Archive for the ‘ Affiliate Marketing ’ Category

Advanced Affiliate Marketing – Building Affiliate Marketing Funnels

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://captain-affiliate.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

When first starting out in affiliate marketing, it’s common to use a blog post, an article, a video or an e-mail to promote affiliate offers. Before long, however, it becomes clear that this is no longer enough, especially if you want to reach the large affiliate commissions earned by those practicing advanced affiliate marketing strategies.

The solution to this transition from affiliate newbie to professional affiliate begins when you learn to build affiliate marketing funnels to promote merchants’ products and services. These funnels not only increase sales and thereby increase affiliate commissions, but also help you to build an opt-in list of targeted affiliate marketing leads for your future promotions as well.

The affiliate marketing funnels may seem daunting at first, but with a bit of practice they’ll become routine. Your affiliate marketing funnels begin with a free report that will appeal to your target market and is offered to them for opting into your mailing list from a page known as a ’squeeze’ page. Once they have joined your list and confirmed their e-mail address, they are forwarded to the download page to get their report.

While on the site they’ll have seen your affiliate ads on the confirmation page and on the download page, plus any links or ads you’ve included in or with the report. And after signing up to your autoresponder they’ll receive your pre-written series of e-mails, which should include additional helpful content along with your affiliate marketing promotional materials. While some of your affiliate marketing leads will drop out of the series early, others will stay in your loop a lot longer as long as you make sure to include useful, helpful, targeted information along with your pitches. And the greater number of contacts you have with each targeted lead, the higher the possibility that you’ll make the sale and collect your affiliate marketing commissions, all on autopilot.

Once your affiliate funnel is in place, all that remains is to drive as many targeted affiliate marketing leads into it as you can, using all of the standard traffic-generation strategies and techniques. With each funnel you should be able to improve your autoresponder series for higher conversions and be able to drive more targeted prospects into your funnels.

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To see one such funnel in action, download Doug Champigny’s free guide to Building Traffic and Lists. For direct help from this super-affiliate marketing mentor, enroll in Doug Champigny’s Affiliate Marketing PowerStart Coaching program and learn to make money online using effective affiliate marketing strategies and techniques.

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Advanced affiliate marketing involves using a lot of strategies and techniques not utilized by average affiliates – but then if you’re looking to make super-affiliate levels of commissions, you already know you have to work harder and smarter than the bulk of those who start affiliate marketing businesses online.

And one of those advanced affiliate marketing strategies seldom seen in average efforts is joint ventures. While the big joint venture launches and joint venture sites are common throughout the Internet marketing and niche marketing worlds, most affiliates have never caught on to using them in their marketing mix.

So just how do you, as an affiliate, use joint ventures when you don’t own the product or site? Let’s look at a prime example: You’re involved in a week-long affiliate contest for a big launch and naturally you want to come out on top – or at least make as many affiliate sales as you can. You’ve blogged about it, podcasted about it, submitted a couple of videos and done your social bookmarking and social networking efforts to support it. And, most importantly, you’ve e-mailed your opt-in list about it the first 3 days of that week and have two more followups planned for the last 2 days of the contest. Pretty standard routine for your advanced affiliate marketing pushes, right?

But what about those other two days – the two days you haven’t planned to mail it out to your list? You know they’d get tired and your opt-outs would skyrocket if you sent them that same offer 7 days straight, so how can you use your list on those two remaining days to boost your sales even higher?

This is where you set up a joint venture with another marketer or affiliate. In your marketing network you’ll know a variety of other marketers and affiliates who aren’t involved in the promotion you’re currently promoting. Contact them and find one or two with lists similar in size to your own who are willing to swap e-mails with you those two days.

Then you either send out each of those two days for the other partner’s offer while they do the same for you, or you line up two partners and send once for each of them, with them each sending one day for you. Either way, you’ve used your mailings those two days to get more promos out with your affiliate links, this time to prospects who most likely aren’t even on your list, giving you access to virgin territory for this offer. Not only can this result in more affiliate sales for you, but might even bring in higher results than if you had been able to resend to your own lists those 2 days.

Now that you have the concept, use your imagination and business acumen to refine and improve the idea too. For example, if the contest means a lot to you for the potential commissions or the branding from being atop the leaderboard, start your strategy the week before – use joint ventures to send out 3 or 4 days that week for other affiliates or marketers who can then send for you the following week while the contest is on. That way you’ve got your 7 mailings that week PLUS 3 or 4 additional mailings from those e-zine swap partners.

Not hard to see how you could extend it yet another week and really hit the leaderboard with a big splash, is it? So don’t forget to use joint ventures as part of your advanced affiliate marketing strategies whenever you have an affiliate opportunity you really want to dominate!

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Super-affiliate marketing mentor Doug Champigny has plenty of free advanced affiliate marketing information for you on his Affiliate Marketing Training blog, or you can learn the processes directly under his tutelage through his PowerStart Affiliate Marketing Coaching Program. And be sure to introduce yourself to Doug Champigny when he makes one of his many live appearances onstage at a marketing seminar, conference, convention or workshop near you!

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List Building For Making Money Affiliate Marketing

©2010 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Whether you’re looking to start a home business, earn a little extra income using affiliate marketing or considering affiliate marketing work for an outside company, building a list is of prime importance to your success.

But to make affiliate marketing pay, it can’t just be a generic list of people in general – you have to make sure it’s a list of targeted prospects, people you already know are interested in your niche and hopefully in buying products and information you’ll be recommending.

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Currently there are two main ways marketers are using to build opt-in lists – by getting involved in joint venture giveaways and by offering a free incentive to those who sign up. The incentive is usually a free download of a report, audio or video that contains worthwhile information relevant to your target niche. The tighter your gifts’ focus the more targeted an affiliate marketing lead it will produce, since only those interested in that information will bother to sign up and download your gift.

Don’t make the mistake of using single opt-in, where the person fills in the form and gets instant access – you have no way of knowing if they entered a valid e-mail address or not. And if they entered someone else’s e-mail, you’ll be guilty of spamming if you start sending your affiliate promotion e-mails to that address.

Most autoresponder companies these days are set up for double opt-in, a system that protects you from that scenario. Once your prospect has filled in the form, an e-mail is generated to the address they gave asking that they click to confirm their intentions. Only once the person clicks that link are they then forwarded to the download page, thus verifying they really are a legitimate affiliate marketing lead who has given you permission to e-mail them.

Once you have that gift signup system, known as ’squeeze pages’, in place, use the Web 2.0 sites and the business networking sites to let people know the gift is available. Web 2.0 sites like FaceBook, MySpace and Twitter have millions of users and usually include target market prospects for any given niche. You’ll find it’s much easier to draw traffic from these sites and the business networking sites with links to free downloads or videos than it is to get people to click on your affiliate links there.

Once that much of your affiliate marketing work is complete, considering adding an affiliate marketing video or podcast to your blogs and the video and podcast directories. At the end of the video or audio, invite your audience to download your free report on the subject – this can add some powerful juice to your affiliate marketing list building efforts, and will stay in place long-term to attract an ever-growing number of potential leads for you.

Once you’ve started building your list, send them regular e-mails to warm up your prospects. Focus on strong, related information that’s of help to your readers, and place your links where they fit the natural flow of your letter. As your list grows and your readers get used to you and your style, you should start to see your affiliate marketing pay rising as your readership does – just keep repeating the process above to get there faster!

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If you’re ready to start making money affiliate marketing or are already an affiliate but not making what you should, be sure to check out the professional Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching program created by world-famous super-affiliate mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny. Take a moment now and visit http://www.Affiliate-Marketing-PowerStart.info for information on the coaching program!

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Using A Blog As Your Affiliate Marketing Web Site

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://captain-affiliate.com. All Rights Reserved.

One of the most powerful tools for affiliate promotion is your affiliate marketing web site, and with today’s online technology a blog is usually your easiest and best choice.

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Self-hosted WordPress blogs are easy to set up, easily updated and can be indexed in many directories beyond the traditional search engines automatically. This makes doing SEO for your affiliate marketing web site much easier and lets you focus that much more of your time on other affiliate promotion strategies.

Building a money-making blog using affiliate marketing involves everything from the ads in your sidebar to the topics you write about. By keeping all your posts targeted to the particular audience you’re targeting you can build a following and start to warm them up regarding the products and services you’ll be offering them in your affiliate promotion.

Further, you can use ads and posts to drive targeted traffic to your squeeze pages and opt-in forms, thus building your affiliate marketing list at the same time. This dual purpose – building your list and demonstrating your expertise within your target niche, will constitute the bulk of your affiliate marketing work online, and can go a long way towards making affiliate marketing pay for you.

Your affiliate blogging also gives you a home base online, a great place to drive targeted prospects to from your article marketing, podcasting and affiliate marketing video efforts. While your site is designed to be a traffic magnet on it’s own, sending additional web site traffic to it using these techniques and the various Web 2.0 sites that allow business networking will help a lot for making money affiliate marketing.

Using affiliate marketing to make money online, especially with your own affiliate marketing web site, is one of the most common ways to start a home business – and setting your site up right, hooking it into the various Web 2.0 sites and using strategies like Twitter affiliate marketing to drive targeted prospects to your web site should make your affiliate marketing pay that much sooner.

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Affiliate marketing has always been the easiest way to get started making money online, but it’s getting even simpler to start your own affiliate marketing business online…

Now don’t misunderstand – it still takes time, effort and money to get going, but at least the current trend is evolving toward ‘push-button simple’ resources that could really ramp up your affiliate commissions while shortening the learning curve dramatically. When I first started online full-time over a dozen years ago, you had to learn it all – and all on your own. No experts existed yet, and we ‘online affiliate pioneers’ had to pretty much make it up as we went along.

And while there are obvious advantages to being a ’senior statesman’ in affiliate marketing, the fact remains I REALLY wish that today’s tools had been around back then, that someone else had blazed the trails and already created these powerful resources so I could have just focused on making money online!

So what would I have done so differently? First, I wouldn’t have built over 150 websites – in fact I probably wouldn’t have built ANY static sites. I’d have focused instead on driving traffic to squeeze pages, both to build my lists and to build my affiliate commissions.

Now we know the best way is to offer a free report to attract targeted visitors who opt-in to our lists to download the free report. That gives you the virtual real estate on the confirmation page and download page to pitch your affiliate links, plus puts the targeted prospects into your pre-written e-course designed to sell them into that and other products, all on auto-pilot. You have to get the traffic to that squeeze page – the rest runs automatically.

But writing that report, setting up that squeeze page system and then writing the followup e-course still sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? And dealing with the autoresponders, squeeze page hosting, etc, just adds to it, right? Well Cindy Battye and Soren Jordansen thought so too, so last year they came out with ClickBank Pirate, a service that looks after all of that for you, leaving you free to just focus on driving the quality traffic to the video squeeze pages they set up for you. A MAJOR step forward towards making affiliate marketing push-button simple!

A huge leap, especially for those just starting an affiliate business – no need to learn HTML, PHP, FTP or any other refugees from their alphabet soup – they could simply sign up, get their links and go to town with it – and many new and experienced affiliate marketers have done just that and done very well by it – myself included!

But for experienced marketers who aren’t lazy (we’re a small but important group ;-) ), it wasn’t yet perfect… You see, while Soren & Cindy do a GREAT job at the automated followup – and the Captain doffs his cap to them for it – the fact remains the list is on THEIR server, under THEIR control. Yes, they keep putting new offers out to the people, ALWAYS using YOUR affiliate link, but then it’s not you who decides which offers to promote, and you have no way to promote your own products to that list. Hmmm…

So this year they developed an additional resource, much like ClickBank Pirate, that both goes great as an additional resource to CBP and addresses that issue too. Affiliate Silver Bullet gives you that many more squeeze pages to send people to, but also gives you the choice of having them host & run it all or downloading the components and running it on your own webspace, building your own list through your own autoresponders. And with services like Hosting4Marketers offering both hosting & autoresponders for just $20 a month, it’s really no big leap to choose that option once you have a bit of experience – experience easily gained pushing the ClickBank Pirate and Affiliate Silver Bullet pages they’re already hosting for you!

That makes that whole end of the biz push-button simple – but now what about the traffic-generation aspect – what’s new to help you build traffic, especially targeted traffic so vital to your affiliate marketing success?

First, you need a home base – your place on the web, your affiliate marketing base camp as it were. Once again, it’s become push-button simple to set up your own affiliate blog, thanks to the WordPress software and Alex Sysoef’s free secure blog installer – in fact, take the $17 upgrade there and installing blogs becomes a one-button simplicity – and that’s as push-button simple as you can get!

Turning that new blog into a powerful and profitable affiliate marketing blog IS NOT push-button simple, however – but don’t despair because at least it’s a lot easier than it was until recently. Mike Paetzold is an expert at all things WordPress and has been affiliate marketing for years now, and he’s recorded a 10-video set of step-by-step how-to videos on affiliate blogging called Profitable Blog Steps. While it doesn’t do the work for you, at least it shows you what to do, from researching your topic to picking your affiliate programs and CPA programs to creating your posts!

Even then, things like automating your sidebar advertising have become simple, using the new services like Jeff Dedrick’s Automated Traffic, which lets you choose various ads for affiliate products from ClickBank and then rotates them for you each time a new visitor hits your blog – sweet, eh? :-)

Beyond that, article marketing, podcasting and video marketing all attract more traffic, more recognition and more signups, which is why we teach all 3 in the PowerStart Internet Marketing coaching program. And social media sites have become another major source of targeted traffic, and therefore affiliate commissions. Use guides like my Advanced Marketing on Twitter to learn the best and fastest ways to draw traffic from those sites. Use Squidoo, HubPages, and write Google knols – use my affiliate marketing knol and Internet marketing knol for examples.

So while affiliate marketing success as a whole isn’t push-button simple just yet, many parts of it now are and great guides exist for the remainder – check out the resources listed here and use them to help you build or start an online business of your own today!

About Captain Affiliate:
Captain Affiliate is the affiliate marketing alter-ego of world-famous Internet marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny. Keep up online with Doug through his:
Internet Marketing Blog;
Internet Marketing Coaching Program;
Affiliate Marketing Coaching Program;
• On Social Media Sites: Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, EzineArticles, LinkedIn, iTunes;
• Or catch Doug speaking at a Live Internet Marketing Event near you soon!

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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?

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Today’s Affiliate Silver Bullet launch sets a new benchmark for affiliate marketing resource sites – that is, sites that provide ongoing services to affiliate marketers for a monthly fee.

Until today, the best was ClickBank Pirate – they provide you with a new video squeeze page to promote each month, supply the free report your prospect downloads and deliver the autoresponder series to sell the prospect into the affiliate product you’re promoting. Everything is done for you – all you do is send traffic.

So it’s no wonder that the new benchmark is being established by Cindy & Soren, owners of CB Pirate – they’re the same service providers behind Affiliate Silver Bullet. At first blush, ASB seems to be the same, and in fact DOES provide everything that CB Pirate does. But there is ONE major difference that experienced affiliate marketing pros will notice right off…

With your Affiliate Silver Bullet membership, you can choose each month whether to let them host it for you and run the e-mail series or to download it all and put it online on your own site. This is a huge improvement, as running it on your own site means YOU own the list it generates, people are opting into YOUR autoresponders, and as a result you can follow up with them about other related products down the road.

And THAT, my friend, makes all the difference in the world to anyone trying to establish or grow their own work-at-home affiliate marketing business online – now you’re able to build opt-in lists while building your commissions, giving you potential earnings immediately and much great potential earnings as each month passes…

Get hooked up with Affiliate Silver Bullet today at http://www.affiliate-silver-bullets.com – head over there now and take a look at everything included in your new affiliate marketing package!

And if you’re not already an expert in affiliate marketing making 4-5 figures a month from it, be sure to sign up for our next round of Affiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching classes – enroll now to start the 8-week program on June 3rd!

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Super-Affiliate Success Strategies is the name of the free affiliate marketing training webinar I’m hosting this Thursday night at 8pm EDT. You have to register for the free affiliate marketing training in advance, so hit the link and reserve your spot now!

You see, this webinar is going to be packed with great content, very valuable content for anyone from the complete affiliate marketing newbie to seasoned affiliates already making 4 or 5 figures a year online. In fact, there’s so many top super-affiliate strategies to cover that the replay and transcript of the webinar will only be available as a paid product – meaning being at the event on Thursday is the ONLY way to access this information for free!

Even better, unlike a teleseminar, a webinar lets you attend by phone OR online, so as long as you have your internet connection and are registered for the event, you don’t even need to dial in – just go to the link the system sends you once you register and attend the event online!

If you’re looking to make money online with your own affiliate marketing business, this webinar is a must-attend – and if you’re already affiliate marketing but not able to live on your affiliate marketing commissions, this event will open your eyes to the steps you’re missing. Take a look at the Super-Affiliate Success Strategies page to see everything I’ll be covering on the webinar…

If you’ve missed the event and are reading this later, you’ll still want to hit that page and get your copy of the recording – there hasn’t been another affiliate marketing training call like it, so you’ll want it both for your own education and for the master resell rights that purchasers get with the recording and transcript.

Either way, be sure to visit the site right now and get in on this powerful affiliate marketing training – I mean, you DO want to learn how to make more money online, right? And just when was the last time a recognized super-affiliate offered to show you strategies for free? ;-)

See you there!

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Have you taken your affiliate marketing out of the dark ages yet? You know, back in the day when successful affiliate marketing simply meant putting a banner ad on your site and sending out an e-mail? Wow, are those days long gone!

Let’s jump to the bleeding edge of today’s affiliate marketing – are you using VIDEO yet? Every super-affiliate is – but are you? Video is the most powerful tool in your marketing mix right now, so you’d better be…

Unless, of course, you’re willing to settle for scraps over and over again… ;-)

Now if you’ve been a long-time fan you know the Captain is a firm believer in online video – from the videos tools package I launched in 2006 to the present, video has been a part of both my Internet marketing and affiliate marketing mix.

Sure, everyone’s pushing video at you lately – but how many are walking the walk? Talk’s cheap online… So let’s start by establishing my street cred in video.
We’ll ignore my making TV commercials when Teri & I owned our ad agency because there’s no online samples, and we’ll leave out my glamour videography because it’s not pertinent to affiliate marketing – even if it IS pretty… LOL

So let’s see…

I already mentioned the Internet Audio Video Pro bundle – but it’s worth checking out if you want to see video of me when I still had short ‘corporate’ hair. ;-)

Then there’s my book on podcasting and video blogging – It’s You, Live! Oh yes, and the one called Creating Your Own Videos – pretty obvious what that one’s about…

And not to leave my PLR following out, there’s Converting PLR Videos – a video training series ABOUT editing PLR videos…

OK – so far, that’s all about TEACHING video marketing – but what about USING videos myself?

Well, products like that PLR videos course, my PLR Tutorial videos and the training in my PowerStart Marketing Coaching Program are all video I created, engineered and produced myself…

I know, I know – that’s teaching others how to make and edit videos, and using video for product creation – but you want to talk affiliate marketing, right?

First, think back – I used videos on my blogs to promote ClickBank Pirate here, here, here and here.

Next, look over in the sidebar to the right of this post – see the 5 videos in the Viddler widget? All videos I used to promote the Affiliate Jump launch.

Oh yeah – and I’m not above using other people’ videos in my affiliate marketing strategy either – like the one from Super-Affiliate Rosalind Gardner or the one from iFlash Video that I posted to my Internet marketing blog today…

You get the point, right? Yes, I’m a video expert, and yes, I walk the walk every day – using video to create products, to create training resources, to brand myself world-wide and to stay a super-affiliate no matter what the competition is up to. I can count on one hand the marketers who’ve done more with video than I have, out of the hundreds suddenly extolling it’s values.

Next week I’ll be teaching my PowerStart Marketing students how to create and use videos in their online marketing – the same classes you could be taking in March. Or, you could rush over and get on the pre-launch list for the new iFlash Videos deal – next week they’re going to open their site for JUST FOUR DAYS to let some smart marketers get a custom-made video commercial every month for $50 – and YOU get to tell THEM what the commercial is for!

Why just $50 I don’t know – I wouldn’t create videos for others for $500. Why should I when they make me more than that in affiliate commissions? But I do know Jason Anderson, and I can vouch for his abilities with video – they already make similar videos for ad agencies for a lot more money.

Be smart – book your custom videos each month as soon as the site opens by getting onto the advanced notice list now…

And start using videos in your affiliate marketing mix while it can still help you get to the top – instead of later when you need it to keep from being crushed!

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Affiliate marketing is just starting to come into it’s own as a true, professional industry but back in the early days of the web it was different story – hundreds or thousands of affiliates were groping around looking to find what would work – and one of the true victors that emerged from that fray was Rosalind Gardner. Her Super Affiliate Handbook is probably still the best-selling guide to affiliate marketing on the market, and Ros continues to offer help and advice to all affiliates as her own business grows.

In fact, Rosalind Gardner’s Net Profits Today blog is SO helpful that it made my list of Top 20 Internet Marketing Blogs to Follow in 2010! And just today Rosalind posted her Affiliate Marketing Predictions for 2010 – here’s the video:

 

 

Be sure you watch the video right through – it runs about 7 minutes. It’s easy to see not only her enthusiasm for the industry, but that Rosalind Gardner is one lady who truly cares about her readers and video audience and is all too happy to pass along the helpful information she’s learned in her years as the Super-Affiliate Queen. And some of the facts she shares here from Forrester Research are astounding – astoundingly great for affiliate marketers, that is!

Do yourself a favor to help your affiliate marketing business grow in 2010 – follow these simple steps right now:

  1. Watch the Rosalind Gardner video above;
  2. Follow Rosalind Gardner on Twitter;
  3. Bookmark the Net Profits Today Blog; and
  4. Subscribe to Ros’ e-zine to get regular helpful affiliate marketing tips!

Disclaimer: Sorry, but there are NO affiliate links or sales links in this post. I haven’t lost my edge, so don’t worry – I’m just that big a fan of Ros’ and think her information can really be helpful to EVERYONE that’s in any way involved in affiliate marketing. I PROMISE I’ll have my usual glut of money-making affiliate and sales links in future posts, so don’t abandon the ol’ Captain now, ok? ;-)

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