Generating an income as an affiliate is the fastest and easiest way to make money online. Your only activity is promoting products and services, so you can focus all your energy on perfecting your marketing.

But don’t follow the crowd, use affiliate strategies that set you apart from the average affiliate marketer.

Affiliate Strategy #1

Use a proper domain name with a URL redirect to your affiliate program. It gets better click through ratios and people don’t suspect it’s an affiliate link. And it’s easy to set up. If you order a domain name from NameCheap.com, login to your account and select URL forwarding. Enter your affiliate link into the form and you’re done.

When your prospect clicks on YourDomainName.com they are automatically taken to the affiliate product or service you’re promoting. More of your prospects will click on your link and you will make more sales

Affiliate Strategy #2

Write articles and post them in article directories. Although this is nothing new, add your link from strategy 1 and you’ll see more readers clicking through to your affiliate website.

Affiliate Strategy #3

Record your articles as MP3s and post them on Podcast directory sites. This is a perfect example of re-purposing your material. Depending on the length of your article it can take you a couple minutes to record it as an MP3, then post it to podcast directories.

Make sure you remind people how to get to your website. In addition to simply telling people what your website URL is, spell it out for them letter by letter. It also helps when you’re spelling if you use the military alphabet, for example, A for Alpha, B for Bravo, C for Charlie. The easier you make it for people to get to your website, the more sales you’ll make.

These 3 strategies will increase your sales almost overnight, but there are hundreds of strategies you can quickly put into place to increase your sales exponentially.

Online affiliate marketing is a fast and easy way to start an online (home) business and make money on the internet. Affiliate marketing simply means that you promote someone else’s product or service and get a share of the profits made from your promotion. The clue is to find good and profitable “hot” products or services to promote, provided by reliable merchants.

Advantages with online affiliate marketing:

• You don’t need your own products
• You don’t have to take orders – or collect money
• No need to handle or ship a product
• You won’t have to deal with customers
• Affiliate programs are (normally) free to join

What you do as an affiliate (also called the publisher, or reseller) is display ads, text links, or banners on your website or blog, or in an email campaign. Then you get paid a commission by the merchant (advertiser) when a visitor takes a specific action, such as making a purchase, subscribing to a service or giving contact information.

Affiliate Commissions range from as little as 2% for high ticket items up to 75% of the selling price for ebooks, software and other types of digital downloadable goods. For referring a lead (prospect, potential customer) to a merchant, you are paid a fixed commission whether the lead does business with the merchant or not.

Most affiliate merchants pay out commissions once a month or once every two weeks. Some even pay instantly as soon as a sale has been made (it goes automatically through the PayPal payment service). So, online affiliate marketing can create a continuous stream of income when done right.

Unlike all the other Entre Institute reviews out there this was done by someone who know what they are talking about.

No Goods or Payment

The great advantage of affiliate online marketing is that there is no hassle mailing goods to customers, taking payments etc. You just send customers to the company, and the company sends you money in return. Clean and easy!

There are thousands of companies that would like you to promote their products or services, and there are hundreds if not thousands of business affiliate programs designed to make it easy for people to promote them and eventually make money.

You can market the product(s) through your own website or blog, or just by advertising your affiliate link, or email your subscriber list if you have one. Although it is possible to do online affiliate marketing without a website of your own, I do recommend that you set up one, for several reasons.

Create a Website

Your own website is a useful “tool” when doing affiliate business. Firstly, some merchants require that affiliates own a website to be approved. Also, some “ready-made” affiliate business programs imply that you have a website.

Secondly, with a website, you can establish trust and credibility with potential buyers that visit your site, which is very important to get them to click on your affiliate links.

Thirdly, you can promote multiple products on a website, probably more than you could afford to advertise on Google! With your own website it’s much easier to pursue different online affiliate business opportunities.

The term “niche marketing” could be defined as a market within a market; for a fruit vendor niche marketing would be to sell only oranges. Manufacturers and marketers work closely together to identify the preferences of mainstream consumers. Many of the products that we buy today were geared toward this market in the past.

Niche marketing to the forefront

But consumer preferences have changed over the last decade and now manufacturers are creating products and services geared to smaller groups. For instance Coca-Cola is probably the best-known soft drink in the world. Over the past 20 years they have introduced at least 10 different varieties of Coca-Cola, the latest being a “Diet Coke Plus” which is aimed at the more health conscious individual. This variety of Coca-Cola boasts certain nutrients that are important to the body’s healthy functioning.

The value of niche marketing is that it allows you to concentrate all of your efforts on catering to a specific group. By focusing your attention on the preferences of a certain group of people you will be able to customize your marketing and advertising to speak to them in their language, using the images they identify with, in the places that they frequent and through the medium they prefer.

Identify your target audience

Identifying your buyers for your product or service with as much detail as possible is the essence of niche marketing. In addition to creating a website that functions properly and gives your visitors the information they need to make the sale, you can earn income through affiliate marketing links and Google Ad Sense contextual advertising.

Generating income through Affiliate links & Google Ad Sense

Contextual advertising has become extremely popular and lucrative for many websites on the Internet. Google is the leader in this area providing contextual ads that link to your copy and produce a link to related products or services on your website.

Google offers three payment options

Cost per click ads-where you get paid every time someone clicks on an ad

Cost per action ads-payment is made every time someone follows a link and takes a predetermined action

Google AdSense ads have proved to be big a money making opportunity for many people. There are several instances of people making upward of $ 100,000 per year. But it is not easy. You have to attract a large audience to make this happen.

Google generally makes payment every month through check, or electronic transfer.

Affiliate marketing text links can be used in the same way throughout your content on your site. For instance Commission Junction offers hundreds of merchants in different categories that will supply text link advertising for you to use on your website and in your e-mail marketing. If you’re selling bed and bath linens you would choose affiliate marketing programs that are related to your product.

One of the major complaints of website visitors today is the amount of advertising instead of valuable information about the products or services they want to buy. The other problem is that in many cases the advertising is totally unrelated to the products or services on the website. Niche marketing gives you a good opportunity to become dominant in your area and excel in your marketing to a specific group.

By using the multimedia capability of the Internet, you can reach your buyers through video, audio and text promotions tailored to their interests and their needs. If you create content around your affiliate marketing text links your website visitors will not feel overwhelmed by advertising.