Social media is booming – and internet marketing is right in the middle. There has never been a better time to get into internet marketing with all of the options available to you. Affiliate marketing and social media make a great team for success.

If you aren’t familiar with the social media site, let me give you a brief description, along with how combining social media with affiliate marketing can get your business rolling or bring back to life a dwindling existing business.

Facebook

This site is tagged as a place for ‘friends to connect,’ but it’s also a potential cash cow for affiliate marketers. Not only is Facebook great to meet others in your niche, but if you are an affiliate marketers, it’s a great place to promote your products. By building a community of like minded individuals, it’s easier to market to individuals who are already interested. If you don’t have a Facebook account, sign up today and get your affiliate business going. An added bonus is you can now customize your URL, so if your niche is custom earrings, you can have facebook/yourname/customerearrings. This makes it easy for others to identify your niche.

Twitter

Everyone is tweeting from Oprah to members of Congress, so why not use it to your advantage. The great thing about Twitter is that it’s quick and easy to post – 140 characters to be exact. Your profile should include a link to your website and your posts can be as simple as “Check out this new product ‘x’” Twitter replaces URLs within a post, so your link is not visible, but if someone clicks it they will be directed to your website. Remember, you have to create a list of followers to market to, so this does take some time, but its well worth it and certainly a potential goldmine for affiliate marketing. You can share videos, blog posts, even articles to your followers, all of these linking to your website, of course.

Linkedin

This is more of a professional or formal social network. It was originally created for professionals to connect with each other and link to other networks. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use Linkedin for your affiliate marketing business. With the help of Q&A, Groups, and Polls that the website has, it’s easy to combine your products with a successful marketing campaign. Keep in mind that this will require a little more work and creativity, but it can be accomplished.

Regardless of which site you want to try out first, affiliate marketing and social networking make a great team only if you build a great network. Simply signing up and posting affiliate products will probably not be a big hit because no one knows who you are; however, if you participate in the different sites beforehand and build a network of individuals who trust you and have termed you as the “expert” in your niche, marketing to these groups is a piece of cake. Social media is about building credibility and trust, so join a social network, start participating and building your target market to sell your affiliate products to.

Some think it’s tough to get started online, especially if they have no prior knowledge of how internet marketing works. Truth is you can get started today, even with affiliate marketing. I won’t kid you though, in the beginning, you won’t be able to sit back and watch the green roll in. It takes time to build your business before you can reap the rewards.

So what is all this talk about affiliate marketing? I’ll make it easy for you. Affiliate marketing is advertising. That’s right advertising products for other people. You see this every day, everywhere you go companies advertising products for other people. Do you get sales papers in your Sunday newspaper? All of the stores are advertising for other people. Affiliate marketing is all about promoting for others and you earn a commission for each sale or lead you send to them. This is all managed by an affiliate company, to make it easier for the marketer and the product creator, although many individual online companies have affiliate programs that you can join and earn a commission from the sales sent through your affiliate code.

So how does affiliate marketing work? When you join an affiliate program you will be given a code or affiliate number. This will track sales that come from you and recorded so the affiliate program can keep track of your earnings. Most affiliate programs will go above and beyond to help you because if you make money, they make money, so they provide banners and text links, and even provide you with an affiliate manager in case you run into problems, in some cases.

Once you have joined and received your affiliate code, you have to select products and start promoting. This can be through posting to blogs and forums, free classified ads, and forums. You may also choose to use social media or article marketing to send some traffic to your website. The more traffic you send, the more your chances increase to make a sale.

Have a great product, Digg it and see who else thinks it’s great. Do you have a group of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter? Post your affiliate products and see if anyone is interested. Don’t be discouraged if no one is interested at first, just keep promoting and you will start to see results, if you have what it takes to send the traffic.

What’s the catch? It sounds too easy, doesn’t it? Well, what looks easy in black and white actually requires some due diligence on your part. Signing up for affiliate programs and finding great products is the easy part – writing compelling sales copy and getting traffic to come to you take a little more effort. Since commissions vary drastically, from a few cents to higher dollar amounts, you may have to work a little harder to build a decent commission.

That’s not to say that you can’t make decent money with affiliate programs – some marketers have replaced their fulltime income with affiliate marketing. You have to find the right program, the right products, and most importantly you have to promote to the right people.

Did you know that it is possible to start an online business even if you don’t have your own products? This is easy to do when you use affiliate marketing to jumpstart your business to get you going.

Many individuals hold off on working online because they don’t have anything to sell, but what they don’t know is that you don’t need anything; you can use other people’s products through affiliate marketing.

There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of affiliate programs just waiting for you to join, and contrary to what you may have heard; this is not just limited to e-books and downloadable audio products that have no value. In fact, affiliate programs also have high-end products that you can sell in addition to your traditional downloadable items.

To start, you will need two things:
1. A place to promote your products; a website or blog
2. Products to promote

Finding the right affiliate program takes some investigating, because there is more than finding great products. You also have to know the company’s reputation, their payout schedule, your commission for the sales you make, and what tools and strategies they have available for you to use. The reason why most internet marketers start with affiliate programs is because it’s so easy to get started. Most companies have banners, and even sales pages, ready for you to start promoting.

Of course, driving the traffic to your site is your job, so you will have to learn how to get people to your site. This can be done in many different ways:

1. Advertising through your blog
2. Forums and social networking sites
3. Social bookmarking
4. Pay per click

If you have a blog, you have control and it’s easy to promote your products, but don’t forget about the content – it must be related to your niche and compelling so your visitors will trust you and feel comfortable buying from you.

Forums and social networking sites are a great way to spread the word about your products. With most forums, there is a section for selling products/services where you can promote, but before you do that, you will need to participate in the forums and create a name for yourself so people know who you are. Most people won’t buy from strangers, so be the social butterfly and stand out.

Social bookmarking can be tedious, but there are tools available that make bookmarking a breeze. If you find that you just don’t have the time, hire someone to handle the task. This doesn’t mean that you have to go out and spend all of your savings, perhaps you have teenagers or college students who want to make a few dollars for the summer.

Pay per click takes some know how, and it does cost, but it will be worth the effort to have your ads being seen across the internet.

Regardless of how you get traffic, if you use affiliate marketing to jumpstart your business and promote your products to a targeted group of individuals, you can be an internet marketing success.

One thing you don’t want to do in affiliate marketing is to stick with just one merchant or pay system. As a matter of fact, as a general rule, you will want to diversify every aspect of your marketing. Especially in the beginning.

Specialization is for insects. As human beings, getting opposable thumbs was just the beginning of our domination of the planet. Speech was only a second step. We were able to do things that no other creature on Earth could. These all culminated into a diversity of skills that is constantly increasing.

Consequently, those who have the most diverse abilities have the most resources at their disposal and have the highest chance of success. This has been proven throughout human history. In more modern times, this is especially true in affiliate marketing.

If you specialize in selling for a particular merchant, you only get the benefits of selling that merchant’s products. In the sense of competition, your merchant may one day become “yesterday’s news.” By being mercenary and working for several merchants, you stand a greater chance of weathering that storm.

Products are also a way you could be limited in your scope. You would, of course, be foolish for promoting one product for one merchant. But it really doesn’t get much better if you promote one type of product for several merchants. The variety of products available on the Internet is a variety of income stream, and having multiple streams of traffic is the key to success.

You DEFINITELY don’t want to advertise in just one place, either. Few things will turn away leads more than having a site that is nothing but banners and other types of affiliate links. It looks tacky, it dilutes the importance of any one of them, and it can be confusing. It’s far better to have several different sites with a different set of one or two ads for each one.

It doesn’t stop there. Let’s say that you have a variety of merchants that you promote, and you have a variety of products. You have a huge variety of people coming to your sites. This leaves one more avenue where you need to diversify.

You have to diversify your payment methods. One way that affiliates can limit themselves is by sticking with just PayPal, Authorize.net, or one of several other online payment brokers. The problem here is that not all merchants use the same payment method. Each one may have diverse payment methods, but they may not all be available on the same campaign.

As a result, it’s in your best interest to have accounts with as many of them as you can. This way, you will be freed up to do business with more merchants on more campaigns.

What you’ll find by diversifying every aspect of your marketing is that your sales will skyrocket. You will have more traffic coming from different sources, you will have more ways to get paid, and in the end, more money in your bank. Always keep in mind, “How can I do this differently?” and you will be at the top of the class.

One of the first questions people tend to ask when they first get into affiliate marketing is, “What should I market?” The answer is pretty simple, though it may not be the most lucrative. You should start off marketing things that you know and love. It may not be a product with a large commission, it may not have a high conversion rate, it may not even be the best managed system. However, if you know it and love it, it will show.

First of all, when you’re an affiliate marketer, new customers will often ask YOU specifics about what you’re promoting. The product itself may have a full support staff, but for some reason, they come to you for answers. Your ability and willingness to answer them will show you to be more than just a guy throwing up links all over the place.

While you do want to direct them to the support staff in most cases, sometimes it’s easier and friendlier to answer the question yourself. This has several benefits. Initially, it’s an opportunity to actually SELL the product and get your commission the old fashioned way. It also builds trust by showing that you are willing to stand behind the product you’re promoting. It additionally shows that you’re concerned about the leads you’ve generated.

Another important element of having knowledge and interest in your product is that it shows in your presentation. The website design, the sales letter and your own testimonial about the product will go a long way toward increasing your conversion rates. You can bet that if you are knowledgeable and interested in your product, it will show and people will respond.

If you don’t know and aren’t passionate about the products you’re promoting, that will also show. This can be a negative mark on your reputation, unfortunately. If you’re selling a product that you don’t know about or believe in, potential customers have a name for you: A scam artist. That’s not to say that you actually ARE that, but they will certainly see you that way. You come off as being insincere, shallow, and just in it for the money. Maybe perhaps you are, but you don’t want your customers to see that, do you?

Finally, if you do know and love your product, it shows in your motivation. All the work that goes into your presentation of this product to the public will not seem too boring, mundane and labor intensive. You will not groan as much about building the web pages, generating your auto responses and newsletters, and so on. You will love what you’re doing.

On the other hand, if you don’t know and love your product, the work will be dull and monotonous. After all, when it really comes down to it, doing something for money isn’t the motivation that it’s cracked up to be. It can get you to see a project through till the end, but you probably won’t like doing it as much as if you were actually excited about what you were selling.

It’s a bit of a hot topic among affiliate marketers that they need to protect their commissions by cloaking them. There is a virtual wave of paranoia about rogue affiliates stealing their commissions. Let’s look at the possibilities of how this can be done, and then we can decide whether cloaking is the way to go.

The basic way that an affiliate link can theoretically get stolen is by essentially hacking the page that it’s on and changing the code in the link so that it pays the thief, and not the owner of the link. There are a few problems with this in general.

First, the thief would have to know what an affiliate link is, and what it does. That’s not terribly hard to figure out; information abounds on the Web about affiliate programs. But the people who would know to look for the information are few and far between, compared with the average user.

Secondly, they would have to know how to hack your page and find your link code. Sure, your page can be hacked, as pages get hacked pretty regularly. They can be scraped for content, but it takes some skill and tools to do that. That also implies a rare breed of individual.

Finally, what are they going to replace your affiliate ID with? That is, your affiliate ID is how the link gets credited to you, and you get paid. If they don’t have one of their own to replace it with, then it follows that they wouldn’t get paid your commissions.

The bottom line of that is that they would have to be an affiliate on the same project that you’re working. I’m willing to bet that on most campaigns, even the large scale ones, there would probably be only one person on staff that could do it.

There are other ways to catch a thief. Many affiliate programs have tracking software that you can use to see where your traffic is going. There are also programs that you can buy to do this. If you keep track of this, you can catch them early on.

If absolutely nothing else, you can check your affiliate ID in the code when you do updates to your site. If you know it by heart, or if you have it on a Post It note on your screen, you can find out in 2 seconds if someone ganked your affiliate link.

Now, let’s compare all that to the possibilities of cloaking. First of all, yes, you wouldn’t have to worry at all about someone stealing your link. Well, at least the probability is negligible. But then, from what I just said, isn’t it already? Besides, if they REALLY want your link, they will find a way to get it.

Now, what if you cloak your affiliate link—what does Google think of that? In the webmaster guidelines, it specifically says:

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

I don’t know what that says to you, but I know what that says to me.

Affiliate marketing is at once one of the most profitable and risky ventures you might get into in online business. Like it or not, we are all judged by the company we keep. Naturally, you will want to affiliate yourself with marketers who have good reputations.

There’s the rub. By going the easy way and shopping on affiliate list sites, you run the risk of affiliating with disreputable marketers. You could very well wind up being part of “the wrong crowd.”

It can even get worse than that. For one thing, you will want affiliates who are in markets relevant to yours. This gets even more important if you realize that some affiliates are in niches that may be an embarrassment to your business, or make your targeted clientèle uneasy.

On the same token, you don’t want to link up with your competition. While you want relevant links, you don’t want to draw business away from your site. It’s also far too tempting to link up with a huge number of affiliates. All in all, it’s caveat emptor when you “shop” for affiliates.

It seems then that it’s a better option to partner up with someone you already know. This obviously puts affiliate marketing in the “long term goal” category of a business plan. However, for all the hassle of reputation management it will save you, it’s worth it.

The best way to start getting good affiliates is to get to know them. This will involve a lot of legwork on your part, of course. In any case, a good place to start is on your own reputation. Start by making yourself an authority in your niche. Establish a reputation of good products and customer service.

You will also want to start hanging out in affiliate marketing forums. Get to know people, make your presence known, and begin thinking about who you want to affiliate with. Throughout this, maintain your reputation by joining in conversations, offering solid advice and all around showing that you have “the stuff.”

From here, you can start attending seminars. These can be focused on affiliate marketing, or they can be more general. This is a great chance to put faces to names, on them as well as yourself. You can also meet new people here and begin to develop relationships with them.

At any point during this process, you may get solicited by affiliates. This is a good sign that you’re in a good place to start picking and choosing who you promote. Naturally, you don’t want to just pick up any yahoo who claims to be an affiliate. In all cases, check out their credentials. Surely they have a resume, right?

Over time, you will develop a collection of people you will want to affiliate with. While this seems to be a slow and “old school” way of doing things, really it’s the best way of doing it. It’s especially true if you want to get into full partnerships.

After some time as an Internet marketer or as an affiliate marketer, you will eventually come to a certain golden moment. You will have generated enough authority and enough trust among your peers that you can enter into partnerships and joint ventures. You have truly made the top rung of affiliate marketing, but now is no time to drop your guard.

You have made it this far for one reason: You have been good to your customers. Mistakes along the way about affiliating yourself with bogus products can almost be forgiven, just so long as you treat your leads well. Of course, promoting shoddy or shady products can tend to get expensive if you have to make things up to your customers. Careful selection of what you promote is obviously in your best interest.

At any rate, now that you’re entering the realm of joint ventures, you have to be especially careful about what company you keep. After all, promoting a product as a JV Affiliate is one thing, while having your name on it is another. How can you avoid the trap of having your name attached to a crap product?

First of all, as soon as you can afford it when you’re “up and coming,” you need to go to conferences. You need to have social interactions and make friends. Much like any other social group, the company you keep in Internet marketing reflects highly on your personal image. Be selective; it may sound like high school all over again, but there are still yet the good crowds and bad crowds.

Once you have a good circle of friends and associates, keep up with each other. You don’t necessarily have to know how “the wife and kids are doing,” but you should all be apprised of each other’s success level in particular ventures. Naturally, knowing how the wife and kids are doing goes a long way toward lubricating negotiations.

Once everyone is comfortable with each other and have determined that a joint venture is a mutually beneficial arrangement, it’s still not time to drop your guard. You know the quality of the person, but you don’t as yet know the quality of the product.

To get this, you need to have statistical information. While you may think the sun rises and sets around the other person, you still have to know that the product actually works. Alpha and beta test results are absolutely essential before jumping in on a product launch.

Even at that, there’s no sure guarantee that the product that you put your name on is going to work out in the long run. Due to the fickleness of certain Web 2.0 properties, for instance, something that worked as late as the beta testing phase may become disabled. This ultimately amounts to a value judgment on your part.

Even if a product seems to work in the later testing phases, you still have to ask the question of if it might become banned as an unsavory practice by websites that it interacts with. You may get stuck with a lame duck in the actual implementing phase otherwise.

When you think of parasites, you most often think of small creatures that you get infected with. These aren’t precisely what I’m talking about. While they share many of the same characteristics as the physical parasites, there is one major difference—they’re electronic. There is a particularly evil criminal form, a dark side of affiliate marketing that uses them.

It can’t honestly be said that affiliate marketing is the complete motivation for using Internet parasites. There is too much of a sociopathic mentality about it. What are these “bugs,” as they’ve been commonly referred to, and what exactly do they have to do with affiliate marketing?

Adware

Adware is the most commonly used Internet parasite for shady direct and affiliate marketing strategies. It and spyware are often considered to be interchangeable, but there is a primary difference. Spyware scans your computer for browsing history files. Adware generally just sticks to delivering unsolicited advertisements by either generating pop-up, pop-under and banner ads, as well as possibly hijacking the browser to a sales page.

Spyware

Spyware is very much like adware, with one major exception. As said above, it collects information from your computer. What it does from there is it sends this information to a remote server, where it gets evaluated and filed away. Then the remote server sends more user-specific ads, either company direct or affiliate marketing. It also tends to sap more resources out of a computer than adware. Otherwise, it’s virtually the same thing.

Rogue Security Tools

While Adware and Spyware may or may not advertise fraudulent products, rogue security tools are patently fraudulent. They don’t have much to do with affiliate marketing, but the potential is certainly there. Essentially, your computer gets infected, and receives a false warning that it’s been infected with an astronomical number of malware files. It claims that if you buy the full version, you can get rid of them. This is never true, and you wind up buying a junk program, and may be a victim of identity theft.

Viruses and worms are other well known malware programs, but they typically have nothing to do with direct or affiliate marketing. With the exception of the XP Antivirus virus and its family, it’s pretty universal.

How is it that Internet parasites are so prevalent? After all, wouldn’t they be illegal? In fact, most types are illegal in most parts of the world. The problem is that most of the people who transmit them do business in countries such as Russia, where they can get away with it.

Adware is often debatable as a legal direct or affiliate marketing practice, depending on certain circumstances. Some adware programs come bundled with other programs, and whether the user knows it or not, they often will sign consent forms to accept these adware programs. I personally think it’s a despicable and dishonest practice, regardless of how they cover their tracks.

In the end, it’s highly doubtful if the results you get from using Internet parasites are worth the risk. If nothing else, think of it this way—would YOU want them on your computer?

Everything you do in your Internet marketing campaign is done with one goal in mind. Of course, that goal is ultimately to make mad cash, but there’s one thing you need to be doing to get that—you have to be getting traffic to your website.

It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest product ever; it won’t make you any money without getting traffic to your website. Not to demean the importance of having a quality product, but it doesn’t mean anything if no one sees it. Let’s look at the different aspects of this central task.

Search Engine Optimization

Getting ranked on the search engines is a good place to start. Most people use search engines to find things that they’re looking for, so search engine ranking is a powerful tool for getting traffic to your website. There are good ways and bad ways of doing this, as well as “white hat” and “black hat” techniques.

From the layout of your page, to the content you have on it, to the way you place keywords and embedded elements, to the ease of navigating to and through the site; these are all part of maximizing the search engine optimization of your page. The higher you rank on search engines, the more likely you are to be seen and visited. This is a key element in getting traffic to your website.

Listbuilding

Once you get people to your website, you want them to come back. Membership opt-in forms are ideal to make this happen. If you please your visitors the first time, chances are they’ll come back, and listbuilding is a way to ensure that they don’t forget you exist. You can send them notifications of changes in your content, special deals, or any changes you make to the site. These can be used as a lure for getting traffic to your website.

Viral Marketing

Everyone loves a good show. If there is an element on your website that particularly won the interest of a visitor, this can be used along with listbuilding for getting more traffic to your site. If it is particularly successful as a viral marketing campaign, you will essentially have volunteer affiliates drawing in traffic for you. One entertained visitor can literally bring in hundreds of other visitors.

Article Posting

Article posting is an old favorite in the game of getting traffic to your site. While your website itself should have content, it’s in your best interest to have articles linking to your website posted in article directories. It establishes you as an expert in your niche and can generate interest in your products. It also serves as a workhorse in search engine optimization.

Web 2.0

A more recent addition to the toolbox of getting traffic to your website, Web 2.0 properties are highly useful. By creating back links from authoritative websites, you increase your search engine rankings. Also, it’s a highly personable forum to interact with and promote to other users.

Of course, there are more ways, but I don’t want to give them ALL away in one post!