How to use your chosen affiliate directory

[edit] To register with an affiliate directory you may need a website/blog. With clickbooth you definitely will. Start a simple blogger.com blog, and use its address as your site for now. I will explain why you need a website later, it is a key tool for most things you will be doing. It shouldn't be too hard to set up a blogger blog, but I will make a post after this explaining.

Another basic piece of information that was so hard to find for me when I first started out. I am a teacher by nature, and when I look at all these other guides about how to make money online I see a lot of basic information going unsaid that confuses the student more than anything, and slows the learning process by at least ten fold. I will try to go out of my way to remember the things that held me up when I was a newbie, and make sure to tell them to you.

Alright, lets assume you chose Clickbank, if you didn't, skip this paragraph. Login. You will see a basic statement about how much money you made and when you made it. Not important. At the top right you will see a link that says "Marketplace", click it. You should be brought to a screen that lets you filter through affiliate programs by selecting categories and such to browse by. Choose a category, but at "Sort by:" filter them by "High Gravity". "Gravity" refers to a rating of how much money was made using that program in the last month, and is a general rating of the quality and success of that program above all others. It also means there is more competition. But overall higher gravity is better. Click "Go". You will get a bunch of results of different programs you can join, you can click the "view pitch page" link under each of them to see what your going to be selling. Now you will want to skip over anything that looks shady, because on clickbank, it probably is! That is why I actually go with clickbooth. So anyway, if you find something that you yourself are interested in, that is what is important. Now another confusing part that people neglect to tell newbies: Affiliate programs are sold by links, you take a link that is customized just for you, when people click on it and buy it from that link, you get the commission from the sale. Clickbank called their links "hoplinks", I think its stupid but, whatever haha. So anyway, if you find something you are interested in, click "Create Hoplink". Enter your user name if it asks, do not enter a tracking ID. You will see two links. The first one is a standard link. The second one is a bit of code that if inserted into websites (and some other places) will show "Click here!" instead of the actual address that is being clicked. I am guessing at this stage you want the first one. Now under each program description you will see certain stats, and here are their explanations:

1. $Earned/Sale: Average amount earned per sale.
2. %Earned/Sale: The % of the sale that you receive as a commission. This number should only vary if the publisher has changed their payout percentage over time.
3. %Referred: This is how many of the programs sales come from affiliates, as a percentage.
4. Gravity: Number of affiliates who earned a commission in the past 8 weeks or something like that. The higher the better.

Anyway that is basically all you do at an affiliate directory. Find a program, get a link. All the advertising takes place elsewhere and will be covered later.

Oh I forgot about Clickbooth, well. Login. On the front page is nothing really important. Click on Programs & Links. Don't set any categories just hit Submit. You will see a lot of programs, to the right you will see "EPC", click it to sort the programs by highest EPC. EPC is one of the most important terms in choosing a program, it means Earnings per 100 Clicks. So if a program costs $10, and its EPC is $1, then it takes about 1000 clicks to make 1 sale with that program, which comes out to a conversion rate of 0.1%, quite bad for this example haha. Yea I know, math bad. But you don't really have to worry about that, higher EPC = good. It basically means its easier to sell, and the public is more interested in it. If your not too good at math, if an EPC is the same as the amount of money you get for commission, then the conversion rate is 1%. Now I am using a lot of fancy terms here, I SHOULD have made a post before this to explain Internet Marketing terms, but I didn't. So that is what my next post will be. So after you have sorted by EPC, choose a program that you like, and click it. For some programs you must register and be approved individually by them, basically they inspect your website and may or may not accept you. But for most, you will see a bunch of banners and links. The banners and links here are harder to use than Clickbank's, but with my help it shouldn't be that bad. There are a lot of choices. Nearly all have what is called a "contextual link", this is what you will be placing on your website if you are going to advertise it there and want it to look like a direct link. Also you have multiple banners to choose from. To use any of these you copy and paste the text code it gives you. You do not need to understand this code at all, it is just html, copy it as-is to wherever you want it to be displayed. That is all you will be using affiliate directories for, choosing a program, and getting a link for that program. What to do with that link will be covered in other posts.