You own a website and may even give advice there or share information of some kind. Whatever you are doing, if you are not using it to make money, then there is an untapped market waiting to be yours.

Website Traffic

This involves people visiting your website. What you want to count are your unique visitors, people who visit for the first time. Repeat visitors are great for sales but to gain interest, the more people who visit, the better.

In order for a business to make money it needs traffic. These people will do something for you on your website that will enhance their life and make money for you. There are a variety of ways to do it, but for any method you use to be cost effective, you will need traffic.

One way to gain traffic is to have a focus. This is your niche. This will determine which traffic comes your way and if they are going to buy whatever you decide to offer on your website.

Now, turn your attention to your content. That is why your traffic is there in the first place. If you haven’t already, optimize it for a wider readership. This involves targeting certain keywords in your articles, blog posts, headers and picture text. Not only will your content get ranked higher for those keywords, but your website also will. If you haven’t done so already, register your website with the major search engines.

Monetizing Your Website

Now that you have made a few tweaks to gain more focused traffic, you are ready to start making money with your website. Here are some ways you can get the job done.

* Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – This basically means that you are posting ads that people will click on. Whenever someone clicks on that ad, you get paid. Depending on who you are using for your service, there are other ways to do this besides just the click-through rate. One you can start with is Google AdSense.

* Banner Advertising – This is a way to get noticed. If you have a good fan base and have networked with others in your business niche, this can work for you. Sell advertising space at the top of your website. You can also sell on the sides, but keep in mind that the top half of your webpage is where people’s eyes tend to gravitate.

* Affiliate Marketing – You not only advertise for others and sponsor their products, but you also get access to lots of helpful tools so you can do just that. Earn commissions on your click rate as well as sale rate depending upon how the affiliate program is set up.

* Paid surveys – Companies will pay you to offer surveys to your visitors. Each time one of them takes the survey, you get paid.

There are many other ways to monetize your website but this is just the beginning. Once you have started, try other ways to make your expertise work for you.

In the long run, affiliate link theft can cost you a lot of money if you are not careful. Link theft can be intentional or accidental, and can be done by other affiliates, customers or in rare cases the vendors themselves.

How Affiliate Link Theft Works: Simple and Advanced Methods

Link theft can be defined as any time someone strips out your affiliate link and replaces it with theirs. The simplest and most common practice is people who sign up directly for the affiliate program, strip out your link and replace it with theirs to get a “discount.” For example, if you are selling a $40 product on ClickBank with a 75 percent commission, the buyer would just replace your link with theirs and pay just $10 for the product.

There are, of course, more mischievous schemes as well. One technique used by other affiliates and unscrupulous publishers is to hide affiliate link codes in a 1×1 iframe. Because credit for affiliate links is usually given to the affiliate who sent the traffic last, that means that if they can get someone to view a page with their 1×1 iframe code on it after you send them traffic, they will get the credit. For example, if a webmaster has an email list, all they need to do is get the customer’s email list, have them read a content page with their affiliate link embedded in it, and they will instantly overwrite your affiliate code.

Now that you know what link theft is, how can you prevent it?

Preventing Affiliate Link Theft

The most basic way of protecting yourself against link theft is to cloak your links. Many merchants will allow you to do this right on their system. If you want, you can also cloak your links yourself. There are a number of free programs on the Internet that will allow you to do this. You can also buy a domain and do a domain-level redirect without showing the destination URL. Unfortunately, anyone seeing the product can still go to the affiliate network to find the product. For example, this person could go to ClickBank, search for the name of the product and find it that way, even if the link is cloaked.

The most drastic way to prevent affiliate theft is to go all the way and write your own sales letter, with different product names and headlines. Then just embed the “buy now” button code in your own website, cloaked. This technique will just about prevent 99 percent of affiliate link fraud.

With the iframing issue, unfortunately, if you are a small publisher, there is little recourse. The one way you can track this kind of link theft is by asking the publisher to place your own tracking pixel on their “Thank You” page. If you are sending more than $500 a month in traffic, they will usually be happy to do this, unless, of course, the thief is the publisher and not another affiliate.

These are a few of the most common ways links are stolen and how to protect against them. Again, link theft can cost you a lot of money over time. Use these techniques to make sure you get paid for your work.

With just a few simple tweaks to your campaigns and strategy, you can take your current ClickBank earnings and double them. Here are some of the top tips for taking an average ClickBank campaign and turning it into a goldmine:

Experiment with Building a List

Say you got your website to rank for a highly trafficked keyword and your site is now earning $500 a month in ClickBank commissions. Instead of sending traffic directly to ClickBank, try getting your traffic on an email list instead. In that way, you will be able to repeatedly sell to them on the affiliate program, as well as other related programs. You will also be able to sell higher ticket items that you wouldn’t be able to convert on a one-time visit. If you apply the list-building strategy well, you could very well double your income from the same amount of traffic.

Use Tracking IDs Liberally

Use Tracking IDs (TIDs) to track the exact source of your traffic. For example, if someone came from your search engine optimization site, on page 2, you might use a TID such as SEOP2. If they came from a pay-per-click campaign, campaign #1 ad group #7, you might use a TID like C1AG7. The goal is to be able to identify exactly what is working and what is not. TIDs can help you do that.

Try Multiple Offers in the Same Market

Most of the “hot” markets on ClickBank have a number of different products. For example, the foreign exchange market has a dozen high gravity products, for example. So does the “dating tips for men” market. The “get your ex back” market didn’t exist, yet the moment one product succeeded, a dozen similar products suddenly sprang into the market. In general, if an offer is successful, there are going to be similar offers. You will never know which converts best unless you split test the traffic. The difference can be as much as 30 percent or more!

If Successful, Create Your Own Product

If you can create a stream of traffic that converts well to someone else’s product, you could take that campaign and apply it to your own product. For example, if you are earning $1,000 a month on commissions from $1,250 on revenues, you can almost immediately boost your profits by 25 percent just by hiring a freelancer to create a similar product and sales letter. That might cost you $250 to $500 up front, but in the months to come you will make that up and more. Furthermore, you can now find affiliates of your own for the product instead of just being an affiliate for someone else’s product.

Being a successful affiliate is hard work, but it is definitely within reach. If you are already earning money from ClickBank, it is just a matter of refining your strategy to improve your earnings.

How can you take your existing commission checks and increase them by twenty, fifty, one hundred percent, or even more? If you are already earning money as an affiliate, that means you are in the top percentile of affiliate marketers. Here are a few tips for increasing your commission checks without too much work to take it to the next level:

Ask for a Bump

If you want to earn more money, all you need to do is ask; ask your affiliate manager for a commission bump.

Let’s say you’re getting paid $4 a lead. The affiliate network gets paid $6.50 per lead by the advertiser. More often than not, they would rather give you $4.50 and keep your business than refuse your bump and risk losing your traffic. If you are delivering a fair amount of converting traffic, they will be happy to give you a commission increase.

This same principle also applies to information products, even on ClickBank. Many publishers are more than happy to give a little extra cut by PayPal if you are driving a lot of traffic.

Go Direct

If you are driving enough traffic ($5,000+ a month) then you should seriously consider going direct, which means you cut out the middleman and send the leads directly to the advertiser instead of through an affiliate network. This alone could boost your revenues by fifty percent. Use affiliate networks to help build up your traffic and test different offers. Once you find an offer from which you can consistently earn a lot of money, explore the possibility of going direct.

Test Different Offers across Different Networks

If you’re getting paid $4 a lead and another network is promoting the same offer for $4 a lead, it’s a very good idea to split test the two offers because the two networks might have different landing pages, different tracking and possibly different amounts of dropped sales. Even if nothing else is apparently different, you will often find differences in sales rates on two different affiliate networks. Testing different offers makes plain sense. Find the highest ROI for your traffic and advertising dollars.

Expand Traffic to All Similar Sources

If you are advertising on Google AdWords, then expand to MSN and Yahoo. If you are advertising on Trafficvance (PPV), then expand to Media Traffic and Zango. If you are advertising on Facebook, experiment with Myspace and PlentyofFish. Whatever traffic sources you are using, identify all the similar sources and see if you can duplicate your results. Although MSN and Yahoo combined might only be a third of your Google traffic, but you don’t need to go through all the trouble of finding a working campaign as you already know what works.

These are a few ways you can take your existing campaigns and techniques and expand them to earn twenty to one hundred percent more money every month.

Asking for an increase in commission, also known as a “bump,” can be difficult. There are many things that factor into whether or not you will get a bump, including traffic volume and your traffic’s quality. Here are a few tips as to how you can ask for a commission increase effectively.

What Will Give You Leverage

There are a few things that give you leverage when it comes to asking for a bump. First and foremost is whether you have alternatives. If the product is the only product your website can realistically promote, or if they are already the highest paying commission in the industry and switching would only lose you money, then it is difficult to negotiate.

On the other hand, if you are working with an affiliate network promoting an offer that is also on five other affiliate networks, the network will know that if they don’t give you competitive commissions, you can take your traffic elsewhere.

Another factor that gives you leverage is the volume of traffic you are sending. In general, the more traffic you send, the more you will be catered to. When sending a lot of traffic, asking for bumps becomes a lot easier.

Finally, the quality of your traffic also matters a lot, especially on CPA and CPL offers. If Match.com is paying you $4 a lead for a six-form submission and they are making $10 a lead from you, they will gladly give you a bump to $5.

On the other hand, if they are making only $6 a lead, after paying the affiliate network they most likely won’t have any room left to give you a bump.

Your Relationship with Your Affiliate Manager

How much your affiliate manager likes you also plays a large role in whether or not you will get a bump. You should always be on a telephone call basis with your affiliate manager. Affiliates who only interface by email will always get lesser treatment than those who take the time to introduce themselves by telephone.

When you ask for a bump, your affiliate manager is often the one who has to make your case to the actual network managers for a commission increase. How hard they will fight to get you a bump depends almost entirely on how much they like you.

Build a relationship with your affiliate managers. In fact, if they are going to a major affiliate conference, make it a point to meet them in person. Take them out for a drink or dinner if you can. Making friends with your affiliate managers can really pay off in the long run, both in bumps and in other advantages.

Know What is Normal

Always keep your finger on the pulse of what’s “normal” in your particular field. For example, if you are an Amazon.com affiliate, you have basically zero chance of getting a bump. That is just normal with Amazon.com, since they are a major company that can’t play favorites to certain affiliates.

On the other hand, ClickBank.com has a cap of 75 percent commission yet major affiliates sending more than $1,000 a day in traffic can often get their commissions up to 90 percent “under the table” by having the merchant send the extra 5-15 percent by PayPal.

Again, that is especially true if the traffic could just be directed to other offers. The merchant has every incentive to bump the affiliate’s payments, even up to 90 percent, and still be taking 10 percent on $30,000+ a month rather than lose out to another merchant who is willing to make that deal.

In CPA and CPL marketing, know what each network is paying and what kind of bumps other affiliates are receiving. This will give you leverage to negotiate with your affiliate manager.

Negotiating for increased commissions isn’t hard if you have all the pieces in place. Build a solid relationship with your affiliate managers, know your space and send lots of good traffic. Do this and your affiliate managers will respond favorably when you ask for a commission increase.