Today's Feature Article

10 Proven Tips To Increase Your Affiliate Income As Revealed By The World's Top Affiliate Marketers

by T. H. Quah

It is often published on the web that 95% of all affiliate marketers do not make any money.

Why?

The answer is simple. They are merely hobbyist indulging in affiliate marketing as a past time. They are not serious. Although their original plan is to make money, they have no commitment power.

Is that you?

If you really want to make money in affiliate marketing, then you need to do what the successful 5% are doing. Just follow their proven path. You do not need to re-invent the wheel.

Here are 10 proven tips from the super affiliates:

1. Get Serious.

Treat this like any business with the ultimate goal of making a profit. Write a plan, follow the plan and stick to your plan. Nothing works if you don't.

2. Prepare Yourself Well

Read as much as you can on the subject. There are lots of free quality materials that are sufficient to give you a head start. Then you should buy a couple of the recommended handbooks or manuals on more specialized area of affiliate marketing. 'You need to spend some money to make money' as the saying goes.

3. Built Your Own Opt-in-list or Ezine

That's what the super affiliate has in their arsenal. You may have read about it many times "the money is in the list". And it's true! You can earn thousands of dollars overnight with a responsive targeted list. It has been proven again and again.

4. Built Mini-Sites

Affiliate marketing focused on preselling. You don't need big bulky website with 100's of pages. Just mini-sites! Start with one. Then another and another. It's like opening your own retail store on the Internet. Each store producing some sales. When you have more stores, you'll have more sales and a bigger total income. A whole book has been written on how to built mini-sites.

5. Do Your Research

There is really too much garbage on the web. If you want to succeed, you need to research properly on what people need. What are the best products available? Match them together and you're in for the gold. Take research seriously in all aspects of your affiliate marketing. It pays!

6. Get Your Own Domain Name

It is important that you have your own domain name for your sites. It's the professional way on the net. Your visitors must be made to feel that you're a serious and in for the long haul. Otherwise, they'll not bother to read what you have to say.

7. Focus on Themes

Do not make market too many different products on your site. Work on 'theme' site with products focused on that theme. For example, if your theme is 'Dogs', then you can have dog food, dog toys, dog kennels, dog books, dog diets, etc.

8. Invest Your Time

Or invest your money. Or invest both! Affiliate marketing is not a get-quick-rich scheme. You need to work on it for a period of time before seeing any results. It could be quicker if you invest some money for advertising or purchase new tools.

9. Keep Your Finger On the Pulse

Affiliate marketing is evolving all the time. There are new rules, new products, new tools. Things changes. What worked last year may not work now. You must keep yourself up to date. Read niche ezine on affiliate marketing, read articles and participate on the specific forums. Stay connected!

10. Promote! Promote! Promote!

Finally, it's all about promotion. Do it daily, weekly or as often as you wish. But just do it consistently. There is no magic formula for success accept hard work. Promote, promote, promote and the sales will come.

Affiliate marketing is not for everyone and not everyone is into affiliate marketing. However, if you have penchant for it and is prepared to follow a proven path, then you will succeed eventually. Joining the successful 5 percent is not impossible. You'll just need to focus your effort with a consistency of purpose.

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T.H. Quah is the Editor for http://www.AffiliateProNews.com
A niche ezine on affiliate marketing. Get breaking news, real life, how-to-do-it, nuts and bolts affiliate marketing know-how, information you can use right now! He also offers a free 7-days ecourse "Discover the 7 Tactical Formula that will turbo charge your affiliate income to an all time high - 100% Guaranteed!"

Today's Motivational Reading

Failure Is Not An Option
By Diane Hughes

I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that online businesses - just like brick and mortar businesses - have a very high failure rate for startups. Ever wonder why that is? There are several business consultants, success gurus, and motivational experts who can tell you. The problem is: Most of us don't listen.

How many times have we heard the "success secrets" of the multimillion-dollar pros? Countless times we have all been preached to about setting goals, having a defined plan, giving it all we've got, and aiming high. Yet still. take a look around. The statistics of small business failures have not changed. In the first five years of starting a new business, the odds say that you'll fail.

Ready for the good news? There is one thing I can tell you - from personal experience, and from the experience of well-known, successful online business owners that I know. More important than setting goals, more than following a plan, more than shooting for the moon, is your mindset. Ask people who have succeeded online how they did it, and they are sure to tell you that they had to. That's right. they HAD to. Why? Because failure is not an option.

When you set your sights on something as grand as starting your own business, you simply have to have the mindset that, regardless of what happens, you will not allow yourself to fail.

When difficulties come, the "failure is not an option" attitude will drive you to overcome them. When things aren't going as you originally planned (and many times they won't), "failure is not an option" will keep you from folding. When everybody else tells you that you can't make it, you will be able to tell them you can because "failure is not an option."

Those whose thinking allows them an "out," those who begin a business with the idea that if it doesn't work out - "oh well," are the ones who will most likely falter. However, on the other hand, those who have no choice but to succeed will do exactly that.

Are you considering starting a new business? Do you have a business that isn't performing the way it should? Take a look at your attitude. Yes, it is important to set goals and follow through with them. It is vital that you have the knowledge and funds to operate a business the right way. However, those things won't carry you very far if you allow yourself to think that it's OK to fail.

Take some time this week to double-check your thinking. Are you "hoping" your company will make it? Do you "wonder" if everything will work out all right? When you eliminate the option of failure, you open up the flow of creativity, you boost your level of willpower, and you energize your thinking so that only those things that lead to success can control your mind. Once you accomplish that, the only viable alternative is to make it, and make it big!

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Diane Hughes is an accomplished Internet entrepreneur and editor of the popular ProBizTips Newsletter. Subscribe to her newsletter for more tips, tricks, and secrets of the trade -- plus get HUNDREDS of eBooks, software and tools just for subscribing! http://www.ProBizTips.com

Subscribers' Corner

Webmaster or Web Slave? Time Saving Tips for Cyberpreneurs
by Marty Foley

Time is money in your online business, just as in the offline business world.

Problem is, the typical Internet entrepreneur is in a race against time. Often they are snowed under with many things to do, trying to achieve maximum results (income) within the precious, very limited time available.

Especially if you're holding down a full-time job while trying to launch or expand your Internet business in your spare hours, you've got precious little time to waste.

If care isn't exercised in the way we spend time online, our personal and family life can suffer, not to mention bad financial consequences.

To add to that pressure, family members may resent the amount of time spent on our venture, versus the limited income it may initially earn.

As the author of an audio program on time management, I'm going to share with you some proven time management tips, which have been adapted to running a business online. I can't promise you more than 24 hours in your day, but I'll share practical tips to help you work smarter and more profitably online - instead of longer or harder.

Two primary keys to making the most of the time we spend online are:

Being selective, and Staying focused.
We must be SELECTIVE, because there are an infinite number of things we can spend on our online time, which will not yield productive results.

We must stay FOCUSED, because any of an infinite number of things can easily distract us from getting more important things done.

That brings us to the first step of effective online time management...

Set Goals
If you don't know what your final destination is, how can you ever take action toward getting there? Hence, the need to set goals.

The goals you set for your online business will vary, based on which stage you're at and which direction you want to go from there. It helps to write your goals down and periodically review them. Many feel that this better enables your subconscious mind to help you work toward your goals.

Keep and Use a Prioritized To-Do List
Keeping lists may seem simplistic, but the most productive top-achievers are typically methodical users of To-Do lists.

Be sure to rank each task on your To-Do lists by priority, such as high, medium or low. As you tackle the items on your list, always tackle the highest priority tasks first, and those of lower priority as time allows. Obviously, your highest priority tasks will correspond with the achievement of your highest priority goals.

I've found that a 3-ring binder kept near my computer is a good place for organizing To-Do lists, project notes, and other frequently used online information, within easy fingertip reach.

Once your goals are set, you'll know exactly where you're going (and what to stay focused on), and when you use a prioritized To-Do list, you'll have a step-by-step plan for reaching your destination.

Exercise Self-Discipline
The best time management system in the world is worthless if we don't exercise self-discipline.

It's so easy to log on to the Net, just planning to "check your email," and before you know it, get distracted by other things and end up spending much more time on things we hadn't planned, and wonder where the time went.

I know, I know: It's easier said than done, but exercising self-discipline will help us stay focused and avoid wasting time or getting distracted on less important activities. If you can stay focused on the most important tasks (which you've identified by setting goals and prioritizing your To-Do list), you'll see greater results from your time and effort.

Automate Where Possible
I have written much more on this topic than the limited space in this article allows, but let me mention a few tools that aren't new to online marketers, but whose time-saving value is often overlooked:

Autoresponders
Autoresponders are very useful tools for automatically filling your prospects' requests for information on your products and services, non-stop, 24 hrs of every day of the year.

Email Filters
The "filters" feature of good email programs such as Pegasus and Eudora Pro make the automation of many email activities a snap. If you're not using them, you don't know what you're missing.

~ Pegasus: http://www.pmail.com/

~ Eudora Pro: http://www.eudora.com

Periodically Analyze Your Business In our quest for more value from the time we spend in our online businesses, it helps to stand back and periodically analyze which activities have been working - and which haven't.

From there, we can give more attention to expanding what's been working, and tweak, change, or eliminate what hasn't. We can thus progressively see more profitable results from the time spent online.

Conclusion
If you want to get maximum benefit from the limited time you have to accomplish things in your online business, or any other area of life, you must manage your time well.

When you do, you'll achieve more, and you'll look back on your work with the satisfaction of knowing that you got the most important things done, instead of looking back with regret. As Benjamin Franklin said: "Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of."

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Marty Foley's Internet marketing techniques and resources have helped set the standard in e-commerce, and have often been imitated by famous Internet marketers. They can truly help you succeed online. http://www.thecassiopeia.com/SuccessReports/ProfitInfo.html

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