Ideal Absolutes

Maybe the single greatest part about affiliate marketing is the incredibly low initial investment you need to start earning money for yourself. All you really need is a website. That’s it. There are so many FREE programs out there that will walk you though basic web design, even if you know nothing about it, you can be up and running in the span on a day. All that’s left at this point is finding an affiliate marketing program to subscribe to.

Here are a few tips about starting up your affiliate marketing campaign today!

There are tens of thousands of affiliate marketing programs you can subscribe to. The list is essentially limitless however, I recommend Wealthy Affiliate. An important piece of advice, though, is that if an affiliate marketing program wants you to pay money to sign up, you might want to think twice. Unless the initial investment is very small, there are many other choices that you could make. You see, almost all affiliate marketing programs are FREE! That’s right, you read that right. FREE! And not only that, but some of the big time programs will even train you and give you tips on the right keywords to put on your webpage so random web surfers will find you, click on your link, buy a product and earn you money! Unless you really want to be part of an affiliate marketing program that charges money, don’t do it. There are thousands that are free.

Don’t use a low-quality internet provider. This can be a tough choice for those looking at keeping their costs at zero or as close to zero as possible. But your local full Internet Service Provider is going to do a better job of hosting your new money making website then some free site that crashes all the time. Your new web site is a money-making machine for you, don’t trust it to a company that isn’t going to do everything they can to make sure it’s up and running 24/7. You probably pay for an internet connection in your home already, and with your basic Internet account, you get web space. Use it and rest easy knowing that your website is in good hands.

As you can see, there are a few ins and outs to affiliate marketing that everyone needs to know. But the key here is the fact that you can earn money with almost no work involved. Just make a website, write some snappy content and set up your links and then sit back, relax and count your money.

An interesting observation by Ted Murphy of Izea, Inc. suggests that in the long term PayPerPost bloggers could be as effective as “A” list bloggers. I’m not commenting on their blog about issue either way as to no take away from the question. The Longtail Rules the Blogosphere. “A-Listers” Don’t Deliver More Value

In my previous post I ranted on Izea’s decision to create a new forum. I see now that I was incorrect and would like to apologize to Ted & his crew at Izea. I stand by the forum posties.us because it represents a counter balance of sorts not only for the posties of Izea’s PayPerPost but for the Smorty Posties, LoudLaunch Posties, ReviewMe Posties, Sponsored Review Posties and others to follow. The posties.us forum was never meant to bash Izea. Instead we hoped that it could serve the purpose of neutral territory where all posties were involved in the governing of our community. Below is Ted’s response to my previous rant.

The decision to disallow advertising of Posties.us through the PayPerPost system has nothing to do with censorship. The fact is that you have created a forum designed to directly compete with the board that we operate as a company. This causes confusion of the behalf of Posties and creates additional challenges for our customer love team. We do our best to answer concerns and listen to feedback. The existence of two boards makes this process extremely inefficient and fragmented. It also disrupts and creates cliques in our community which I am not in favor of.

You are more than welcome to create whatever site you like. However, just because you create a site doesn’t mean we have to provide a conduit to promote it.

I believe that we are one of the most open companies on the Internet today. We invite our customers to participate in conversations on our boards, blog and in town hall meetings. We show you what happens behind the scenes in RockStartup and have an open door policy to visit our office. Many Posties have my cell phone number, email address and IM. 1/5 of our staff is dedicated to Customer Love and education. We have invested heavily in monitoring, quantifying and acting on customer feedback. To suggest that we don’t care or ignore calls for help isn’t really a fair statement.

While there have been some isolated incidents of over-zealous moderation on the boards which I fully acknowledge, as a company I would say we do a pretty good job of listening to our customers and allowing open conversation. In fact, the majority of complaints that we receive on the boards are not about IZEA team members, rather they are about other members of the boards that we do not employ.

Still, there is room for improvement and we are making changes to the boards to address concerns that you and others have voiced.

Ted Murphy

This will obviously cause quite a stir in the blogging world. Reading through the Izea townhall meeting transcript a few statements stuck in my mind as encouraging for everyone involved. First, Izea is a fast moving target not easily thrown off course by Google’s attempt at censoring bloggers through PR (pagerank) deletion (Google Smacking). Second, I got the impression Izea does listen to feedback from both the Posties and the advertisers. Speaking of advertisers there are now over fourteen thousand using the Izea platform. WOW.

Now for the good news. But before I go there I wanted to make a point of expressing my opinion that the honorable FTC Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras, seen here helping Jones Day celebrate their 20th year anniversary, doesn’t understand the power of Google and the possible danger posed by their acquisition of Double Click. OK, with that out of the way everyone should know that Izea will be dumping Google’s Page Rank - yeah boy - and that Social Spark is on track. Maybe not tomorrow, but it did like we’ll see it this calendar year.

*this is an evolving article - updates through the day with announcements from Izea