Working With Merchants for Your Affiliate Programs

Contacting the merchant of your favorite affiliate program is an ideal way to increase your sales, which can save you a lot of time and heartache. Once you contact the merchant, be sure to let them know what you are doing to promote their products, and ask for their advice when it comes to marketing. Many merchants provide an excellent array of affiliate tools such as banners, follow up emails, advertisements, Java Script to pull in different products from their product based on your keywords, an entire set of broad as well as specific keywords and even Adword ads. The merchant will know their product best, and they will have a good idea of the strategies that are being used by other affiliates to make sales. By contacting the merchant, you'll also show them that you are dedicated to succeeding with affiliate marketing. Contacting the merchant also shows your enthusiasm for marketing their products and services.

In most of the affiliate programs 5% of the affiliates generate 90% of the results. All merchant who knows affiliate marketing knows this fact well and would be happy to interact with the affiliates who take the trouble of contacting them. Good merchants recognize efforts of such affiliates and provide them with information and resources and may even boost their commission rates!

Recognizing the Quality of Merchants

Generally merchants would respond well to affiliates. If you email a merchant and they don't respond, you may try again. Merchants who do not respond to affiliate queries, may not be in business. One should think twice about promoting such affiliate partnerships, as lack of communication can indicate other problems as well - such as payments or disinterest. Keep in mind that many merchants make big promises, and set a high payout rate knowing well that their products do not meet customer requirements. They may also set high payout targets which very few affiliates will actually meet. This isn't a good way to do business, and you should avoid working with these types of merchants.

Communicating With The affiliate Program Merchants

All your communications with merchants should be done on a professional tone. If you have suggestions of how a merchant can improve their offers, you should let them know. Good merchants appreciate such feedback, and know that any feedback they receive can improve their programs.

Wise merchants always understand that good affiliates are hard to find and will treat them with respect, assist with resources, and be prompt with payments. Good affiliates act are the same way, and understand that merchants want quality promotion and sales performance. To get the most out of your partnership, you should always be professional and have excellent understanding with merchants. Good merchants are always busy, which may make them seem like they aren't that good. They will answer your questions and emails, although it may take them a little bit of time.

When you work with a merchant long enough you'll understand how they do things. If you are just starting out in affiliate marketing, a merchant can help you understand how things work. If you listen to them and show initiative, you'll be well on your way to making it to the top in your affiliate marketing business.

The Basic Monetised Blogging Advice

If you are anything like me, who wants to get into the online space without spending too much effort or money, then blogging is the right platform for you. A web log or simply a blog is the opportunity available to the average person to say what he wants to say, make himself heard and build his own following if what one says is valuable.

A blog is also an opportunity to make money if you just know the simple techniques that are illustrated in the blog program which you use. For example this is a blog on a blogger platform. You have the opportunity to monetize it through adsense for which you will be guided if you chose to do so.

A typical blog has the following components:

Post date -the date and time of the blog entry
Category - the category that the blog belongs to
Title - the title of the blog

Main body - the main content of the blog

RSS and trackback - links the blog back from other sites

Comments - commentaries that are added by readers

Permalinks - the URL of the full article

What are the type of blogs that You can create. I have given a list of broad categories. However you may find specific niches within these categories to make it more focussed and targeted if you plan to make it a professional monetized blog.

1. Political blog - on news, politics, activism, and other issue based blogs (such as campaigning).

2. Personal blog - also known as online diary that may include an individual's day-to-day experience, complaints, poems, and illicit thoughts, and communications between friends

3. Topical blog - with focus either on a particular niche (function or position) that is usually technical in nature or a local information

4. Health blog - on specific health issues. Medical blog is a major category of health blog that features medical news from health care professionals and/or actual patient cases

5. Literary blog - also known as litblog

6. Travel blog - with focus on a traveler's stories on a particular journey

7. Research blog - on academic issues such as research notes.

8. Legal blog - on law (technical areas) and legal affairs; also known as 'blawgs'.

9. Media blog - focus on falsehoods or inconsistencies in mass media; usually exclusive for a newspaper or a television network.

10. Religious blog - on religious topics

11. Educational blog - on educational applications, usually written by students and teachers

12. Collaborative or collective blog - a specific topic written by a group of people

13. Directory blog - contains a collection of numerous web sites

14. Business blog - used by entrepreneurs and corporate employees to promote their businesses or talk about their work

15. Personification blog - focus on non-human being or objects (such as dogs)

16. Spam blogs - used for promoting affiliated websites; also known as 'splogs'

If you are looking to monetize the blog, then you need to spend time on daily basis updating the blog with fresh content to make your visitors keep coming back for more info. You will also be listed and ranked better by search engines due to your regularity and fresh content. Fresh content is the food for search spiders.

But if you are too lazy to get into all these efforts then you can check out this guy who makes $40000.00 a month on just a blog.