Affiliate Marketing Diagram

Affiliate Marketing History

While many believe that Amazon were the first to offer an affiliate type program with the Amazon Associates program there was one other affiliate program introduced earlier. In November 1994 Geffen Records and CDNow came to an agreement that allowed Geffen Records to place links on their website directed at the CDNow website. Instead of these links directing to the CDNow homepage they would link to the appropriate artist’s page that included any CDs that artist had for sale. In April of 1996, EPage released an affiliate program to the public enabling them to work on a similar structure.

Amazon Associates was released later that year in July 1996. While Amazon wasn’t the first it certainly helped put affiliate marketing on the map and to this day the Amazon Associates affiliate program remains one of the most popular in the world. Many other companies have followed suit and offered their own affiliate programs. For those companies too small to introduce their own program, affiliate groups and other third party organizations have been established making the process easier and quicker.

Many foresaw the death of affiliate marketing with the introduction of Google Adsense pay-per-click advertising campaigns and while affiliate plans have seen a lull they are far from being dead in the water.

General Affiliate Success
Affiliate marketing success is all about numbers. The more people you attract to your site the greater the chance you have of diverting customers to the merchant’s site and hence making money. Affiliate marketing is not a quick hit and it will require a combination of time and patience before you make a reasonable amount of money from it. But during this time you will undoubtedly master some of the finer arts of making money through affiliate programs.

This E-book aims to guide you through many of the choices you will be faced with and also help you with some of the finer points of affiliate marketing. Whether you are a beginner or you consider yourself an advanced affiliate there is undoubtedly a large amount of information in here that will help you in your efforts.

How to get traffic to your website using Articles

Article marketing is a really effective way of getting traffic to your website. The traffic is either direct or indirect

Direct traffic from article marketing

Most article directories encourage you to include a biobox at the end of your article. In the biobox you usually have some sort of signature which can include a link to your website. If your article is interesting and informative and fires the readers imagination, they may click on your 'find out more at your URL' signature in your biobox

Indirect traffic from article submissions

Again it is about the biobox. Some article directories actually have the do follow attribute on the link in your biobox. This means that the link contributes to the SEO of the site it is pointing to. With more do follow backlinks to your site from relevant sites, you get a higher ranking in the search engines. Better rankings leads to more traffic.


Writing article in your chosen niche is not very difficult. The following is a list of tips that will help you in your article campaign

• Write your own articles. This has several advantages

• Your articles will all have a certain style and feel, based on your personality, which your readers will soon become aware of and come to expect. A consistent style across all the articles published by author X gets Author X credibility
• If you use someone else's article, chances are they have sold the article to other people as well resulting in duplicate content. This could hurt your ranking.
• You can design your article specifically with your website in mind. This gives you the opportunity to presell your site to the readers
• Researching your articles also serves as research for your niche website.
  

• Submit your articles only to article submission sites that include your website URL on the page. Also use websites that only allow unedited use of your article. This means that when someone requests a copy of your article to use on their own site or in an email campaign, they must use the article displaying your URL. Hence promoting your website

• Do not use article generator software. Google and the article submission sites are switched on to this and frown on this. Remember that Google is looking for unique content

• Do not submit one article to multiple article directories. I have found that this is really just a waste of your time. Once your article is published in one of the big article directories like ezinearticles, if it of reasonable quality, some other smaller directories and other webmasters will re-publish it as well. Just stick with the major directories. 3 or 4 will do suffice.

• Do not use the same keyword or phrase in all your articles to link back to your site. Google will see this as spam and it could hurt your ranking. We are referring to the link to your website in the biobox. Vary it a little so that you don't end up with a thousand backlinks all using the same anchor text. could get your site penalized or even banned with Google
  

• Aim to submit a couple of articles a week. It really matters how many articles you ave in circulation if you want to make this work. The major article marketers actually advice submitting a few articles a day. The problem with that s the ability to generate good content for so many articles. A couple a week over the course of a year will definitely result in a significant increase in the traffic to your site
  

• Make sure that your articles are genuinely informative and well writing. Remember there is a direct traffic component to article marketing. If your articles suck, no-one is going to click on your link.
  

• Construct your article like you would a webpage with regards to search engine optimization. Use your keywords often and prominently