Get HtmlThe earliest Mother’s Day commemorations date back to ancient Greece and the spring celebrations held in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. Today, the second Sunday in May is set aside to honor all of the special mother’s who have touched our lives in ways untold. Mother’s Day is also a huge sales and commissionable event for our Gemorie affiliates so roll out your best affiliate strategies and promote beautiful gemstone jewelry from Gemorie.com. Gemorie.com features the latest and trendiest jewelry designs that your visitors, subscribers, fans, and followers will absolutely love. And the deals are amazing at Gemorie!

Be sure to promote up to 40% OFF more than 142 select items for Mother’s Day using the text ads and banners from your CJ account.

Get Html

Affiliate marketing is a great way for anyone with a website, blog, Facebook page, or Twitter account to earn extra money through the Internet. It’s really easy to get started and start growing your affiliate marketing empire. I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss some ways any ambitious affiliate marketer can maximize their efforts and start generating revenue with their time spent online.

The first step most affiliate marketers take is to launch a website or blog. I recommend a 100% free Blogger.com website. All you need is a gmail account and you can launch your first blog on Blogger.com about whatever you want. Pick a “niche” that you know something about or are passionate about. For instance, if you are an avid gardener, launch a gardening blog. If you are really into politics, launch a political blog. Once your blog site is live, you can apply to some “affiliate networks” where you can access companies you want to partner with. Then, you just need to add those company’s banner ads or links to your website and you are in the game! So here are some tips and strategies to start building up your affiliate marketing presence and earning money on the Internet doing many of the same things you are already doing like posting content and interacting on social networks.

1. Be timely – during various times of year, i.e. New Year, Spring, Summer, Fall, and the Holidays, people are shopping online or looking for services that match those times of year, therefore the traffic volume surges for products relevant to those times. For instance, in the beginning of the year people are looking to do New Years resolution oriented things like: lose weight, stop smoking, find love, and get healthier, so you should be ramped up with your promotions with companies that are in those niches. Similarly, in the summer, people are looking to slim down, vacation, and buy products like swimwear, sunglasses, and travel packages, so you be affiliating with companies that sell these types of products or services. You have to start your promotions some time prior to the season hitting so you are early with content as opposed to putting it up last second, that way you can plant the seed in your visitors’ heads about what they might be wanting coming up in the calender year. Since content is the key to getting free traffic, make sure you are posting fresh content daily on your website or as frequently as you can. Stay away from re-publishing content already on the Internet, because the search engines don’t respect it and you won’t get much traffic. Once you join some affiliate programs, they will start sending you deals and promotions that you can turn around and make a post about on your blog, which you can then share the url to that page on your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and anywhere else you spend time socially. This generates repeat traffic back to your site.

2. Building Your Subscriber List – make sure you are prominently positioning “sticky” items in your blog layout such as: a newsletter sign-up box, Twitter account, and Facebook Fan Page widget in order to increase the overall rate at which you gain new subscribers from your traffic. This is always a good idea because you can re-market to those people, which become your Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and email subscribers during the year. Some site use pop-ups or pop-unders to ask the user to join their list like aweber.com, this can be very effective if you present a good value for their sign-up, like offering some helpful tips or an ebook. Don’t use a pop-up on your homepage if you are running a Google Adwords pay per click search because they don’t allow that. Incorporating the Facebook Fan Page widget into your blog or article pages is a must so you can build your fans from your visitor traffic. Most blog platforms have plug-ins to allow you to easily add these widgets to the website’s layout.

3. Sharing Your Content – Once you have posted a new company write-up, product review, deal, or promotion on your blog, make sure you are sharing your content on your social networks, i.e. Facebook profile, Facebook Fan Page, and Twitter account. You should be including the affiliate banner ads and text links within or under the blog post every time. By sharing each page or blog post you are spreading it around for others to share it, like it or comment on it, which allows other people to be exposed to your content. Once you post a new page of content or article, you should run it through a process where you are sharing it around the Internet in various venues. Hootsuite.com is a great way to post your pages to several social networks at once. By doing this you can maximize the views and traffic of each page of content on your site. Once you have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of original content on your site and have shared them you will definitely be seeing higher traffic levels and affiliate commissions. Make sure to use Google Analytics on your blog so you can see where all of your traffic is coming from and it will motivate you to produce content more frequently.

4. Amp Up Your Social Networking  – Always make sure to be adding new Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Pinterest friends, Foursquare friends, and connect with people on forums and other types of sites that allow you to build friends. Building more friends and followers is always a great idea because you can interact with them later and share your content and pages with them. Building up your social networks should be something you work on daily with some kind of process, like every morning you add friends and interact with your friends status updates, although you can do it randomly and get a good effect. Then, when you proactively interact with your connections’ content postings, they will be more likely to reciprocate by interacting with your content postings which brings more traffic and exposure through the social sharing effect.

5. Engage Your Audience through Email – Now that you are building your email subscribers to your newsletter, what are you sending them? Make sure you are sending quality, purposeful messages that will be well-received. This is a process that should improve over time until you are sending really professional, effective messages to your subscriber base. Send timely types of promotions and balance your promotions with good content and articles so it will be better received. Have a really nice HTML newsletter designed that you can send to your lists of subscribers that is professional looking and has a purpose. There’s nothing worse than receiving an ugly newsletter, it just won’t get any action. Also, make sure you are creative and compelling with your subject lines and always be testing new subject lines to try to increase open rates. Use an email sending program like iContact or ConstantContact, so you can gauge the success of your email campaigns. Also, make sure to have the unsubscribe link at the bottom of your emails and follow email sending best practices so it will be well received every time. Make sure the “forward to a friend” is included in all your newsletter campaigns. Email is still the #1 thing people do online, so you can look place affiliate offers and banners in your newsletters to generate clicks and commissions from your email sending.

6. Build Your Social Karma – social networking is a dominant medium and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. Make sure you are proactively interacting with your friends and followers on your social networks by liking, sharing, commenting, and retweeting their status updates (where appropriate). By doing this you will build up a lot of good “social karma”, which increases the likelihood they will share, comment, like, and retweet your content, which helps it go viral and get more traffic. People in general aren’t very proactive with their online social networking, so you have to be the one that makes the effort by scanning through your friends’ postings and seeing what you can interact with every day. The more you interact first, the more they will return the favor and your content will get more action, which brings in more traffic and eventual commissions from affiliations.

7. Get Higher Payouts – make sure to ask your affiliate advertisers and merchants for higher commission amounts on a regular basis, especially if you have produced for the company in the past. Most advertisers hold back what they can payout, so there is room to go up with commission amounts. If they balk at your request tell them you will go to their competitor and I bet they change their tune quickly. Over time, as you generate quality customers for your advertisers, they will be more inclined to increase your commission rate because they can gauge the lifetime value of the customers you are generating for them.

8. Make Sure to Promote Deals – make sure you are promoting the latest deals and coupon codes from your advertisers because people like getting and using deals, and they increase the conversion rate on the click-though. If people come to your site and find no promotions or deals they may go elsewhere looking and someone else will get the sale. You can also obtain “vanity coupon codes” from your advertisers that match your site title, which are nice because it brings a certain amount of branding to the user experience and they may remember they got the coupon through your affiliate site in the future and return. Try to have a site where you can easily edit the pages you are creating, something like Blogger or WordPress, so you can easily update the page with the most current coupon promotion for each merchant you profile. Promoting coupons tends to increase the conversion rate of the visitor making a purchase, so make sure to promote them on your site whenever possible and share the pages as soon as you are done posting. Most advertisers will offer coupon codes on a fairly frequent basis, so keep on the look out for them. As soon as they send you the affiliate newsletters, go create a fresh content post on your blog about the deal and how great it is, when share it.

9. Learn From Others -  making friends and learning from other affiliate marketers is a great way to further your own knowledge. Don’t be afraid to share what you know with others so you can get ahead together. Attend affiliate conferences like Affiliate Summit so you can meet others in the industry and gain bits of knowledge and strategy you can apply to your own efforts, not to mention you can share your successful strategies with your new friends!

10. Ask for Products to Review/Samples- reviewing products and services on your blog is a great way to provide valuable content for your readers and subscribers. Providing an actual product review can be very effective in selling the benefits of the company you are promoting. Once you have a decent amount of traffic and/or subscribers to your site or blog you can ask advertisers for samples you can use, review, and post about. Not all companies will do this with you but it can’t hurt to ask. Then you can make a nice review on your site and link to their site through your affiliate tracking link/banner so you get credit if someone buys. Don’t make misleading reviews or untrue reviews, rather if you can’t review the actual product, write about the company itself and what a wonder line of products they offer!

11. Produce More Content – content is everything, so make sure to write until your little fingers get sore…and then keep writing! Working on your typing speed, since the faster you type the more content you can product. Affiliate marketing is definitely mainly about content, unless you have a bunch of money to dump into PPC traffic. Also, websites tend to rank better in the organic or free traffic results when you post frequently to your site or blog, so don’t be afraid to post several times a day to your site or blog. And make sure you are sharing all of your new posts socially! Try to become a faster and more accurate type over time, so you can produce more content quicker. The more content you produce the more traffic you will get, so always live by that rule. You can also outsource some of your article production on a per article basis, this can be effective if you find the right writers. These days there are tons of people on Facebook that would respond to write some articles for you for $5-10 per article. Only original content though, accept nothing less than great, original content!

12. Google Alerts - Setting up Google alerts is a great way to stay on top of any keyword or industry. Once you sign up for the alerts you will be emailed as soon as new content hits the Internet about your chosen keywords. This is a great way to feed yourself ideas to post about and keeps you on the cutting edge of your niche or industry.

13. Turn Your Phone into a Cash Register - adding the Blogger or WordPress apps to your mobile phone will allow you to post pictures and short bursts of content right to your blog from your phone! You can also use the Hootsuite app to then share your new content pages on all your social networks right from your phone. Image posting to your blog as you go around doing your daily routine or on your next vacation, now that’s using technology productively!

I hope you enjoyed reading about affiliate marketing and how to start earning money through a blog site, social networking, and email sending. Make sure you have a good strategy and cover all the bases, it’s not enough to do a little bit and not bring a full effort to your website. Make sure you are on a site platform that will allow you to publish content/pages quickly and easily, so you aren’t caught up on your site design, which is wasting time. Make sure to tie Facebook and other social networking plugins and buttons into all your content so you can really facilitate sharing of your own content. Build sites/blogs about things you know about and are passionate about and the writing will go easier, although learning something new to build a site about is great too! Most of all have fun with it, be clever in your writing, and make friends with everyone! Hope you liked the article, and feel free to share it on your social networks. Have a great day!

Here is a live, recorded webinar featuring Experience Advertising CEO Evan Weber breaking it down about using social media and networking with websites and affiliate marketing…

Hey everyone! I hope you have had a really nice 2012 and are ready to crush it in 2013 with your affiliate marketing projects. The “New Year” brings a whole new set of circumstances and issues into peoples lives that affiliate marketers can target on their websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and on Twitter. People will be actively searching for topics related to their new years resolutions, so make sure to heavily focus on niches like self-improvement to fully capitalize. Also, Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, so make sure to start posting content and creating pages about Valentine’s Day topics and products to stay ahead of the curve. So, I wanted to discuss some ways affiliate marketers can take advantage of the New Year to earn more commissions and generate more web traffic. Here is a list of ways affiliate marketers can promote better and be more effectively during the Q1 time-frame:

1. Focus on New Years Resolution Products/Services – during the new year time-frame (January 1-April), people are trying to do things like:

• Lose weight
• Quit smoking
• Find love
• Get in shape
• Save money
• Start on their taxes
• Get organized
• Reduce debt
• Travel

…and many other related types of life objectives. So make sure to heavily promote “New Years Resolution” oriented products and services on your sites because they tend to covert really well during the Q1 time period. People will be flocking to Google to search for various information, strategies, and products related to achieving their new years resolutions, so if you have created content on your websites talking about that you could get those visitors to come to your site. Likewise, you should be posting on your Facebook Page and tweeting helpful information and articles designed to help people and also save them money with great companies you are affiliating with. What a great time to email your subscribers with a helpful article about new year’s resolutions and how to attain them. Make sure to craft your post titles and content really well so you can rank under various keyword phrases related to new years resolutions and the issues associated with them. Setting up Google Alerts for certain keywords is a great way to keep yourself up to date on all the latest news and Internet content about any subject, so make sure to take advantage of that Google tool.

2. Focus on Building Your Email/Subscriber List – Make sure you are prominently displaying your newsletter sign-up, Twitter account, and Facebook Fan Page widget on your sites and blogs in order to increase the overall rate at which you gain new subscribers, fans, and followers. This is always a good idea because you can re-market to your fans, followers, and subscribers throughout the year. Also, running a sweepstakes or contest on your website is another great way to opt-in your site visitors and subscribers and capture their contact info so they can become part of your audience. If you have a decent amount of site traffic take a look at aweber.com, which collects name and email via a pop-up widget on your site. It’s a great way to maximize your site traffic and grow your email list. Aweber.com also features Facebook integration which makes for sure fast opt-ins from your site traffic.

3. Syndicate Your Content Better – Once you have written and posted a new review or blog post, make sure you are “syndicating” your content by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, and your other favorite social bookmarking sites. By submitting each page or blog post you are spreading it around for others to share or like, which allows their friends to be exposed to your content. Consider launching online press releases which will build inbound links to your site and also get you additional organic search engine rankings depending on your release title and content. This is a very cost-effective way to spread the word about your site or company. You should have a little process you go through of sharing your new content on your social networks after posting it, which helps get it more exposure and traffic back to your site.

4. Increase Your Social Networking Presence – Always make sure to add new Facebook friends, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Foursquare friends, Pinterest friends, and connect with people on forums and other types of sites that allow you to build friends. Make sure to use these sites’ mass friend invite features to really ramp up your connections. Spending time building your connections is always time well spent and will pay dividends in the future. Building more friends and followers is a great idea because you can interact with them later and share your content and pages with them via your status updates. You can never have too many friends, followers, and subscribers to your content. You should be focused on building all of these areas so you have more people overall to market your content to. Rapportive is an amazing tool that connects right in your gmail and allows you to invite anyone in your email box to connecting on all of their social profiles.

5. Message Your Fans and Subscribers More Effectively – Now that you have fans and subscribers to your newsletter, what are you messaging them? Make sure you are sending quality, purposeful messages that will be well-received and deliver value. This is a process that should improve over time until you are sending really professional, effective messages to your subscriber bases. Send timely types of promotions and balance your promotions with good content and articles so it will be better received and not perceived as just marketing to them. Try to enrich people’s lives with your content or articles from respected 3rd-party sources or your own wonderful content. Don’t forget to be super-friendly to your fans and followers and seek to engage them in discussions. Also, polling and surveying your fans is a great way to spur interaction on your Facebook wall and get the sharing ramped up. Try Facebook Promoted Posts, which allow more fans to see and interact with your content…they work great!

6. Build Your “Social Networking Karma” – Social networking is the most power tool there is in online marketing to get your content out there, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, so it’s imperative to take advantage of it to the fullest. Make sure you are pro-actively interacting with your friends and followers by sharing, commenting, retweeting, and liking their posts (where appropriate). By doing this you will build up a lot of good “social karma”, which increases the likelihood your connections will share, comment, like, and retweet your content, which helps it go viral and get more traffic. I usually spend a good part of my day going through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn looking for status updates I can interact with. I always notice an uptick in activity on my content when I do this regularly. This is something you have to work at to get good at interacting with other people. The more you interact with others the more they will interact with your posting which makes it go viral and increases website traffic.

7. Ask for Higher Payouts – Make sure to ask your affiliate advertisers and affiliate managers for higher commission amounts, especially if you have produced for the company in the past. Most advertisers hold back what they can payout, so there is room to go up with commission amounts. If they balk at your request tell them you will go to their competitor and I bet they change their tune quickly. Tell them you can produce more sales if you were at a higher commission rate. Some companies may reward content-based publishers more than other types of affiliates, so you if you are a blog or content site you should be able to get a higher commission rate than what is published on the affiliate network. Sometimes you can even get an advertiser to sponsor a contest or sweepstakes you are running, which can be a great way to whip up excitement on your site and social networks.

8. Make Sure to Promote Deals from Your Advertisers – Make sure you are promoting current deals and coupon codes from your advertisers because people like getting and using deals, not to mention promoting coupons and deals increases the conversion rate to sale on your click-throughs to advertisers. If people come to your site and don’t find promotion or coupons they may go elsewhere looking and someone else will get the sale. Promotions and discounts tend to increase the likelihood a visitor will make a purchase, so make sure to offer people coupons and discounts when you promote and share posts about companies. You can mention it’s a special discount and even get a “vanity” coupon code which will match the name of your site. This can increase branding and make people remember your site in the future if they think they can get special discounts through your site or social presences.

9. Learn from other Affiliate Marketers – Making friends and learning from other affiliate marketers is a great way to further your own knowledge. Don’t be afraid to share what you know with others so you can get ahead together. Don’t get sucked into “make money online” courses and systems, as they usually are worthless and just want your money. There is plenty of free information out there on the Internet to guide your online marketing efforts. Go on online forums like the Affiliate Summit forums and ask any questions you my have, there are tons of people ready to answer your questions and give tips and pointers.

10. Ask for Products to Review (Samples) - Reviewing products and services is a great way to provide valuable content for your readers and subscribers. Providing an actual product review can be very effective in selling the benefits of the company you are promoting. Also, you can ask for sponsored prizes to give away in your sweepstakes and contests. Check out Woobox.com for an inexpensive way to run sweepstakes and contests. That way you can really ramp up the excitement level on your sites or fan page. If you can’t get a prize donated, you can try a $25 gift card to kick off the sweepstakes!

11. Produce More Content – Content is everything, so make sure to write until your little fingers get sore, or outsource your content writing to get more content written and published faster. Websites tend to rank better in the free traffic results when posting frequently, so don’t be afraid to post several times a day to your site. And make sure you are syndicating and sharing all of your new posts. The more pages of original content you have on your site the more free traffic you can bring in from Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing. So make sure to post like crazy so you can build your free traffic up over time. Look at your site like a house you build bigger and bigger until it’s a mansion that gets a ton of traffic! Make sure to post about new year resolution oriented topics, issues, and problems during this time of year. Then you can go back next year and refresh those posts for the following year so they stay relevant.
These are some ways to improve your affiliate marketing efforts in the new year. Let me know if you have any questions at all about these strategies, I would love to review them with you on the phone or email. Now get to it and build out the web with a bunch of great content and share it! Good luck in your 2013 affiliate marketing goals!

Hey all! I hope your 2012 is going well and you are ready to take advantage of the holiday shopping season! I wanted to put together some useful tips for generating more traffic and affiliate commissions during the busy holiday shopping season so you can maximize your affiliate marketing earnings. More people are shopping online this year than ever before, so it’s must to take advantage of that with your affiliate marketing. Here are some online marketing tips you can use to maximize your online marketing efforts this holiday shopping season:

1. Post about hot gift items - posting about the hottest holiday gift items is a great way to build your site or blog with content people are actually searching for during the holidays, ex. “10 hottest gift ideas for 2012? or “What are the top gadget gifts for 2012?” Do your research and depending on your niche there will be a set of hot products that are in-demand this holiday season. Then, create pages on your site or blog with good content write-ups about these hot products and use “lists” as well because they tend to be read and shared, such as: Top 11 Tech Gadget Gifts for 2012, 6 Must-have Corporate Gifts Ideas to Impress Your Clients, 8 Innovated Gifts for Your Children. Titles like that can really pull in the traffic and are more likely to be commented on. Remember, the more content you post the more search rankings you can garner with each page of your site, so post a lot of pages and fill them with great, keyword-rich content and titles to maximize your SEO benefits. Gear your December promotions towards holiday savings, coupons, and great shopping deals, which a lot of people will be searching those keywords for various merchants, so make sure to weave that content into your postings and pages. Great deals for the holidays that can be promoted all month long every day. Finally, you have your after-Christmas sales that can promoted from every merchant you affiliate with.

2. Ask for Special Coupons or Promos - asking your affiliate managers and advertisers for special deals, coupon promotions, or vanity coupon codes (coupon word matching your site)  are great ways to leverage your site’s branding to market exclusive deals to your traffic, subscribers, fans, and followers. Not all affiliate advertisers will be able to provide this because they can’t do it for everyone or may not at all due to lack of resources, but you can get lucky with a great promotions sometimes and really kill it. Make sure to get the current month’s deals from the advertisers you are promoting so the offers in the posts will be compelling and convert higher with your visitors. Make sure to keep your deals current and timely, otherwise visitors will hit brick walls when trying shop using the codes, which isn’t ideal at all. Just keep posting those great deals as you get them from your affiliate advertisers and then share the pasts/pages on Facebook and Twitter. Also, make sure you are emailing your database weekly with all the latest and greatest promotions.

3. Ramp-Up Your Social Networking - Make sure you are adding Facebook friends, Facebook fans from your site traffic, and Twitter followers on a constant basis so you have more people to expose your offers, promotions, and pages to during the holidays. However, don’t crush people with too many offers in a short span or they may get turned off from your frequency. Don’t recommend something you haven’t tried yourself, however you can make product suggestions and promote really good deals and coupons from merchants you are affiliated with. If you always have fresh content and promotions your audience will really appreciate that and you will be building website branding with your traffic which is good for repeat traffic. Check out Facebook Promoted Posts which allow you to advertise your fan page wall post to a larger amount of your fans and their friends, it really spurs engagement! One of my $200 promoted posts got 3000 likes and a ton of comments, so the exposure can be huge. Also, Facebook allows you to promote a post on your personal profile, which can get you some extra exposure for cheap on Facebook.

4. Post Your Butt Off - Posting tons of original articles to your site or blog, then sharing it all socially, are the best ways to ramp up your traffic in advance of the holidays. Adding frequent posts of fresh content to your site can really expand the number of pages you have indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Bing which increases the chances your site will rank under a larger variety of search phrases and bring in more free traffic to your site. Once you make a new post on your site you can immediately share the title and page url on Facebook, Twitter, and your fan page. Make sure to add something like, “Isn’t this a wonderful deal?” to your postings to increase interaction and response especially on Facebook. Your goal is to get as make Likes, Comments, and Shares on Facebook as you possibly can to gain the most exposure and traffic. Also, make sure to submit your new posts to Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and other bookmarking sites to maximize your exposure. Post other versions of your articles and posts to 3rd party article directories, like ezinearticles.com, with rewrites of your articles and titles to maximize your organic rankings. I recommend 1-10 posts a day to your site to increase your frequency and page count. But you can never post too much to your site as long as it’s all unique content. Over time, you can build your page count into the thousands of pages which will bring your site more free “organic” search traffic. Make sure you have the Sharethis.com social buttons at the top of each post and your Facebook fan page widget at the top of the right column of your site or blog. Check out aweber.com to implement a pop-up to gain the visitor’s name and email in exchange for your helpful guide or newsletter subscription. This can really maximize the number of people you can remarket to via email and send back to your site or fan page.

5. Ask for Higher Commissions - asking your affiliate advertisers for better commission rates during the holidays is a great way to ensure you will maximize yourearnings. Some advertisers may only do this if you have produced a good amount of sales volume in the past, but it never hurts to ask…they can only say no. Most affiliate advertisers have some room to increase affiliate commissions so you need to ask for a higher payout whenever possible. If they say no or are rude, tell them you will go and promote their competitor, which will change their attitude quickly. You can also offer paid placement on your website, blog, newsletter, or social networks. If you have a decent amount of traffic, fans and followers, there are advertisers that will pay an additional paid placement fee in addition to your affiliate commissions, so that’s a great reason to try to expand what you are doing steadily over time and build the relationship with your advertisers. You can sell them “Promoted Posts” to your fans on Facebook and charge an additional fee. Savvy advertisers know the value of a promoted post on the right fan page, however it’s a recently new advertising medium so you have to suggest it and make it sound as great of an opportunity as it is. A few case studies wouldn’t hurt either.

6. Email your list - if you maintain a database of email addresses as you should, make sure you are messaging your database at least weekly with the newest offers from your affiliate advertisers. Make sure you are growing your list with email opt-in plug-ins on your site like aweber.com. Take growing your list seriously as it will pay dividends the larger a list it is. You can use services like icontact, constantcontact, or mailchimp to blast your email list. Or just use aweber.com to handle it all. Make the investment in Dreamveaver to edit your HTML, and have a nice HTML newsletter designed which you can use as a template for all your future blasts. This time of year you can email your database daily if you have new stuff to share every day.

7. Run Sweepstakes and Contests -  running sweepstakes and contests on your website during the holiday time-frame is a great idea because you will gain more fans, emails, wall postings, and user data from your existing website traffic. Using Woobox.com is a great way to inexpensively run an exciting sweepstakes or contest on your site, fan page, email list, and twitter. If you can get your affiliate advertisers to supply the prizes even better! You can do anything from giving away a $100 gift card to a multi-prize, mega-contest! This is the best ways to really maximize your traffic, fans, and followers. It’s my #1 recommendation to basically everyone, so make sure to implement a sweepstakes or contest during these pivotal next few weeks. Let me know if you need any ideas about how to run your sweepstakes promotion effectively!

8. Turn on Paid Search - Pay-per-click search is still the #1 way to obtain targeted traffic, so why not turn on some traffic to your site for the holidays! The only issues is the cost, check out Bing Ads for less expensive clicks under your popular keyword phrases. One great technique is to purchase keywords based on a merchant’s name with coupon code attached to it. Only certain companies even allow this and it can get quite competitive, but if you can drop your cookie on those types of searches it should have a profit level, since those searchers are likely in the buying process. But check with your advertisers before starting. Similarly you can target more general keyword phrases like “auto part coupon codes” (and even more product-specific searches with coupon code) and then link to a page of deals from affiliate advertisers. You could test that out to 100′s search phrases and seeing which converted and had a return. There are many angles to pursue with paid search, however since there is cost associated you have to tread extremely lightly with your keyword bids otherwise you will lose money and have nothing to show for it but some clicks.

9. Advertise for Fans on Facebook - The beautiful thing about Facebook advertising is the targeting! You can really drill down to the types of people you want to see your ads and gain just those people as fans. For instance you can target based on: age, location, sex, education, and “likes and interests” which ensures you will gain fans that are into the kinds of things that pertain to your niche or products/services you promote. There is a cost associated with this type of advertising, so you have to attempt to measure the amount of revenue your new fans are generating for you. If you can estimate your average per fan revenue you can determine how much you can afford to pay for fans and proceed to advertise each month for new fans. Then, you can do Promoted Posts to get them clicking and buying from the great deals you are sharing on your site! There’s your social media-based affiliate formula in a nutshell.

10. Don’t Forget to Build Your LinkedIn - LinkedIn is really coming on as a great social network to spend time on. I’ve been using it for years, but only recently have they made it more interactive and improved the usability so people will even spend time there. I absolutely love the new functionality. You can even share your affiliate deals on LinkedIn and your connections will see it. You can use it just like Facebook now. You can start a group about any niche or industry and people will just join it, which is cool. You can really build up your connections by doing a “mass friend invite” from your email contacts. LinkedIn has fabulous tools for inviting everyone you know to get connected to you on LinkedIn. Once you have a decent amount of connections you can use LinkedIn to share your postings from your site, including your affiliate deals. In my opinion, LinkedIn is a valuable place to spend those precious online marketing hours, I would suggest an hour or so per day to really work LinkedIn and get some value out of it. Also, you never know who you can meet on LinkedIn professionally via the groups you may join, so always keep your eyes open and be proactive!!

These are some affiliate marketing strategies you can use to maximize your traffic and commissions during the holiday season! I hope it was helpful and let me know if there is anything you want to discuss more in-depth with me. I would love to hear from you! Thanks! Evan

Hey all my affiliate marketing friends and colleagues! I wanted to put an article together about the upcoming 2012 holiday shopping season which will be the biggest ever according to all indications. “Black Friday,” which falls on November 23th this year and is the day after Thanksgiving, and the following “Cyber Monday” are when online retailers are rolling out their best deals of the 2012 holiday shopping season. Not to mention this time kicks off the Holiday shopping season for consumers, so demand for deals at popular retailers will be strong with online shoppers. Every year, millions of Americans flock all over the Internet looking for deals and promotions to maximize their gift shopping budget. But how to capitalize on your Black Friday/Cyber Monday Affiliate Marketing efforts and maximize your time spent and commissions? Here are some suggestions to maximize your affiliate marketing activities leading up to the Black Friday / Cyber Monday time-frame:

1. Posting About Black Friday/Cyber Monday Deals – this may sound obvious but the more pages of unique content you create on your site about various company’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals (that you are affiliated with), the more search engine rankings and free traffic you can get to those pages, and therefore possible referral commissions. Make sure to maximize your page  titles and post titles to be relevant to what people are searching for, i.e. “Black Friday – Cyber Monday Deals on Electronics from TheNerds.net – Save up to 60%” or “The 10 Best Black Friday Gift Ideas for 12 Year Olds for 2012.” These would be examples of website page or post titles. Your “on-page content” is also really important to getting the organic search rankings for the exact search phrase or related searches going on, so include good, original, thorough content on all your pages about Black Friday and Cyber Monday deal info to maximize the number of search results each page of your site can get from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The more pages of content you post to your site or blog, the more potential search rankings you can gain, and therefore traffic you can get to your site. I would suggest posting as the affiliate deals are sent to you, including an original write-up describing the merchant, the deal, photo, and how great it sounds. Then, once you have created the page/post on your site, you can share it on your Facebook profile, Facebook fan page, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other social network you participate with. I encourage you to use images in all of your posts so you can pin the images to Pinterest after you post, which can create click-through traffic to your site from Pinterest.

2. Socially Sharing With Your Friends/Followers/Community – once you create your post or page, you should spread it around through your own social networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Fan Page, Pinterest) and also post it to “bookmarking” sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, LinkedIn Groups, and StumbleUpon. This can help syndicate your posts onto more sites, and if the articles get popular on those social sites they can bring in good traffic. Also, submitting your content to well-ranking 3rd party sites like these can get you extra organic search listings for the article’s title and content. Definitely encourage your social friends to Like, Comment, Share, and Retweet your posts on Facebook and Twitter by asking for it and also do the same to their status updates. By interacting socially with friends on Facebook and Twitter they will do the same for you and it will help your content go viral to their friends, thereby increasing traffic to your affiliate offers and promotions. Try to avoid posting the exact same content in multiple places because it won’t really work for you to get rankings, rather post different variations of the same title and content in multiple places and then link back to the page on your site (such as on article directories). Make sure to have the social sharing buttons on every page of your site, see ShareThis.com to install the social sharing buttons to your site. Also the Facebook fan page widget is a must in your website/blog layout. Get really familiar with page sharing onto social networks and make it a part of your posting routine.

3. Messaging Your Base – If you are accumulating a database of email addresses through your website, you should most definitely be sending email newsletter blasts to promote Black Friday – Cyber Monday deals from your favorite affiliate Advertisers on a weekly if not daily basis. There are many email sending tools that are easy to use and very cheap including: iContact, Constant Contact, and MailChimp (which is free for up to 2000 contacts via Google). Make sure you are posting Fan Page and personal Facebook status updates daily and sharing your new site posts through your fan page to encourage fans to check it out and click-through. Really try to interact with your Facebook Fans and actively try to build more fans at every turn. If you are writing post after post, promoting a bunch of Advertiser’s deals you don’t have to be worried about bothering anyone because you are exposing them to new offers every time. Try not to post the same thing repetitively unless it’s a tremendous deal or one that has gotten great responses and uptake. Otherwise, keep posting more and more Advertiser’s deals to your base and you will gain more dropped cookies and traffic from it. Keep it varied and frequent. Don’t worry about posting too much because you never know which deal will resonate with your fan base. I recommend several posts per day through your fan page and other social networks.

4. Facebook Promoted Posts - Make sure to check out Facebook Promoted Posts, which ensures that a large percentage of your Facebook fans see your fan page postings. This has a flat-fee cost based on the amount of exposure you want for the post, but is very effective from my experience. Not to mention you can choose to expose your wall post to the friends of your fans which can be really powerful and allows your post to go viral beyond your fans. You can even ask some of your affiliate merchants to pay for the cost of the promoted posts, or even mark up the cost of the promoted posts to generate profit. Of course, the more engaged fans you have the better it will work, so you have to experiment with it and see what works best. But don’t be afraid of promoted posts, they are amazing! Also, make sure to try out sponsored posts on your Facebook profile for $7 per post. Also, make sure to check out Facebook fan advertising, which allows you to build your Facebook fans for a per fan fee. This is a very good way to boost your fan count and therefore have more people to expose your holiday deals to. You can really target to your ideal demographic which is nice. You can NEVER have too many targeted fans on Facebook to market to.

5. Online Press Releases - Online press releases are a great tool to increase your website’s exposure as well as building inbound links to your website. I recommend either PRWeb or eReleases.com. You can send a press release such as: Black Friday Deals are Launching on Evan’s Shopping Mall or 2012 Holiday Deals Have Launched at Mom’s Saving Mall (or whatever your website is called). Make sure to embed a couple of hyperlinks to your website in your press release to maximize inbound links to your site. Online press releases have cost, so make sure to have a really great titles and great content to make sure it gets good search rankings based on your content. Typically online press releases get distributed to 100′s of well-ranking websites, so over time this strategy can gain increased saturation in the search engines and bring traffic and exposure to your website. I recommend doing online press releases on a monthly basis, if not weekly. They work great!

6. Word of Mouth – telling people to check out your website or blog for some great deals shouldn’t be under-estimated. Having a website url that can be emailed, told by phone, posted socially, or otherwise communicated to your friends and family is great because why wouldn’t someone shopping online buy through your site when they can get great deals from all the top merchants online? So make sure to tell people to check out your site or blog for some great shopping deals whenever you can. Make sure to list deals and coupon from all the advertisers you are affiliated with so your friends and family will actually get a great deal and get excited about it, which will cause them to return later for more deals. You can even ask your affiliate advertisers to provide you with a dedicated coupon code (vanity coupons) to match your site url, which adds a little site branding to the experience and can increase the conversion rate of the sale. Social networking has stepped in to facilitate word of mouth, so make sure to be a very active social networker, which can help expose more people to the offers you are promoting.

7. Running Sweepstakes and Contests - Running sweepstakes, contests, and giveaways through WooBox.com is a great way to maximize your reach, build fans, and gather data for your newsletter list. The nice thing about Woobox is that it gives you the ability to capture more email opt-ins and Facebook fans from your site visitors, fans, and email subscribers. You can even convince some of your affiliate advertisers to sponsor your sweepstakes and donate the prize so it costs you very little to run the promotion. Then you can promote the sweepstakes on your site, newsletter, fan page, tweets, and other ways you can get the word out about your holiday sweepstakes. This is a really powerful way to maximize your exposure, grow your Facebook Fans, and build your email subscriber list. And, it’s extremely affordable to run a basic sweepstakes on your site with Woobox.com. Let me know if you have any questions about how to do this effectively. I have plenty of great examples to show you.

8. Pay-per-click Advertising - paid search engine advertising isn’t for everyone, and definitely has cost associated with it, so you have to tread lightly and really pick and choose what keyword phrases you want to advertise for in Google Adwords and Bing Ads (Yahoo and MSN/Bing). Google Adwords is definitely more expensive per click due to how many companies are advertising under various keyword phrases. Look to set up keyword campaigns for the affiliate advertisers that allow keyword bidding, utilizing the deals they have provided for you in your ad copy and pages you are sending the traffic to. Making general keyword phrases “convert” can be difficult for affiliates due to their low margins relative to the advertisers themselves, but there are sweet spots that can be exploited, i.e. inexpensive keyword phrases with high conversions. This is definitely an advanced technique and should be run very conservatively, spend-wise, until you know what keyword phrases are performing. In general, Bing Ads will be a more affordable way to go with your pay-per-click advertising campaigns, due to less competition, however there is less search volume than on Google. But it can definitely be a great way to compliment your site traffic with targeted search traffic that should perform well with good ad copy and landing pages. Not to mention lead to more Facebook fans and Twitter followers.

9. Getting Higher Commission Rates - once thing is for sure, most companies don’t pay their affiliate marketers what they possibly could for a sale, especially for a new customer sale. Look to ask your advertisers for higher payouts during the holiday season, they can only refuse, however most won’t offer it to their affiliate base so you have to be proactive and ask. Having a long cookie duration is also highly desirable to affiliate marketers, so make sure to promote companies that offer longer cookie lengths than their competitors, this gives you  more of a chance of converting a click into a sale. Some advertisers may offer a performance incentive structure, meaning you will earn more commissions the more sales you produce. This can be effective, however doesn’t help smaller affiliates earn more. So I would suggest asking your affiliate advertisers for higher commission rates across the board, if they say no you can tell them you will promote their competitor and they will likely give in to your request.

10. Beyond Black Friday/ Cyber Monday – Black Friday / Cyber Monday is just the start of great deals from online merchants lasting all through December, so make sure to ask your affiliate advertisers for deals on a frequent basis. Posting holiday deals to your sites and blogs on a frequent basis can really build your site’s page count and can get you more organic traffic, so make sure to post as frequently as possible, the more frequently the better, and then share. Not to mention you can gain more fans and followers from the new pages of content when you position the Facebook Fan widget prominently in your site’s layout.
I hope you like these tips on how to maximize your Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Holiday Season affiliate promotions. If you would like to discuss any of these strategies please let us know. Thanks and have a great 2012 Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Holiday Season!

The November Coupons are out and ready to promote in addition to this week’s Weekly Deals from Dealyard.com! Holiday shoppers are already online searching for good deals on all of the items on their gift lists. If ever there was an ideal time for affiliates to pump up their commissions, NOW is that time! Spruce up your websites, blogs and social media sites to prepare for the busy holiday shopping season. Continue building a list of email addresses on
your sites that can be messaged later with specials and holiday promotions from your affiliate advertisers. There are many free plug-ins to handle the subscribing process, there are even pop-overs that launch when your site loads to prompt the visitor to join your list for valuable updates. There are some great WordPress blog plugins you can use to facilitate this here. For more ideas on how to increase traffic to your sites check out the many suggestions on our Affiliate Resources page.

PROMOTE THESE WEEKLY DEALS & NOVEMBER COUPONS on Commission Junction & Share A Sale: 

WEEKLY DEALS (VALID: NOW – NOVEMBER 11th) 

• Weekly Deal 1 – Ronco ST2000SSGEN Showtime Petite Rotisserie in White for $29.95.
• Weekly Deal 2 – Sunbeam Dynasty Cuddle-Up Fleece Heated Throw Electric Warming Blanket Walnut/Celadon for $39.95.
• Weekly Deal 3 – Life Gear LL01Y LifeLight Super Bright LED Lantern with Four Options for Power for $21.95.
• Weekly Deal 4 – Crock Pot SCVP659-SS 6.5 Qt Smart Pot Slow Cooker w/ Little Dipper for $58.95.
• Weekly Deal 5 – Aerobed 19813 Comfort Hi Rise Premium Queen Inflatable Mattress w Headboard for $179.95.

NOVEMBER COUPONS (OFFER ENDS: NOVEMBER 30th)

• Get 5% OFF on Entire Order at DealYard.com! Use Coupon Code: CJDYNV5. This coupon code is valid through November 30th.
• Get $10 OFF on $150 Orders or More at DealYard.com! Use Coupon Code: CJDYNOV10. This coupon code is valid through November 30th.
• Get $15 Off for purchase of $200 or more at DealYard.com. Use Coupon Code: CJDYNOV15. This coupon code is valid through November 30th.

IN STOCK (EXPIRES: ONGOING)

• DealYard.com added Kavu Handbags for active and fashionable women on the go! The fabrics of Kavu wallet, cross-body bag, backpack and much are are durable and trendy.

DEAL OF THE DAY

• Deal of the Day – Always an Amazing Deal at DealYard.com – Valid through December 31, 2012

Hey all! Experience Advertising, Inc. recently conducted our “Official Affiliate Survey” in which over 300 affiliate marketers from the major affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Linkshare, Shareasale, and Google Affiliate network responded. Here are the results of the question: Which of the following motivates you most as an affiliate? Over 300 affiliate marketers responded. Here is a graphic of the results:

Hey Affiliates! Thanks for being in the Hancock Fabrics Affiliate Program on CJ and on Google Affiliate Network! September is winding down but Hancock Fabrics is gearing up for the many shoppers who will be taking advantage of the AUTUMN SALE beginning today!From NOW – SEPTEMBER 23rd, invite your viewers to check out all the great deals on cotton fabrics, pillow forms, sewing machines and much more, at savings up to 50% OFF! Please post the new banners to help promote the Autumn Sale. The Anniversary Sale is still ongoing through September 26th, so remember to promote that sale, too!

Hey Affiliates: Check out this week’s WEEKLY DEALS plus the new BACK TO SCHOOL COUPON for FREE SHIPPING on purchases of $150 or more. With school shopping now underway, your visitors will appreciate all the great discounts they will find at TheNerds.net! Also, check out the NEW BANNERS now available to help you promote the BACK TO SCHOOL savings at TheNerds. For example, the BELKIN HOME THEATRE POWER CONSOLE regularly $147.99, is on sale this week for only $110.99. This innovative console is packed with features, such as Multi-Phase PureFilter Circuitry, designed to remove electrical noise and provide clean and clear power to all of your valuable equipment. It isolates audio, video and digital components, and prevents noise created by one connected component from contaminating the entire system. To deal with threats from sources other than your AC lines, all PureAV Power Consoles come with coaxial cable, pay-per view/phone and broadband Ethernet line protection. This item is just one of the great deals offered at TheNerds.net. Check out these other spectacular deals:

AirPremier DAP-2555 Wireless Access Point for $236.99
Samsung SyncMaster S19A200NW 19″ LED LCD Monitor – 16:10 – 5 ms for $135.99
Sharp HT-SB600 3.1 Speaker System for $220.99
Patriot Memory Extreme Performance Supersonic 32 GB Flash Drive – Black for $52.99
Free Shipping Purchase of $150 or more by using Coupon Code: BACK2SCHOOL

Thank you for promoting TheNerds.com on CJ and Share A Sale. Experience Advertising has a staff of well-qualified and experienced affiliate managers who are available 24/7 to provide you with cutting-edge tools and support to help you build your affiliate program. Please give us a call if you want some ideas on how to accelerate your promotions, traffic and returns. Also, here is another article I’ve written that you might find helpful: What is social networking karma?