Computers and the Internet have finally come full circle for the average American looking to make money through promoting products and services online. Blogging and site building has enabled many more people to earn money through affiliate marketing. I don’t know about save the economy, but affiliate marketing can definitely provide a means for more Americans to earn income online. Currently, there are several states that want to impose taxes on merchants with producing affiliates in those states, as is the case in New York. This can only be a bad thing and counter-productive to the growth of affiliate marketing as a vehicle for more people to earn money online. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of this happening, but people in their local states can protest and petition against this happening and get angry about it. It definitely has a negative effect on affiliates as merchants may choose to not working with affiliates in those certain states, which I don’t think is the answer at all. The merchants will just have to restructure their own margins to accommodate this change and make it work. The various affiliate networks seem to be stepping up and fighting this impending legislation more vigorously, so thats good. Everyone in the affiliate marketing world needs to mobile to fight this. The states are just looking for revenue anywhere they can get it.

Affiliate marketing truly is a vehicle towards earning income online by promoting various online retailers and websites. There are many supposed affiliate marketing gurus that novices come across, but they only want to sell you something themselves in the end by telling you how to make money through affiliate marketing. Stay away from anyone considered a guru! Affiliate marketing is very much about content, writing, and putting a heck of a lot of time in on your keyboard getting work done. I would venture to say that typing speed is one of the most important factors in how much content you can produce online. So I always recommend to work on becoming a faster typer. Doing a lot of reading online is also a good way to improve your own writing skills, which will help you craft better, more intresting content for your site visitors.

Blogging and blogs have really opened up the doors to many affiliates that struggle with creating their own sites in HTML. Now anyone can create a blog, put up the affiliate banners, and start writing. This is why I created the free affiliate site builder for the affiliate programs we manage. It allows you to get up and running with a .com or free subdomain site is under a minute. Everything is hosted for free and you can build as many site as you would like. There are other site building tools as well you can use like Synthasite. Once you are up and running with a niche site or blog, you can go to work adding articles and other useful/interesting information without worrying about building the pages in HTML and FTPing them to your server.

Content is one biggest part of affiliate marketing because sites with good content rank well in the search engines. Leveraging pay-per-click or PPC keyword marketing is also a great way to generate traffic to your site or in some cases directly to the merchants site, but more and more merchants are moving away from allowing that. So affiliates need to have their own niche sites or send the traffic to a dedicated page on their site which pre-sells for the merchant. A good pre-sell page can really help convince the consumer that they should buy from the merchant and maybe even promote a coupon code to increase conversion likely hood. Making PPC work is not easy at all but affiliates do make it work so it can be done successfully. I always recommend a very slow, controled experiment with about $100 to see how many sales occur and if any ROI is present. Testing out 100s of keyword niches in this manner may leave you with 20 or 30 that are profitable and can be run effectively to create a profit channel. Using PPC and organic SEO together is the best approach towards creating sustained long-term traffic and affiliate commissions. Make sure to make your site “stickier” by adding newsletter sign-up, Twitter follow, email this page, bookmark this page, etc.

Affiliate marketing is still a growing industry that is really seeing more interest due to the current economic crisis. As people look for way to generate additional revenue, they will be turning online. Affiliate marketing is the best way for the “average American” (I only mean that in the most general sense) to generate income by marketing products and services online. This industry needs to be supported and embraced in order for it to really flourish for more people. So yes I do think affiliate marketing can save the economy! This was more of a ramble than a well-constructed piece, so take it for what it’s worth. I’d love to know your feedback and thoughts! Happy Easter!