There is a real advantage to Associate Programs that no one else has tapped into but us (that I am aware of)... and in this section I will give you all of the details on how you can start using it yourself.

An Associate Program is really the ultimate ad-tracking software!

What I mean by this is that when you place your banner ads, your text links, buttons, or any type of advertising you pay for, you can assign an associate number to that advertising and track its results to see if it is making you money (or losing you money).

Then you can track exactly how many visitors come in and how many sales were generated by each individual ad. You can tell exactly what ads are making you money and which ads are losing your money. It is the ultimate ad-tracking software!

In fact, depending on how you use it... it is like ad-tracking software with a built-in bonus Associate Program! We have been using this technique for years and it has made us a fortune!

Just think, within days of you placing an ad, you will know if it will make you a profit - right to the last penny. If the ad is not making you enough money, you can abandon it immediately and not waste another penny wondering if it was actually making you money.

You've probably seen many of our ads or banners, which are placed by our associates. However we also purchase banners and advertising in order to track them and see how they are doing. We use our associate software to test banners, buttons, text links, ezines ads, opt-in email ads, and so on… to make sure they are actually making a profit. If they aren't making a profit, we will dump the ad... if they are making a profit we will keep buying that banner or button space, or even keep buying that sponsorship space on a newsletter or email discussion.

Isn't that an incredible powerful tool? Knowing EXACTLY which ads are making you a profit and EXACTLY which ones are not!

We test a variety of promotional methods, and each time we assign an associate number to ourselves. Then using the same methods we use to track an associate (in essence, the paid ad or paid banner basically becomes an associate), we can track exactly how many visitors came in, and how many sales were generated from that ad, so we can see if the ad made money.

Your Associate Program software is the ultimate tracking software! No one else is doing this... and I have no idea why? I told one of my marketing friends about it at a seminar last September ("Hi Jonathan", if you are reading :-) and he said, 'It's the greatest idea! It's so simple, that I can't believe I didn't think of it and that other people aren't using this idea! The ad tracking capability of this is worth the price alone… it is like getting the ultimate ad tracker with a built in associate program.'

You can place hundreds of ads anywhere on the net, and at the end of the month, you know exactly which ads made you money, and which ones lost you money. Of course, you keep the ones that made money, and you dump the ones that lost you money. It is the ultimate way to test... and you get your results instantaneously because the software tracks the results in real time! There is no staff to figure it out at the end of the month and no stacks of paper work to do. You just check the stats by going to a webpage on your website and you know exactly how many visitors were converted into sales.

You can check three things with this method:

1. Is my banner or ad slogan effective?
2. Does the ad space make a profit?
3. See if you got all your ad impressions (or if the advertiser ripped you off).

Ok, let's go over #1 first. If the advertiser tells you how many impressions the banner had, you can see how many clicked through your banner, and how many people have converted into sales. So you know how effective or ineffective that banner is. Find the banner which pulls the best for you.

#2… you can test new banners and ads to see if they pull better than old ones. For example, you may find that the banner or ad which usually pulls a 5% click-through does much better than a new ad you placed which only pulls a 3% click-through (because your associate program tracks all this). You may also find that you are only converting one visitor out of every 300 visitors into a sale, and you normally convert one out of every 100 (because the associate program software tracks all this). This system allows you to determine which ad space pulls better or worse than other ad space. This information is invaluable!

#3… if the advertisers track click-throughs (especially if you are paying per click-through) and they say you got 1000 clickthroughs, but your software shows that you only got 700 clickthroughs, you have an argument with them that their counts are wrong. This is very powerful and I have personal experience with a situation like this… and they gave me the remaining clickthroughs free as I could prove that I didn't get all my click-throughs.

It is the perfect way to test new banners, new buttons, new text links and new ads.

We use this all the time... it allows us to implement an idea and test it on a moment's notice. Since we spend over $25,000 a month (yes, I know that is a lot of money and most of you don't have that to spend every month… but remember we started out small a few years back… only spending less than $100 a month. But with this tracking method, we just place new ads every month and the ones which made money we stayed with, and the ones that lost money we dumped. After a few years, we are left with over $25,000 a month in ads that always make us a profit. Are you starting to see the power of this yet?

We use this software to track almost every ad we place. On banner ads, button ads, text-link ads, sponsorship of newsletters and Ezines, and so on. It's critically important that we track everything to see which ads are successful and which ones aren't.

We'd never be able to track this number of ads without using our Associate Program software as our ad-tracking software! There would just be too much paperwork to do (it would be a full-time job just to track and record this information). But with an associate program, you can assign as many numbers as you want to your ads and it takes care of all the tracking for you. For every promotion you do, for every joint venture you do, every special deal you do, every ad that you place can have a different number enabling you to get some very detailed statistics and information. You will see which ones are profitable and which ones aren't.

I know I have said this over and over in this section, but it is that important! Do not underestimate the power of this… the power to see which ads are working… which ads are not… and where you are making your money online.

Ok, as you can tell, I am getting a little excited here so I'd better cool down for a moment (I just love talking about making money and automating things!).

Let's go even a little further. Say you are doing a promotion in a newsgroup (I talk about how to do newsgroup promotions and get tremendous results in my Internet Marketing Course, click here to check it out)... you assign yourself an associate number and put that associate URL in the signature portion... you can check exactly how many visitors you got from that one promotion, how many sales you got, not just the one time, but over and over and over again. You can assign a different associate number, and track every single promotion separately.

Use it when you do a free classified ad promotion. In other words you assign yourself an associate number, use that, and it will tell you exactly how many visitors and sales you got.

This way you know exactly how many visitors you get from classified ads vs. how many visitors you got from the banner ads you placed. How many visitors you got from an Ezine sponsorship ad you placed vs. how many visitors you got from trading links with somebody.

It will also help you pinpoint problems. For example, if your stats say that 500 visitors came to the site, no one bought… either you have a very misleading ad attracting "unqualified" visitors, or you may have a webpage or sales material which is not doing a good job at converting visitors into sales. All of this is invaluable information!

Let's even go one step further to show you the uses for this.

You don't have to rely on what people want you to believe... when you can get the cold, hard facts! For example if someone approaches you to trade links... they could claim that, "I have 20,000 visitors coming to my site a month and you are probably going to get a 5% click through." in reality they may only have 2,000 visitors coming through their site! By assigning an associate number to the link you can find out exactly how many visitors are actually clicking through the reciprocal link and coming to your site. And if you find that they are not sending you enough visitors, you can cancel your reciprocal link agreement. Do you see the advantages of this? The benefits are huge.

You can track it all. The advantages are just incredible! You just HAVE to start tracking your advertising this way today!

So that is the "secret weapon" our Associate Program software gives us. Just the ad tracking capabilities, in my opinion, are worth the Associate Program software purchase alone. It really gives you power with your advertising dollar. For details on some of the most powerful associate program software on the market click here. This is a really, really good way of using Associate Programs in a unique and creative manner.

Let me reword that. Even if you don't use the software for your own Associate Program, but use it for ad-tracking... it is worth every penny! It will allow you to know for sure where you are making money and where you are losing money. It will help you streamline your business, making it a lean mean money machine...by taking out the ads that don't work and keeping ads that do work, and testing new ones over and over again.

To summarize… a very, VERY, very powerful way to make money online!