We hear this term more and more lately, "affiliate marketing", but what actually makes someone an affiliate marketer ? How did he get that status ? Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing between a merchant and an affiliate who gets paid for referring or promoting the merchants products and services. It has gained more and more exposure because it has been proven to be cost-efficient and a way of attaining great profits. If you want to be an affiliate marketer and start earning nice solid streams of income, following the 7 most basic and easiest ways to start an affective affiliate marketing program will get you there.

1) Identify the one thing that interests you the most, and start monetizing it. It is best to go this way ensuring you will not get bored.

2) Understand branding as a very important step in your marketer career.

3) Look for good paying merchants and products or services that relate to your interests. (see point 1)

4) Choose the right product to sell, expensive products might not be as easy to sell as some other cheap ones, but with the right marketing strategies and sales techniques this could work.

5) Take the CR into consideration.

6) Be open minded. Keep your imagination gates open and never and I mean it, NEVER be afraid to try something new.

7 Use landing pages, and optimize them.

8) Embrace failure as you would embrace achievement, don't be afraid to loose, failure is the road to success.

Many affiliate marketers fail to understand this and when they don't have any sales they just quit, looking for other programs and repeat the same mistakes they did before. In conclusion, never give up on your goals, always follow them to the end.

The reason why affiliate marketing is considered to be so beneficial is because it usually represents a win-win situation for both the merchant and the publisher. Although there are much more benefits on the merchants side the publisher also has the liberty of choice a flexible working program and a work-at-home opportunity.

As a merchant you can enjoy the benefit of having a wider market to advertise to. Affiliate marketing will give the product or service the maximum exposure required that it might not receive by using other advertising techniques. Affiliate marketing is best described as the equivalent of having a bunch of people advertising your product. That bunch of people are actually the pillars for the publishers community.

As a publisher you will only get paid a certain commission if a customers purchases. Foremost among the benefits a publisher has is an easy way of making profits.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn and still work at home because :

- there are virtually no production costs;
- the product has been already advertised by the merchant you're just selling it;
- it's very simple to understand and work with;
- the possibilities are numerous;
- you can build a successful affiliate marketing business right in the comfort of your house;
- there's a minimum risk involved;

You will only have to worry about one single thing : finding prospects ; you don't have to worry about processing product shipping inventory payment processors or things like that - this is one of the reasons that makes it so great.

Because the power of the Internet has reached all of us finding a prospect isn't as hard as it used to be. Among millions of Internet users you can literally find thousands of prospects.By attracting more and more prospects you will also maximize your potential to earn a commission.

Bottom line

Affiliate marketing is an easy way to increase your income you can work at home in a comfortable environment while maximizing your revenues.

I could also have named this article "Ronaldinho, go home!"

So I was looking at the top videos of the day on YouTube when I see a video named "Hottie with skills", which I obvioulsy click to watch.

And this is what I see...



Now, I don't know what you think but I found it pretty impressive and enjoyable. But what I found even more impressive is the last image of the video, an ad for the site uMoviez.com

It's not the first time I see videos with this site at the end which makes me thing these people are working hard to hit YouTube's most viewed videos of the day and they are obviously succeeding!

This video was posted yesterday, July 16. So it's online since less than 24 hours and YouTube counted already 180,000+ views of the video. That's a looot of people!

Now, is this actually bringing them any traffic will you ask. Well, looking at their Alexa stats, it seems it does.



If only 1% of the users who have seen the video actually go to their site, that's still 1,800 free visitors they will receive in just a few hours. And the video will probably remain there for quite longer.

This plus the fact they are probably adding hundreds of videos to YouTube everyday, they must drive a nice amount of traffic to their site.

I don't know if that traffic is worth the effort, but at least it's worth a try!
The beauty of it is that this video will spread on the Internet forever with their URL at the end!

*** EDIT: The video has now been removed by YouTube, so it looks like they don't like that too much.

In this tutorial, I will try to give you some information on how to configure your campaigns with ExoClick and optimize them for the best conversions.

Account Funding

Note that ExoClick is only working with pre-payments. You decide what you want to pay and when you want to pay it. The minimum amount is $10
Today, we accept payments through Paypal, credit card, ePassporte and wire transfer. (Minimum amount for wire transfer is $500)

New Campaign

Once your account is funded, you can start creating campaigns. There is no limitation on the number of campaigns you can create.



There is 3 main sections for the creation of a campaign.

1. The campaign information.

Name of the campaign: This is just a name for you to remember what you are targeting in this campaign. Example: "MyProduct.com - Blogging Category - All countries"

CPC: Fixed "Cost Per Click" price you want to pay. If you want to bid $0.15 for this campaign, then you should enter 15. (Minimum bid is only $0.01)

Maximum number of Clicks: Number of clicks you want to receive for this campaign. You can just set a very high number if you don't want to have any limitation.

Ad type: Type of advertising you want to set. For now, you can choose between text or banner.

2. The targeting

This section is very important as this is where you configure WHERE your ad will appear.

2.1 Categories: Selecting a category is an easy way of getting wide exposure as your ad will be shown for that full category!
If you select some sub-categories, your ad will be shown on the selected sub-categories only.

I strongly recommend to select a category, and no sub-categories.

2.2 Countries: By default, there is no countries selected, which means your ad will be shown EVERYWHERE. If you want to restrict the geo-localization of your ad, just select the countries where you want your ad to be shown. (For selecting multiple countries, just keep the key "CTRL" pressed and select the countries you want)

2.3 Keywords: Add here your list of keywords so your ad will be shown on these searches. Note that if you selected a category, you can leave the keywords field empty.

2.4 Sites: By default, there is no sites selected, which means your ad will be shown on the full network. If you want to display your ad only on specific sites, then enter here the list of hostnames.

Example:
blog.exoclick.com
loudsearch.com
loveseeking.net

Tip 1, CATCH-ALL traffic: You can buy traffic from the FULL Network by using the sign "%" in the keywords list. By doing so, you ad will appear for all keywords, all categories, all sites, as far as your bid is sufficient. This is the maximum exposure you can get.

Tip 2, dynamic ad: You can use the tag "{keyword}" in the title and description of your ads to replace dynamically the tag by the search term. E.g. if you set the title of your ad as "{keyword} ringtones" and someone search for "Dido", the title of your ad will be "Dido ringtones".

3. Advertisement data

This is what the surfers will see.

Title: Enter the title of your ad. Try to make it as short and catchy as possible!

Text: Description of your ad.

URL: Where the surfer will be sent. Make sure your URL start by "http://"

URL to display: As your real URL can look complicate, with long parameters, etc... you can enter here a more friendly URL that the surfers will see. The real URL will not be shown.

I hope this tutorial was helpful and shed some light on the campaigns creation. If you still have some problems, then you know where to reach us.