If you aren’t participating in some type of Affiliate Marketing program, you really are missing out on the endless possibilities of residual income. It is those endless possibilities, however, that create the biggest problem when its time to sort through the hundreds of thousands of Internet opportunities and e-books. If you are not careful, rather than finding valid opportunities and helpful e-books, what you’ll end up with are scams. If you jump in without a keen eye, or if you act too quickly, on those “one-time-offer” schemes, you could end up investing unnecessary dollars to programs that either don’t work or that don’t do anything you couldn’t have done yourself for free. Affiliate marketing is one of the few business ventures that you really can do with little or no monetary investment. However, not many people think of their time as an investment. This is a big mistake, because time, is your most precious resource. It is non-renewable ? once it’s gone, it NEVER comes back. This is why you’ve heard “time is money” countless of times ? however, time is more valuable than money. Consider the millionaire on his deathbed ? he has loads of money, but no time, and no amount of money can buy him more time. So use it wisely. Before you decide on any affiliate venture consider how much time you have on your hands and what you can afford to invest. Choose a program that best suits the time you have available. If you have a lot of time, you will save money, but will need to put in a lot of footwork, researching, and promoting. If you have very little time, you will need to invest some money in either a program that does most of the work for you or you will need to invest in some advertisement for promotions and traffic building of your blog or site. (Don’t have a blog? Set up a free one at Blogger. com. Want to set up a free website? Try Weeby. com. Most traffic building ebooks that you find online will promise to teach you how to write the best articles for Search Engine Optimization, and they will claim that this method is the best because it increases your website or blog’s search engine ranking and allows people searching for information that pertains to your topic to find you own their own. I don’t totally discount this method, functioning at its best; it can bring many unsolicited potential customers to your site. What I’ve discovered is that some e-books forget to mention that you will need to submit your site to the various search engines ? an important step if you plan on being discovered via a search engine. If they do mention this step it is often accompanied with a price guaranteeing quick results, but this is something you can do own your own for free and I’ve discovered it doesn’t take weeks like they’ll tell you. I’ve found AddMe. com to be extremely helpful with this. The downside to relying on search engine optimization and rankings, however, is that it takes an uncertain amount of time to get a high ranking. And such rankings are unstable ? at any moment, things can change and suddenly your site is no longer appearing on the first two pages of a keyword search, which is the optimum position since people don’t often go past the first couple of result pages. Consider your own Google search habits – I rarely go beyond the first page of results. So what other methods are there? Some e-books suggest that you post your blog or site information on other blogs, various webgroups (ie. Yahoo Groups), and social sites, like Facebok or Twitter. Basically you’re trying to get information about your blog or site in as many places as possible to increase your chances of being discovered by potential customers. What this also does is increase your chances of being found via search engines like Google by relying on the rankings of the various sites you’ve posted your blog or site to. These methods have their usefulness, but they are time consuming. Methods I’ve discovered to be simultaneously cost effective and time efficient are those explained in Harvey Segal’s free e-book The Ultimate Supertip. You can read more about it at The Affiliate Marketer’s Help Desk at: http://affiliate-helpdesk. blogspot. com.
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