An Affiliate Marketer from the Ground Up

This post, at first glance may seem a little out of place on a site devoted to Affiliate Marketing. However, the reason for the post is because I believe in the near future (very near) any kind of renewable energy, solar, wind, anything and everything considered 'gree energy' will one of the hottest niches going.

Obviously for years now you've seen (too) many ads and sites related to ringtones, weight loss and a host of other popular niches. Lots of people have made a lot of money in these areas, and still do. That's why I would recommend staying away from anything that competitive. They are very saturated at this point. Especially if you're just getting started.

Solar and wind energy are obviously nothing new, but there's still relatively smaller numbers of merchants that have affiliate programs set up, and subsequently a fairly small number of individuals in these niches.

With the recent mind-numbing hike on gasoline prices, and the still steady rise of many other fuel costs, more and more people are going to start taking a closer look at other (green) forms of energy.

Click Here for Information on How You Can Build Your Own Wind Power Generator for Less than $200!! - Designed for Novices - Build in a Weekend

Also, many states are offering very good incentives for adding solar panels, and other energy efficient devices to your home. I have no doubt this trend will continue and even get better financially for the homeowner, as the prices of solar panels and other related equipment declines due to better, more efficient manufacturing techniques, and also an increase in demand, allowing for a smaller profit margin over an exponential growth of sales.

As an affiliate I would be keeping an eye out for this niche. The ones that have a content populated site up and already generating significant traffic will stand to gain much when the interest really explodes.

Personally, I believe a fantastic segment of the market will be in the extremely affordable DIY (Do It Yourself) type of equipment installations. Take a look at this site to get an idea of what I'm talking about. This informational product is geared toward the complete novice with no experience whatsoever in building or installing solar or wind power generating equipment.

For an unbelievable less than $200, the average homeowner can build a wind turbine that will generate the bulk of the power needs of a single family home. There are also plans for building a solar system. For just a few hundred dollars, you can build and install a compact, backyard power generating station that will generate not only enough electricity to power everything in your home, but you will actually have a surplus that you can sell back to your utility company.

There's also information on obtaining free deep-cycle batteries to store the electricity, information on how to be less dependant oil, as well as much other valuable information.

It's worth checking out to be sure. I'll be starting my first wind turbine very, very soon. I plan to be totally, 100% 'free' of the utility company within a few months. I'm also going to start heating my home totally with wind generated electricity.

I'm estimating I'll be saving close to $4,000 per year when my system is totally finished. I'll probably have a surplus that I'll be selling back to the local power company also. I can't wait to see my electric meter running backward!!

In case you haven't heard of it by now, there's an excellent program called the Bum Marketing Method. If you're like many of us just starting out in affiliate marketing, you probably don't have a lot of money to spend on it. Even if you do have some extra money, it may be better to get your feet wet with article marketing before you start shelling out money on PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising.

I've posted here before regarding article marketing, and it's a very well known technique to generate free traffic. Obviously, free is good. Although article marketing can generally take longer than PPC's nearly instant traffic results, it's a small price to pay for a proven, fairly easy to use method of making money on the Internet.

As suggested in the BMM, there is one exception that I would make to going the totally free route. Actually, as you start getting more advanced there's a few resources that will be worth many times more than the relatively small amount of money that you have to invest in them.

The one exception that I would make immediately though is USFreeAds. You've probably heard of this one too. It's a site that let's you post classified ads. There's many good things here that are easily worth the small monthly fee of $9.95

Here's some of the benefits of USFreeAds.

• Set Ads to Never Expire
• Full HTML Editor
• Use of Affiliate Links
• Unlimited Amount of Ads
• Broad Exposure
• Very Popular w/ the Search Engines (especially Google)

These are some of the major benefits. For such a small monthly fee there's really no downside to getting a premium account. Depending on what product(s) and/or service(s) you promote, you could easily cover the cost of several months of membership with just one sale via your merchant. If you have many well written ads that are producing for you, the $9.95/month would be a fantastic investment.

Click Here for Your Own USFreeAds Premium Account

As the benefits of becoming an Affiliate Marketer are becoming better well known in the mainstream, countless individuals are jumping on the bandwagon to reap their rewards that Affiliate Marketing promises. Working at home, making your own hours, no boss to answer to, and lots of easy money being made.

However, the vast majority of those individuals will spend some time, often 'waste' time as it turns out, and spend anywhere from a little money to a large sum of money, before they become frustrated and give up on their dream of making a very good living by working from home.

That's disheartening, because it doesn't have to be that way. I'm a firm believer in the human mind being able to be given a problem, and then finding a solution to that problem. All that's needed is time, perseverance, and the right tools.

The reason, at least one of the reasons that most would-be Affiliate Marketers don't fullfill their self-imposed destiny is because they never find the information (tools) that's needed to guide them in their endeavor.

If these people do manage to hang in there long enough, they will eventually, usually, obtain enough of an online education to finally make some money, but it often times comes at great expense...both financial, and by spending many months, or even years searching out, and usually purchasing everything that they possibly can.

Had I known about just two sources of virtually everything that I needed to know about getting a good solid education in Affiliate Marketing, I could have saved myself literally thousands of dollars, not to mention the late nights, and often times feelings of hopelessness.

These two sources are Rosalind Gardner's 'Super Affiliate Handbook', and Anik Singal's 'Affiliate Classroom'. I truly believe, armed with just these two tools, anyone seeking to become a successful Affiliate Marketer, can, and will succeed. Although there is a small cost incurred with these fabulous resources, it's relatively insignificant in relation to the time, money and frustrations they will save.

If you're just starting out in Affiliate Marketing, and you're determined to have it work for you, please use your time and money wisely. You can buy all the (self-appointed) Guru's methods, handbooks, courses, case studies, newsletters and anything else out there, but if the answers aren't there, it will all be for nothing.

Lastly, I can testify to what the Affiliate Classroom and Super Affiliate Handbook can offer, but please don't think that they're the often sought after 'get rich overnight' answer...they are not! Nothing is, it doesn't exist. The only way to get rich instantly is to inherit the money, or hit the lottery.

What the Affiliate Classroom and Super Affiliate Handbook can, and do offer, is a good solid fundamental education that's needed to succeed in Affiliate Marketing. There's no false promises or get rich quick schemes. Had this writer found these quality products early on, there would have been countless thousands of dollars saved, and many headaches and frustrations avoided.

Read the amazing true story of how one woman, with no previous business experience, earned $436,797+ in 2002 and now earns MUCH MORE than that ... just by selling other people's stuff online!

In her down-to-earth, sincere and often humorous style, Rosalind Gardner guides you through the entire process of building an affiliate marketing business on the 'Net.

Frequently revised and updated to reflect industry changes, the Super Affiliate Handbook now consists of 236 pages and 124 screenshots that will show you step-by-step how to become a Super Affiliate. You'll learn how to pick the best affiliate programs, negotiate a commission raise and save time, money and effort on everything from affiliate software to web hosting.

To learn exactly how she does it, Click Here.

The Webinar Solution

The Webinar Solution
By J. Gregory Thomas

Few businesses today are immune to the effects of today's higher travel expenses. Unfortunately, news of a slowing economy further compounds the problems faced by small businesses, particularly where business development comes into play.

During economic moments like these, sales activities typically lose steam and margins increase. This results

Read the rest of this entry »

If you're doing PPC advertising, this is probably the best news that you've had to date. KeywordSpy.com has a product that is second to none in the field of Pay Per Click marketing.

There's quite a few reputable keyword research tools available. There's even some free ones that are pretty good, but Keyword Spy goes one step beyond helping you to come up with some great keywords. It's lets you see what the competition is using for keywords also.

Personally, I 'almost' feel like there could be an element of being slightly shady, but then I thought...this is done every single day in the business world. When an advertiser sees what's working for another company, you can bet that they're going to use the same tactics. It's just always been a bit different in the PPC world because your competitors keywords weren't normally accessible.

I won't go into detail about the different options at KeywordSpy.com, except to say that they have a package for just tracking your competitions keyword, and also a 'Professional' package that includes research and tracking.

Oh, they also have a free trial. It's been my experience that when a company believes in it's product enough to offer a free trial, they usually can do what they are offering...and this is awesome. I'm on my way to sign up now.

After not having the best of results with my PPC endeavors, I can see that this is the product that's going to turn things around for me.