Anyone who’s dabbled in the world of affiliate marketing knows that protecting your information online is extremely important.  When it comes to driving traffic to your affiliate offers, link cloaking is one of the most underestimated requirements for ensuring your affiliate income is not compromised.  This is probably most vital when promoting eBooks, software and membership programs on Clickbank.

A lot of people make 6 figure incomes strictly off of utilizing pay per click advertising methods to drive traffic to the vendor-supplied or home made landing pages.  One issue that’s always been at the forefront of the Clickbank community is link cloaking. 

Previously, Clickbank generated horrendous links with all sorts of ugly characters which aren’t SEO friendly or encouraging to the potential buyer.  Though they have implemented a built in link cloaking tool, many hackers and dark side marketers are still able to hijack your Clickbank affiliate links, input their user ID and steal your profits.

With the advent of social networking and real time micro-blogging sites like Twitter, url shortening services are becoming quite popular among the affiliate marketing industry.  After all, 99% of them are absolutely free with zero strings attached!  The top 3 url shortener services available are provided by Doiop, TinyURL and ReadThisUrl.  Url shortening services are effective and reliable – with the only true issue being complete control over the appearance and tracking of your affiliate links.

While using a simple chunk of html can easily accomplish the same end result, there is really no point to figuring it out if you have never done it before.  Equally enough, if you want to cloak and protect your Clickbank links, there are also several paid services available, which if you can afford, will present you with the most options.  Sometimes your tools can make or break your business, so remember to streamline your efforts and become a well oiled Clickbank profit machine!

While it’s not exactly proven where the term “bum marketing” came from, one thing we know for sure is that tons of affiliate marketers – both new and experienced – use bum marketing methods to generate free, targeted traffic to their advertisers for hard, cold cash.

With regards to making money with affiliate marketing, bum marketing is essentially the technique of utilizing free resources to get organic search engine placement and backlinks pointing to the product you are promoting. Bum marketing is not as effective in high competition niches, but if you get a little bit more specific with your keywords it shouldn’t be too hard to gain that number one spot on Google for a handful of your primary keywords.

Article marketing is probably the most talked about method of bum marketing. Websites, such as EzineArticles.com, provide publishers with a 100% free platform to post niche articles. The real power comes in the ability to add links in what’s known as a resource or author box. This has two benefits to the everyday affiliate marketer:

1. Article directories tend to have a high page rank, which means that if your content is optimized correctly with keywords, your articles have a good chance of gaining top spot in the search engines. Top spot equals tons of free traffic to that page.
2. Because of the link in your resource box, article directories also provide a means to building high ranking, one-way links which point to your website or affiliate offer. This means a better ranking for your site, and a potential for it to have a first page ranking as well.

It’s definitely not unheard of for someone to have the top two spots on Google for a particular keyword, one being their website and the other being a related article which points to their website. Creating this occurrence across multiple targeted keywords is how successful affiliate marketers take full advantage of organic search engine placement and how it directly relates to bum marketing.

Bum marketing is not immediate, and despite popular belief, it requires a fair amount of planning and patience to effectively get the most out of it. Ask any affiliate marketer and they will tell you the same thing: it takes patience and versatility to survive in this business. Bum marketers know this first hand.

Today, social media and social networking is the name of the game. People want to connect, they want streamlined information and they want it as quick and convenient as possible. The nature of social media causes events and information to spread at an extremely fast rate, and in the last few years this has created a huge opportunity for affiliate marketers to cash in on the self-sustained power of social networking influence among the buying public.

There are several different social media outlets which you can leverage to promote and profit from affiliate offers. It is important to note that each of these social networks have unique features which set them apart from each other. Equally enough, they also have similarities such as creating profiles; adding friends and private messaging/message board functions.

Below is a list of the most popular social networks and how affiliates use them to generate traffic:

• Twitter – Probably the most popular and profitable social networking platform available for affiliate marketers. Having a tightly knit network of followers, sometimes across multiple Twitter accounts, can generate massive leads when used correctly. As an affiliate marketer you can blast useful links via your Twitter account to your followers, who will then click the link and hopefully head to the affiliate offer page.
• Facebook – In a very close second place, Facebook is used by affiliate marketers to create networks focused around a particular niche or interest. With the ability to create groups and even promote events, Facebook has a lot more options, but also requires a bit more work to get the traffic heading in the right direction. Once mastered, it can be quite lucrative.
• Forums – While some wouldn’t consider forums to be social networks, I beg to differ. In actuality, they are the original social network. Becoming and authority in a niche related forum can bring laser-targeted traffic to your links; which would typically be placed in the “signature” or footer of your individual publically viewed profile and threads.

While many top earning affiliate marketers will stick to more immediate methods of generating traffic, such as Google Adwords, The risks with social media marketing are much less harmful. By integrated social networking into your affiliate promotions, you will be up to date and on point with the latest and greatest source of traffic and prospective leads. Be patient and it will pay off.

There are many benefits surrounding the affiliate marketing business model.  While regular brick and mortar businesses require commercial space, liability insurance and employees, running an affiliate marketing business can be accomplished from the comfort of your home; providing you have web hosting, a reliable merchant account such as Paypal and a high speed internet connection.

Because affiliate marketing is based on promoting other peoples products, you don’t have the added stress of creating your own market-busting product or service.  A great affiliate program will have all of the tools you need to start promoting; including banners, sales copy, website templates and even fully tested email and Google ad campaigns – keywords included.

To reach super star affiliate status, conversions is the name of the game.  You start by sending traffic to your website or landing page that is promoting the particular affiliate offer.  If your content is fully optimized and relevant, sending targeted traffic to that page will result in more clicks on your affiliate banners and text links.  From there, if the affiliate offer itself has a high quality landing page you can count on getting a healthy conversion rate between click throughs and those who actual purchase the product or complete the offer.  A 5% – 10% CR is considered by many to be lucrative.

At the end of the day, affiliate marketing is not easy.  Everyday more and more people are chasing their tail in circles trying to be successful with affiliate marketing, and everyday more and more people are failing.  Just like any other business, you have to put in your time, learn from your mistakes and continue to educate yourself.  Nothing can guarantee success, but you can definitely increase your odds.

How can you top Google and get free traffic to your affiliate offers?  Great question, and luckily for you and I Google owns and operates one of the largest free blog networks on the Internet:  Blogger aka Blogspot.  Because these free blogs are owned by Google, they have a tendency to carry a lot of link juice and generate great traffic.

In reality, there are endless ways to promote your latest affiliate venture, some are paid and some are free.  It’s no secret that when you’re first starting out with affiliate marketing you are going to try and use as many free resources available.  As you start making money, you will cycle those funds back into your business for various expenses like web hosting, domain names and PPC advertising.

This is where using Blogger blogs can help you make money online.

You can set up a free blogspot blog to promote the product itself, or you can use the blogspot blog to funnel traffic to your main website.  Regardless, you will find Google has made this service extremely user friendly and you can have a blog set up in a matter of minutes.

If you’re using a blogspot blog to direct traffic to you main page, there are some important points you want to consider.  First, be sure that the content you put on this blog is unique, targeted and easy to read.  Use your main keyword in the blogspot address, for example, http://dogcareguide.blogspot.com.  Also use the keyword in the title of your articles, category names and for the links within the article content.

This will help you rank very well for your selected keywords in the major search engines, as well as leave no questions unanswered with regards to what your blog is about, the product or service you are promoting and what they need to do next in order to purchase or find out more information.

Almost anybody who has read a marketing book in their lifetime will have heard about Pareto’s Law.  It is essentially the concept of 80/20 and with affiliate marketing it definitely holds true.  It’s a fact that 20% of affiliates online produce 80% of the market sales.  This means that out of the millions of affiliates online only 20% of them are actually doing anything with this opportunity – while the other 80% get lost in the shuffle of sales pages and push-button products.

To help better your chances, here are 3 killer tips to help affiliate marketing newbies increase their chances of success online.  Read these affiliate marketing tips and put them into action today.

Always cloak your affiliate links

Many affiliates get commissions stolen because their links are visible to the public – this is not good.  Be sure that you cloak your affiliate link, as well as keep it short and sweet.  People do not click on long, suspicious links so try to implement a php script or a plugin like GoCodes to make your linking life easier.

Never compromise content

Content is king on the web.  Whatever you do, whether it’s writing your own content or outsourcing it, make sure that your articles are fresh, unique, targeted and engaging.  These prerequisites apply for sales copy, ebooks, blog posts and any other type of content online.  Take advantage of the many SEO article writing services available online.

Free traffic is good traffic

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an absolute must when promoting your affiliate products organically.  Gaining placement in the search engines will insure you get loads of free, targeted traffic to your review pages and offers.  Brush up on your SEO and stick to a regular schedule.  If you’d rather, you can always outsource this to an SEO expert.