There is a lot of talk in internet marketing communities about using traffic from Craigslist to publish affiliate or CPA offers. While it is possible to do so, there are certain practices to avoid. Here are some things not to do when using Craigslist.

• Don’t use it for offers where it is not allowed

CPA networks are aware of the fact that some marketers use Craigslist. Some networks ban this type of promotion outright, some forbid it for certain offers, while certain allow it as long as you follow some rules set forth by them. If you do not want to get banned from the network and possible lose the earnings that you have made, you should comply with any rules that they have. When in doubt, contact your affiliate manager just to be sure.

• Don’t simply put in your affiliate links and banners all over the place

Craigslist is mainly designed for local businesses and individuals to post ads and not a place to spam affiliate offers. Any blatant affiliate links and offers will be flagged down rather quickly by users of the site. Simply put, do not direct link from a Craigslist post to an affiliate offer. Your post will probably be gone within minutes anyways.

• Don’t post in the wrong category just to get traffic

If you post an ad in a category that is irrelevant, it will get flagged down almost instantly. The bottom line is, keep your postings to categories where they are relevant if you want them to have any chance of staying up.

• Don’t attempt to trick or mislead people

This is one of the biggest things not to do when using Craiglist. While it was quite popular with black hat marketers about 2 years ago, Craigslist, affiliate networks and merchants have all come down on this and took action to prevent it from happening.

Now, what exactly is “misleading” people? Some examples would be: posting a fake job offer, telling people that they got the job, but that they simply need to complete a biz opp offer to “verify their info”. Or putting up an ad for an apartment and then telling people that they need to pass a credit check, then sending them over to a credit report affiliate offer. One other trick that was popular consisted of offering people a job and then telling them to buy a video conferencing software from an affiliate offer as the “training” for the job would be done remotely. In all cases, this is misleading people, as the apartment or job that was promised to them simply does not exist.

If you do this, soon enough, somebody will complain to the merchant and say “Hey! You promised me a job if I signed up on your site! How come nothing happened?” and you will simply end up banned.

Craigslist is a popular and free online classified ads site. While it certainly isn’t as popular as say Google or Facebook, it is still one of the most popular sites on the internet, with millions of users from all around the world visiting it. This has given online marketers a lot of ideas on how to monetize all of this traffic. Unfortunately, Craigslist is not what it used to be when it comes to internet marketing and you have black hat marketers to thank for that. What some people did went far beyond just spamming CPA offers to downright lying to people such as promising them jobs or mortgages if they complete a CPA offer for a credit report or a biz opp. As a response to that, Craigslist has upped its security mechanism and has even posted warning in many of its sections that specifically mention affiliate marketing.

But this doesn’t mean that is is completely useless to online entrepreneurs. There are a few ways to use it for your online marketing efforts. Here are some of them:

• Promoting your e-commerce site

If you have a website that sells merchandise, then you can still use Craigslist to promote it. For example, if you sell clothes or electronics in your online shop, then you can post an ad in the proper section of Craigslist and get some traffic to it that way. Make sure to post in the right section, or your ad will be flagged down rather quickly. Also, don’t post the same ad in different cities at the same time. While there is nothing wrong with a global e-commerce site posting ads in multiple cities, remember that Craigslist is not mainly aimed at internet marketers, but rather for small, local businesses to post ads in the city where they operate.

• Providing services

If you offer some services that can be done over the internet, then you can use Craigslist to get some business too. For example, if you create websites for businesses and individuals, then you can put an ad in the right section to promote that. There are plenty of services that you can do over the internet and have your clients pay your by Paypal or another payment system. Some examples include: translation, writing, graphic design, flier/advertising design, promotional video creations and a whole lot more. If you want to appear more professional and therefore more trustworthy when providing these services, you can always create a simple “business” style website that gives details of what you do and your prices, as well as get a toll free phone number to get your clients to reach you. You can get one for a few dollars a month and then forward it to your cell phone, or just leave it to always go to voicemail. Here’s a tip to get more sales: put a special discount or coupon code in your ad and tell readers to mention it when they order.

If you want to make some money online by promoting affiliate offers, then there are various ways for you to accomplish this. You could building landing pages for each offer you push, or even link directly to the offer depending on which advertising channel you use. But one of the ways to push affiliate offers online is by simply creating a blog.

Blogs have many advantages. They make it very easy to add unique and new content, which will help them remain interesting with readers and also make SEO easier. With blogging platforms such as Joomla and WordPress, creating your own blog has never been easier. So how do you make one for affiliate marketing? Here is an example scenario:

Let’s say that you are promoting web hosting affiliate offers. The main topic of your blog will be web hosting, or issues that are of interest to other internet marketers or webmasters. You would make regular posts such as: web building tips, reviews of particular web hosts, comparisons between different types of web hosting, SEO advice, etc. Basically, anything that is related to being a webmaster.

There will be various ways for you to “plug” the affiliate ads into your blog. You can, of course use classic banner ads, or text ads placed in prominent locations. But it is also possible for you to include affiliate links inside the text of your blog. For example, you could link the name of a web host that you talk about in a blog post to the affiliate offer.

But one important thing to remember when you are creating a blog for affiliate marketing is to not make it look like this is the only purpose of your blog. Sure, for you the main objective of your blog would be to generate money for you. But your readers come to your blog in order to be informed about something they care about, not simply read post after post that is singing praises of various different companies and products.

So back to our example of a web hosting blog. Sure, it is fine to have certain posts talk about how great a certain web host is, or that inform readers of a special promotion that a hosting company is having at this time. But you also need to include some informative content as well. So you could make some posts that talk about web design tools or posts that explain how VPS web hosting is different from shared hosting, etc. If your readers notice that your blog is nothing more than an advertising platform, chances are they won’t trust it very much. They will probably leave to go to another site and the chances that someone would click one of your ads and sign up for one of the web hosts that you are pushing are quite remote if your blog is structured that way. Basically, the key to success is having regularly updated and informative content.

If you are creating a blog, there are various ways that you can monetize it, which simply means to make money from it. Yesterday, we have seen the two easiest and most common ways of making some profit from your blog, which are inserting pay per click ads on it, as well as putting up a donation button. But there are two other options worth mentioning. While they may be a bit more complex, they are still being used by plenty of bloggers out there and can be extremely profitable.

• Putting up affiliate ads

The basic concept behind affiliate marketing is that you get paid a certain commission when someone clicks on an ad on your blog and either buys something, or performs a specific action such as signing up for a website. Unlike pay per click ads, you do not get paid for every click that the ad receives from a visitor.

When it comes to affiliate offers, in order to get the most success, you should use offers that are closely related to the theme of your blog. So if your blog talks about cars, for example, you could put ads for car insurance companies, which typically pay you whenever someone requests a quote from the insurance company. You can also participate in the Amazon Affiliate Program. Amazon.com is one of the world’s most popular online retailers and they sell hundreds of thousands of items in different categories. So if your blog talks about photography, you can put up some ads for photo cameras from Amazon. If someone clicks on the ad and makes a purchase, you will receive a commission based on the amount of the total sale. Remember that in order to make the highest amount of money possible, the affiliate offers that you promote on your blog should be related to its content.

The more “generic” ads such as the “shoot 3 ducks and get a free iPhone!!” banners are best avoided, since many of your readers have probably already seen them and will simply ignore them. While you can put some affiliate offers that aren’t really related to the niche of your blog, doing so is not recommended since your readers are far less likely to even click on these ads in the first place.

• Selling your own products

This can be a good monetization option if you produce your own products, or you simply own an e-commerce site that sells certain items that could be of interest to your readers. For example, if you have a blog about technology and at the same time, you sell video game consoles and computers on eBay, you can put an ad for your eBay page inviting users to visit your online shop. To make it even more attractive for them, you could even offer a special discount code for readers of your blog. This can be a very profitable monetization choice, but of course you would need to be already involved in some form of e-commerce for you to make use of it.

When looking at full time online business opportunities, many people ask themselves whether affiliate marketing is a good thing to go into. While there is definitely a lot of money to be made in this business, it is not the most simple thing to set up. One of the reasons behind this is that you will have plenty of competitors who are going to be after the same kind of traffic that you are and pushing the exact same types of affiliate offers. So what do you require in order to become a good affiliate marketer and make a profitable business out of it? Here are certain things you will need:

• Patience

While some people did make a few thousand in their first months, there is nothing guaranteeing that you will be able to emulate them. Becoming a successful affiliate marketer will take some time. First, you would need to make various efforts to make your business become profitable. Next, you would need to consider the fact that most affiliate programs pay you one month after the end of the current month, so it is not instant money like if you would be selling things on eBay or offering services. If you need to make some money right away, like cash to pay some bills, you can try a different business model for the time being and then move onto affiliate marketing later.

• Money to invest

While it is possible to get started here with just a few dollars for a web hosting account, if you want your business to be successful, you will need to invest a lot of money into it. Some of the things that you may need to pay include: hosting, advertising as well as paying other people to do some tasks for you, such as creating landing pages or putting up ads if you don’t want to spend too much time doing these yourself.

• Ability to stay on top of things

The world of internet marketing is one that is always changing. As such, there are new offers for you to promote, new networks for you to do business with, new advertising opportunities, etc. that appear regularly. If you want to maximize the amount of profit that your business will be making, then you will also need to spend some time scouting for new opportunities in addition to running your existing campaigns. This will require some good planning and time management on your part.

• Having no fear of failure

There are many great methods to make money online, however no one will tell you the exact steps that you will need to take to build a successful affiliate campaign. This is something that you will need to figure out on your own. Along the may, it is very well possible that you will make mistakes. The important thing here is not to be afraid to try new things and to learn from your errors so that you can gain a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

There are a lot of people who want to earn some money on the internet. There are also plenty of guides, some free, some paid, which describe various ways to do so. The problem with these is that they often tend to take a “one size fits all” approach and make no difference between someone who just wants a few extra dollars to pay their bills or someone who wants to make a six figure income by building a complete online business.

Also, the issue is that these guides, courses and ebooks, while useful and interesting, tend to focus exclusively on one online money making activity, such as affiliate marketing, digital product creation or eBay selling. This, in itself, is not entirely a bad thing. After all, if someone wants to learn how to be a Power Seller on eBay and make thousands of dollars in sales each day, it would be much better for them to have a complete guide on the topic, rather than just reading a few pages in a more general money making ideas guide.

However, for those who do not yet know which specialty, or specialties of online money making they want to get into, this may not be the best choice. In that case, it would be much better for these people to read something that describes various ways to make money on the internet, so that they can choose which activities they would want to perform to earn.

Even though many individuals with no knowledge of online business wouldn’t know much about different money making activities, they typically know what their objectives are in terms of income. Some people only want to make a hundred or so dollars each month, while others want to make a thousand dollars each day.

There are basically three different categories of objectives in terms of income:

Micro online business: $0 to $500 a month.

This is for those who only want a few extra bucks at the end of the month, to do things like pay some bills, buy a few extra things that they want, etc. These people typically do not want to invest much time or money in their business and just want methods that will bring them a bit of cash without being too complex.

Part time online business: $500 to $2500 a month.

This is often used by people who want to supplement an existing income or those that are willing to put in a bit more effort in their online activities and spend about 15 to 30 hours a week on it. Some investments might be required, but they will usually be relatively small sums of money.

Full time online business: $2500 a month +

Here, things start getting serious. Those who have this objective need to know that they will essentially be building a complete online business and they must be willing to put in 30 or more hours per week into it, as well as make the necessary financial investments to get their business off the ground and to keep it growing.

We will keep exploring some money making ideas for each of these categories tomorrow.

We have previously looked at various options that you have with regards to webhosting. Now hosting a small website can usually be done really well with just a shared hosting account. If you are just putting up a website as a hobby, you might even consider using a free web host at the beginning. But of course, none of these options are the best solutions if you are going to build a serious e-commerce site. In this case, you would be better off getting a dedicated server to host your site. Even there, you have two options. Let’s take a look at what they are.

• VPS Hosting

VPS, or virtual private server, is kind of an in between solution, between getting a dedicated server all to yourself and getting a shared hosting account. What you actually get a part of a dedicated server to yourself. It is called a virtual server, as it runs in a virtual machine on an actual server that you will share with a few other users. However, you will be assigned resources for your virtual server that only you can use, such as RAM, disk space and bandwidth. You are free to install any applications or scripts that you need to run your site as well. The pricing varies and can range from $25 to $300 a month.

Recommended for: Large scale affiliate marketing, running a medium to large e-commerce site or web store.

• Dedicated Server

Here, you get to rent a dedicated server all to yourself. You basically have the entire server just for your usage. You will get to customize the hardware that your server will have, such as the hard drive space, the CPU and the amount of RAM. A dedicated server offers unparallelled security, reliability and performance for the most demanding applications. Depending on the host, you may get to choose whether you will be using a server based on a Windows or Linux environment. Prices range from $100 to $500 a month, depending on host and server configuration chosen.

Recommended for: Large membership sites, medium to large general online business, large e-commerce sites.

Selecting a dedicated server is not complicated. All you have to do is to consider what your needs will be and then go look for a webhosting company that will offer you what you are looking for. However, it is important that you don’t base your decision solely on price. Sure, there are a few small webhosts which are able to offer very cheap prices, however based on comments from other webmasters, I can tell you that these are not always the most reliable companies to do business with. You should rather base your choice on what other webmasters who have used a certain host recommend and by reading reviews written by experts in the industry. That way, you can avoid making a mistake and going with an unreliable or problematic hosting company, but will rather end up with a quality server to power your website.

Unfortunately some of the best ways to place affiliate links involve black hat methods, we will cover one of these methods but are mostly interested in how to place you links using all white hat methods (the two in this article are enough to build a successful affiliate career that is completely white hat).

Linking in eBooks

It is no secret that people on the internet love ebooks, however most beginning internet marketers become suspicious after their first few “Sell this ebook on forums” ebooks that they purchase.  Avoid and reshape this mentality by creating (or buying the rights for) ebooks and giving them away for free, now this activity might seem counterintuitive “How can I make money by giving stuff away?” but it is truly ingenious. What you are looking to do is create an ebook about how to make money online using different products, explain the overwhelmingly positive benefits of each of these products and each time you mention the product place it as a hyperlink with your affiliate link as the target.  You can use this technique with all sorts of different niches and some say targeting niches that are not internet marketing are more profitable because people tend to not be expecting affiliate links (did you know the average person does not know that there is any such thing as an affiliate link?).

Article Marketing

This technique will again be focusing on giving people free content and sneaking in your affiliate links. While article marketing can be sort of a shot in the dark, it is a nice way to put some of you links out on the internet and never have to think about them again. Your goal in article marketing is the same as with writing an ebook, provide quality content and advice that causes the user to realize they really need the products in the book, then put your affiliate links and the targets for the product hyperlinks. Article marketing is a much faster way to get your affiliate links out to the world.

Craigslist

This one is definitely blackhat, so only read ahead if you have no problems scamming ordinary everyday people out of their money.  One of the best ways to work affiliate links into craigslist is in the jobs section, when searching for jobs people are nearly as desperate as ever and will go to great lengths to get a job. Another excellent way is in the for sale section, you can actually get away with posting straight affiliate links to Amazon and surprisingly people will purchase through your link! Again, these methods are blackhat and can get you flagged on craigslist.

That’s all there is to it, it takes a little bit of work and patience once you have the links placed, but the internet is a big place and over time you will start seeing sales rolling in via your affiliate links.

Image Source: Bill Board Mama

Affiliate marketing is something we talk about quite a bit here, but one area we don’t always touch on enough is creating your own products. We have talked about it a bit, but I haven’t touched on one very valuable area of affiliate marketing — creating an incentive for your affiliates to try and sell your product.

Below are four rock solid ways for you to help your affiliates to sell your product and to make it easier on them.

Create Banners For Them
One of the easiest things you can do is create banners and graphics for your affiliates to display. It saves them time and money creating them banners for themselves to sell YOUR product, and it will keep your branding and identity of your product consistent.

Give Away a Prize
At launch, giving away a high valued prize can be a great incentive for people to work hard and sell your product. For example, a lot of affiliates give away a MacBook Pro or Apple iPad to the top selling affiliate after so many weeks or months. Nothing gives more incentive than cool gadgets and cold hard cash.

Make it Easy
Create a great product that people want to use. Don’t take shortcuts on your landing page design and make sure your sales copywriting is rock solid. Having a good product and a good website and layout is essential in getting affiliates in the first place. Every time I sign up for an affiliate program or to sell someone’s product, I go to their product page to see 1) Does the product fit my niche? 2) How well is the website laid out? 3) What is the sales copywriting look like? 4) Is the site easy to use, uncluttered and is it easy to find the “order” page (the most essential page!)? Create a good product and great site and you will be very successful if you take care of your affiliates.

Have a High Payout
Do not be cheap when it comes to payouts, because people love making money. If they are going to go through a ton of effort for your product, they better have a great reason why — money. If your product is $30, you should think of $15 as the minimum and $20 as a number down the road potentially. Why? The more people selling your product the more products you will sell, so you will try and make it up in mass sales.

One of the areas a lot of internet marketers overlook is creating their own product. Many think in one way: affiliate revenue.

Now, affiliate marketing is great, however you sometimes need more than one way to generate revenue, and creating your own products is one of the best ways to do it.

The content doesn’t necessarily have to be 100% unique either, sometimes rebranding some parts of master resale rights products along with some unique offerings of your own can build a great product for potential buyers.

Here is a hypothetical example. Imagine that you are a prolific SEO specialist that is great at giving speeches and presentations, but lack the attention span to do long form writing such as ebooks or reports for potential clients.

Creating a video series could be a great way to create some passive income for yourself as well as your affiliate revenue. But sometimes you need to have more than just a video series. Luckily, you have several options, including hiring a virtual assistant or contractor to create an ebook for you. You could have them create a unique offering for your, including all of the areas you touch on in the video series as well as other things you may have overlooked at the time of recording. Or you could have them write a supplemental ebook that gives different looks and case studies on different websites and proper SEO work in practice.

Building a package of content like this is very enticing for potential buyers, because it will give them more content for the same price. If you could buy one ebook that comes with an audio only version, or an ebook on the same subject with a video series, a free case study, and a follow up series giving tips and tricks for 3 months after your purchase, which would you choose (given the prices are in the same ballpark obviously).

Packaging different product types together is the best way to reach a broader audience, every person learns differently — so having different ways to reach them with the same consistent message is very important and essential to a great product launch. Make sure you diversify your offerings in order to reach the most people.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to bring in some money. There are a lot of affiliate programs out there that pay well, but if you don’t know how to use them effectively, you won’t get very far with them. There’s no single strategy that’s going to work for everyone, but there are a few things you can keep in mind that will help you grow your affiliate marketing strategy.

Relevance

When you’re picking an affiliate program, it’s important to choose one that’s relevant. You want to promote products that other people are interested in, and searching for. Take the time to do a little keyword research for any products you’re thinking of promoting. Get a feel for the level of interest that exists for that product before you dive in. You want something that gets a fair amount of searches, but it’s best to avoid extremely popular products. If a products is getting millions of searches a month, your marketing efforts are likely tog et lost in the sea of information that exists about that product.

Know Your Audience

Once you pick an affiliate program to work with, it’s important to understand the audience it appeals to. Do some market research and figure out who you’re audience is. You don’t want to use the same marketing methods to communicate with a 20 year old male as you would a 50 year old female. In order to craft an effective marketing strategy, you have to know who you’re target audience is first.

Potential For Profit

If the product you’re thinking about promoting has poor profit potential, then there’s no point in wasting your time on it. Products with lower demand but higher profit margins can be profitable, and products with high demand, and low profit margin, it can still be profitable. If the profit margin is low, and the demand isn’t very high, you should probably steer clear of the product.

If you take the time to find the right product, and do the research to determine your target audience, you’ll be able to craft an effective affiliate marketing strategy. If you’re selling the right products to the right people, you’ll be bringing in a decent amount of revenue before you know it.

If you’re at all familiar with online marketing, you probably know something about social bookmarking. For those not in the know, social bookmarking sites allow you to post links, and share them with other users. Most social bookmarking sises have a rating system in place where users can choose to vote a link up or down. If a link gets voted up enough, it gets featured on the site’s homepage. Now that you have a understanding of what social bookmarking is, you’re probably wondering exactly what it can do for you as an affiliate marketer.

The number one benefit social bookmarking can have for an affiliate marketer is that it can help you raise your search rank. Social bookmarking sites are among the most popular sites on the internet, and just having a link present on a social bookmarking site can help your site become more visible to search engines. Search engines determine a page’s value by looking at a variety of factors, one of which is the quality of sites that link to it. Social bookmarking sites have a high value  to search engines, so having a social bookmarking site link into your site will help to raise your search rank. When you’re running an affiliate website, it’s important to have a high search rank. Most of your traffic is going to come from search engines, and as such, using social bookmarking sites to boost your search rank is highly beneficial.

In addition to boosting your search rank, social bookmarking sites can also bring in a fair amount of traffic to your site. If you have a link on a social bookmarking site that gets popular, and makes it’s way to the homepage, it’s a safe bet that you’ll get a great deal of traffic to that link. It’s tough to get pages on affiliate sites to become popular on social bookmarking sites, but if your content is either extremely informative, or entertaining, it can definitely happen.

Social bookmarking sites can bring two of the most important things to your affiliate site: traffic, and a higher search rank. As your search rank goes up, so too will your traffic. As your traffic goes up, so to will your profits.Be sure to use good anchor text in your social bookmarking links, and you’ll see results in no time.

Getting started with affiliate marketing sounds a lot more difficult than it actually is. In fact, there are only three major points you absolutely need to keep in mind to get started. You need to know what product to promote, who you’re promoting it to, and you need a website.

Picking the right affiliate program takes a little bit of effort. There are two major factors you need to look at. You need to know how in demand the product is, and you need to know the commission rate the affiliate program is paying out. It’s important to find an affiliate program that balances a high demand product with a fair commission rate. It’s very tempting to pick the products with the highest commission rates, but if there isn’t any demand for them, you won’t make money that way. A product with high demand and low commission pay outs can easily outperform a product with low demand, and a high pay out.

Once you’ve picked a product, it’s time to identify your target audience. You can’t sell a product if you don’t know who you’re selling it to, so take the time to do a little research about what kind of people will be buying the products you’ve chosen to promote. By learning all you can about your customers, you will be able to find better ways to present your products to them.

Once you know your product and your audience, it’s time to start pushing that product to that audience. There are a lot of different marketing strategies you can use, but at the center of any good affiliate marketing system there should be a solid website. Consider creating a review site for the type of products you’re marketing. By reviewing the specific type of product yo’re trying to sell, and including affiliate links on each review, you’ll be able to give your viewers information they’re looking for, and send them straight to the products they want to buy.

Affiliate marketing may seem overwhelming, but it’s really all about bringing people together with the products they want to buy. By understanding the product, and the customer, you can create an effective website designed to bring the two together. If you can bring customers together with the things they’re looking for, the rest will fall into place on it’s own.

As a member to my program I will show you how to set-up a network of successful niche websites built on WordPress.  WordPress is a content management system that is free to the public and is mainly used for Blogging.  A blog can be used as a personal diary to write daily articles about anything you like.  Nearly all online companies use a blog, as blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website and attract a reader base.  The reason blogs are so successful is because search engines love a website that is updated on a daily basis with unique information especially a WordPress blog because they are optimised for search engines.

The best way to make money online is to start your own blog on any niche you like.  My advice is to set up a blog in a niche that you have a personal interest in.  For example if you’re into gadgets or electronics set-up a blog dedicated to writing reviews and news about electrical items.  If you have an interest in health and beauty set up a blog writing about the latest health and beauty products and so on.  If you have an interest in finance set up a blog about the latest news.

If you’re serious about making money online with your own network of blogs then I highly recommend you to join up to my membership program and watch my video tutorials on how to set-up a successful blog and drive traffic to them and make money from affiliate marketing.

Click Here To Join