Affiliate Marketing Resources

Affiliate marketing takes the risk away. It can also be started with next to 0 money. Affiliate marketing can be quite a lucrative venture. If you have a natural knack for sales or marketing and are self motivated and prepared to work hard then an affiliate marketing scheme could be a wise move for you.

Almost daily, you see advertised, courses and seminars that claim to hold the secret of instant wealth. By attending this course you will have all of the tools you need to get your business off the ground and become a millionaire. Those who want to start their own affiliate marketing business often attend these thinking that they will help their business thrive.

Courses and seminars more often then not, disappoint. First, these courses and seminars are usually quite expensive. You have the course or seminar fee. Plus any travel and hotel costs. Most of these are held in heavy tourist destinations around the country. Second, the person giving the seminar or course is usually on some kind of a promotional tour. While they do give out information at the course or seminar, their true goal is to sell you their latest book or software. The truth be told, everything you learned from that seminar was probably written in their book. You could have saved thousands if you had just bough their book and read it rather than shelling out for this course.

While it is true that you should educate yourself in affiliate marketing, the best resources are not courses. However, books are. By simply reading up on affiliate marketing, you can gain wonderful insights and save loads of money. By simply looking on retail sites such as Amazon or EBay, you can get hundred of titles on the subject. There are loads of step by step guides available on how to get your affiliate marketing business going and how to build it up.

Another great resource for affiliate marketing is the internet. Simply by typing affiliate marketing into any major search engine, loads of information comes up. There are plenty of free courses online that you can take on the subject if you are determined. Read through the information available to you for nothing. Chances are a course or a seminar won’t teach you anymore than what you can learn online for free.

Magazines and news letters are fantastic resources for affiliate marketing. Newsletters are generally free and contain good, valuable information about particular programs. You’ll hear account from people who are working in affiliate marketing. Their advice is worth having being that they are doing now what you want to be doing in the near future.

Finally, one of the advantages of joining an affiliate marketing program is the support that you receive. Any legitimate company should want you to succeed. The more profit you make, they better for them. They should have their own advice and support network that is available to you. This could be in the form of an agent whom you can contact or advertising materials. They may offer a wide variety of things to help you build your business. They can be one of the most important resources for you to rely on.

If you are considering a career in affiliate marketing, then you should find out what you are getting yourself into. Don’t waste money on expensive seminars and courses. Look for books, newsletters, online information and the companies themselves. Some of the best information is available to you for free

Firepow Software Review

If you've heard about this new blogging software called Firepow around the web, you're not alone.

Basically Firepow is a blogging software but with a whole lot of features
stacked on top of it... features that seem to make it a pretty darn interesting little (or big) tool.

It's based on wordpress, and begins by installing you a nice wp blog - in fact from what I can tell, REALLY nice - you can create your own blog theme from scratch if you want, with the advanced theme generator and then select from a list of all the plugins under the sun, to have installed and activated on your blog with no further action from you.

Then you can go about adding your content - you can set the content to appear on schedules, including into the future, plus you can take advantage of other people's content via various means not disclosed yet...

It also seems to have a focus on video content but I'm not quite sure in what capacity yet - in any case, more relevant video on your site can only be a good thing - oh and as well - they just released that there will be an "add camtasia video plugin" so you can easily get camtasia vids on your blog without using youtube... which if you're in internet/software niches is a BIG plus.

Anyway after your blog is looking good with all the cool content, Firepow helps you generate traffic and promote your site around the web. At the moment the only traffic tactic I've seen is the promotion of your site through an in house network of blogs owned by Andrew which you can use to obtain links and a few extra visitors.

I've also heard mention of social bookmarking and rss feed promotion but we can't be sure about what capacity these tools take.

Finally Firepow apparently lets you manage your sites too. You can view and make changes to your multiple sites from the one control panel, as well as monitor certain aspects of them.

One plugin we saw released was one that allows a user to split test variations of posts you make to see what generates the most click throughs. That alone makes this product exciting for me.

Even though what we've seen so far seems only a fraction of what this software will be capable of.

If you want to check out more of Firepow for yourself, click here.

Affiliate Marketing Rules

So you have been wanting to get into affiliate marketing, and want to know the rules. You have your website and or blog all set up and ready to go. You have chosen your niche and market that you want to promote and make money off of. You just need links to start making money. Promoting other’s services and products is not something that is difficult to do. However, you will find that with all of the many companies that offer affiliate programs, and referral options, they all have their own rules that you must follow.

Affiliate marketing is pretty easy to follow, that is unless you have many different programs that you are a part of. When you start getting so many that you cannot remember the rules, or the guidelines that you have to follow, you might have a problem. This is because the rules for affiliate programs are as different as the companies. Each company is allowed to make their own rules. However, you might see many similarities. That does not mean that they are copying one another, or cloning their affiliate program so to speak, but yet it means that they have the same rules.

Affiliate marketing rules can be so very different. They can range from not mentioning the brand names that they sell anywhere on your website, to not have that particular market in your website URL. Because they are so different for each program and company that you promote, you are going to have to be sure that you read each one well and make sure that you understand it fully. If you all ready have your URL for your website, you may not be able to participate in some of the affiliate programs. This is because you will not meet the requirements for the rules.

Another rule that you are going to see often when you are into affiliate marketing is the page rank rule. Some of the companies that will allow you to promote their services or products will not want you to have a higher page rank than they do. Nor will they allow you to have a website that is higher in the search engine rankings. For example, if you were promoting coffee, and you wanted to become an affiliate for Folgers coffee. Your website would not be able to come up above the official Folgers coffee website in the search engine results when coffee, or Folgers coffee is used as the search term. The companies that have this rule in place for their affiliate marketing programs feel as if your website were higher than theirs for the product that they are selling, that it would hurt their business tremendously. And, it just might. They would rather have the straight sales any day, than the commissioned sales. Who wouldn’t?

Keeping a spreadsheet of the affiliate marketing programs that you are a part of and their rules is a great idea. This way you are never confused and know just where you need to stand to be a part of that program. This is the best thing that you can do for your affiliate marketing business. Not only that, you will also find that some of the sites that have broken rules and have been caught have resulted in law suits. Cover your tracks and make sure that you are following the rules that are set by that company for the best results.

You will also find that there is a thing that is called affiliate marketing software. If you can find a program that fits your needs and will help you keep everything straight, you may not have to worry about keeping track of them yourself. Use your software to keep track and make sure that you are doing your affiliate marketing the right way. Your efforts will pay off eventually, and you will be glad that you went by the book and followed the necessary affiliate marketing rules