Setting up a blog is just the first step in making money online. The key to a successful, money-generating blog is deciding what specialty your blog will focus on. Having a blog that covers a variety of topics is useless when you are looking to appeal to a specific market and generate income; not only will it be less attractive to potential readers, but it will rank lower on search engines as well.

If you keep it focused on a niche market, your chances of running a successful money-making blog will be much higher. Your blog will attract more readers, and it will show up higher in the ranks of major search engines.

Deciding which niche you are going to target is an important decision, and may not be as simple as you would like. This decision involves considering what your personality and writing style lends itself to selling best, what area you are passionate about, and what your personal belief system is. A careful self-analysis in all three of these areas will lead you in the right direction.

First you must think about things that you could sell that would appeal to your character and the way that you write. If you have a very introverted personality and you are better at technical writing, you may not be well-matched with something like home decorating. Perhaps you would be better matched with high-tech items like computer programs.

Second, you should think about things that you enjoy doing in your free time. If you enjoy visiting wineries and cooking, your blog specialty could focus on food and wine. You will be much happier writing about something that you enjoy rather than something that you have no interest in.

Finally, you should think about your personal convictions; what issues do you hold a strong opinion on? If you think that the public school system should focus more on the arts, perhaps a blog that sells items that support this effort would be right for you. The point is that you will not have a very convincing or popular blog if you dont believe in what you are selling.

Take the time to reflect on products that you really believe in before just randomly choosing a specialty; choosing the right focus will have a positive impact on your blog and the potential to make more money with it.

As you can see, deciding the specialty or focus of your blog is a tough decision, but also a very important one. Remember to think about your personal character, how you write, your ethics, and things that appeal to you. This will lead you in the best direction for determining your blog niche and deciding what specialty is right for your blog.

ALL Affiliate Marketers Begin With the Same Small Baby Step

When you haven’t yet developed your own internet marketing information, software or audio-video training products, affiliate marketing is the least complicated and easiest way to start earning an income online from your work-from-home office. Don’t be fooled by guru offers that tell you a website or web page is not necessary. To be viewed as a professional affiliate marketer, one or both is absolutely essential.

Intimidated by the thought of learning HTML? Don’t be. There is simple and easy-to-learn, Open Source (free) software called Kompozer, which you can download right now at http://kompozer.net/download.php. This is called a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editor, that is considered by many to be far superior to WYSIWYG Editors costing a hundred dollars or more.

In time you will want to invest in a wide variety of software applications to enhance and expand your web designing and web page creations. If you are a newbie, however, the last thing you want to do is complicate the process of web site and web page building. Adding to Kompozer the graphics creation application called Web Graphics Creator by Laughing Bird Software will complete your beginning affiliate tool kit.

Your investment in Kompozer: $0.00. Your investment in Web Graphics Creator: $39.95. You can purchase and down Web Graphics Creator, here: http://www.laughingbirdsoftware.com/the-web-graphics-creator.html

Your First Goal and Primary Objective

Your mission, Mr. Newbie Affiliate Marketer, if you decide to accept it, is hardly Mission Impossible! You will learn how to efficiently and effectively drive huge amounts of traffic to your main web site, including landing, squeeze and affiliate funnel pages, and bring back to Database Central the names and email addresses of thousands of potential customers.

If you desire to build upon your image as a professional affiliate marketer, these beginning steps must be approached in this order. Just to reinforce what I am telling you, ask yourself this question. Who stands to benefit if you spend time and money energy driving traffic directly to the seller’s website or affiliate funnel page? Even if you earn some affiliate commissions, you are left holding an empty purse. The seller has ALL of your potential future customer base.

Your First Mission, Mr. Newbie Affiliate Marketer, is the building of your own massive customer database, the only tested, tried and true marketing strategy by which to earn a full-time income as a professional online marketer.

Traffic Trick No. 1 of the Affiliate Marketing Trade

Why would you take the time required to write your own original Ezine or Newsletter? What is an Ezine or Newsletter in their simplest form? Both are essential content emails which you program an autoresponder to deliver to your potential customer database of opt-in subscribers.

Of the many multiple purposes for developing an ezine or newsletter:

1. Newsletters, ezines and mini-courses may be used to develop a trust between your subscriber and you, as you deliver valuable free content to him and her.

2. How else would you discover, except by the most direct route (emails), the latest marketing trends, hot niches, software, audio-video training and digital information products than via your ezine, newsletter or mini-training course?

3. The importance and value of regular, rhythmic communication with your potential customer base cannot be underestimated.

4. I hope I have shattered your illusion that Internet Marketing is something for nothing. These steps, simple as they can be, still require an investment of time and thought-energy to accomplish in the virtual reality of the Internet. The end result, however, can bring success to you as an affiliate marketer, leading to a lifetime online business, which requires only a few hours a day to maintain, which can be accomplished from anywhere in the world on your laptop.

5. The true secret ingredient is the rapport and and trust developed via the quality content you deliver to your potential customer database of opt-in subscribers. The goose that lays the golden eggs may still be laying golden eggs well into your retirement years.

In summary of the above points, it is critical to develop an affiliate funnel or subscriber web page, first, to which you drive massive numbers of opt-in subscribers, in order to build your own customer list, deliver valuable free content to them via ezine, mini-course or newsletter, and lastly, to direct these qualified, potential buyers to your affiliate product offers, from which you will derive a part-time, and eventually a full-time affiliate income.

To your online affiliate success,

Timothy R Walls

Editor, Marketing Secrets EZine

First of all, affiliate link is your most important online business property

Your affiliate link is the link your sponsor gives to you when you join the program. It is very important as this is how your sales and commissions will be tracked. It is usually your sponsor’s URL with a code name or number at the end. This code is how your sponsor’s affiliate software or program will track your traffic and ultimately the sales that you send to them.

In another words, affiliate link is your property to make you money online. You should protect it no matter what.

Secondly, a big threat to your affiliate income is affiliate link hijacking.

Almost everyone online today is looking to make or save a buck any way they can. In the past, most of the people who clicked on your affiliate links used to purchase without a second thought… but, as times get tougher online, it seems a growing number won’t! As money gets tighter and product prices rise, people who know how to manipulate the system will sometimes replace your affiliate ID with theirs and “hijack” your commissions.

If you fail to protect your affiliate link, you will end up losing many affiliate commissions entitled to you but gone miserably. So that all your time and money spending in marketing will become in vain.

Thirdly, there are four ways to cloak your affiliate link.

1. Use affililate link cloaking software

Those affiliate link cloaker software can shield your links from being revealed to the visitors. Choose the ones which can effectively hide your affiliate ID or affiliate referral numbers.

Any affiliate link cloaker should also have the capability to customize your links. This means the cloaker should create links that will look like the merchant’s URL sales page. Such functionality will allow you to avoid people who will bypass your affiliate links.

2. Use redirect tool.

Tinyurl may be the most popular redirect tool most marketers use. There are many other redirect tools that you can use either for free or for a small amount of money. But the best way is to use your own domain service to shield your affiliate link.

3. Use JavaScript redirect page

Javascript redirect page used to be a easy and cost effective way to cloak affiliate links. But it becomes less popular nowadays because it can be easily disabled while leaving your affiliate link totally “naked”.

4. Use zero-frame page with URL encryption

Currently the best way to protect your affiliate commissions from ruthless hijackers is to use a combination of a zero-frame page along with URL encryption. This involves sending someone to URL that looks like a page on your site, but actually pulls in your affiliate link like those “sub-domain” services.

If you’re promoting Clickbank products as an affiliate, you will probably notice that there is a 90-day refund rule for each product.

Refunds can kill your Clickbank sales efforts! Lots of sales means nothing if your referred customers request their money back.

Refunds can not be totally avoided. What you need is to choose the right products when you start promoting. Calculating the average refund rate of the Clickbank product that you want to promote is a great way to decide if it is worth your time and efforts to promote.

Visit the Clickbank Market Place, you are provided with some important payout stats. Every product at Clickbank has some information attached to it, which can help you determine if it is a quality product for you to promote.

%/sale: How much you earn as a percentage of the total price of the product, the commission rate.

$/sale ($Earned/Sale): The average net amount earned per affiliate per referred sale in the past considering refunds and the Clickbank fees. With this number, you can have an inner look at the real performance of the products you want to promote.

The average refund rate of a Clickbank product is: (Affiliate Commission – $/sale)/ Affiliate Commission = Average Refund Rate

Affiliate Commission= (Product Price – Product Price * 7.5% -$1) * %/sale

For example, you check the Clickbank marketplace and see the price of Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate report is $29.95, $Earned/Sale is 19.97, and the commission rate is 75%. So the affiliate commission of this report is 75% * (29.95-29.95 * 7.5%-1) =$20.03 and the refund rate is (20.03-19.97) / 20.03 =0.29%. Yeah, it’s one of the lowest refund products I have ever seen.

The normal refund rate of Clickbank products is around 10%. With a 5% or less refund rate congrats you find an excellent product. With an 20-25% (or higher) refund rate you should consider promoting other ones.

And you should beware that you can’t calculate the refund rate with any accuracy if a Clickbank vendor is selling different products with different prices. You can check if this vendor has multiple products in this way. Type payment URLs like this in your browser: http://1.vendor.pay.clickbank.net/, http://2.vendor.pay.clickbank.net/… If you get a 404 error on http://2.vendor.pay.clickbank.net then this merchant has only one product in the Clickbank marketplace.

Another factor is when vendors change their pricing too. If a vendor offers different products/price this isn’t going to work either.