Mike Paetzold and I am back again for day 2 of visit here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. This week I will be discussing affiliate marketing. Yesterday I started with what affiliate marketing is. Today I will talk about the tools you need to be an effective affiliate marketer.

Now lets cut out the crap from the beginning as you do need to spend some money to be an affiliate marketer despite what all the sales letters promise you.

Yes there are free resources and I use some of them but ultimately to get good results there are some tools you need to pay for. The key is to use paid products that have an affiliate program you can earn from so that you can earn your money back.

Do that with your tools and you can have the advantage of using better tools and doing it for free (eventually).

Here are the tools you should have as an affiliate marketer at a minimum.

• Your own domain
• A hosting account for your domain
• An autoresponder
• Tracking

The first two are important because a good affiliate marketer is always looking to build a list first and your domain and a hosting account will allow you to start monetizing that process through the three page web site system I discussed in my first stop.

With out your own hosting you lose that chance to monetize the process.

As list building should be your focus even as an affiliate marketer you will need a quality autoresponder too. This will allow you to stay in contact with your subscribers and build a relationship. Now you can send them to your favorite affiliate product more than once increasing the chance of you earning a commission significantly.

Finally you need to track your results and if you are not tracking what you are doing it is impossible to know what is working or not working so you can improve it.

Fortunately you can get a domain for less than $10 a year and the balance of what you need you need can be had in one package at The Marketers Hosting for $20 a month. (That even includes an affiliate program for when you create your own product but we will stick to affiliate marketing.

Now for traffic generation there are other items you will need depending on whether or not you are going to use paid or “free” traffic. Yes I put “free” in quotes on purpose, You know that didn’t you .

You will always pay for traffic either with your time or your money or both so there never really is free. Now as I do almost no PPC type traffic I won’t discuss that but there are a couple tools for free traffic that you should consider.

First is to add a blog to the hosting you already have, preferably a WordPress blog as they are quite easy to make into search engine magnets.

Second I would strongly recommend a web based article submission service like Content Crooner if you are going to use article marketing fro driving traffic (and you should.) The time savings using a service like this pays for itself over and over.

Now there are lots of other items you can use for traffic like Squidoo, Hub Pages, etc but they do not qualify as tools at least to this Old Bald Guy.

That’s all for today tomorrow we will talk about content marketing for affiliate marketing.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends. You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. Follow Mike on Twitter

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, autoresponder, build list, domain, web hosting

Let me take a minute to introduce myself. My name is Mike Paetzold and I am traveling across the blogosphere as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. Each week I stop at a new blog to guest post for 5 days.

I do a lot of affiliate marketing, am an avid blogger and write a blog on using WordPress and another on using provate label rights amongst many others.

This week I will be discussuing affiliate marketing and how to be an effective affiliate marketer. A large portion of my earnings comes from affiliate promotions.

To start let’s define affiliate marketing.

From Wikipedia

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. It is an application of crowdsourcing.

One of the nice things about working on line is that you can find affiliate programs for almost any product. New marketers look mainly at the digital products usually in the make money from home market.

Now there is a good reason as digital products pay a higher commission than when you are selling hard goods. It is easy for someone that creates a digital product to offer 50% or more as there is little overhead and almost no cost to deliver the product.

That being said you can find almost any product you see in your local store as quite a few off line retailers, like Wal-Mart, have on line affiliate programs. Add in Amazon which sells almost anything and it becomes easy to find products to recommend.

Some of the biggest affiliate networks are..

• Amazon
• Commission Junction
• Clickbank (for digital products)

but if you go to Google and put in your topic + affiliate program you can probably find a program for almost any topic.

That’s all for today and tomorrow we will discuss the tools to be an effective affiliate marketer.

About the author

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends. You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy. Follow Mike on Twitter

New PLR Package – Achieve Your Dreams

A new PLR package has been released by Brett McEllhiney. It is a complete PLR package called “Achieve Your Dreams”. You won’t find anything missing in this package. You will be able to get your niche website set up and completed quickly and with ease. This is a great niche marketing product.

Here is what you receive:

• 45 page PLR ebook
• 10 PLR articles
• Keyword research completed (over 75 keywords provided in 2 test files)
• A very professional sales letter
• Professional matched download thank you page
• Professional matched squeeze page
• Professional matched graphics – .JPG and .PNG formats
• Professional matched Blog Theme

This PLR package is available with a $10 discount until 9/18/2009. The price for this package gives you a PLR package that you can use right away. This is a real value product. Get your copy now.

Currently Brett has not placed a limit on the number of copies to be sold. However, I would not be surprised to see that and a price increase soon.

Get your discounted price for this Achieve Your Dreams PLR Package now.

Technorati Tags: niche marketing, plr, PLR package - Achieve Your Dreams, sales letter, squeeze page

ReTweeting: One Of The Keys To Your Twitter Success

If you are involved with affiliate marketing, you are probably using Twitter. But are you using it in the most effective way for your marketing efforts.  If you really want to get the very best marketing benefit from your efforts, than you need to get a copy of “The Advanced Twitter Marketing System” .

In this book you will learn that retweeting in very critical to your success in using Twitter as a marketing tool.

So, what is retweeting?

It is sending someone else’s Twitter post to your followers. It is accomplished by placing RT in the “What are you doing?” update box and then coping the person’s post immediately after the RT. (Make sure there is a space after the RT.)

For example suppose Tom makes a post such as: Subscribe to my Affiliate Marketing newsletter at WWW.TomsNewsletter.com

You see that post and say, “Tom’s a good friend, I’ll help him build his news letter by sending this message to my Twitter followers”. Or you see a post from someone and you say, “This would be useful to my followers.”

So, you would retweet the post by entering: RT @Tom Subscribe to my Affiliate Marketing newsletter at WWW.TomsNewsletter.com

into the update box on your Twitter home page and that message would go to all of your follows.

This is one of the best and one of the fasting ways of getting information spread throughout Twitter. If you run across a tweet that would be useful to your follows, then retweet it to them.

This is also an excellent way to provide your followers with relevant information that will help them in their affiliate marketing efforts. Providing up to date information for your followers is one way to build trust with your followers and building this relationship is important to your success.

Other than the reason I just mentioned, why would you want to provide someone else’s information to your followers? Why let them know what someone that might be considered your competition is doing?

Well one reason is that the person whose tweet you are retweeting, Tom in the example above, will see that you have retweeted his post. Out of courtesy, Tom will thank you for the retweet.

That action has a great benefit for you as well. When Tom thanks you for the retweet, all of his follows will see the retweet thanks. Some of Tom’s follows will click on your @username in the retweet thank you and when they see your profile page some will follow you.

So by retweeting, you have provided your followers with pertinent information and you have very likely picked up some additional followers yourself. It’s a win-win situation, so retweet often. If you see a good tweet, retweet it.

Twitter is a powerful marketing tool and retweeting is a way to compliment someone else by passing on what they have to say to your followers. If you retweet them enough, they will notice you and before long their followers will be seeing the conversations that you are having and they will follow you also.

Retweeting just makes Twitter more powerful as an effective marketing tool. Use it in your affiliate internet marketing efforts to help you build your online business. It also increases your opportunities to make money online.

To Your Online Success,

Lonnie Minton

Technorati Tags: advanced twitter marketing system, affiliate internet marketing online, affiliate marketing, ReTweet, Twitter