Why Redirect Links?

Sometimes, you were given a long jumbled up URL as a referral link such as http://www.example.com/exa/example.php?theurl=dxg_32zxxd345; not only it is hard to remember, but it also reduces your chance of growing your customer base from word of mouth or offline advertising. Imagine if you look at an advertisement in your local newspaper, the business is online based and thus, they are dropping in this kind of URL. How many people do you think will spend their time actually typing this kind of link word-by-word? Most probably they will google it away instead.

How to Start Redirecting Links

There are three most common approaches that I use to redirect links.

1. Using META Redirect. By this method, you should create an HTML page that contains a meta refresh tag. The tag is written in this format <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=your URL">. For example, you wanted to redirect a request to http://www.example.com/about-us.php using the URL www.example.com/about.html.  What you need to do is create an about.html page and pu the content as  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.example.com/about-us.php"> and upload it to the root of your site. Now, anytime there is a request for about.html, it will be redirected to about-us.php.
2. Using 301 redirect. If your web hosting is providing you with a cPanel control panel, you can easily do this by accessing "manage redirect" menu or anything similar.
3. Using 301 redirect through an .htaccess file. If your web hosting allows you to modify and use .htaccess file, you can easily redirect using an additional Redirect 301 <source> <destination> in your .htaccess file. Using the same example as META redirect, you can simply add the line "Redirect 301 /about.html http://www.example.com/about-us.php" to your .htaccess file and voila! you're done.
4. If you are using wordpress, use goCodes plugin. GoCodes plugin will redirect specific requests to your custom URL. You can download goCodes plugin from webmaster source website

Now start making your redirection beautiful! And this site obviously needs some clearing up as well =p

1. Does not even know where to start
2. Thinking that online business can make money overnight
3. Lack of dedication in personal time
4. Information overload especially when starting
5. Picking a very tight niche and failing

How to overcome them

Truth be told, all of us that jump into affiliate marketing without enough research beforehand are guaranteed to have encounter those pitfalls. After we open our eyes, then only we realized that these can be overcome in simple ways.

1. Does not even know where to start. This is quite easy, there are a lot of people and organization out there that offer courses and lessons on affiliate marketing. This blog is trying to help in elaborating the most common issues, so read up. And don't forget to contact me if there are any specific question that you want me to cover =D
2. Thinking that online business can make money overnight. Snap it, if you still think this way, big chance you will never earn money online. It is a lot better to just buy lotto, cross your fingers and pray. =D
3. Lack of dedication in personal time. Related to make money overnight believe. Without enough dedication, you will go nowhere at all. Although lesser time and dedication needed compared to brick and mortar business, you still need to give your affiliate marketing business enough time and resources to grow.
4. Information overload especially when starting. Get your hand on a comprehensive guide (my recommendation would be the Super Affiliate Handbook by Rosalind Gardner) or get a tutoring on affiliate marketing through any of the best affiliate marketing courses available (the best course that I find so far is Wealthy Affiliate University which I have reviewed here).
5. Picking a very tight niche and failing. This can be overcome by researching more using free keyword tools available such as google's keyword external tool or free keyword tool from wordtracker.

Share away your stumbling blocks as well on the comment section, I will try my best to include them in this post. Cheers

Payment type consideration

Going on further; once you have found your target market, you would want to consider the payment method offered by the product (service) provider. For the payment method, you want to be quite particular on how you get paid (unless you are a great authority figure in your field whereby even a small commission will become really big through the sheer power of the number of people you refer. Even then, you would still be selective now, wouldn't you?). There are several types of payment possibility:

1. one time commission
2. residual income
3. growing residual income through MLM (Multi Level Marketing)

One time commission

A one time commission is the most common way of payment if your affiliate partner is selling a product or a one time service. You will be paid a certain percentage of their profit as commission. There are a lot of great product listed in affiliate networks out there. Or you can get an affiliate partner by going straight up to the product or service provider that you like.

Residual Income

To grow a great business, you have to try your best to get a lot of residual income whereby you will get paid over and over again depending on the product you sale. This type of payment normally occurs in membership program, whereby member of the program will pay the same amount over and over again to the content provider. You as the affiliate of this content (or service) provider will be paid over and over again as long as that particular member stays with that content provider.

Growing residual income

An even better option is to promote services that has a possibility giving you a growing residual income. Get your hand on a free MLM business opportunity out there whereby you will get people to join the service or content provider under your affiliate ID and further, when these people managed to get more people to join under their ID, you will get a part of their commission. Although the commission is not as big as the one directly under you, this network will grow when the third tier of recruit recruited more people. Thus, this will give you a stable source of income.

Be warned though, there are a lot of pyramid scheme out there that disguise themselves as MLM company. Compared to MLM, pyramid scheme operates with the same method as MLM, the only difference is that in pyramid scheme, they do not have anything at all to sell. Pyramid scheme based their income on amount paid by new joining members.

Did I miss out anything? Or is there anything that you want to know more? do leave me a comment and tell me what you think =D

The Growth of Affiliate Marketing

Since the beginning of the internet, affiliate marketing has grown big enough. Nowadays, there are a lot of affiliate networks available as a venue for advertisers to advertise their products and services. A place where marketer can get an opportunity to find a product or service and make a deal with the advertiser. The working structure of these affiliate network is quite simple. In a nutshell, advertiser would go to this affiliate network, register and place their advertisement. Affiliate marketer or more commonly known as publisher will go to this affiliate network site and get a link for this advertisement and place it somewhere in their site.

These affiliate networks become so successful since they become a hub that links advertiser and publisher. As a publisher, you do not have to pay for any registration fee and there are no dead line given that you have to comply to get your commission (unlike traditional marketing where marketer is given an amount that they have to achieve). Unfortunately though, some of these affiliate networks do not provide their services for people outside USA and Canada. To loop around this constraint, you can ask the advertiser that you are attracted to and ask personally regarding affiliation opportunity. And if you are working on a big enough online niche, most probably you can find your desired affiliate programs posted directly by the advertiser in their site; just look for affiliate or partner links.

Currently, more and more merchants are going with this approach, including game merchant, and even food merchants since this will give them the exposure they need to grow in the online market. Because of the appeal affiliate marketing has, bigger companies are advertising their product in these affiliate networks. Have you ever dreamed of marketing products for Amazon or Dell? you can do it through affiliate marketing. Go ahead and explore these affiliate networks, and you will be thrilled seeing how big is your opportunity of marketing the stuffs you love.

1. Commision Junction - Commision junction is one the most established affiliate network. Publishers can join for free and select the product or service they want to market. After selection, the advertiser will assess marketers eligibility and send them the affiliate link if they agreed.
2. LinkShare - LinkShare is a leading affiliate network. Linkshare has a large selection of advertisers available, ranging from automotive all the way to hobbies.
3. AdToll - AdToll is an innovative affiliate network. Aside from normal banner and link ads, AdToll also server peel away ads and stripe ads.
4. ClickBank - Clickbank is by far the fastest growing affiliate network in the industry. Clickbank focuses mainly on digital products such as e-books. It has a neat mechanism of generating an affiliate link, just add the username that you use plus hop.clickbank.com. It will look something like this: http://username.hop.clickbank.com
5. Google adsense - Adsense is currently the biggest advertisement network. Google adsense work by giving out javascript for you to copy paste on your site. Registration is free and it requires a little bit of technical knowledge to install it in your side.
6. AdBrite - Another advertisement network that has been around for a long time. AdBrite serves advertisement for a lot of big companies around.

True that this will invoke customers urgency and true that some of these product really ARE going offline in 2 hours time. But after getting used to these kind of advertisement, customer will think "At, this is just another tingle-your-urgency-senses kind of marketing" and the next thing they know, BAM, the product is just not there anymore. Because of this, they might just missed a really good product or coaching program that are seriously closing it's door in 2 hours time or 2 days time all thanks to the great marketer.

This happened to me previously, but considering the mails I received on these various product; at one point, I just ignore this timed offering to see other similar products. When I was sure and decided to actually buy that timed product, turns out it WAS really timed. That point onwards, I started to keep track of which marketer to trust and which not and thus leads me to the question.

The big question

Yes, you just want to sell the products, but then more and more people are getting sick of this approach (considering my own experience). This is especially true if you are doing this in almost all of the products being sold. So, do you really need to be this aggressive (or let's say threatening)? Are you increasing your sells or just driving your customer away? For me, once in a while (as in 1 every 10 products) this is okay, since there are some truly time sensitive products, how about you?

Affiliate marketing ways explained

There are 4 types of marketing types that I am aware of. Normally other types are just another ways of saying these terms; PPS, PPA, PPC and PPP.

1. PPS stands for Pay Per Sale. When using this approach to affiliate marketing, you are getting paid if you managed to lead prospect customers into the advertiser's website and actually bought something from them. The commisions are calculated in percentage basis. This is the most common type of marketing that are being used in the market; standing side by side with PPC.
2. PPA stands for Pay Per Action. This marketing technique is also known as Pay Per Lead. As the marketer, you get paid when you managed to get prospect into advertiser's site and do some sort of action; commonly signing up to the newsletter published by the advertiser or downloading a free report or e-book that is provided by the advertiser. This type of affiliate program is normally paid less than Pay Per Sale type and the commisions are normally fixed.
3. PPC stands for Pay Per Click. This type of advertising campaign pays you when you managed to get prospect to click on any of the links provided by the advertiser. This type of campaign is normally served through an ad network. The best example for this is the google adsense program.
4. PPP stands for Pay Per Post. This is the one affiliate marketing way that does not open for all types of website. As the publisher, we get paid after doing a review of a product or service requested by the advertiser. Thus, the most commonplace for doing this is inside a blog. There are more and more pay per post affiliate program provider now that blogs are growing rapidly in the industry.

That is all for today, hope this sharing of information helps all of you out there. Do leave a comment if I missed out on any other types of techniques. Happy marketing!!