Many of the great fortunes of the 19th and 20th centuries were made by simply buying and selling — buying other people’s products and getting other people to sell them. In the world of off-line commerce, this has always been the traditional method of generating wealth. Now, in the internet age, this technique can be done effortlessly with just a click of your mouse.U.S. marketing legends, Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, Ted Nicholas and many others, have taught for years the power of becoming a joint-venture broker and, in the process, have generated hundreds of millions of dollars. This, in the off-line sense, is where you find a company wanting to sell more of their product, find a company that has the capability of selling more of that product and broker a deal between them in return for a hefty commission on the total sales.

On the international stage, the system is also known as an import/export agency where the agent sources products from overseas and finds buyers at home who sell on to the end user. If you’ve bought something from your local hardware store, it probably came in a box marked ‘Made in China’. The storekeeper didn’t spend weeks visiting Chinese factories looking for something to sell in his store! He, directly or indirectly, used the services of an agent/broker.

The same system applies to many other aspects of our lives. For example, a dating agency will introduce two people with mutual interests and, in the process, collect a commission for making the connection. Closer to home, the fruit and vegetables in your local supermarket go through a middleman. He finds the farmers wanting to sell and the supermarket has the ‘list’; the customers who do the weekly shopping there.

Prior to the emergence of the internet, brokering deals meant complicated contracts, usually involving expensive lawyers, extensive telephone and telex calls and a fair amount of hard work, often lasting for many months before the commissions started coming in.

Now, all that has changed and contracts happen automatically, all contact is done on-line and the only hard work is carrying out a little research and sending off some e-mails.

Transferring this system on-line can see results appearing quite literally in a a few days and all the components of even an on-line business become redundant. No products to sell, no website to build, no marketing skills to be learned and, most importantly, the holy grail of internet marketing: no list required.

Picking a category to broker for is probably the hardest first step to take as the internet has an overwhelming range to choose from - just take a look at e-Bay’s category list! A hobby, interest or passion even is an easier place to start and brokering deals on a subject you enjoy will provide the motivation to get going. Once you’ve experienced the thrill of successfully brokering your first deal, you have many thousands of categories and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of products to take your pick from.

Once a subject has been chosen, Google and affiliate directories are used to find products for use with this system and it’s then time to look for marketers to promote these products.

Using Clickbank as a springboard, specific search phrases in Google will bring up sties that are already promoting other products in the same category. Further specific search terms will bring up many more sites that won’t appear in a standard Google search.

Depending on how precise your category is, hundreds, but often thousands of sites that have the potential to market your product to can be found with ease. E-zines will also provide an ideal hunting ground and a simple search will reveal many thousands of potential sites.

The hardest part of brokering is contacting all the site owners but software can automate much of your work. The e-mail must be phrased to offer a specific benefit that requires only a few minutes work on the part of the owners; that way as many as possible grab the offer.

Not all sites will respond to your offers but those that do will provide a residual income for months or years to come and each new deal will provide another layer of income. There will also be spurts of income levels as e-zines send out your offer to their mailing lists.

In conclusion, joint-venture brokering has been producing a comfortable and lucrative living since trading began. Now, thanks to the internet, it’s easier and quicker than ever to get a percentage of the vast sums of money that are moving around the world between buyer and seller.

John Geraghty is a professional nurseryman who decided there must be a more comfortable way to make money than being frost-bitten, soaked and sunburnt See how you can improve your comfort zone at http://www.jv-treasurechest.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Geraghty
http://EzineArticles.com/?Two-Tier-Affiliate-Marketing—The-No-Cost,-Easy-Way-To-An-Online-Income&id=926013

Affiliate programs offer an excellent opportunity to make money online with two tier affiliate programs potentially the most lucrative of all providing a viral network for the affiliate marketing program and affiliates the benefit of substantial residual earnings. A two tier affiliate program pays commission to affiliates at two levels, on sales generated from your own website link plus a percentage of the commission earned by other affiliates introduced to the affiliate program through your link.

The Hype
Join a Two Tier Affiliate Program and become Super Rich in the virtual world virtually overnight simply by placing a link on your website then sit back and watch enormous lumps of money swell your own private cash pile growing by the hour. Amazing! Fantastic! New car, new home, extended holidays, all while you relax by the pool and your affiliate program link delivers you super rich status! It is that easy!

Welcome to the real world.
Fact a two tier affiliate program has the absolute potential to make you serious amounts of money. It won’t happen overnight; it will require dedication, persistence and a completely focused work ethic targeted at building your affiliate program business. You can do it from home; you can do it part time.
But can it happen? - Most definitely YES! Your financial dreams really can come true with a two tier affiliate program.
It will require work, you can make money with Affiliate Program and the harder you work the more you will make. Sit back and do nothing and that’s what you will make - Nothing!

Join a Two Tier Affiliate Program
Look for a two tier affiliate program that pays a good tier one commission and most important an excellent tier two commission. Level one commission are the rewards for your efforts. Level two commissions are crucial to building your residual income. A 50% level two commission only requires two affiliates to join your affiliate program to double your income if you encourage your affiliates to work at your level. When you join a Two Tier Affiliate Program you are running your own affiliate marketing program. Join a free affiliate program.

Affiliate Program Content
Placing a link on your website while essential is not nearly enough. Add real content, quality content either provided by the affiliate program website or search the internet, article sites being an exceptional resource. Add high quality content to your affiliate program website. In addition to directly relevant content and a link to the affiliate program website add a second link direct to that affiliate program website sign up page. Focus the content to encourage visitors to click through to the affiliate program. Stimulate visitor interest, pose the question and provide the answer in a link through to the affiliate program website. The Affiliate Program website is where you earn your commission and where you want the visitor to go.

Optimise Affiliate Program Content Page
Use Meta tags to optimise the affiliate program page for search engines:
TITLE “Content Specific and relevant” maximum 80 characters, preferably 70
META NAME Description “Use your keywords to write description and keep below 250 characters, preferably 150″
META NAME Keywords “Choose 5 - 10 keywords that will get your site on the first 10 organic search pages”
META NAME Robots All
Choosing the highest volume search terms is tremendously beneficial if your affiliate program content page has a high page rank. Be realistic, if your affiliate program page has a lower page rank choose less popular keywords to increase your chance of being searched. Use a free optimisation site to ensure title; description; keywords and relevancy score 100%. After optimisation submit the affiliate program webpage with the two tier affiliate program links using a free submission service to get the affiliate program page indexed and listed.
If your website has a site map add the affiliate program page to that map for indexing

Link Popularity Drives Traffic
List the affiliate program content page on suitable directories, hundreds of links back to this page will drive traffic and improve the page rank.
Write articles relevant to the affiliate program content and post these through the internet. Consider an article submitter to automate part of this process, avoid spamming the article sites. Writing good quality articles will increase link popularity and drive even more traffic to your content page. Get articles from the Two Tier Affiliate Program website.
Approach and write articles for ezines and newsletters relative to content or your 2 tier affiliate program.
Conduct searches using main industry keywords to find similar content websites and invite non competitive sites to join your two tier affiliate program.

Set and Achieve Targets
Set targets for sales and affiliate recruitment, work at page content and popularity links to drive traffic to achieve the targets. It helps if your affiliate marketing program is a free affiliate program. A free affiliate program is one less barrier to joining your affiliate program.
Be persistent and determined. Achieve the goals of your very own affiliate marketing program. The cash will follow. Remember Lady Luck? Lady Luck is proportionate to the number of chances you make for yourself. Give yourself enough chances and Lady Luck will smile in your direction. Good Luck.

About the Author

Please visit and make money with affiliate program athttp://www.diyaccounting.co.uk/affiliate.htm

Two Tier Affiliate program is free to join and pays up to 30% commission plus 50% second tier commission, provides content and offers real time stats on your desktop
DIY Accounting supply accounting and payroll software to small and medium business.http://diyaccounting.co.uk/index.htm

To those who are not familiar with affiliate marketing, two-tier could be a new term to you but to those who are involved in this kind of money-making experience; it could mean a stream of income. Two-tier is an enticing feature of a particular affiliate program wherein, affiliates are allowed to sign-up additional affiliates below them. So that when the sub-affiliates otherwise known as second tier affiliates, earns a commission, the affiliate above receives a commission too.

In two-tier system, the first tier of commission is just like in the usual affiliate program. The sole difference is that it has an additional tier/s or sub-affiliates, whereby marketers also gain a commission once the people that the additional tiers referred to the program generate sales. Theoretically, affiliate programs can have multi-tier program with infinite number of tiers, however, there are practical limitations. As tiers increase, the affiliate program draws more webmasters who are mostly interested in gaining profit from other’s work and effort.

Two-Tier affiliate program is also recognized as Multi-Level Marketing. When you sign-up for an affiliate program, you are identified as the first tier and the person that you have recruited or encouraged to sign up is the second tier. If there are additional tiers, then the system can now be regarded as multi-level marketing (MLM). But today, MLM isn’t as effective and successful as it was several years ago. It is because at present, affiliates can freely select from thousands of affiliate programs and they can quickly switch from one program to another.

You could probably go wrong if you’re thinking that you can depend on your second tier to do the job for you. So if you want to use two-tier affiliate program to your advantage and generate more income by encouraging sub-affiliates to sign-up below you, make sure that you carefully choose your affiliate merchant. Pick those merchants who generate stable stream of high quality products, give high or just commissions, offers real time tracking, furnishes you with a proven and tested advertising arsenal and treat their affiliates very well. You can also sign-up for the merchant who gives high visitors-to-sales conversion rate.

It is also advisable if you engage yourself with a web merchant that has a user-friendly website which you can access anytime so that you can monitor your statistics including visits and sales. And if possible, choose the one with powerful marketing tools which you can use in promoting their products.

You’re just wasting much of your time and effort and worse, damaging your integrity once you promote poor affiliate program because your visitor will surely presume that the product or service you are reselling must be dreadful too. That’s the reason why it is important to pick first-rate affiliate programs. Through these, you can not only build up a good relationship with your visitor, but also, you can easily get more tiers to sign-up under you. You should also be cautious of some affiliate programs that give more importance on the profits to be earned in taking on other affiliates than on the income from sales, because you’ll just eventually find out that someone has already close those sales without informing you. Usually, this kind of affiliate program offers a very low first-tier payment but a sky-scraping second-tier commission.

If you want to start an affiliate program of your own, you surely have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier affiliate program. Who am I to say which of these two programs are better? But let me tell you the benefits you could get out of two-tier affiliate program.

First, your profit will increase due to increased sales from the customers that your second tier has referred. Second, you have a much broader customer base to which you can sell your products and services. Then, you gain more and stable income because the customers referred by your affiliate and sub-affiliates could probably develop a lifetime loyalty on your site and your products. Plus, you have an army of sub-affiliates who will promote and resell your products and services to their visitors and subscribers.

Two-tier program has been a proven winner and should be the number one choice for the budding affiliates as well as for the affiliate program managers. When you start gaining profits from your site as well as your tiers, this is now the right time to say that you have used two-tier affiliate program to your advantage.

Author is writter for sites such asInformation
Today

About the Author

Author is writter for sites such asInformation
Today

One way to increase your affiliate earnings, is to join two tier affiliate programs. With regular affiliate programs, you only earn money if and when you sell products and services for the program you’ve joined. With a two tier affiliate program though, you can also earn money when other people make sales… if they’ve signed up for the same affiliate program through your affiliate link.

You don’t make money just by having a new affiliate sign up under you. Instead you make money if that affiliate signs up under you, and then proceeds to make affiliate sales. These affiliates who sign up under you are usually called “sub affiliates”.

Now, you don’t usually make tons of money from sub affiliates. In fact, you usually earn just a small fraction from them compared to what you can earn by making sales yourself. Let’s say for example, you’ve affiliated with a company that pays you 50% commission on any sales you make through your affiliate link. If that company offer a second tier option, they’re likely to pay just 10% to you, for any sales your sub affiliates make.

Now the sub affiliates will still earn 50% of their sales too. Your commissions will not be taken from theirs. Your commissions instead, are taken from the profit of the actual company you’re selling for.

Having sub affiliates is an excellent way to make extra money. In rare cases, you can make a very good living from sub affiliates. But to do this you must first sign up many affiliates under you. Signing up hundreds of affiliates might work decently, but the more the better because not all affiliates make sales. In fact, only about 5%-10% of them will make sales.

You can help increase the amount of sales your sub affiliates make, but it takes a lot of time, effort and hard work. Some of the ways you can help improve their performance is to train them, mentor them, create custom sales material for them, and give them bonuses they can use when promoting the program. In essence, if you become an independant affiliate program manager for your own group of sub affiliates, you can increase their sales greatly and in doing so, help build your own income streams too.

This is a profitable way to approach affiliate marketing, but it’s much more profitable if you also make direct sales yourself.

To those who are not familiar with affiliate marketing, two-tier could be a new term to you but to those who are involved in this kind of money-making experience; it could mean a stream of income. Two-tier is an enticing feature of a particular affiliate program wherein, affiliates are allowed to sign-up additional affiliates below them. So that when the sub-affiliates otherwise known as second tier affiliates, earns a commission, the affiliate above receives a commission too.

In two-tier system, the first tier of commission is just like in the usual affiliate program. The sole difference is that it has an additional tier/s or sub-affiliates, whereby marketers also gain a commission once the people that the additional tiers referred to the program generate sales. Theoretically, affiliate programs can have multi-tier program with infinite number of tiers, however, there are practical limitations. As tiers increase, the affiliate program draws more webmasters who are mostly interested in gaining profit from other’s work and effort.

Two-Tier affiliate program is also recognized as Multi-Level Marketing. When you sign-up for an affiliate program, you are identified as the first tier and the person that you have recruited or encouraged to sign up is the second tier. If there are additional tiers, then the system can now be regarded as multi-level marketing (MLM). But today, MLM isn’t as effective and successful as it was several years ago. It is because at present, affiliates can freely select from thousands of affiliate programs and they can quickly switch from one program to another.

You could probably go wrong if you’re thinking that you can depend on your second tier to do the job for you. So if you want to use two-tier affiliate program to your advantage and generate more income by encouraging sub-affiliates to sign-up below you, make sure that you carefully choose your affiliate merchant. Pick those merchants who generate stable stream of high quality products, give high or just commissions, offers real time tracking, furnishes you with a proven and tested advertising arsenal and treat their affiliates very well. You can also sign-up for the merchant who gives high visitors-to-sales conversion rate.

It is also advisable if you engage yourself with a web merchant that has a user-friendly website which you can access anytime so that you can monitor your statistics including visits and sales. And if possible, choose the one with powerful marketing tools which you can use in promoting their products.

You’re just wasting much of your time and effort and worse, damaging your integrity once you promote poor affiliate program because your visitor will surely presume that the product or service you are reselling must be dreadful too. That’s the reason why it is important to pick first-rate affiliate programs. Through these, you can not only build up a good relationship with your visitor, but also, you can easily get more tiers to sign-up under you. You should also be cautious of some affiliate programs that give more importance on the profits to be earned in taking on other affiliates than on the income from sales, because you’ll just eventually find out that someone has already close those sales without informing you. Usually, this kind of affiliate program offers a very low first-tier payment but a sky-scraping second-tier commission.

If you want to start an affiliate program of your own, you surely have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier affiliate program. Who am I to say which of these two programs are better? But let me tell you the benefits you could get out of two-tier affiliate program.

First, your profit will increase due to increased sales from the customers that your second tier has referred. Second, you have a much broader customer base to which you can sell your products and services. Then, you gain more and stable income because the customers referred by your affiliate and sub-affiliates could probably develop a lifetime loyalty on your site and your products. Plus, you have an army of sub-affiliates who will promote and resell your products and services to their visitors and subscribers.

Two-tier program has been a proven winner and should be the number one choice for the budding affiliates as well as for the affiliate program managers. When you start gaining profits from your site as well as your tiers, this is now the right time to say that you have used two-tier affiliate program to your advantage.

Note that if you don’t do this, you are leaving money on
the table.

What Internet marketing affiliate programs should you join
and endorse to your list in order to increase your online
business profit?

The answer is - two-tier affiliate programs.

When you promote a 2-tier affiliate program, you earn
commissions not only on your direct sales as in a regular
affiliate program, but you also earn commissions on sales
generated by people that you refer to the program.

Here is a list of proven, free-to-join Internet marketing
two-tier affiliate programs:

http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com/marketingtips
http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com/nitro
http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com/implix

The above 2-tier affiliate programs offer excellent
products and services, generous commission and are designed
to SELL. These are the most important factors when you are
looking for good two-tier affiliate programs to join.

Some of the above affiliate programs can even earn you
lifetime commissions. It means that you don’t just earn a
commission on one sale, you can earn a commission on every
subsequent purchase by your referrals.

About the author:
Gerardas Norkus has been marketing online since 1997.
Take advantage of his battle tested Internet marketing
strategies that could quietly make you huge profits
every single month. Take 7-part e-mail course at:
http://www.netmarketingstrategies.com

Two-Tier Affiliate programs are best

When you join an affiliate program or start an affiliate program of your own, you have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier program.

With a single tier program you earn a
commission on any sales you make and that is it. If you are running your own affiliate program, you pay your affiliates a commission for any sales they refer and that is all.

However, with a two-tier program, affiliates are allowed to recruit sub-affiliates and are paid a small percentage of the sales these
sub-affiliates generate. For example, the affiliates may earn a 30% commission for selling product X himself; and when one of the sub-affiliates makes a sale, the affiliate may get a 10% commission as well.

This is very profitable for the affiliate as he can recruit an army of sub-affiliates, all earning commissions for him without any effort on his part except for the initial recruiting process.

If you are starting an affiliate program of your own should it be two-tier or single tier?
Some might shy away from the seeming
expense of a two-tier program. But is it really that expensive? Many affiliate
program managers make the wrong decision
on this.

Lets look at an example.
You have an affiliate program up and running and an average affiliate joins your program. Mr.Average has a web site that receives average traffic. He also has an ezine with thousands of subscribers published monthly.
Mr. Average posts your affiliate links to his web site and promotes your product to his ezine list.

Initially, he generates good sales. However,a point comes when he saturates his market with your product and his sales begin to drop. He begins to lose interest in your program and your sales remain small.

What happens if you set up a two-tier program? Rather than trying to keep your commission pay outs small, you motivate your existing affiliates to recruit other people to your program. This will exponentially increase
your affiliate sales. Would it not be worth paying the referring affiliate a percentage of their sub-affiliates sales?

Now when Mr.Average joins your affiliate
program this is what would happen. When
he has saturated his market with your product,he would now promote your affiliate program to his customers and ezine subscribers.
Many of Mr.Averages customers and
subscribers decide to join the affiliate program. This in turn will motivate Mr.Average to continue promoting your products and
recruiting affiliates.

Now what is the situation?
*Your income increases because of increased sales.
*You have a much larger customer base to which you can sell backend products.
*An increase in your income because of the life time loyalty of the customers referred by your affiliate.
*An army of sub-affiliates who will sell your products, and in turn promote your affiliate program to their customers and subscribers.

The little extra in affiliate sales commission pay outs will be more than compensated for by the exponential sales increase.
This is why the two-tier affiliate program is a guaranteed winner and should be the automatic choice for potential affiliates and affiliate program managers.

John Lynch 2002

[ John Lynch is an affiliate of the Internet Marketing
Center http://www.marketingtips.com/sr/t.x/650274]

John Lynch is an affiliate of the Internet Marketing Center -http://www.marketingtips.com/sr/t.x/650274

“Focus for Affiliate Success”David McKenzie

Affiliate marketing question - Should you join every affiliate program you can find or just a few?

There are many thousands of affiliate programs on the net that you can join. Every man and his dog is running one. But how do you decide which ones to join?

There are two trains of thought in this area. First you can take the scatter gun approach, which is quite popular on the net, and join as many programs as possible. This ensures that at least SOME of them will pay off. Well, thats the theory.

The other alternative is to take the shot gun approach. Join some leading affiliate programs in just a few areas and put more effort into each one. Do some affiliate marketing research
by reading as many articles on the subject as possible. This way you can narrow down your candidates.

Well, as always there are pros and cons to both but why not do what everyone else is not doing. It seems to me most sites are taking the scatter gun approach. For example: We have 3,000
affiliate programs listed on our site. We have the largest selection of affiliate programs!

Why not focus? Find your own niche. Find a particular area that you are interested in.

Example: Perhaps your interest is in selling rare papyrus from Egypt and you find there is only one affiliate program dedicated to this. You join. You focus your affiliate marketing
strategies on this product. You are not thinking about selling papyrus from Egypt one minute and then long distance phone calls the next. With fewer products and services you are able
to focus more energy and effort onto the products and services that you have a genuine interest in. You may even be considered an expert in this particular area because of your knowledge.

There are many webmasters doing just fine with their hundreds or even thousands of affiliate programs, but the market for the scatter gun approach now appears to be cluttered.

This is where the specialists enter. The new breed of webmaster that focuses on particular products or services. Alternatively your focus may be on one area, and selecting only the best-selling, highest-paying commissions for that field. Then you target your affiliates with high level affiliate marketing techniques. Now there is room for the specialist to succeed.

Target your affiliate programs.

Pick just a few.

Concentrate all of your time into marketing these programs - because you are so passionate about the product or service you are selling, you will drive more targeted traffic to your affiliate program.

Resource Box
David McKenzie is the author of a new e-book titled The Facts You Should Know About Affiliate Programs
Get a Free 5 Day Email Course
http://www.1sthomebasedbusiness.com

David McKenzie is the author of a new e-book titled The Facts You Should Know About Affiliate Programs
Get a Free 5 Day Email Course
http://www.1sthomebasedbusiness.com

When you look into affiliate programs, you will notice that there are all kinds of them. The ones that I am interested in right now are the single-tier programs, two-tier affiliate programs, and multi-tier affiliate programs. You may not understand what the difference is, but there is a difference. These types of affiliate marketing are based on the different levels or tiers that you will get paid within the network. Let me explain.

Single-tier programs are when you sign up with an affiliate program to sell their product or service. The only time you are paid is if you make a direct sale or for traffic you have referred to the companies website. Some examples of single-tier are the pay per click (PPC), and pay per lead (PPL) affiliate programs.

With two-tier affiliate programs, there are two ways to make money. You get paid for direct sales or traffic you referred, but also on other traffic or sales made by affiliates that signed up under you. You get money for the work of the affiliates two-tiers or levels down from you. An example of a two-tier program is Ken Envoy’s Site Sell.

Multi-tier affiliate programs works pretty much the same way as the two-tier. The only difference is that you get paid a commission on a wider number of affiliates in the different levels or tiers of the affiliate network. So for example: You sign up with a multi-tier program, and they may pay you for any affiliates under you that goes down 5 levels or tiers deep.

So how can you tell if a program is a single, two-tier, or multi-tier? Do a search on any major search engine for the different types of affiliate programs. Once you find them, read about the program. Read the faq section if one is provided. This is the best way to find out whether it is a single-tier, two-tier affiliate program or multi-tier affiliate program. It will tell you how many levels or tiers deep that they pay you on. If you can’t find anything on the website that says, send them an email before signing up with them. Don’t be afraid to ask them questions. Always be sure about the product or service, and the company before joining them.

Whatever type of affiliate program you are promoting, you want to make sure you concentrate on selling the product or service first. This is the best way to make money with any program. Signing up other affiliates under you is just a bonus way to make money. Just because you can sign up other affiliates does not guarantee that they will do anything with the program. They may get side tracked by other things online, or they may not do anything at all. So sell the product or service first, and sign up affiliates second. That way you will be able to make money. Don’t rely on others to make you money, it is up to you to become successful.

Deciding which type of program to promote is totally up to you. Do your research, and learn all you can about the company first. That way you can decide if you should be promoting single-tier, two-tier affiliate programs, or multi -tier affiliate programs. No one can decide for you. Make the best decision for you and your business by finding out information before you start promoting anything. You can make money with any type of affiliate program. You just have to be able to find the right one, and do the work that will get you to the top. Don’t let anyone stop you from achieving your dreams.

Copyright ? Melody Heddings

About the Author

To find the best home based business ideas and
opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.HomeBizMadeEZ4U.com and Affiliate Programs:http://affiliate-programs.ideas-from.us

One way to increase your affiliate earnings, is to join two tier affiliate programs. With regular affiliate programs, you only earn money if and when you sell products and services for the program you’ve joined. With a two tier affiliate program though, you can also earn money when other people make sales… if they’ve signed up for the same affiliate program through your affiliate link.

You don’t make money just by having a new affiliate sign up under you. Instead you make money if that affiliate signs up under you, and then proceeds to make affiliate sales. These affiliates who sign up under you are usually called “sub affiliates”.

Now, you don’t usually make tons of money from sub affiliates. In fact, you usually earn just a small fraction from them compared to what you can earn by making sales yourself. Let’s say for example, you’ve affiliated with a company that pays you 50% commission on any sales you make through your affiliate link. If that company offer a second tier option, they’re likely to pay just 10% to you, for any sales your sub affiliates make.

Now the sub affiliates will still earn 50% of their sales too. Your commissions will not be taken from theirs. Your commissions instead, are taken from the profit of the actual company you’re selling for.

Having sub affiliates is an excellent way to make extra money. In rare cases, you can make a very good living from sub affiliates. But to do this you must first sign up many affiliates under you. Signing up hundreds of affiliates might work decently, but the more the better because not all affiliates make sales. In fact, only about 5%-10% of them will make sales.

You can help increase the amount of sales your sub affiliates make, but it takes a lot of time, effort and hard work. Some of the ways you can help improve their performance is to train them, mentor them, create custom sales material for them, and give them bonuses they can use when promoting the program. In essence, if you become an independant affiliate program manager for your own group of sub affiliates, you can increase their sales greatly and in doing so, help build your own income streams too.

This is a profitable way to approach affiliate marketing, but it’s much more profitable if you also make direct sales yourself.

Two-Tier Affiliate programs are best

When you join an affiliate program or start an affiliate program of your own, you have to decide whether it will be a single tier or two-tier program.

With a single tier program you earn a
commission on any sales you make and that is it. If you are running your own affiliate program, you pay your affiliates a commission for any sales they refer and that is all.

However, with a two-tier program, affiliates are allowed to recruit sub-affiliates and are paid a small percentage of the sales these
sub-affiliates generate. For example, the affiliates may earn a 30% commission for selling product X himself; and when one of the sub-affiliates makes a sale, the affiliate may get a 10% commission as well.

This is very profitable for the affiliate as he can recruit an army of sub-affiliates, all earning commissions for him without any effort on his part except for the initial recruiting process.

If you are starting an affiliate program of your own should it be two-tier or single tier?
Some might shy away from the seeming
expense of a two-tier program. But is it really that expensive? Many affiliate
program managers make the wrong decision
on this.

Lets look at an example.
You have an affiliate program up and running and an average affiliate joins your program. Mr.Average has a web site that receives average traffic. He also has an ezine with thousands of subscribers published monthly.
Mr. Average posts your affiliate links to his web site and promotes your product to his ezine list.

Initially, he generates good sales. However,a point comes when he saturates his market with your product and his sales begin to drop. He begins to lose interest in your program and your sales remain small.

What happens if you set up a two-tier program? Rather than trying to keep your commission pay outs small, you motivate your existing affiliates to recruit other people to your program. This will exponentially increase
your affiliate sales. Would it not be worth paying the referring affiliate a percentage of their sub-affiliates sales?

Now when Mr.Average joins your affiliate
program this is what would happen. When
he has saturated his market with your product,he would now promote your affiliate program to his customers and ezine subscribers.
Many of Mr.Averages customers and
subscribers decide to join the affiliate program. This in turn will motivate Mr.Average to continue promoting your products and
recruiting affiliates.

Now what is the situation?
*Your income increases because of increased sales.
*You have a much larger customer base to which you can sell backend products.
*An increase in your income because of the life time loyalty of the customers referred by your affiliate.
*An army of sub-affiliates who will sell your products, and in turn promote your affiliate program to their customers and subscribers.

The little extra in affiliate sales commission pay outs will be more than compensated for by the exponential sales increase.
This is why the two-tier affiliate program is a guaranteed winner and should be the automatic choice for potential affiliates and affiliate program managers.

John Lynch 2002

[ John Lynch is an affiliate of the Internet Marketing
Center http://www.marketingtips.com/sr/t.x/650274]

John Lynch is an affiliate of the Internet Marketing Center -http://www.marketingtips.com/sr/t.x/650274

“Focus for Affiliate Success”David McKenzie

Affiliate marketing question - Should you join every affiliate program you can find or just a few?

There are many thousands of affiliate programs on the net that you can join. Every man and his dog is running one. But how do you decide which ones to join?

There are two trains of thought in this area. First you can take the scatter gun approach, which is quite popular on the net, and join as many programs as possible. This ensures that at least SOME of them will pay off. Well, thats the theory.

The other alternative is to take the shot gun approach. Join some leading affiliate programs in just a few areas and put more effort into each one. Do some affiliate marketing research
by reading as many articles on the subject as possible. This way you can narrow down your candidates.

Well, as always there are pros and cons to both but why not do what everyone else is not doing. It seems to me most sites are taking the scatter gun approach. For example: We have 3,000
affiliate programs listed on our site. We have the largest selection of affiliate programs!

Why not focus? Find your own niche. Find a particular area that you are interested in.

Example: Perhaps your interest is in selling rare papyrus from Egypt and you find there is only one affiliate program dedicated to this. You join. You focus your affiliate marketing
strategies on this product. You are not thinking about selling papyrus from Egypt one minute and then long distance phone calls the next. With fewer products and services you are able
to focus more energy and effort onto the products and services that you have a genuine interest in. You may even be considered an expert in this particular area because of your knowledge.

There are many webmasters doing just fine with their hundreds or even thousands of affiliate programs, but the market for the scatter gun approach now appears to be cluttered.

This is where the specialists enter. The new breed of webmaster that focuses on particular products or services. Alternatively your focus may be on one area, and selecting only the best-selling, highest-paying commissions for that field. Then you target your affiliates with high level affiliate marketing techniques. Now there is room for the specialist to succeed.

Target your affiliate programs.

Pick just a few.

Concentrate all of your time into marketing these programs - because you are so passionate about the product or service you are selling, you will drive more targeted traffic to your affiliate program.

Resource Box
David McKenzie is the author of a new e-book titled The Facts You Should Know About Affiliate Programs
Get a Free 5 Day Email Course
http://www.1sthomebasedbusiness.com

David McKenzie is the author of a new e-book titled The Facts You Should Know About Affiliate Programs
Get a Free 5 Day Email Course
http://www.1sthomebasedbusiness.com