It never fails. Everytime that I show my site to someone and tell them how much money I have made off of it over the years, they always say "You gotta show me how to do this!". Well, I’m tired of wasting my breath on this subject so I’m going to write down everything that’s needed and just point people to this article from now on.

First off, a little history may be in order. I created my site about seven years ago after a friend told me of someone he knew that was making something like $60k a year from his own website. I checked out the website and saw that it was an affiliate site. An affiliate site is a site where there are special links to online stores and if someone clicks on one of those links and then buys something from that store, the site owner gets paid a percentage of the sale. It seemed easy enough to do and I knew enough about html to do it, so I decided to give it a try.

I couldn’t afford to risk much in trying to create a new business as I didn’t have a lot of money. The only site I had created up until then was just a free site on Geocities, so I didn’t really have any knowledge about what it took to set up a "real" website. After doing a little research, I found out that you really didn’t need a lot of money to set up a site and to get your own domain name. Basically if you have $150 (a year) to spare and some free time, you can create your own online business site to make extra money with.

How much money? I can’t say that I have been able to quit my day job (yet), but I have made significant amounts of money from my site. How significant? Some months I have made nothing. Some months I have made thousands. 2005 was my best year ever- I made over $25,000 from my site! How much you make really all depends on the fickle nature of the search engine gods and on how much work that you want to put into your site. Some people have made fortunes from affiliate sites, but I assume that the ones who do have made it their life’s work and spend most of their time working on their site, studying the search engines, and how to beat them. I put very little work into my site (and it shows), but it has still provided me with a good deal of extra income.

Still want to know how to do it yourself? Here’s how:

Step 1 - Learn HTML
Most of the friends that I have showed my site to already knew how to make webpages with HTML. If you don’t know anything about HTML, don’t worry; HTML is easy to learn and you don’t need to know much to get started. If you can make a simple webpage with links on it, that’s all you really need to know to begin building your site. If you need help with this, I suggest reading a book like HTML in Easy Steps. I’ve had good luck with the other books in the Easy Step series. They’re small books that give you just enough info to get started without confusing you with theory and they’re cheap- only $10.

You don’t need to spend any money for a tool to create web pages in. You can use any text editor, even Notepad works. If you do a search on Google for "free html editor", you’ll find lots of free tools that you can try.

Step 2 - Set Up Your Website
Ok, now that you know how to create a webpage, its time to start setting up your website. To run your website you will need a webhost. That’s a company that hosts websites on their servers. You can get a lot of webhosting bang for your buck if you know what to look for.

The main things that you will need to think about as you choose a webhost are: price, language support, and database support. If you only know HTML, all you have to worry about is price. If you need support for ASP, PHP, MYSQL, etc., you will need to do a bit more research before you make your choice.

What’s a good price for webhosting? You can pay hundreds of dollars a month for dedicated hosting, but your site will work just as well with a webhost that costs less than $10 per month. Another thing you need to consider when comparing the prices of the different webhosts is how much they charge to register domain names for you. This can range from free (yay!) upwards of $20 per year.

Getting set up with on your chosen webhost should be an easy task. It usually requires no more than filling in some personal info and your credit card number. The only hard part is picking a domain name to use for your website. Unfortunately, most good, short names are already taken. Either make up a new word altogether or combine two or more words into a name. That’s how I ended up with Bargainstrike as a name.

Some sites chain words together with hypens in order to gain an advantage from search engines. An example of this would be: www.buy-cars-online-cheap.com. While this may help your search ranking on some search engines, I would advoid naming your site like this. It’s a practice that’s likely to be penalized by Google and others someday. Fixing a problem with a domain name problem like would not be easy to fix.

Step 3 - Register with Affiliate Companies
Affiliate companies are the middlemen between online stores and you. They provide you with the links to different stores, record the amount of traffic and sales that your links send to those stores, and they send you your payment for this. You really can’t run an affiliate site without registering with at least one Affiliate company as very few major stores run their own independant affiliate program. There are lots of different ones that you can sign up with, but there are only three major ones that you really need to registered with. They are Linkshare, Commission Junction, and Performics. And of these three, Linkshare is by far the most important one to belong to. At least 90% of my money comes from Linkshare links as more major stores with affiliate programs use Linkshare than any other affiliate company.

After you have registered with an Affiliate company, you will need to sign up with the companies that you would like to affiliate with. This can be tricky expecially when you are just getting started. Some companies check out each applicant by hand to make sure that your site meets their standards. Since your website isn’t even built yet, you will get rejected by these companies. The good news is that there are a lot of companies who automatically accept all applicants without checking anything. These are the ones that you are looking for at this point in the game. Later, when your site is actually running and getting some traffic, come back and try registering for the ones who declined your application before.

After you get accepted into a company’s affiliate program you can then get the links that point to that company’s products and promotions. These links contain the affiliate tracking codes that are necessary for giving you credit for sending them a sale. Take care that when you copy them to your site that you get the entire code for the link.

Step 4 - Build Your Site
Ok, this is where it all comes together. If you haven’t built a website before, it can be an intimidating task. What should it look like? What colors should everything be? What fonts should I use? The best advice I can give about the look and feel of your site is to look around the internet, find some sites that you like, and try to copy the look in your design.

A thing to remember is that since you only get money for sending people to another website, your website is not a final destination. It is a conduit. It should be functional and fast. The best way to achieve this is to keep your design simple and keep graphics to a minimum. When in doubt, look at how Google or Yahoo designs their pages.

Your home page should contain links to all the rest of the pages on your site. Its main function is to allow search engines to easily spider your entire site. It should also be easy for users to find what they are looking for, but don’t be fooled- most people will never see your homepage. If you build your other pages correctly, users will go to them much more often than your homepage.

All of the other pages on your site are where you make the money. Build a separate page for each companies affiliate program that you belong to. Put the name of the company along with what ever search term that you want to key on in the TITLE element of the page. The title of the page is by far the most important thing that search engines will rank your pages on. Now get some links to their site from the affiliate site that this company uses and put them in the page. Add some text describing the company that you are linking to and perhaps their banner image. Do this for each of the stores that you want to link to and your basic site is done.

Once you have your site done, ftp all of it to your webhost. There are some free programs to do this with, but I usually just use the one that built into Internet Explorer.

One final thing, don’t use pop-ups, pop-unders, or any other devious tricks on your visitors. Don’t spam people with emails. People who do these things are assholes. Don’t be an asshole.

Step 5 - Promote your Website
Now that you have a working affiliate site on the web, the money is just going to start pouring in, right? Not exactly. First off, nobody will find your site until you get listed by the search engines. To get started, use a free automated URL submission service like Sitesearchsubmit. Fill in your website’s URL and email address and Sitesearchsubmit will submit your site’s address to many of the top search engines automatically. Next, you will need to manually submit the address of your page to the search engines that don’t allow for automated submission like MSN and Yahoo.

Now be patient. Some search engines can take 3-4 months to list your site. Some will have your site indexed within a month. Just do a search for your site’s name once a week on each search engine to see if has been listed yet.

Once your site has been listed you can start testing to see how you are being ranked for the keywords that you are using. If you would like to find out what keywords are important to ranked high for, do a search here for suggestions. Do some research on how to optimize your pages for search engines. I won’t go into that here as search engines are constantly changing how they rank pages and such info is quickly outdated. Make some changes to your site and wait until they re-indexed (Google will usually index your site every month) and see whether or not your changes made a difference. Keep doing this until you have the ranking you want or until you give up in frustration.

Search engines are fickle beasts. Be patient as it will probably take at least a year before you see your first check. Also, don’t give up when the search engines leave your site high and dry sometimes. I’ve had an entire year before where my traffic almost dropped to nothing and then the next year it went through the roof- all without me making any changes to the site at all. Stay in it for the long run and you will make money.

by

Mike Hensley http://www.bargainstrike.com

I received an email from a subscriber telling me he is promoting affiliate products on his website and since I’ve sent the AdSense Videos offer, he’s interested to put AdSense on his site but not too sure for fear of losing affiliate business.

I’ve been using AdSense along with affiliate products for quite awhile and I haven’t noticed any significant decrease in affiliate earnings. AdSense is an important revenue stream and I simply think you’re losing money each day if you’re not using AdSense. Even if you’re not too much into it, use it to cover your hosting fees.

Here is good way to start implementing AdSense. Build a website around a topic you’re interested in but make your keyword research first at

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion http://www.wordtracker.com

Avoid using keywords that have too many searches per month or per day because this means they are really competitive.

Then you can put a few affiliate products on your website. Browse the ClickBank Marketplace for all types of products you can promote at http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace and get related content from sites like http://www.ezinearticles.com and http://www.articlebiz.com

Next, get a few links to your website and get it indexed. Of course, you need to promote your website and acquire more and more links to have a decent ranking in the major search engines for your primary keyword phrases. In the meantime, you can receive a few visitors from some search engine queries because content on your site are rich in keywords.

AdSense is partly a numbers game. The more websites and pages you have running AdSense, the more chances in earning more revenue. But it’s better to learn all you can about AdSense to get the most out of it because this will reflect in your income. I know some people still struggling with AdSense because they don’t really know the ins and outs and also how to implement it effectively and lucratively for eg keywords, content, ad placement, ad layout. They also need to treat AdSense more like a business rather than like a hobby.

This article can be freely published on a website as long as it’s not modified in any way including the author bylines, plus all the hyperlinks must be made active just like below.

If you want to learn about AdSense Videos, check out my AdSense Secrets review. For linking, indexing and ranking websites, get your own copy of Top 10 Google Ranking Report recently updated to 100 pages with new additional tips and strategies.

One reason many people get into Internet Marketing is so that they can have more free time. However, many people find themselves sinking more and more time into their online business before they realise that they have exchanged one job chained to a desk for another, chained to a computer.

Is it really possible that you can get more free time through Internet Marketing? All the big names tell us it is possible, but how can it happen?

Well firstly, you can pay someone else to do the web designing, search engine optimization and so on. However, for some of us, that may not be practical. Oftentimes people start an Internet business because they don’t have a lot of money and need a cheap and effective way to get their business up and running.

It is entirely possible to earn money whilst doing nothing with Internet marketing. Firstly, if you have automated your website and it is ranking high in the directories then it will run on auto-pilot.

However, you may not be high in the search engines yet and need other ways to put your business on auto-pilot.

One of the best methods I know of is to set up an affiliate program. This allows other people to promote your product and be paid a commission for each sale. If they don’t make any sales, they don’t get any commission. Obviously, you need to pay them enough commission to make it worth their while. A few dollars as the commission level is not going to motivate anyone for anything, so you may need to offer 40%, 50% of even higher depending on your business and product strategy.

This kind of percentage will get your potential affiliates much more excited about selling your product. Be wary though of raising the price of your product in order to make up the affiliate payment. You may end up pricing yourself out of the market and making no sales!

There are many different options for running an affiliate program. You can host the software on your web server and run if from there, or you can pay a monthly fee for someone else to host it for you. You could also join a program such as Paydotcom or Clickbank that handle everything for you, and all you need to do is sit back and enjoy the profits.

In fact, for many marketers, Clickbank is a real favourite because it truly allows you to automate your business! They handle everything for you – taking payment, paying the affiliate and paying you, allowing you to really put your business on auto-pilot and achieve the elusive dream of making money whilst you sleep.

Affiliates do equal more free time and more money. They will promote your product for you, earn you money, with minimal effort on your behalf. Investigate today how you can run your own affiliate program and benefit from this fantastic leverage on your time and resources.

Jason E Johns is a successful Internet Marketer & personal coach dedicated to your success. He has produced a number of effective programs to help you become the success you desire. To find out more about affiliate programs & affiliate marketing through his Success For Affiliate Managers program visit http://www.successforaffiliatemanagers.com

There is no denying the fact that Affiliate Marketing is very popular right now. The main reason for its popularity is simple: it benefits both the merchant (the supplier of the product or service) and the marketer (the person promoting the product or service) in many ways. Presented below are two short lists of several benefits enjoyed by both merchant & marketer, respectively.

Benefits for the Merchant:

1. Instead of a sales force of one or two people, by using Affiliate Marketing a merchant can have a sales force of thousands or more. Their products will be seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors instead of only those that they alone would be able to promote their product to.

2. The merchant does not have to worry about hiring, firing and all the other tedious tasks that come along with having employees in a business. Software programs can run the affiliate program and do much of the mundane work.

3. Affiliate Marketing allows the merchant to get exposure for his product without incurring a huge expense. Many affiliate programs pay the marketer a percentage of the products sale price. Utilizing this type of program, the merchant wouldn’t pay anything to the marketer unless his product actually sells.

4. The advertising costs for the merchant are minimal compared to the aspect of the merchant doing all the promoting themselves.

Benefits for the Marketer:

1. Most affiliate programs are free to join. You can join numerous programs and have a myriad of products available to promote, depending on your situation.

2. Your overhead should be low. You don’t have to buy the products up front. Your job is to get people to visit the merchant. When the visitor makes a purchase, the merchant handles the transaction and the shipping of the product as well as any refunds that may be required.

3. There is no need to hire employees. You can promote many different affiliate programs from one website. This makes it an ideal way for a person to earn some extra income without a lot of work being involved.

4. Since the merchant handles the transaction, there is normally no customer interaction needed. Of course you may get the odd email asking questions about the product, but under most circumstances there is no need for interaction between you and a potential buyer.

5. You have the option of changing products/programs as you see fit for your particular site or situation. This wouldn’t necessarily be the case if you were promoting your own products. If a certain product is not selling, you can easily exchange it for another, or perhaps even decide to stop promoting it altogether.

In Conclusion:

Affiliate Marketing works because it benefits both the merchant and the marketer. Each party benefits from the program in several distinct ways, thereby making Affiliate Marketing a wise and cost efficient way to sell products or services.

Copyright 2006 Craig Binkley

Craig Binkley is a husband, father and home business owner. Visit his Work From Home Directory at http://www.workfromhomehelper.com for legitimate work from home opportunities and ideas.

When dealing with affiliate companies for revenue on your websites it makes sense to keep an eye on what they are peddling and very carefully consider the types of revenue you use. Some websites are choosing to use highlighted word hyperlinks to affiliates. Others decry this type of advertising because it looks cheesy. Nevertheless if it indeed makes money then folks will try it. Those that have are split, some say it derives a lot of revenue others say it is pure evil; interesting debates on this topic indeed.

From only a personal perspective these highlighted words in the regular text of a website somewhat scare me as user. Why? Well, because I have no idea where the link is going to and it could be going to a website that automatically loads on Spyware or Adware to your computer. So when I see these, I will scan the article if interesting and back out of the website all together or even close the browser and start over.

Many very well known Websites in the "public science realm" do this and some of those sites I no longer visit. It would seem if it tends to detract readership then it also will lessen a website’s use and therefore over all hurt the site, even though occasionally someone will click on the highlighted words link. Originally some websites used this to go to a definition of a word or one could click on the word to go to a listing of all the articles on the subject, but now most go to affiliate websites for Ads, that is unfortunate.

While on Wikipedia.com those highlighted words go to more depth in the subject of that word. So, it can be confusing and a way of trickery of the new users understanding. I find that troubling. This is an interesting subject however. And something perhaps you need to think on when considering possibilities for affiliate revenues. Consider this in 2006.

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance in the Online Think Tank and solve the problems of the World; www.WorldThinkTank.net/

Affiliate marketing is a phenomenal creation of the Internet. In no other environment you do this:

Sell products you don’t own, don’t bother to arrange delivery, forget billing and cash collection, don’t bother with after sales service, still get paid and yet not go to prison!

Imagine a whole team of people take care of all the setting up of a web site(s), product sales literature, software systems, billing, delivery and after sales service.

And hat do you do? You just collect a big chunk of money! Wow! OK, it sounds great so lets see what the actual arrangement is in affiliate marketing.

The process is about sharing income between the affiliate merchant (the product developer) and the affiliate marketer (anyone willing to promote the product by all legitimate means).

The relationship will allow the affiliate merchant to grow their revenue by paying only for the advertising that results in a sale. The affiliate marketer will profit by making a percentage on a sale that he does not have to manage after the sale.

*Getting paid*

Getting paid all depends upon how the affiliate program is set up. Some merchants will run their own affiliate program. They’ll have special types of software that assigns each affiliate marketer a special link that’s used in promoting the product.

The software tracks sales of every marketer and the merchant will pay the commission on a periodic basis using either PayPal or another method of payment.

*Selecting products or services*

Your income is directly tied to how well your selected product or service sells, and the size of the commission you earn, which makes it very important that you choose carefully when it comes to choosing the affiliate merchant you’ll be partnering with.

Choose programs that you’re comfortable promoting and programs that you’ll happily recommend to your family and friends if they were to ask you about it.

In the early days, you’ll do much better if you promote products that you fully understand and are already familiar with. This way, you’ll be able to write better ads without having to strain yourself coming up with the right things to say.

Something else you should note is that the best affiliate products also include plenty of sales collateral. That means, they’ll have a ready made selection of graphics, text ads, solo ads (small articles about the product) and other helpful material so you don’t have to spend time creating these.

Another important factor to consider is whether the merchant provides any training for you and the potential customers. Those who do shold be at the top of your list.

Be on the lookout for programs with commission rates no less than 50%. Do give preference to programs that pay commission on multiple levels. This means you’ll also earn commissions on sales made by people who buy the products through your link and then go on and become affiliates themselves later on.

Affiliate marketing is a highly rewarding way of doing business on the Internet. It has been around for quite some time in Internet terms but the best is yet to come. Learn more to earn more and prosper.

Dr Sami Fab is the founder of OnDemand Ltd.

Sign up for his free newsletter, packed full of valuable tips, helping you make a success of your online business. Sign up here ==>http://www.Autopilot-Business.com

With the addition of affiliate programs, making money online has never been easier. Affiliate programs are easy because they allow people with no computer experience, and no business experience, to jump online and start making money almost instantly on the Internet.

An affiliate program is something many Web sites use to attract new visitors. Companies allow you to sign up as their affiliate and promote their product for them. Should you help them sell anything, they pay you a commission for your sales. They track their sales typically by using a cookie they set on the Web visitor’s browser when they first arrive at the Web site. As an affiliate, if you send a customer to the main site, even if they return at a later date and purchase, as long as they still have the cookie on their computer, the sale is tracked to you. That’s right, you can make money online without having to process any orders, employ anyone, deal with customer service issues, or any other time consuming tasks.

If you’re familiar with affiliate programs then you probably already know that the whole key to making high commissions is through getting quality traffic, and a lot of it, through your affiliate link. How you go about this is going to be different for whatever product you’re promoting. I strongly believe one of the most lucrative ways is through pay-per-click advertising. The nice part about PPC advertising is that you can carefully pick your keywords for pennies and promote only programs that can pay you in dollars. The best way to turn a profit with affiliate programs usually requires some type of budget to buy advertising. You cannot be afraid to spend money to make money.

There are a couple of other ways to make money promoting affiliate programs that cost nothing. You can create a free blog at Blogger and write about subjects that relate to the products you’re promoting. You can also write informative articles and submit them to places which will index them and include your affiliate link. And another popular and free way is to hang out in forums that relate to your target demographic and post to highly active threads. If you answer people’s questions honestly and provide a value to the forum, people will not only read what you post, they will click on your signature and see the Website you’re affiliated with. These are a great free ways to get traffic to your affiliate link. They take a little more time and patience than writing a two line PPC ad, but are completely 100% free.

Some affiliate networks and Web sites require you to already have a Web site to join. If you’re just starting out and don’t have a Web site you can use to promote your affiliate link, start with signing up with places, such as, Clickbank. If you promote products for a company like Clickbank, not only do you not need a Web site to join, but you can market thousands of products they sell and only sign up once. This means you can have an affiliate link for any of the products they have, open an account with a PPC search engine (e.g. Google) and be in business in only a matter of minutes. Most people new to online marketing have no idea how quickly they can sign up as an affiliate, open a PPC advertising account, and immediately start getting traffic through their affiliate link.

If you pick a network like Clickbank they’ll provide you with details regarding which products sell better than others. This is where many people make the mistake of signing up for one of the top ten affiliate programs and try to go out and market it. There’s a reason why a product is the highest selling product at the time, it’s because everyone is already promoting it. When there is a massive amount of competition, it means that you’ll sell less product and make less money per sale. I’ve found that the most lucrative programs to promote are the ones that are several pages deep into Clickbank’s catalog. The less competition, the easier and quicker you’ll start to see sales. Clickbank is only one out of hundreds of affiliate networks. You can search almost any store you can think of along with the word "affiliate" and chances are they have some kind of affiliate program. Also, run a search for affiliate programs and affiliate networks and you’ll stumble onto a ton of companies that want you to promote their site.

Your opportunity to start making money on the Internet immediately has never been easier. Affiliate programs allow entrepreneurs to share in the profits of large corporations and other web based businesses with little effort. With the large amount of affiliate programs available today, and the rapid growth of the Internet, there has never been a better time to get involved in online marketing.

Angie Fleszar is a partner at The Real Straightshooter, INC. at http://www.therealstraightshooter.com Angie has helped many pursue their goals of running an online business and still remains one of the industries most highly paid super affiliates.

If you are a newcomers to Internet marketing, affiliate programs provide an excellent opportunity – a way to earn money without producing your own product.

Suppose you have interest in beauty and fashion products, so you create a website in which you recommend beauty and fashion products you like and usually use.The merchants websites selling those products provide you with affiliate links which you paste into your site.When visitors click on those links and buy those products, you earn a commission.

Major advantages of Affiliate Programs :

1. No need to sell products :

Selling your own product involves a lot of money investment and time.On the other hand using affiliate programs are quick, easy, and cost effective market to get into.

2. No Customer Service :

There is no need of having customer service instead you can utilize your time building more websites for greater profits.

3. Fast creation :

It takes very less time to make your affiliate site and start your next projects.

4. Rich experience :

Working with your own affiliate site, you can gain tremendous experience and knowledge and can easily utilize it in your other projects.

Optimize your website and make it search engine friendly so that you can maximize your sites visibility.

Visit: Halfvalue.com [Online shopping site]

If only there was a way to put in a minimal amount of effort and reap great rewards … wait a minute! There is an opportunity like that right on the internet! It’s called affiliate marketing. For people wanting to earn a residual income, becoming an affiliate marketer makes sense. Whether you have a full-time job and want to earn some extra bucks online or you are a stay-at-home parent who is looking for a way to make ends meet, the internet is your best bet. Affiliate marketing is one of the best tools in creating a residual income online.

Defining Affiliate Marketing and Residual Income

If you are a relative newbie to the whole making money online scenario, you are probably wondering: “What the heck is a residual income and affiliate marketing?” Residual income basically is a method where you can earn ongoing commissions as the result from one sale of a product or service. Some real estate agents earn a residual income off of rental properties. Owners of the property will pay the real estate agent a commission each month that the tenant is renting the property. Of course, if the tenant leaves, that commission is lost until a new tenant takes residence.

Affiliate marketing is the hottest way to make money online these days. To put it in simplistic terms, it is a paid referral program. Say, for instance, that you have a website devoted to a particular hobby like fly-fishing. You could make money online from your website by having different internet links to your favorite stores that sell outdoor gear or even links to popular fishing resorts. Every time someone clicks that link and purchases something, you are paid a commission.

How to Get Started on the Road to Earning a Residual Income Online

Not all affiliate marketing programs pay a residual income. For the most part, these types of programs pay a commission per sale only. In order to earn money consistently from a single sale, you have to search for the right affiliate marketing opportunities that pay a residual income. Just think about it, not only would you earn a commission on the sale of a product or service, but you would continue to earn money for as long as that person remained a customer of the affiliate company.

The biggest hurdle in earning money online is having a website. Without a website, you do not have the medium necessary to get started with affiliate marketing and earning a residual income. There are a variety of ways to start up a website from utilizing the extra space your internet provider gives you as part of your email package to finding a low-cost or free web hosting company that has basic templates in which you can build your own website.

The next challenge to making a residual income online is finding those affiliate programs that offer this earning potential. Think about those instances where someone might purchase a product or service and have to pay on a periodic basis, whether weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. These are the best opportunities for residual income. You hook in the sale and earn that initial commission, then start earning a fee for as long as they stay customers. Many of these opportunities are for services. Here are just a few ideas:

• Beach house or resort rentals
• Internet providers
• Utilities like electricity, telephones and digital cable
• Monthly subscriptions to newsletters, access to databases or job sites, or anything else that requires a payment plan

There are a few instances where the sale of actual physical products can earn you a residual income. Think of all the products in your home or office that require reordering on a periodic basis. Water bottles for your water cooler, printer or toner cartridges for office equipment, air conditioner filters, medications, vitamins and even software are all possibilities. By choosing one or more affiliate programs online that offer residual income, you can focus on marketing your website to get more visitors which translates into more potential customers. You are guaranteed that residual income on the sales you have already made. There is little maintenance involved in that aspect.

Beware of the Affiliate Scams

While earning money online is getting easier, even for newbies, spotting affiliate scams is getting tougher. You’ve got to protect yourself and do a little research before signing on as an affiliate for a company. There are too many people to count who have been swindled out of payments by online merchants. And if residual income is your goal, you could stand to lose a potential steady source of money. Here are a few things to look for so you don’t get scammed:

• No point of contact – If contact information where you can call, write or email with questions and/or concerns is not found on the website, don’t even bother looking further.
• High commissions/residual income – Take a look at what this online merchant is offering. If the commission and/or residual income appears to be more than what they are making on a sale, be leery. Chances are that they are running an affiliate scam to just boost online traffic and sales to their website. These scammers know that very few people will follow through with any type of legal action.
• Short cookie existence – When a potential customer visits a website online, a cookie is stored on their computer. This little cookie file lives on the computer for a certain length of time and the customer has that particular time period in which to purchase something from that website in order for an affiliate to get the credit. You want to make sure that the cookie has a long life so that you can get that potential sale and residual income. Otherwise you are out of luck.

There are a lot of nuances to affiliate marketing and earning residual income online. Take the time to research each opportunity. You want to pick out some affiliate opportunities that will mesh well with your website or interests. Outline a few marketing strategies and ideas to promote your website for higher traffic volume. Remember – the biggest investment you make is your time, so spend it on something worthwhile and reap the rewards!

*This article was written by Rob A Johnson 17/06/2006, Rob has been successfully making money from affiliate marketing online in Australia for a number of years. He is also the webmaster of http://www.cashflowaffiliate.com, a frequently updated list of internet affiliate programs and marketing recourses.

Nowadays, Adsense maybe considered as the biggest money making program for website owners. If you are an Adsense publisher wanting to earn more money, I have outlined some tips below.

1. Use Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites - Forum and directory websites now offer adsense revenue sharing on their sites. Most offer 50% sharing which means your adsense code will be displayed on your forum posts or article post pages 50% of the time.

2. Use Blogger Blogs - Blogger blogs are easily crawled by major search engines.It is an great way to get your new websites listed in Yahoo, MSN and Google. Within your account, you can easily enable Adsense Ads to show to your blog pages as well.

3. Post Articles with Your Adsense Code - www.GlobeArticles.com is a growing Article Directory site which allows authors to include their Adsense Publisher codes in all their article postings and the authors unique publisher ID with be displayed 100% of the time on the Adsense Ads appearing on their article url’s.

4. Use Google Adwords - Advertise your adsense pages using Google Adwords program. To do this you need to build a keyword list of at least 200 and just bid a minimum amount for all of them. If you target a good niche market, you will profit using this technique.

5. Build Web Pages Using Low Competition Keywords - If you are subscribed to Wordtracker.com, you can easily build a keyword list of these low competition keywords. You can easily find keywords or phrases with only 100 competing websites or less. Get some basic SEO knowledge, build your web pages around these low competition keywords and easily get search engine rankings for those pages.

Submit Articles with your Google Adsense Ads