Before I talk about how affiliate marketing can be used as a cost effective way to advertise your business, I want to give a brief introduction to what an affiliate program is.

An affiliate program is a form of internet advertising that rewards marketers for driving traffic to a company’s website and producing sales. The company gives its affiliates a personalized tracking link that the marketer can use in their promotions. This link enables the company to track where traffic and sales are coming from and pay their affiliates accordingly. Simply put, affiliate programs are about paying commissions to people who help you to make sales. This is not quite as easy as it sounds.

Running an affiliate program has its ups and downs. It is very important to be armed with up to date information and technical know how if you are going to run such a program successfully and with the minimum stress. In this article we will look at the benefits of affiliate marketing as a tool for increasing your businesses profitability. (more…)

Here is a list of free file sharing sites that you can upload a variety of files such as PDF’s, Word Documents, Spreadsheets and other types of files.

• DocShare
• DocStoc
• Scribd
• 4Shared
• SlideShare
• YuduFreedom
• Issuu
• Calameo
• GoogleDocs
• Box
• MediaFire
• KeepAndShare
• MyEbook

Using these types of sites is another great way to leverage your content, I have one  that has been viewed by more than 45,000 people in just a over a year. You can check it out here, it’s about improving your copywriting skills.

If you know of any other file sharing sites, please list them below in the comment section.

How will referring new affiliates to an affiliate program make me money in the future? That’s where a 2 tier affiliate program works like magic!

Affiliates are getting cleverer by the day. So these days, affiliates know the difference between the different types of traffic they can get paid for. There are a lot of definitions though CPM, CPC, CPA, CPL, CPD and many more.

CPM is impressions, when the publisher (the website owner) gets paid every time a banner is shown.

CPC is clicks, where the publisher (or email marketer and other marketers) gets paid every time a banner or text link is clicked upon.

The other ways of getting paid are grouped together under the term performance marketing and this is where the term affiliate is most commonly used as well. (more…)