Q: What should we pay for leads in a new PPL program, it’s a construction related site that services the hotel and commercial remodeling industries.

A: The best move there is to see what your competitors are doing, or anybody else in a related niche.

That’s really the best indicator to see what’s going on in the market and the demands in your industry.

You don’t want to go in blindly and set a rate by comparing apples to oranges with another niche.

So study your competitors first to determine the average, and maybe pay more if you can work it into your margins.

But bear in mind that a higher commission rate should not just be for a shorter time. If you do that, you’ll lose the affiliates when you drop your commission.

Video: How Much to Pay Per Lead

Ask Shawn Collins your affiliate marketing question and it will be added on the affiliate blog.

Q: I want to thank you for your youtube video tips it was very useful and now i am thinking about signing for Google adsence to blog about smart phones my question to you is do I have to pay for WordPress beside paying for a domain name how does the process work?

A: There are a couple different costs to consider when starting up a new affiliate site.

There is the domain registration, which runs about $8 a year.

You also need hosting for your site, and you can get a hosting plan for around $5 or $10 a month on a shared server, which means your site will be on a server with many other sites.

An alternative is getting a dedicated server, which costs far more, and it’s not something you really need to consider when you’re starting.

Anyhow, a lot of hosts have a one-click install of WordPress, so it’s nice and easy to get it going on your site. You can literally click a link with the host and WordPress will get setup on your site.

I use BlueHost for a number of my affiliate sites, and they have the WordPress one-click install feature. In addition to WordPress, they have the one-click install for a variety of other scripts and software programs.

My free online book, Extra Money Answer, includes details on registering a domain name and website hosting.

Q: What’s the best way to let my twitter following know that a link in one of my tweets points to an affiliate product? Is there an acronym I should use like (aff.)?

A: First of all, I’d say it’s really not valuable to anybody if you’re just going to post affiliate links to Twitter.

It’s far more useful, and it removes this issue, if your Tweet goes to a post of yours, where you pre-sell a product or service through persuasive, original content.

In Twitter, if you’re putting up a single Tweet direct to a merchant and simply broadcasting that people should buy, you are adding no value at all.

But when your Tweet links to your site, you can go on at length about why you recommend a product or service.

Q: Just wondering what your thoughts are on the current state of affiliate marketing, particularly with regard to finding a niche to pursue. Would you say there a still plenty of niches to attempt?

A: I really think the best approach is to go with the topics you really care about.

If you try to build an audience around a popular niche or trend, and it’s not something that interests you, it will likely fade away after a short period of time.

It took me going through the motions a number of times before I realized that a popular topic that doesn’t interest me is a recipe for failure.

You will find it’s a struggle to update it regularly because it bores you. And the early stages of a site don’t typically provide a monetary return, so all you’ve got at that point is your passion.

What I would suggest is to come up with two or three topics that interest you and do some research.

Check the related keywords in Google for each topic to determine which are most popular.

But wait, it’s not necessarily best to go with the most popular, because it will be more competitive with other affiliates. If you zero in on a less popular area, you have a better chance of dominating it.

Either way, go with your heart and not your head.

I discuss this topic in chapter one of Extra Money Answer, my free online book for getting started as an affiliate: Narrow Down Your Potential Topics.

Video: Deciding on a Niche in Affiliate Marketing

Ask Shawn Collins your affiliate marketing question and it will be added on the affiliate blog.

Q: First, just to say thanks for all your tips and guidance over the years. What I’d like to know please, is how, as an affiliate, to best leverage my various vendors YouTube videos?

A: I am assuming you are talking about affiliate programs you are already promoting, and if that’s the case, those affiliate programs with videos usually have a technology they recommend to use to promote and track their videos.

If you don’t see the option in their affiliate creative, I would suggest reaching out to the advertiser to ask if you can use their videos with your affiliate links.

Otherwise, the use of their videos without permission could be a violation of their terms.

If a particular affiliate program has videos out there, but doesn’t have a way for you to use them as an affiliate, have a look at LinkedTube and ViewBix.

Q: I have been let down by my developer, so now I’m seeking someone to create my web store using XML feeds from my Affiliate programs. I use Linkshare, Commission Junction and Affiliate Window. I already have the design, I just need the widget created for wordpress. Can you recommend someone or a company who does this?

A: Rather than getting this all created from scratch, I would highly recommend taking a look at Datafeedr.

Datafeedr is a paid WordPress plugin that I use. I’ve been happy with the ease of use of the plugin.

I wanted to break into datafeeds as an affiliate for more years than I care to admit, but the various solutions I tried previously still left datafeeds as a complicated mystery for me.

Datafeedr enables affiliates to create and embed an affiliate store into a WordPress blog, and there is no need to mess with the datafeed files or outsource a custom build from a programmer.

Don’t reinvent the wheel for a whole lot more money.

Q: I’m a newbie stuck for the last three years because of difficulty posting links. Can you recommend (hopefully free) a basic HTML and CSS primer, as well as which affiliate network is easiest to begin using? And BTW, please hurry the rest of your extra money course (ExtraMoneyAnswer.com) – it’s terrific.

A: I am a bit confused by the question. I am not clear how you have been stuck for three years, because you cannot post links.

If you go through all of the steps in my Extra Money Answer site, it’s based on creating an affiliate site in WordPress, which is very easy to use.

Also, I have a quick video on YouTube: How to Insert an Affiliate Link in WordPress

By using WordPress to create and maintain affiliate sites, you can get by without knowing HTML/CSS, though it’s definitely an asset to have a working knowledge of HTML and CSS.

Basically, when you are in WordPress, you highlight the word or phrase you’d like to make into a link, click the word “link” in the WordPress toolbar, paste your affiliate link into the field, and click “Add Link”.

Hopefully, that’s not the missing link (rimshot) for you these past three years.

Anyhow, I cannot emphasize enough how you should be using WordPress if you are not using it already. When I started as an affiliate, I was hand coding HTML, and it was a time-consuming process. You’ve got this great, free tool as your disposal now.

I converted all of my affiliate sites to WordPress years ago.

Q: I am about to start a beauty website; how much products should I put on the website… 5k, 10k, 15k, 20k, or more?

A: I think you are asking the wrong question.

You should be more focused on how you can make the site into a unique resource that people will want to visit.

The world doesn’t need or want another giant directory of products without any value added to it.

There must be a compelling reason for people to visit your site.

Don’t worry about how many products will be featured, but rather why people would want to go to the site.

Then scale up the site with your unique content, whether it be consumer reviews or what have you.

Can you imagine going to a site that is offering consumer reviews and just a fraction of the products have any review at all?

I wouldn’t want to return when I can go to more active and established sites, unless there was some other unique value to the site that I wasn’t getting elsewhere.

Q: Why do some affiliates cloak there affiliate links? Do you recommend it?

A: I do recommend cloaking affiliate links, and I’ve been doing it myself for quite some time.

There are a variety of reasons that affiliates cloak links, and I do it myself for a few different purposes.

One note: some people refer to the practice as redirecting affiliate links, and cloaking is sometimes seen as a way to describe shady ways of doing it. For the purpose of clarity here, I’m using cloaking and redirecting synonymously.

Anyhow, I send out text emails to some of my lists, and an affiliate link is often so long that it will break in text emails. So cloaking the links makes them short enough to work without any issues.

Also, I cloak links to track clicks. This way I can audit the link reporting I’m getting from an affiliate program. If it’s far off from my own numbers, it can be a red flag for their tracking.

Finally, affiliate offers or entire companies will sometimes disappear abruptly. If you have the actual affiliate links out there in lots of places, it can take a significant amount of time to go back and find all of them to make updates.

But if you have the affiliate link cloaked and it’s out there in 10, 20, 100 places or more, it’s a matter of changing one link to update all of them.

In the past, I was using an .htaccess file, but now all of my affiliate sites are in WordPress, and I use a plugin called Pretty Link to create and manage redirects.