dallas-based National Financial Literacy Network today launched their affiliate program that enables webmasters, bloggers and email newsletter distributors to remarket NFAN products and earn 25 percent from sales the affiliate generates. Those interested in becoming an affiliate can go to www.nfan.com and click on the “Become an Affiliate” link to register.

It's success is mentioned on the official website, but for webmasters, we're more interested in the commission we would receive. 25% is nothing to sneeze at, so get signed up if your blog and/or website offers any sort of financial advice.

PayPerPost Referrals

A few of my more loyal readers have already hooked me up by allowing me to refer them to PPP. PayPerPost is a network of bloggers and advertisers that allows people like you and me to earn revenue for the posts we make. Advertisers give us opportunities, we blog about the opportunities, advertisers pay PPP, and PPP pays us via paypal.

I'd like to sing up as many as possible, so if your not a member yet and live in the US just drop me your email in a comment. For every person that I refer to the network I earn $5, not a bad way to make money.

Currently there have been discussions that PPP will offer their affiliate program in the form of links. Although it is a bit cumbersome to exchange emails, it does open the blog up to some nice conversation and allows me to meet my readers.

NoFollow Affiliate Links

With my latest project moving full steam forward and having enjoyed the luxury of top placement in the SERPs, I discovered something disturbing. Within 48 hours of me placing my affiliate links up, the site that I was affiliating for moved ahead of me in the SERP. While this could be a coincidence, I may be contributing to their success...more than I want.

I want people to find me, not them!

Online affiliating can be a dangerous game, especially considering most businesses have larger ad budgets than their affiliates. When at the whim of search engine traffic, one can't be too careful when it comes to link juice. Let's hope that by building more specific backlinks with specific anchor text I can overcome the affiliate SERP ranking.

I need to do some more research into the effects of "nofollow" on affiliate links and whether it is even allowed by most programs. Once I have some more specific data I'll report back.

Learning SEO

SEO techniques change almost daily and keeping up with what the Search Engines are doing can be a full time job. The easiest way to keep up with such a fast paced market is to monitor weblogs.

Apogee offers a great SEO Blog, that offers up the latest in search engine optimization. Updated on a regular basis following this blog makes it easy to follow trends in SEO and PPC. Successful website designs starts with quality research, Apogee offers a great resource, so check it out!

Domain Name Affiliate Program

NetRegistry has launched a new affiliate program that helps remove the burden of offering support and other requirements of reselling hosting. This affiliate scheme was designed to help businesses that wanted to sell domain related services, but didn't have the expertise associated with the support side.

"This scheme really suits organisations that want to provide these services to customers but don't want to be responsible for ongoing billing. For example, a Web designer," he said. "In this way, resellers can maintain relationships with customers but we handle the back end."

I'm sure all are aware of the low price of domain names, therefore the affiliate commission is very low. However, earning $.10 per domain purchase can really add up and you receive the commission for the life of the customer. I've already purchased over 25 domains in my short existence in webmastering, imagine how many teh big dogs are purchasing.

The Adsense Alternative

Blogging on the internet is the latest and greatest thing and for some a method to get-rich-quick. The number one tool used by bloggers, especially those on BlogSpot.com, to make money is Google Adsense.

Google Adsense is contextual advertising, which essentially takes the guess work and leg work out of advertising on a site. The ads displayed are triggered by certain keywords in posts, therefore making the ads relevant. Phenomenal idea that works for some, but not most.

The problem with Google Adsense is first to receive a check you must have earned $100. Although this may not seem like a lot, it is whenever you are only receiving pennies on the click. This is typical CPC(cost per click) for bloggers and google wants it this way, their latest is smart pricing, which we'll get into at a later date.

The alternatives to Adsense are few and far between, but leading the way is PayPerPost.com, a beta project I've mentioned on a number of occasions. Essentially a blogger is paid to post about certain products, services, or sites in general to generate a buzz. Perhaps this is the next step in Blogger revenue building techniques, Adsense may just be dead for bloggers.

Positioning Your Affiliate Site

I've mentioned previously in this blog the importance of positioning your website for prelaunch products. Today I've learned just how important that really is, especially following major announcements.

The product I'm affiliating for made an official announcement yesterday stating the launch date and pricing info. Following the information my site was literally flooded with search engine traffic, so much so that it virtually shut down my servers. All of the traffic stimmed from keywords that I had been targetting, but was not heavily searched. Now that the info is available, the number of searches hunting for my keywords has went through the roof.

24hrs after this announcement and I am well on my way to affiliate stardom. As I compile the specifics I'll keep this blog updated.

The MySpace Marketer

Interesting enough, MySpace can be a phenomenal place to market any website that you own. However, creating a presence, a persona, or even a reputation can be difficult amongst the sea of sameness.

To help in the matter of setting your self apart from the rest, avatars are often used to help individualize people. It’s difficult however, for those without Photoshop skills, to create their own avatar or rendition of oneself on the internet. To help, TheDollPalace.com offers a number of avatars for you to create, personalize, and then use as avatars as you see fit.

Although the doll maker program can be used for alternative purposes, it most definitely can create a welcoming persona on MySpace. If your like me, you don’t like showing your face anywhere, especially internet social networks, so this offers a simple alternative.

Below is an example of what TheDollPalace.com is capable of creating, flashy and perfect for the MySpace crowd.

| |

With a flashy presence on MySpace individuals will be more likely to add you to their friends list. Therefore you will have a larger audience to market to once you start sending out those ever important myspace bulletins. My MySpace research is still undergoing testing, however, as of today it is a free source of traffic…looking very promising.

MySpace Advertising

MySpace, a popular social networking site(you should know this by now, duh!?), has a bohemeth of an audience to market to, putting it lightly. There are ways to tap into this resource, but use caution when moving forward.

For example, it's probably pointless, depending on your niche, to target any and every person on myspace. However, by doing searches on topics that cover your niche you can easily find a number of people to add as friends, for whom you will advertise to. Currently, I'm experimenting with users in the gaming industry and my ability to 'market' my affiliate site to them.

I'm keeping close tabs on the numbers and hope to be able to provide a decent resource for MySpace marketing techniques. One of the biggest problems to overcome is the number of indivduals using the service, that don't have money. Persistance pays off in numbers...right?

Paper Hanger

It seems like most days I'm busier than a one armed paper hanger, but I really shouldn't be. If the boss of our location was a little bit more in the managerial field I think things would be a little smoother.

ManagerAssistant.com offers a great program that helps with managerial duties and increase productivity. Their latest toolset features the ability to help with Employee Apprasials and Reviews. It'd be nice to get a raise every once in awhile in my 9-5, that is until my online affiliate plans take off. ;)

Affiliate Planning

When we talk about affiliate marketing we are talking about products that are readily available from specific vendors. However, what about getting a jump on the affiliate train and start building sites targeted to pre-release products?

I have created a site that is focusing entirely on a product that has yet to launch. There is a large buzz around the internet focusing on this product and potential launch dates have been announced. The benefit that I have is that my site is aged, has already been optimized, and is receiving several hundred hits daily for a very specific phrase and this phrase pays BIG.

Planning ahead and watching product markets that interest you can pay off in the long run. Target products or services that your interested in, build a site focused on this upcoming opportunity and promote, promote, promote. Eventually there will be venues for affiliating that product, that's when you start cashing in. Good luck and happy affiliating.

SEO, A Part of Your Affiliate Plan

Success on the internet takes many forms, however to get there it only takes one thing, traffic. The greatest source of traffic on the internet comes from Search Engines. SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is the optimization of your site so that it's listed at the top of SERPs. Finding a company that is qualified can be difficult, but if your looking for Search Engine Marketing in Austin, then I can recommend Apogee-Search.com.

Apogee-Search.com is the fastest growing SEO company in Texas and offers a number of different services. From Paid Search Advertising to Affiliate Marketing programs, Apogee-Search has the bases covered in regards to optimizing your site for traffic and ROI(Return on Investment). Get the traffic and start earning revenue, Apogee-Search can help.