Your website is a marketing tool. Don't take it lightly. Your copy is the most important aspect of your website. Don't shortcut it. Too many new website owners try to write their copy themselves and pay ooodles of hard-earned money on design. Don't do that. If you are going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on your website then put the money into great copywriting and save on the design. Your website's design won't make you any money. Your copywriting will.

When it comes to tracking your affiliates, should you use a manager or do it yourself? To be sure, there are pros and cons to both approaches. If you do it yourself and you have a lot of affiliates you could find yourself spending most of your time managing affiliates and not running your business. On the other hand, if you hire a manager to oversee your affiliate program for you then you could have some out of pocket expenses,

Many affiliate marketers start off thinking they will get rich if they choose the right program. They've heard that there is good money in affiliate marketing so they rushed out and put up a website on the first affiliate marketing scheme that they found. Then they waited. And waited. And waited. The money never came. What happened? If this has happened to you then you can relate to the affiliate marketing story. It has many variations,

You can run your affiliate marketing program yourself using a software program, design one for your own use, or join an affiliate marketing program. There are several programs you can join and which one you choose depends a lot on your personality and what you expect to get out of your affiliate manager.

According to SEO Book , eBay has officially dropped CJ and ValueClick as part of their affiliate program. Giovanna over at SEO Book informed us of this tidbit: This will start on April 1st and run with CJ for another month. With a company as big as eBay, I often wondered why they used a 3rd party platform in the first place.

Affiliate newsletter writers are always trying to stay ahead of different trends, and using dedicated RSS feeds is starting to become more popular. We are not yet at a stage that it would be feasible to put out an affiliate newsletter solely through RSS, but we are getting there and the technology is definitely worth implementing. If you are unfamiliar with RSS, it stands for Really Simply Syndication and over the last few years,

One question that keeps being raised is, "Is affiliate site verification is necessary in affiliate network management? Another is, "How closely do I need to monitor sites in my affiliate network?" These seem to be about different topics, but are actually somewhat different issues of affiliate network management. Should those in affiliate network management be verifying the sites of affiliates, absolutely, but it does not necessarily need to be a manual job.

When you are running your own affiliate marketing network, a decent payment solution is definitely worth considering. As you are no doubt in the e-commerce field in some way, you will probably be aware of the different payment systems that are around. Chances are that you accept credit card payments directly and if you don't, you almost certainly accept PayPal. If you are running your own affiliate marketing network,

Nothing is more disheartening than an affiliate marketing campaign that has lost its focus. What can you do if you find that your affiliates are no longer turning over the same amount of sales as before? What can you do if you have more people leaving your program than you have signing up? These are the two questions that we are going to look at today on the Affiliate Marketing Journals. First, let's take a look at why some affiliate marketing campaigns flounder.

Affiliate newsletters are something that many affiliate program managers would rather do without. They can be a lot of work, finding time to produce affiliate newsletters when you are already busy with a thousand and one other things can be trying at the best of times. What makes matters worse is that it is hard to know for certain whether affiliate newsletters have any tangible benefit at all.

If you are doing the bulk of your writing for your affiliate marketing materials, then there are a few things that can really improve your writing technique and get you a much better response. The following advice comes courtesy of Site Pro News, but follows along similar lines to many of the recommendations that we have made right here on Affiliate Marketing Journals. Often, press releases form the core of your affiliate marketing materials,

There is a trap that many writers of affiliate newsletters are drawn into if they lack experience. Many writers that are new to newsletter writing have a tendency to overwrite and many others have a tendency to waffle, some do both which is really unpleasant. Simplicity should be embraced as a writer of affiliate newsletters. Don't use affiliate newsletters as a forum to show off your writing technique.

Recently we did a piece on the Link Connector affiliate network and mentioned an interesting alternative affiliate payout type that they offer, Pay Per Call. In case you missed the post, you can find it here . The article was a more general look at the two Advanced Events on the Link Connector site; today we are going to look more closely at the application of the Pay Per Call affiliate payout type. First of all, a quick rehash, what is it?

Affiliate recruiting campaigns tend to take a multi-pronged approach. I would never recommend simply using text advertising for affiliate recruiting, a combination of methods is always the best. Bringing text advertising together with organic methods of affiliate recruiting has a lot of success. Recently, people have also seen some success with video in affiliate recruiting. In fact,

Affiliate management is tough at the best of times, but if your affiliates are of the overly communicative type, the job can be a nightmare. What can you do if your affiliates are taking up too much of your precious time? Outsourcing your Affiliate Management Communications Marketing Pilgrim reports that more online retailers are using call centers than ever before.

Advertising is not just for making website sales, it can be a great way to boost your affiliate recruiting effort. If your website is not getting the traffic that you need, then it can be very difficult to promote your affiliate program from within. In fact one of the biggest reasons why businesses build affiliate networks to begin with is to gain the extra traffic that comes from a large mobile sales force.

What lies ahead this week for The Affiliate Marketing Journal? We have a few plans in store. Last week we took a look at some alternative payout types. We are going to take a closer look at the Pay Per Call affiliate payout type and examine some ways that you can bolster that with a call center. It has been a long time since we featured any affiliate newsletter writing techniques here at Affiliate Marketing Journal, so we will focus on that topic a little bit more.

Link Connector is an affiliate network that is well worth joining for many reasons, but one of the things that I like most about their program is that they are committed to providing options that other affiliate networks just do not have. The Advanced Events on Link Connector are not for everyone, but they do have a place. Today we are going to take a brief look at the two additional payout types on the LinkConnector network.

When is it time to pull the plug on affiliate promotions? The answer to that question depends largely on the types of affiliate promotions that you are making are making use of and what you hope to accomplish from each one. While the simple answer would be that affiliate promotions should stop when their goals are met, this is not the case. Affiliate promotions should stop before they cease to be profitable.