Entrecard and Constant Contact and Commission Junction, Oh my!

You are likely sitting there in your chair, looking at that title and thinking I'm completely off my rocker. Sure, I haven't posted in awhile, but this is a good one.

How would anyone in their sane mind, think to combine Entrecard with Constant Contact or even Commission Junction? Well ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be amazed.

First, lets begin with a step by step rundown.

1. All Bloggers should have an Entrecard account, it's free and it can generate wonderful traffic. If not, sign up at www.entrecard.com

2. From here you have 2 options, depending on your blog's traffic. If you have a blog that generates a lot of traffic, then you should be able to simply put the widget on your site and leave it, just occasionally confirming ads for your site so you get EC's. If you site only generates mild traffic, you can use Sitehoppin, with this, you can stumble across various sites that have entrecard installed, and just drop your card, this will also generate EC's for you.

3. Now the fun starts. I don't think I've promoted Constant Contact before, but they are a great email marketing service, the best part, 60 days free!

4. After you sign up with CC, you need to generate EC's like a madman. Inside the shop, someone will post a sale for Opt-In email addresses. Buy Them!

5. Now go back to Constant Contact and type up an advertisement for one of your products from Commission Junction, and then send. Rinse/Repeat every time you see a new auction for Addresses, and you can make yourself some quick cash for a little bit of work.

Another great thing about Constant Contact is that you get your own personal representative to help you along your way. I was rather surprised after I signed up and about 2 days later I had a live person calling me asking how I was liking everything, and offering to send me tutorials and such. They sure invest a lot in a 60 day trial, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep it. Unfortunately, it's the email equivalent of cold calling, so many people will simply delete your email, but if you keep at it, you will eventually get enough people to click it.

Good luck, at let me know what you think!

MAKE Money with AdWords

So you might be thinking, wait a second, isn't AdWords something you use to SPEND money on and it drives traffic to your site? Isn't that counter productive? No, Here's why.

Clickbank, Commission Junction, or Affiliate Scout, it's really that simple.

WARNING: This is the biggest gamble of any ideas listed on 03cents so far. You can make a whole boatload of money, or you can lose money, make sure you really want to do this before jumping in. Luckily for the weary, AdWords allows you to place a maximum so that way, you don't break the bank trying to get this to work. Odds are, you might lose money the first few months, but after testing, this can be HUGE.

Step 1: Register for as many affiliate accounts as you can track. I like commission junction simply because your are "selling" hard products, Clickbank is nice due to their payouts, but you are selling E books most of the time, so it gets kind of hard.

Step 2: Sign up with AdWords (See link on right), it will ask you to register if you have not before, sign up with the name of your link, and then describe it. Please, please, PLEASE, read your agreement with both the company AND AdWords, do not assume when registering with another company their rules are the same, some companies will not allow you to use their name in your add, or other things of the sort.

Step 3: Profit, This is very straightforward, and to think, there are e books out there that will want to charge you for this information...

Tips and Tricks

1.Direct your ads, there is a lot of competition with affiliate links and AdWords, make yourself stand out, think outside the box. Sure everyone thinks of Credit Agencies or Credit Monitoring for Experian, but try registering ID Theft, or something a little more directed.

2. Make sure to set your limits, sure, that link may payout $100 if someone signs up for the service, but how many people will click your link and sign up. Don't bankrupt yourself doing this

3. Moderation and perseverance, one month you might break the bank with sales, other months you may get nothing. Do not get overboard if you're having a good month, sure if you are trending up with sales, you may want to increase the amount of ads you have, or pay more to increase exposure, just be careful.

4. Study Trends, got an account with 1800flowers? you might want to push this ad more around holidays, but watch out, other people will as well. So think outside the box, did you know ID theft is higher around the holidays? People have more on their plates and don't worry about certain things, so when they come around to it around February, have your ads ready, push credit monitoring services when other people are pushing flowers.

5. Know your potential customers, sure, your market is all of Google, but think of what people are searching for. What are people going to call it? Sure, a bunch of ads might be available for someone looking for MicroSD Memory Card, but what about the guy sitting as his computer looking for Cell Phone Memory Stick and he can't seem to find it.

6. Try Yahoo! Search Market as well, all the focus is on Google, experiment, see how it works out. Also, American Express offers a 5% discount on all Yahoo! Search Market purchases, so you might want to look into that in order to save some $.

Do you guys have any other ideas? Drop me a line, the comment box is always open.

Making money with Commission Junction.

This post is a playoff of my original Ebay + Craigslist Post. Instead of using Ebay, your CJ login will link to other companies. Here's how it works:

For new users, start with Step 1, for existing CJ members, skip to step 3:

Step 1: Visit www.cj.com, follow the promts in creating an account.

Step 2: Make sure to find out where your PID is located, see corresponding image:

Step 3: You will want to find a company that sells a product you know about, in my case, I work for a large credit card company, so if I wanted to pitch say, a credit monitoring service, it would be easy for me. You can find the companies that CJ works with under the "Get Links" tab on top.

Step 4: By clicking on the company name on the get links icon, you will see their payout structure, find one that suits you and click the apply for program link.

FYI: Depending on the company, you may get approved immediately, or reviewed.

Step 5: This step is optional: Register a domain name for your affiliate link(s). Which would you rather click www.monitoryourcredit.com or http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2737229-10432997? My point exactly.

Step 6: Now what you can do, take this new link to somewhere like yahoo! answers, or really any Q and A forums and answer questions about your topic.

Q: Hey, I just went to apply for a car loan and I was told I have an account with xyz credit company. I'm afraid I might be a victim of ID Theft, what should I do?
A: Hi, Soandso, What you should do, contact the company the card was opened with and tell them you didn't apply for that card, follow their requests, they may need a police report or something, and then you might want to check out www.monitoryourcredit.com and check out the offer from Equifax so you can make sure you're on top of your credit report.

Step 6: You may not need to register a domain if the forum you are posting at has HTML options, many times you can simply just replace the link with words with the code: < href =" link "> Name< /a >. By doing this, you can save yourself some cash and simply say "Visit Equifax and see what they have to offer."

Another FYI, make sure you know the rules and regulations for your company, the last thing you want to do is find a marketing idea only to learn its against the Terms of Use. Many companies will not allow you to register adwords with the companies name or something of the like.

Again, this is hardly the only use for Commission Junction nor are they the only affiliate marketing company available, my frequent viewers may just like it because you can try multiple ideas with one company.