Are you looking to setup your own Affiliate Program for something that you are selling online? Well if you are willing to use the new and slick Magento open source shopping cart,  there is a free and open source solution for you for creating your own affiliate program. It’s a component for Magento called Affiliates For All and it’s completely free and open source.

Affiliates for All is highly configurable. You can set:

• a fixed commission rate or a percentage,
• the affiliate cookie lifetime,
• the currency, and
• whether commission is paid for the life of a customer or just for the first order.

Some other really cool features to take note of are:

1. Affiliates for All will (optionally) email affiliates with details of new orders and approved commissions.
2. Affiliates for All provides your affiliates with many reporting features. They can see graphs of orders and revenue over time. They can view and download lists of orders. If you want to, you can pass customer names and email addresses to the referring affiliates, allowing for further marketing efforts.
3. Affiliates for All has a user interface similar to Google Mail. Just like Google Mail, this is achieved with AJAX, but you can use Affiliates for All without understanding the details.

This is a really cool open source application, similar to which you will not find anywhere! There just is not really any good open source affiliate applications out there. And this one appears that it could eventually stand head and shoulders above the rest. Check it out.

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LinkShare.com is an affiliate bank or warehouse as I like to call it. It’s a tool that allows you to manage several of your affiliate accounts all in one place. Saving you countless hours and helping you organize your affiliate efforts. There are a few other companies that do the same thing as LinkShare.com but they just don’t do it quite as well. The interface for LinkShare.com is easier and better to use than any other you will find in the market.

Whether you do affiliate marketing on a large scale, or you just have a website on the internet, I recommend signing up for an account with LinkShare.com and start placing some ads that are relevant to your site. That way you can make yet another stream of income with your websites. LinkShare.com is fast, free, and easy to setup. Check it out.

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A great article from the SEO Book blog about marketing your website on the internet. If only more marketers would think this way, the internet would be much better. Enjoy…

When submitting to directories, buying paid search ads, buying display ads, or ranking in organic search a small company with a smart marketer can seem like it is much more powerful and much more authoritative than it is. But some webmasters undermine their authority by not considering how displaying ads on their own site could affect the perception of quality.

Which Directory is the Best?

Many directories sell sitewide banner ads to other directories, which directly states the other directory is of higher quality and more worthy of submitting to, not only for how the ads flow link equity, but also for the general brand perception.

Sell Yourself First:

Some sites make the same error of undermining their perceived site quality by placing external ads above their house ads or internal products. An earlier version of my site design placed other ads in-line with the content and the ad for my book on the sidebar. The day I put my ebook ad inline with the site content my sales tripled. If you have an editorial site that people subscribe to the easiest thing to sell should be your own stuff since people reading your site already trust you. Now my site has less ads, a better brand perception, and more profit.

Promote Your Content to Sell the Ads:

Without distribution it is hard to make money from advertising. Without heavily promoting the value of your content it is hard to get much distribution, especially with the self reinforcing nature of networks and the web.
Some sites are so optimized for short term profits that they undermine their own authority by placing a large ad block above the content. There are many creative ways to slightly reduce ad CTR while still leaving the general perception of quality to most site visitors. Just about every link you get will be from someone who visits your site. If your site leaves a good perception of quality and trustworthiness it is much easier to be deemed as linkworthy than if your site looks like an ad farm. AdSense aligned top and to the left is the equivalent of a noisy FFA page.

The order you place things in tells readers of your site what you think is most important. If you are in a competitive marketplace it is hard to compete if you place other brands or ads above your content.

source = http://www.seobook.com/archives/002059.shtml

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