The 3 Affiliate Programs That Almost Always Earns You Money

Image Source: krisdecurtis

You are about to learn about the three affiliate programs that almost always earns you money irrespective of what niche you belong to. Please avoid reading this post if you are not into affiliate marketing or earning money as this might increase your sales.

Affiliate marketing through blogs can be very easy when you do it the right way. Most people get confused on what to be an affiliate for. But this is one of the easiest things, at least easier than selling the product that you have chosen. You can sell almost any product or book using content. But when you go for affiliate marketing using banners, it is hard to sell products. It gets tough to convince your readers using banners.

Give me 5 minutes and I’ll show you the 3 affiliate programs that almost always earn you money:

1. Hosting Programs
Hosting programs are THE best in my opinion. They convert like crazy even if you are using banners. You don’t need to be in the “make money online” niche to affiliate hosting programs. It works for every niche. Most of your blog’s readers will be having a blog. When you recommend them a host that you have been using and having no trouble with, they are going to buy it. Many bloggers go for the wrong hosting the first time and when these people see your recommendation, they might give your recommendation a try. I have been using hostgator and I always recommend it to people who ask me which hosting program to choose. Hostgator has 24 hours live support and you can have unlimited domains hosted in your account for less than $10. In fact, they have an offer for those who want to give it a try. You will get the first month’s hosting for 1 cent if you use the coupon code wordpress.

2. WordPress Themes
As I said above, most people who visit your blog will be bloggers unless your source of traffic is 100% from search engines. And most of these bloggers will be using WordPress (Huh! You knew it). WordPress blogger are always on lookout for themes. So when you have a good theme recommendation, they will check it. You can recommend themes like DIY themes which is already quite famous. Some bloggers might have seen the promotion in other blogs and they might choose to buy when they are in your blog. Some people don’t buy products the first time they see it.

3. Make Money Online Programs
Who doesn’t like to earn money? After all, one of the main reasons for many people to start a blog is to earn money. It is easy to refer people to money making programs. Let me tell you a secret. People always want to try new money making programs. When you find a program just after its release, you might be able to get many people to join the program using your affiliate link. One more secret: Your conversion rates will be high when you are promoting money making programs since people don’t have to pay anything in most of the cases. One of the recent money making programs that does quite well is Performancing Ads.

Now you know what programs to promote in your blog. I don’t give any guarantee that you will make money by being affiliate for these programs or by throwing up the banners in your blog. You need to work hard to get people to see the banners. At the same time, don’t have too many banners. Have at the maximum four 125X125 ads in your sidebar.

What affiliate programs do you promote that have earned you money? Do you know any other affiliate program which can be promoted irrespective of the niche? I’ll be glad to add it to the list with your name. Please share your opinion in the comments.

- Ramkarthik

How To Find Free Forums In Your Niche

Forum marketing is a great way to get traffic to your blog. First you have to find a forum in your niche. But how to find free forums in your niche? This blog post will help you find the best forums that are on the web and that are related to your niche.

1. Select the niche
Before finding the forum, you have select the niche you want to target. Niche is like a topic that you want to concentrate on. This can be anything from health to making money online. But make sure you are selecting the niche that you have some interest on. You should be able to provide information to the people in that niche. It is always best to start with one of your hobbies.

2. How To Find Free Forums In Your Niche
This is the important step and is what this post will be concentrating on. Now there are tons of forums in the web and it is impossible to join every forum. Also you cannot post in every forum actively. Even if you post in many forums, they won’t help you much unless the people reading the forum are interested in your blog or product or whatever you are promoting. So you have to be smart and find the niche that is really interested in your service. Here are the steps to follow:

• Go to Google
• Type “your niche forum”. If my niche is internet marketing, I’ll search “internet marketing forum”
• You can type with/without quotes
• Note down the forums in the first page in the same order as it is listed
• Now visit all the forums and see how many members they have, how many threads they have and how active the forums are
• Write down all the information by the side of the forums name that you have noted down
• Arrange them in such a way the forum with most number of members or threads or activity is first and followed by others in decreasing order
• Also see if the forums are free or not and note them down
• Now decide on how many forums you want to join and do so quickly
• Start answering questions in the forum and have your blog or product url in your signature (You will see a post on this tomorrow so don’t forget to come back or better subscribe to the blog so you will not miss the article)

Important Tip: Don’t spam the forum with affiliate links. Contribute to the forum.

P.S: If you don’t have a blog yet, I recommend you start one. If you are looking for a good host, you can check hostgator. For the first month, you can get hosting for only 1 cent.
Coupon Code: wordpress

Do You Spend A Lot Of Time In Twitter? (What To Do About It)

Image Source: Mykl Roventine

Do you log into twitter, update your status the whole day and do less or nothing related to your online work? Are you trying to limit your twitter usage but cannot? If your answer is yes to the questions, continue reading the post as I show you the 5 ways that I use to limit the time I spend in twitter.

Twitter is addictive. I used to spend a lot of time refreshing my twitter page and sending updates many times a day. I found myself to be less productive when I spent a lot of time in twitter. I don’t say you shouldn’t use twitter but I’m telling you to limit the time spent in twitter. In the past 20 days, I have sent only around 5 tweets. But I have become more productive. You can use a little more than that but not too much.

1. Install A Twitter Client
By installing a twitter client, you don’t need to refresh your twitter page now and then to check if you have got any tweets. You will be updated with the latest tweets automatically. You will also be alerted when you receive a direct message. Sometimes using a twitter client will make you to use twitter more. But if you use the twitter clients properly, you should save a lot of time. Here are two resources with a list of twitter clients:
# How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients
# A List From Twitter

2. Keep Your Busy With Other Works
This is simple. How to stop doing something? Keep yourself busy doing something else which is more important. For instance, you can keep yourself busy writing articles or reading books to limit your twitter usage. The more you keep yourself busy, the lesser time you will spend in twitter.

3. Twitter Is Down
Create a mindset that twitter is down. Twitter has had lot of downtimes. A month ago, twitter had continuous downtimes. I used to log into twitter only to find that it is down. It happened for a few days. Later twitter started to get back to normal. I created a mindset that twitter is down and stopped visiting twitter many times day.

4. What’s In It For Me
Ask yourself “What’s in it for me?” every time you log into twitter. Use twitter when you want to get something from it. If you feel the need for getting new friends, log into twitter. If you have something extremely important to share with twitter users, sign into twitter. There is nothing that you can gain by spending hours in twitter.

5. A Plan
Create a plan. Allocate a specific amount of time for using twitter. If you are a person who uses twitter 5+ hours a day, you must consider limiting it to 2 hours. Once you are at 2 hours a day, reduce it to 1 hour a day. This is surely possible. With a little effort, you can considerably reduce the time you spend on twitter.

Do you spend a lot of time in twitter? Were these points useful? What do you do to limit your twitter usage? Please share it in the comments.

Instantly Move Away From Your Computer (At Least After Reading This Article)

Maybe the headline is expecting a quick action from you. But you do have to move away from your computer and see the other things in the world. I have had people asking me why they are not able to come up with a good blog post or why they are not productive. Of course you know the answer and I can hear you saying it. Sitting in front of your computer for long hours staring at it, going through all the blog posts in the feed reader or checking your email and stats will not help you in being productive. Please do go out and enjoy the outside world.

Liz Strauss made a post few days back on breakthrough. It was a short post but it had a strong message. You can get tons of ideas when you go out and relax for a while. You will also become a lot productive by going out.

What you can do outside?
I know it can be boring outside sometimes. But to make every single visit to the outside world a worthy experience, take a camera or just your mobile phone outside and capture everything that you think is beautiful or worth a click.

What to do with it?
You can make these pictures your wallpaper or create a screen saver. Every time you feel unproductive, you can take a look at them and try to gain back your blogging confidence. You could also use these pictures in your blog posts and be very proud of that.

Will you be going out and enjoying the nature? Will you be taking pictures of the beautiful sights in the outside world? Share your views or even pictures you have taken before and I will write about it in the blog.

What Does Blog Really Mean?

Daniel of Daily Blog Tips has a group writing contest in which he has asked the participants to define what a blog is. Blog means many things. It has different meaning to different people. If you ask my friend, he would say it is a website and you can make money from it. While if you ask people who blog they have a different definition.

I’m not going to make this a long post and waste your time. I’ll just tell you what a blog is to me. It is only my way of defining blog your definition may vary.

What is a blog?

A blog is a space in the internet which an individual person/a group create to share their knowledge, offer opinions and provide service.

I use a blog to share my knowledge while a company will use a blog to promote their service.

So what does a blog mean to you? Write a blog post or make a comment.