Well, I am going to correct this sometime in the future, but before I should agree with one statement. Yes, best paying Affiliate Programs are fro the different sector or niche. In fact even very big companies like William Hill can pay you more than 50% (just listen to this, more than half!) of the total money they receive from your referral link. In fact there are two most profitable affiliate programs known – sex and gambling. I am not going to discuss or help with the first one – I strongly dislike sex and especially porn industry (call me old-fashioned if you like!), then second one – gambling should not be omitted.

Responsible gambling is something of an interactive entertainment, and therefore should be included in the Affiliate Programs discussion. At the same time I would recommend to go with well established household names of the industry and this will allow you and your customers to avoid bitter disappointments.

The best gambling affiliate program I have seen is below:

To be honest the revenue share they are offering is amazing. You can get up-to 70% of the revenue from a client which means if your client puts £100 into the game, then £70 is actually yours. Unlike many other industries this revenue is often recurring, and you keep your client for as long as he actively plays. So sign up for the program above (and behind that affiliate program is William Hill, which is good enough by itself) and start promoting.

The only thing, please don’t forget to put “Gamble Responsibly” somewhere in your promotional texts and give links to the counselling services somewhere in your website. This is what I call a responsible affiliate marketing campaign.

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This is not an easy question to answer. Therefore I would run a whole series of articles and this one being just an introduction.

First of all you might try and use both PPC and Affiliate. But this has it’s advantages and disadvantages. For example, let’s assume you are blogging about a product which costs 100 pounds. Many of bloggers that try to monetise do usually start with reviews, product blogging or similar. We will discuss it in more details in the future articles.

Now, before making your decision you should get your calculations right. Here we would only operate with estimates. Product that costs £100 pounds usually gives you commission of £6-£7 per sale.





How much it could give you in Adsense? It is not difficult to check. Search Google for “google keyword tool”. The firs result will take you to a keyword tool itself, where you should type your product name (e.g. iPod), enter captcha (letters that are used to check that the user is actually a human) and click Search. On the top of the results page you will see “Columns”, click on it and select “Estimated Avg. CPC”, where CPC stands for Cost Per Click. Click on Save. Your last column will now show a number (in our case it is now £0.89 but it changes on a daily basis). This number means that Google suggest Advertisers to pay £0.89 to have their ad placed. It doesn’t mean that you will get this amount if someone clicks on the ad, Google should take it’s share first. Therefore if you are estimating your earnings then around £0.40 earning per click would be a realistic estimate.


 

Conclusion: we have estimated our possible profits from single sale at £6 and from single click at £0.40. In my next article we would do some more calculations to get closer to the real-life situation.

To be continued…

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2. Affiliate Marketing – Amazon vs Affiliate Window
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Well, this is my short answer: I would not trust a company that wants my name, address and bank details prior to the signup. Sorry, people, I would like to test you before I give so much personal and sensitive information. I would preffer business model implemented by Chitika, even if it doesn’t look as polished as some others.

If company wants to pay you then it is rarely so desperate to get all your payment details prior to the due date.

If it is a mistake, then it can be costly to the Netklix business model. If they want people to check their service then they should at least give an alternative payment rout (e.g. Cheque or PayPal). I am not prejudice against the Netklix whatsoever, the above is simply my initial impression. And it was not in favour of Netklix. Therefore I am not going to test it or try it – sorry.

Your opinion might differ, so it is up to you to decide. My testing for the moment would still be based on Chitika.

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1. Adsense Alternatives
2. Paid Surveys

For example, if you have three domains watches.co.uk, rings.co.uk, mobiles.co.uk (Watches, mobiles and rings, hmm…, I wish I had them all, in that case I wouldn’t be typing tutorials now).

First what you should do is to get yourself a web hosting account. I will base this tutorial on my trusty host for many years Site5. And if you want you can sign-up with them using my affiliate link. See, I am not masking it, I am writing a tutorial so if you find it useful and decide to get yourself hosting package, then why not let me earn few pennies, especially if it doesn’t cost you anything.

Where was I? Yes, Site5. I have one of my reseller accounts with them therefore “sold” myself a shared hosting package with 10 addon domain. Shared hosting is what most people get and addon domains is way of hosting many sites on one account with one cPanel (control panel).

When you buy a hosting, you either buy a domain from Site5 or use one of your own domains by changing nameservers. Let’s say we use watches.co.uk as our main domain with username watches. In that case a special folder is created in your root directory

/home/watches/public_html

This is where we are going to upload our Datafeed studio files. After everything is uploaded and installed (I am not going to retype installation instructions here, just read-as-you go or check dfstudio docs), you register your first site in admin menu

watches.co.uk.

TIP. In configurations, if asked about URL, omit the www bit, e.g. enter http://watches.co.uk. There are some glitches if you use www, which are fixable but require more advanced techniques.





Now it is time to upload Datafeeds. Please upload feeds for all your domains, e.g. merchants for watches, rings and mobiles into this single install. To make your watches.co.uk display only watches, edit categories displayed in site menu and un-check ALL, selecting only watch related. You can also create your own dynamic categories and replace merchant’s own, as you find convenient.

Next in your cPanel select Addon domains and configure your next domain, e.g. mobiles.co.uk with a username watches. What would happen, a directory would be created in your root

/home/watches/public_html/mobiles.co.uk

From this stage Martin writes in his Wiki how to configure everything using shell access. But not many average affiliate webmasters would feel comfortable using shell / bash, and not many hosts would be happy giving you full shell / root access by default. Therefore I will show you how to do it WITHOUT shell enabled on your account.

First of all, use File Manger in your cPanel and navigate to

www or public_html

directory in your root folder. Do not touch anything else! In the right-hand pane check the

mobiles.co.uk

folder and click delete button on the top menu. Make sure that only mobiles.co.uk folder is checked, otherwise you might dramatically mess your service.

Now, when the folder is deleted (make sure it’s gone from both public_html and www directories) create a text file in your Notepad and copy the following line there

<?php symlink(‘/home/watches/public_html’, ‘/home/watches/public_html/mobiles.co.uk’); ?>

Don’t forget to replace “watches” and “mobiles” with your own user and domain names.

Save the text file with .php extension e.g. symlink.php and upload into /home/watches/public_html directory. Then point your browser to

http://watches.co.uk/symlink.php

(replace watches by your own domain). If you just see a blank page and no error messages, then the job is most probably done with symbolic link being created.

Log into the amin are in watches.co.uk and add mobiles.co.uk under configure sites option. Select categories required from categories menu or create dynamic ones whichever you find easier. Done! Two different websites running from single install.

Just do the same with your second, third, etc. addon domain.

As you can see, we have avoided using bash and scary terminal windows but still have a working multisite setup. Enjoy!

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First we should select a colour scheme for our shop. Go to the colours section and keep in mind few simple rules. If your shop is made for more mature customer base then chose more warm colours like different shades of orange (like on our tutorial site). For younger buyers choose very dark (black, very dark blue, very dark terracotta) background, silver-grey navigation and white main shop window. If your shop is universal the colour scheme should be white-light blue or white-gray.

Now it is time to fill our new shops with products. Using “sitewide keyword” is not a good idea, Amazon API returns lots of irrelevant results that spoil the overall impression. Therefore you should experiment in the category and use the “-“ sign to eliminate irrelevant products. For example if you want to sell Western Digital hard disks and type it into the keyword section, the resulted selection of products always includes some other products e.g. from Iomega. Therefore check you category one by one until you eliminate all irrelevant results by putting something like [western digital hard drive –iomega –buffalo] until only products that you intend to sell are included in the category.

Do this exercise for all categories. The reason is simple – keyword saturation for relevant results is much higher as well as a shopping experience for your customers is much better.

As you can see we are already learning some basic SEO. Now second and very important tip. I call it singular – plural play. All your categories have an entry called Cat ID, this is also important entry it should not be filled with random staff like cat1, cat2, etc. Use only relevant wording but in following way: if you are selling Hard Drives then put Cat ID as harddrive and Cat Name as Hard Drives. As you can see there is a singular word in ID and plural in the name. This is also important for our overall SEO solution for the standalone shop.

…to be continued

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1. Affiliate Marketing Tutorial – Standalone Amazon Shop
2. Daily Tip – New Category
3. Affiliate Marketing – Amazon vs Affiliate Window

Installation is very simple, but please note, if you want to use this software avoid “easy hosts” and use classic cPanel hosting companies. After uploading the package you should do some initial configuration. We have already spoken about obtaining Amazon associate account and you should take a note of BOTH (!) of your API keys as they are going to be inserted into the AoM.

Point your browser to yourdomain/admin.php and select login details. Keep your login name and password secure. After selection you can now login into your admin area and first of all choose the country you are building your shop for (in our case – UK) and insert all Amazon IDs. After pressing “Save” button your initial configuration is ready and you can start inserting products into your shop.

AoM itself has busy and helpful forum where you can ask all sorts of technical questions and find solutions to problems. In fact, I am not going to discuss actual settings in much detail here but I am going to show how to make your thin affiliate shop to do well in SERPs. If you check google.co.uk for the keyword combination feet warmers, you would see that our tutorial site is number one. This is the main idea of the tutorial – technical questions are being discussed all over the Internet but I want to show you that the standalone affiliate shop could actually be set and optimized in a way that it would bring you organic traffic and therefore customers. Organic traffic is when people type something in the search engine and find your site. This is the best way of obtaining customers as it doesn’t cost you anything but your time and effort. Even without much advanced SEO work it is still possible.



Many Internet gurus are saying that a thin affiliate shop would never bring good organic traffic simply because it would be treated as “duplicate content” and therefore go to the “supplemental pages” section. As you can see it is not true, thin affiliate site that we have selected for our tutorial is not even using built-in SEO options but still tops the SERP.

I am going to reveal some of the secrets of how this could be achieved. Watch this space.

…to be continued

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1. Affiliate Marketing Tutorial – Selecting Products for Your Amazon Shop
2. Standalone Affiliate Shops
3. Affiliate Marketing – Amazon vs Affiliate Window

The problem is, once site goes down for a while (and if the site is relatively new), then it’s position in search engine results page drops. And to understand is it dropping because the site is inaccessible or because search engines treat site as supplementary is pretty difficult. This is why the website should be clean and responsive for a while to get the results right.

Now the main question: which affiliate system to use? I know many people would not change Amazon program for anything else, others say that the Affiliate Window is an absolute leader in the UK.

Here we can do simple pros and cons and then you decide what to use.

Amazon.
Pros: Great variety of products, very good prices, lots of information can be retrieved using simple API method, populating your site is easy, the name is one of the most trusted, etc.
Cons: Commission levels are not so good and, most important; whatever you sell could not bring you more than 7 pounds.

The latest is a big NO if you want to use Amazon affiliate for any serious items like large plasma TVs, laptops, etc. Generally speaking, anything that costs more that 100 pounds should not be included because any other affiliate system would pay you much more.

Affiliate Window.
Pros: Huge selection of retailers, products from virtually all niches could be found including travel, hotels, etc., good commission rates.
Cons: They depend on feeds and therefore have no control over content, images, etc. Often feeds are broken and “no image available” icon spoils even otherwise nice looking sites.

Therefore Affiliate Window shops require some more effort and control from your side.

Now, my second tutorial site is being transferred to a cPanel host and once the search engines pick it up again, we will continue with the tutorial.

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I have replied to some mails but now decided to clarify the situation here as well. And I am not going to say that I was busy (well, I WAS, but this is not an excuse), the reason is – one of tutorial sites I’ve made earlier went belly-up simply because the hosting company introduced some changes to the Apache configuration, recompiled PHP and Zend Optimizer was disabled. I don’t know why they did it, but I recompiled my own PHP again, site went live and in a week time – same story. The situation started to get on my nerves and I decided to move hosting which requires some extra work and time.

Please, stay tuned, if I said that the tutorial will be published here, then it will!

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After researching the market and testing quite a few offerings, I’ve decided to use two of them and show to my readers how they could make a working Affiliate Shop without putting to much work (shame, shame…) into design and implementation.

We are going to test two most popular Affiliate networks in the UK: Amazon and Affiliate Window. For Amazon I’ve selected

Associate-O-Matic script, and for Affiliate Window the Datafeed Studio.

I am NOT going to compare these two scripts, as they would be used in a different manner and on different networks. But I would compare the networks themselves and we would check or Pros and Cons on building particular type of Affiliate Shops.

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3. Affiliate Marketing Tutorial – Selecting Products for Your Amazon Shop