Have you contemplated joining an affiliate business internet marketing program? If you answered yes to this question you may be asking yourself another question. How do I choose a high-quality affiliate internet marketing program to join?

Discovering the best affiliate program for you means knowing which affiliate business marketing program will present you the most benefits and the fewest disadvantages. Most affiliate programs will show you up front what they have to offer. Take some time to weigh up the pros and cons of each affiliate marketing program.

There are two types of affiliate marketing programs. Direct sales marketing, this means that every time you make a sale through your link you will be recognized with the sale.

Then there are two-tier marketing programs where you will not only get paid for direct sales but also for directly sponsoring other affiliates. Every occasion a sponsored affiliate makes a sale you will earn a commission.

The amount of commission depends on the particular affiliate business internet marketing program in question. But since we are in this for the cash the higher the commission rate the better off you will be financially. Have a look at the compensation plan and see what bonuses get offered. Some programs triple your commissions if you sign up just 3 people a month.

A good quality affiliate business internet marketing program will also provide its members with a lot of support. This support can come in different forms such as, direct phone hook up, email service and members forums. Which ever way you go your question should be answered within 24 hours.

Choosing the right affiliate business internet marketing program is vital to your opening success as an affiliate marketer and with the potential to make serious amounts of money it’s only a matter of choosing the right program for you.

If you are involved with an internet business then you probably have noticed that one of the most effective marketing strategies is direct email marketing list promotions. (If you haven’t yet tried this method of marketing then you need to get to it right away!) Of course, the success of email marketing will always be found in the ability to compile a targeted list of email recipients. This means that a great deal of time must be put into list building and probably the most devastating thing one could do to a company would be to destroy your internet business brand in the eyes of those people on your e mail marketing list. That means the strategy you employ when performing your direct mail campaign must be a sound one.

There are a number of common mistakes people make when performing direct e mail marketing list campaigns, but probably the most common would be sending too many emails. If you send a multitude of emails promoting sales, new arrivals, updates, etc too often during the week people become less like to open your emails. That is because receiving the email is no longer something special or worth taking note of. Instead, it becomes spam. At one time, I took all those discount coupons Overstock.com and Borders.com would send me. Now, they send me three or four a week and I basically ignore them. After all, why would I rush out and make a purchase when I know that there will be another dozen coupons coming around the bend?

Take your email recipients seriously and don’t dump a million emails on them. This will maintain the integrity of your e mail marketing list and keep it valuable.

The majority of websites are established to promote products or a service of some kind, yet they are little use if no-one knows about their existence. A website operator may decide to leave the generation of visitor traffic to his site to the various search engines. However, most search engines work by simply taking account of the number of other sites linking to yours as a measure of your popularity. Affiliate Marketing is a way to take advantage of this fact to generate revenue, not only for you through your own site, but also for those sites that point visitors in your direction.

For most of the 20th Century, the traditional sales and marketing model was predicated on spreading your message as far and wide as possible. Traditionally, this was done through media advertising, direct marketing to potential customers and the use of sales teams, both direct and indirect. In many ways, Affiliate Marketing takes this model and applies it to the Internet – with one crucial difference. In traditional marketing, the message is spread hoping that it will reach prospective customers – an outward-bound style of marketing; with Affiliate Marketing, the potential customers are drawn towards the product information – an inward-bound marketing model that is far more effective.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, the message was spread through mutual link exchanges. A simple mechanism where one website would exchange a link with another on the basis of “I’ll tell my visitors about your website, if you tell yours about mine.” However this was little more than a “hand-shake” type arrangement with no incentive for links to be promoted and no financial benefits attached.

Affiliate Marketing takes that concept and expands it.

Assume that you are a store selling a popular commodity item such as books. While you want people to come to your bookstore, it would also be a good revenue generator if people purchased books through your website, saving you overhead and enabling you to order books from the distributors as they are purchased, cutting inventory and reducing risk. So how do you get people to come to your website to buy the books they are interested in?

Offer to pay anyone who sends a visitor from their website to yours a small percentage of any resulting sales.

The owners of that website now have both a benefit from the link and an incentive to promote your store. You can almost guarantee that your link will go from being buried on the “Links” page to being on the front page of their site. They will also spread the word among people of the same interests, and before long you have more people supplying revenue generating links to your site. The link exchange has now become “Look at this cool site and these cool products – Go visit it.”

Now you have an Affiliate Marketing program in place.

So one simple definition of an affiliate marketing program is that a producer (X) establishes a relationship with another website owner or publisher (Y) wherein he provides a financial benefit for Y to direct visitors to X’s website.

Of course, the more associate publishers that content producer signs up, the broader his reach and the more revenue will be generated.

My research tells me something that is fairly obvious. If a nice shiny pack arrives in your business mail it will grab your attention more than any of the flat white envelopes. With that in mind, if you are planning a Business to Business direct marketing campaign, maybe you should consider some alternatives to white envelopes. Your main consideration should be to find a product that will have a very positive effect on the success of your direct marketing campaign. I am talking about bespoke mailing packs. The style is up to you but whatever you choose will be a massive improvement on a white envelope!

Promotional mailing packs can be made as folders, as sleeves with trays or as boxes. It would be a good idea to talk to your design agency about costs as it is quite possible that a campaign could be designed so that your promotional literature and the mailing pack could all be printed on the same sheet. This would have several advantages.

Let’s say that your promotional piece was a pop-up card printed on 350gsm art board. The agency could easily design a presentation mailing pack that would enhance the promotional product and increase the chances of the project becoming a success. The material would be suitable for both the pop-up card and the mailing pack and could therefore be printed on the same sheet. That would save money on printing and on die-cutting whilst also help to tie the whole project together.

Some promotional products, such as those with an automatic pop-up, are often supplied with their own custom-printed, sturdy, all-board mailers and they make a fine mailing pack. In fact, they can look quite ridiculous in an ordinary envelope. The internal rubber band tries to force the product to pop-up and as a paper envelope offers no resistance, the product pops up as far as the envelope will allow leading to your prestigious promotion looking something like a bag of crisps!

However, most manual interactive products are supplied just as they are, without a custom designed mailing pack but you can address that situation. If you have already made up your mind about using a certain style of interactive product such as a Starburst, a Flicker Card or a Dissolving Picture for example, then you can ask your design agency to look into making a custom mailing pack for these devices, too. It will convert your mailing into what the American’s call “dimensional marketing” and the success rates have proven to be far higher than “flat” mail in white envelopes. A glossy, printed pack looks much more like a gift and will be opened with anticipation.

Of course, mailing packs can be used to improve most promotional materials. Your product doesn’t have to be a high-action, interactive mailer. It could be that you want to create a different tone or it could be that the product that you are mailing just isn’t terribly exciting by itself. Wheel charts are a good example. Whilst wheel charts are very effective marketing tools, they can look pretty much like an everyday object and so to enhance their appeal as a promotional product you need to “dress them up” in an attractive mailing pack.

Whilst I acknowledge that white envelopes are one of the cheapest mailing options, I firmly believe that mail is much more likely to be opened and read by the person that you want to reach if it arrives in a neat little box or mailing pack. What could be better to do the job properly than a totally custom designed pack?