http://www.automating-traffic.com is in pre-launch right now, and to entice people to join their early notification list they’re GIVING AWAY great software for affiliates looking to build a money-making blog.

Since you’re reading this column, chances are you already know that making money with blogs is best done with affiliate marketing, and that’s exactly where this free software comes it – it lets you choose from a number of top ClickBank products in your niche and set up banner rotation – with tracking. This means that the banner changes with each visitor, rotating between those you chose to display. Your tracking will show you which attract the most clicks, allowing to drop under-performing ads and pump up the ones that are making you the most money.

And unlike the banner rotators of yesteryear that only handled 468×60 banners, these include those, 125×125 buttons most favored by bloggers, 250×250 buttons and various other sizes. These are all professionally designed graphics designed to generate the highest volume of clickthroughs, and will be updated as time goes on to ensure rates remain as high as possible.

But what hasn’t been announced is when the service will stop accepting free members, so I apologize if you’re reading this post at a future date and they’ve moved to a paid model – all I know for sure at this point is that as I write this, you can still get into the program and use the resources for free by going to the Automated Ads information page.

Whether you’re a serious online marketer, a marketing hobbyist or just someone who loves to blog, not taking the 5 minutes to sign up and then 2 minutes to set up your ad campaigns could mean you’re leaving a lot of money on the table – both when blogging and when building static sites. Watch the Automated Ads video that explains the service and then decide whether this great new free service is right for YOU and YOUR online activities, ok?

Technorati Tags: Automated Ads, affiliate marketing, ClickBank affiliate marketing, free affiliate marketing software, free software, free resources, blogging for money, money-making blogs, make money blogging

Every super-affiliate has a powerful opt-in list they can send their affiliate marketing promotions to. And every other affiliate wants to achieve that same level of affiliate marketing success. So it’s obvious that effective affiliate marketing has to include several successful list-building campaigns, preferably running simultaneously to ring forward the income horizon from your lists.

But full-time affiliate marketers are relatively rare – even most super-affiliates have their own products to market too, or are running membership sites or affiliate coaching and mentoring programs. Some of us are involved in all aspects of the above. And since affiliate marketing is the easiest and least expensive way of starting a business online, the bulk of all affiliate marketers are newbies – some of whom still aren’t even aware that building your targeted opt-in list is one of the cornerstones in the foundation of every successful affiliate marketing business. In an earlier post I refered to affiliates not building a list as The Biggest Affiliate Marketing Mistake Of All, and from the comments left by the affiliates who read the post you’ll see every one of the agrees.

There are a number of ways to build your opt-in list as an affiliate, and you should be using as many of them as your wallet and time availability will allow you to. That doesn’t mean go deep in debt to build your list – there’s no need to. Start with the free resources proven to build lists, then use the money as it comes in to try some of the more expensive methods – but keep your free list-building activities going on throughout, since there’s never a good reason to turn down free targeted traffic or free targeted opt-ins – even at the top of the affiliate marketing game, we still love them all!

Over the next few days the Captain is going to bring you a number of ways to build your affiliate lists, so be sure to bookmark this blog and return regularly, or better yet subscribe to the Captain Affiliate RSS feed if you have a feed reader you use. Some will be free methods, some will have a price attached – but all are tested and true methods of building your opt-in lists. Use as many of them as you can, and stay with them – you’ll see your lists growing daily and along with them, your affiliate marketing commissions.

For today, the Captain wants to point you to two necessary pieces of software – neither is free, but both are very reliable and powerful. First up is your professional autoresponders – the software that keeps track of the people on your list, and sends them your e-zine or e-course each time. Obviously you can’t send out 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000 e-mails in a day manually, so professional autoresponders are a must.

Your choice of autoresponders is critical – avoid the free services like the plague! Either they tack other people’s ads on top of your mailings, like the big places do with their free accounts, or they are small-fry who will eventually go broke and your list will disappear right along with their system. I recommend Hosting4Marketers.com, the service I use for over 80% of our daily mailing.

Why them? Because they’re the most reasonable of the pro services, and give the most bang for your buck. For about $20 a month you get hosting for up to a dozen small sites (You’ll see why you need this in future list-building posts), unlimited pro autoresponders, and even an affiliate program of your own should you decide to sell your own products later on. And your rate doesn’t rise as your list grows, like it does at the services that only give you the autoresponders.

The second piece of software you need is a way to capture subscribers when you send people to your affiliate links. This software is called the Power List Pro, and it lives up to it’s name… Not only does it give you a number of popups you can use on your own site, but you can use them on other people’s sites too, believe it or not.

Here, let me show you… Here’s a link to one of my friend Liz Tomey’s sites – don’t worry, it opens in a new window. See my opt-in form at the top-right of this blog? Now follow this link and wait a couple of seconds to see what happens – then close that window and c’mon back to read on. Here’s the link: Proof That It Works.

Pretty nifty, eh? So now you can be building your own list each time you promote an affiliate link – how sweet is that? So arm yourself with those two tools – your Hosting4Marketers.com account and your copy of the Power List Pro software, and play around with both til you get the hang of them.

Tomorrow I’ll start showing you EXACTLY what strategies to use to build tightly-targeted, highly profitable affiliate marketing lists – see you then!

Technorati Tags: Affiliate marketing lists, building affiliate lists, affiliate list building, getting subscribers, getting opt-ins, getting opt-in subscribers, e-mail marketing

Here’s another advanced Affiliate Marketing Power Tip from Captain Affiliate: There’s a new affiliate marketing tool for ClickBank affiliates that lets you automate your profits and list-building through ClickBank – and automatically increases your affiliate marketing commissions too!

If you’ve been paying attention to the affiliate marketing and joint venture partner contests lately, you know that they’re being won by affiliates and partners who are offering related bonuses, right? But why only use that system for contests – especially if you could use it to make money on every ClickBank promotion in every niche you operate in?

Until now, the hardest part about offering bonuses to ClickBank buyers was that as the affiliate, you don’t get the info on who bought through your link added to your autoresponder, and you had to deliver every bonus manually – either by looking up your sales and e-mailing those people, or by getting your buyers to then e-mail you their receipt so you could send them your bonus – complicated, faulty and a pain, right?

That’s why the Captain was so stoked to see Jeff Czyzewski’s new CB Bonus Domination package – it puts all of that on autopilot for you – delivering the bonus, adding the person to your autoresponder – the whole bit! No more fussing around tying up all your time for one lousy affiliate promotion after another… Now you can be operating – and profiting – in every niche you promote ClickBank products to at the same time – automatically!

Jeff’s put a great video together about his CB Bonus Domination package, so head on over and watch the CB Bonus Domination video right now, ok?

(Smart affiliates will see right away how well this system could utilize our free Daily ClickBank Product Alerts to crush affiliate marketing competition – when the alert shows a new rising star on ClickBank in one of your niches, immediately set up your CB Bonus Domination promotion for it and be making affiliate commissions and building your niche mailing lists before most other ClickBank affiliates even know the product exists! )

Technorati Tags: CB Bonus Domination, automating ClickBank Bonuses, affiliate marketing software, ClickBank affiliate marketing, advanced affiliate marketing, ClickBank profits, Jeff Czyzewski software, Jeff Czyzewski program, Jeff Czyzewski

In these days of Web 2.0 affiliate marketing, there’s no doubting that a blog is the fastest way to boost targeted traffic to affiliate links in any given niche – which is a blessing considering WordPress blog software is free. Installing it through your cPanel is fairly painless, but as I personally experienced, the automatic blog installs are great targets for hackers – we had three of our blogs hit in 2008 alone.

So as I watched WordPress expert Alex Sysoef develop his Expert WordPress software, I was quite impressed that it used a secure setup that didn’t include the standard installation codes. But what really caught my eye was his decision to include all the latest SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plugins to go with it.

Now blogs are already powerful affiliate marketing traffic tools – they allow you an easy platform to keep your readers updated with fresh content, they get indexed in the major search engines like any other web site, but then they also get listed in blog-specific directories, and in such massive traffic generators as Technorati and MyBlogLog. But it’s only when coupled with the latest SEO plugins that your blog really starts to rock as a targeted traffic generator – and Alex Sysoef’s Expert WordPress installs these for you too.

Best of all, this tool is a newbie’s dream – no technical knowledge is required whatsoever to install secure, optimized WordPress blogs with it, and Alex STILL includes videos to demonstrate exactly how to complete the 3 steps required. I sure wish this software had been available 4 years ago when I first started blogging!

So obviously it’s a no-brainer that you want this software as part of your affiliate marketing routine, that you want to install WordPress Blogs & their SEO plugins automatically. So once you see all the features of Alex Sysoef’s Expert WordPress software, I’m sure that you’ll be as surprised as I was that he’s giving it away for free. And that he has an upgraded version with more features that’s available for a low monthly investment.

Alex Sysoef’s Expert WordPress software really has to be the best traffic-generating software aid for affiliate marketers I’ve seen in the last year or two – I give it 5 out of 5 and suggest you download it now while it’s still free! Put your affiliate marketing – and any other blogging you do – into the big leagues today!

Technorati Tags: free seo software, free seo help, free seo downloads, Expert WordPress, WordPress Blogs, Alex Sysoef’s Expert WordPress, affiliate marketing, affiliate traffic, affiliate success, targeted traffic, Alex Sysoef software, Alex Sysoef

Affiliate Marketing? If so, are you making the biggest affiliate marketing mistake of them all?

We all know that going the affiliate marketing route is one of the easiest and most lucrative ways to make money online, and it can continue to add a large percentage of our income for as long as we’re working online. But most affiliates, even the big dogs, could be making a lot more money from affiliate marketing than they are, due to this one big mistake…

Most affiliate marketers fail to add a steady stream of highly-targeted action-taking prospects to their opt-in lists! Think about it for a moment – you place your affiliate links in a lot of places – on your sites, your blogs, in articles you distribute around the Internet, even on your accounts at LinkedIn, Twitter, MyBlogLog, Technorati, YouTube, etc.

Hopefully a lot of people click those links for you and buy the product you’re recommending – but then what? They’re gone, whether they bought or not – and in most cases you have no idea who they were or how to contact them again. Opportunity lost…

But what if instead, when people clicked those lnks, YOUR pop-up opt-in form showed up over the merchant’s site? Now obviously not everyone is going to opt-in, as with any site, but every one who does is a bonus for you – someone who already clicked one of your links and took action – what could be more targeted than that?

Now, if you’re new to Affiliate marketing that may seem a bit complicated – so let me show you what I mean. One of my favorite programs to promote to new affiliate marketers is 5 Day Cash Machines by Liz Tomey. Not just becase Liz & Jamie are close friends, but because she actually shows how she took a complete newbie and had her building a list and makng money her first 5 days online – pretty impressive, right?

But more important, look what happens when you go to the site through our link: Liz Tomey’s 5 Day Cash Machines! Go ahead – click that link, let the page draw in and wait a few seconds… Violla! Our pop-in form, light-boxed over Liz’s site!

Pretty cool, eh? Easy to see how this one makes you more money quickly, since you’re getting new signups from the same affiliate marketing efforts you’re putting in now – and keeps the merchant’s page open throughout the process. If I were to tweak the page the signup form takes you to, I’m sure I could monetize it more heavily too!

And it’s all done with push-button simplicity using the Power List Pro software – as you’ll see on that page, it’ll even create simple pop-ins for you if you’re not familiar with the process. It even has a function to create list-building JVs with other marketers – but you’ll have to read about that on the site, as it’s outside the scope of this article.

Now before you rush off to download and start using Power List Pro, let me explain when you WOULDN’T want to use it…

Most obviously, you wouldn’t use it to send links to your existing e-zine readers – why distract them with a popup when they’re already on your list? You want to use this on your blogs, sites and social media exposures, to move some of your followers there onto your lists, right?

Secondly, stick to products being sold through services like ClickBank when you’re using this software. More experienced affiliate marketers and web designers will recognize this as an advanced system of framing, meaning the person stays on YOUR site while viewing the merchant’s salespage. Once the buyer reaches ClickBank they get bounced out of the frame – but by then they’ve been cookied with your link and it’s too late for them to change it.

On the other hand, affiliate systems that work with PayPal and similar systems cookie the visitor as soon as they get to the salespage – being in a frame stops that from happening, as it becomes a ‘3rd party cookie’ since it’s not being delivered by the site they’re actually on. When they progress from there, they hit PayPal still in your frame, and the order won’t even process, never mind get credited to your account.

It’s important to note that this is true of ALL link cloaking that uses frames – save it just for ClickBank and use a simple PHP redirect for the others. So don’t let that stop you from using this powerful list builder – just remember to only use it for ClickBank links.

As I said above, there are more list-building functions to >Power List Pro than what I’ve covered here, but this is the most important use for affiliate marketing. Check out the other features listed on the site too, but be sure to download Power List Pro now & make it a daily part of your affiliate marketing strategies – and watch your opt-in list – and profits – skyrocket!

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing opt-in lists, building affiliate marketing opt-ins, Power List Pro software, Power List Pro program, getting opt-ins, getting subscribers