Even I stayed in and enjoyed the online Black Friday deals because where I live, people have to camp out in the freezing cold just go get the best deals. Pneumonia isn’t worth saving 50% on mostly useless stuff to me lol

Bottom line is that more and more companies are offering perks like free shipping promotions, lower prices and people are staying at home instead of burning gas and time at the mall.

Get your online business game up in 2012!

The first solution is affiliate program software which is any software you download and host on your own server. My favorite one out of the bunch is iDevAffiliate. They’ve been around for almost a decade and many major companies use their software. Another good one is Post Affiliate Pro although they’ve really been pushing their monthly service lately.

The “pros” of going with affiliate program software

• Usually a 1 time fee so the lifetime cost is often lower than monthly solutions
• Full control of the program terms, data displayed and payments
• Since you own the affiliate program, you can set how much you want to pay affiliates (some hosted solutions have minimum percentages) and you can sometimes pay more since there are no middleman fees.

The “cons”

• It’s hosted on your server (unless you pay for a hosted option) so installation and updates have to be done by your staff unless you pay for that also.
• Any problems have to be dealt with externally through a support ticket which can take up time depending on the issue.
• Promoting your affiliate program and finding affiliates is your responsibility. If you’re clueless to this matter, it might be difficult and time consuming.

The other solution is hosted affiliate programs meaning another company runs the program and you pay them a monthly or annual service fee. This is a little different depending on if you’re selling physical goods (clothing,dvd’s, etc) or electronic goods/services (downloadable audio, memberships, ebooks, downloadable video, etc).

For physical goods recommend Shareasale and Commission Junction

For electronic goods and services, the big dogs are Clickbank, Paydotcom and eJunkie.

The “pros” of hosted solutions

• They handle all the technical issues on their end
• Affiliate networks have thousands of affiliates ready to promote your products
• Because you’re paying them a percentage, many affiliate networks will have other tools to maximize your sales. For example Shareasale and Commission Junction both have free “store building” software.

The “cons”

• You generally pay monthly so your lifetime costs can be higher than buying affiliate software
• Less control over your affiliate program and terms
• Some affiliate networks have sales minimums and payment processor limitations

At the end of the day, my vote goes to having a hosted solution. It might be a little more expensive in the long run but the amount of time it frees up by not having to worry about software bugs, upgrades and hunting down good affiliates is easily worth the monthly fee in most cases.

One additional note for affiliate solutions is that there is a newer program out there called Rapid Action Profits. It’s an affiliate software but the catch is there is a large affiliate network available through RAPBank. The format is a little different in that affiliates and yourself are paid instantly via Paypal when sales occur. Many affiliates like the instant payment style so Rapid Action Profits been gaining a lot of popularity this year. Worth looking into! Thanks for reading.

Mashable wrote an article about a month ago on the Apple co-founder about the simple lessons that any business owner can take from Steve Jobs and apply it to their own business.

I really liked this article because it highlighted how Steve Jobs essentially came back to Apple, trimmed the fat (development on Apple’s least successful products) and focused on making a small group of products outstanding before moving ahead and expanding.

That’s one thing we’ve done here at Final Round, last year most of customers were here for Internet Marketing so we finally dropped our design team and to focus 100% on Internet Marketing.

Many friends and associates often come to me for advice and they tell me they’re reading 20 different marketing books and trying 10 different SEO methods they read about and can’t understand why they aren’t having success making money online. I like to keep it simple and tell them “Become good at 1 thing instead of spreading yourself too thing and being poor at 10 things”. Once you have a consistent income, then expand.

This problem isn’t just limited to friends and associates but many businesses have failed trying to do too many things at once. Most run out of money before anything comes to fruition.  So if anyone is struggling out there, re-evaluate what your company does and keep things simple before you move ahead.

His question to me was how can he generate the most sales with out having to wait years to build up his name on a national or world level.

I asked what he thought of affiliate marketing where people could sign up for his online affiliate program. Basically how it would work is that each affiliate would receive a special tracking link and every sale they helped generate, they would be paid a commission. Either a flat rate or percentage.

Like many business owners I talk to, he really didn’t like the idea of having to pay commissions. No one wants to share a piece of the pie if they don’t have to I suppose.

As a former full time affiliate marketer, I think a successful affiliate program can be a huge business asset so I will give you these points to consider:
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• Affiliates get your sales you would not have had otherwise.
• You’re only paying when sales occur so it would be difficult to lose money. It’s not like having to pay a salesperson a salary or hourly wage.
• Good affiliate software can be purchased and set up for a few hundred dollars and there are even a couple of free options out there.
• Once your affiliate program is set up, all you have to do is pay your affiliates at the end of the month or however you want the payment schedule to go. Not a lot of maintenance.
• Selling other companies products is what a lot of affiliates do full time. Some have their own niche mailing lists which took years to form. One email blast with your product to the right list of people can be worth thousands or even millions. Other affiliates take out newspaper ads, TV ads, blog posts to targeted audiences. The industry term we use is “super affiliates”. With the right super affiliates on board, they can help you make more money than you would have ever thought. Finding them is the challenge.

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Cons? I can’t think of many. I will say that depending on what you are selling or what your current reputation is, an affiliate program might not fit into your business model.

Watch for Part 2 next week where I highlight the best affiliate program software. Everything from self hosted solutions to monthly affiliate management services.

Kidding of course but this video is pretty hilarious and a good example of a “viral” video!

Sorry but it doesn’t work like that.

I’ve managed a number of blogs personally on everything from software to hand bags and this is what I found to make the most money from blogging:

1.  AdSense
I have mixed feelings on AdSense. On one hand it’s easy to get accepted into the network. It’s easy to set up and Google does pay. It’s just easy.

The downside is that Google doesn’t pay very well. Even for sites that have 10′s of thousands of visitors, the amount webmasters get paid is usually substantially lower than the other 2 options I’m going to talk about.

2.  CPA or Cost Per Acquisition
If you have content that is highly sought after and exclusive to your site. Specialty video and television sites come to mind. CPA offers range range from a few dollars to over $100 per lead/sign up so with the right website, you can make some serious money.

The downside? You need a pretty legit site because CPA networks are much more picky than Adsense about who they let in. Plus depending on the network, they like to ban people and if you’re banned, that means they don’t have to pay you and there’s no way to really debate with them.

3.  Affiliate advertising
My favorite choice and a nice step up from Adsense, affiliate advertising allows you to choose exactly what you want to advertise on your site. You get commission from every sale you make and the money comes directly from the company, not a middleman network so you can get some pretty high paying offers.

There is an affiliate program for just about any type of product or service you can imagine. One of the larger ones which a lot of people use is Clickbank.

There’s also a nice little plugin for Clickbank which picks out the best converting promos and adds them to your blog automatically. You can check it out here at WackyGals.

While it’s pretty obvious that the top sites on Google get more clicks, you might be surprised and even a little scared by the actual click through numbers.

What this means is websites with a #1 rank get clicked on 36.4% of the time, #2 gets 12.5%, #3 gets 9.5% of the clicks and so on.

And to further clarify, out of 100 searches, the #1 spot would click clicked 36 times.

What this means for your business? Two things really stand out.

• A #1 ranking gets almost 66% more clicks than #2.
• 89% of web surfers click results from the first page. So if you aren’t on page 1, you stand very little chance of being found at all.

Now because I love math, let’s see how this breaks down in dollar amounts over the course of 1 year.

I’ll be real modest here and say you have a #5 ranking site and you’re getting 6.1% clicks pretty steadily over the year. How much more will you make than if you were say…. #11. First ranking on page #2 of Google (2.6% clicks). Doesn’t sound like a bad position to be in but let’s see:

For a search term that gets 3,000 searches a day, the difference in traffic would be 183 vs 78. That’s a 134.6% difference in visitors! Over the course of a year, that would be 66,795 visitors vs 28,475.A difference of 38,320 visitors. Depending on how much profit you make per visitor, you can imagine how much money you’re losing out on! And this is for only ONE TERM on only ONE of the search engines!

What if your business has no search marketing at all and you don’t even rank #11? Scary thought right there.

One final thing worth noting is that while rankings ARE important, they aren’t everything. If you’re going after the WRONG keywords, a #1 ranking could mean very little to your business. But that’s why we exist ^__~