I am looking for websites and other high traffic areas that have a high percentage of their visitors being business owners.  The service my company provides is specific for small business owners.  Of course, finding affiliates that have websites with this traffic is a tough thing to do.

Aside from typing "small business" into google and sifting through all 8 billion results, Are there any ways I can affiliates that have small business owner traffic?

[Small Biz Survival]

Like a well-scripted novel, a good blog usually keeps you engaged and waiting for more. With everything that’s on the Web today, it’s impossible to filter and summarize all that’s relevant to a specific business discipline. A blog also helps you establish a public dialogue where anyone can participate and learn … Here are a few of my favorite small business blogs I’ve stumbled across:

Small Biz Survival

A description on the site reads: “By and for small business people in rural areas and small towns,” and that’s exactly what this weblog is. Regular features fall into primarily five subjects: Ideas revolving around entrepreneurial or community growth, new or particularly useful small business resources found on the Web, reviews on helpful online tools or interesting Web utilities, and point-of-view stories from small business owners sharing both their accomplishments and failures. Once a week, business owners can promote their products or services in the Brag Basket, where touting your business success is encouraged. The primary contributor, Becky McCray, is on a clear mission to revive public loyalty to small business and offers a great personal touch to the blog. Bookmark their site, as I did, and you can follow their progress.

Flyte: Web Marketing Strategies for Small Business

Flyte’s notably entertaining and informative blog features tech savvy Rich Brooks tackling the kind of Web issues that budding entrepreneurs face every day. Updated three to four times a week, topics include: e-mail marketing, social media, search engine optimization, Website design and marketing, blog writing, related small business news and more. Digging in, I found posts like “How to Keep Visitors at Your Website” and “Social Media Overload.” Entertain yourself and visit their About Us page where the staff cleverly placed their favorite toddler pics next to their respective bios. I’ll admit that at first I thought this was a group of over-achieving preschoolers running the show. Then I went a little bit deeper. According to his own bio, Rich is not only an experienced blogger but also an avid speaker who entertains national audiences on subjects like Web design and Internet marketing. Among many other activities and involvements he also teaches a class at the University of Southern Maine called “Web Marketing for Entrepreneurs.”

The Entrepreneurial Mind

Jeff Cornwall, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Belmont University, hosts a daily blog on just about everything entrepreneurial. To really find what you’re looking for here I suggest scrolling down a little bit to the left hand drop-down bar labeled “Flag Sticks”. Here, blog topics can be searched by subject, like Family Business, Entrepreneurial Finance, Entrepreneurial Myths, and Bootstrapping with articles like "Competing with the Big Boys on Cyber Monday" or "If I Only Had the Money" myth. A well researched and informative blog that stays current with today’s trends. Special thanks to Jeff and the student body for sharing their research.

Duct Tape Marketing

Waggish name aside, Duct Tape Marketing is a small-business-centric site diving deep into marketing-related topics. Topics, ranging from “7 Tips for Successful Blogging” to “Social Networking with Training Wheels,” are all hosted by small business marketing specialists. Duct Tape marketing founder, John Jantsch, brings over 20 years of marketing experience and specializes in helping small businesses create and implement effective marketing plans.

RetailEmail.Blogspot

Want to find out what your big-box competitors are doing to win customers? It’s easy, just spy on them. Better yet, you can count on RetailEmail.Blogspot to conduct the espionage for you. The blog showcases e-mails sent out by your retail rivals and diagrams what is done effectively or poorly. They monitor the e-mail marketing campaigns of more than 100 of the top retailers on the Web, meaning that you can stay on top of the trends without a million-dollar marketing budget. You can search by selling season, retailer, topic and more. The latest post I saw on the site was a Harry & David e-mail they had critiqued. Overall, the site functions as an excellent resource for any small business marketer trying to stay hip in the e-mail world.

Church of the Customer

Updated three to four times a week, the blog is an intellectual evaluation of how companies past and present interact and deal with their customers; decisions that small businesses can learn from. The site operators, Ben McConnell and Jackie Hubba are accomplished writers, speakers, and sought-after consultants. Contributing to the blog is a handful of other scholars and marketing gurus who put their best two cents on the table with every article. This is a successful blog that keeps you on your toes. Why the church? Because they teach you how to create “customer evangelists.” You can find out how you can develop customer loyalty and how to effectively manage your customers.  What’s more important than that? Well, that’s their point.

Small Business Brief

The Small Business Brief contains a treasure trove of links to helpful small-business-related articles found throughout the Web. It’s a well-structured and easy to navigate blog, offering direction for entrepreneurs on how to successfully plan, open and run a business. In the Small Business Ideas Forum, you can find plenty of topic listings concentrating mostly on e-commerce. Here you can find out more on topics like affiliate advertising and buying and selling advertising space. If you like what you read here, Fetch it!

Small Business Trends

This all encompassing blog tracks a wide range of small business issues, utilizing news commentary, links to related articles, interviews and an occasional book review. Updated daily, the blog speaks to all types of entrepreneurs. Much of the focus here is on achieving marketing success, but you can expect to find brief articles on nearly every subject. They regularly feature articles from a cast of almost forty industry experts so you can expect many points of view here. It’s up to you to disseminate.

Small Biz Mentor

How would you like to have your own small business mentor? Here you go. Most of the blogs you’ll read here are quick inspirations or an occasional anecdote from a happy customer like the article I read today “The Little Pizza Café That Could – Take Away for Any Small Business.” I even watched a humorous YouTube video capturing a clash between Chef Ramsey and a restaurant owner named Sabastian, which was featured on the reality TV series Kitchen Nightmares. You’ll find a steady stream of business related topics here. If you want to quickly peruse the archived articles or browse by topic, you can easily search through links posted on the right hand column of the blog.

Small Business Growth Strategies

Stephanie Chandler puts together a rich mix of articles for entrepreneurs and has compiled a list of hundreds of links to sites she recommends. She is a bona-fide entrepreneur who fled Silicon Valley and her corporate cohorts to pursue the American Dream. Like many Weblogs, you can quickly lose three hours of your day, hopping from blog to blog.

The Savvy Entrepreneur

I originally stumbled on this blog through a link on Small Business Growth Strategies and it hooked me right away. This blog speaks to a particular niche of service-based small business professionals.  Christine Favreau is a passionate entrepreneur who shares her tried-and-true experiences of running a small business in the service industry. You’ll find a collection of her thoughts, research, challenges, opinions, tools and tricks of the trade.

Seeds of Growth: Ideas to Help Small Business Grow

This is a good place to plant a bookmark. This blog combines original articles with content filtered from their favorite blogs across the Web. I found a mix of offbeat subjects and interesting articles like “The Cannonball Business Plan” and “The Pumpkin That Sold Me a House.” This blog is more of a casual read and the best you might walk away with is inspiration. Still, who doesn’t want to be inspired?

So with these twelve recommended blogs and of course our own at America’s Best Companies, you should never need to crack open a book or pay another consultant again.

If I’ve left out any particularly good ones, please feel free to add to the list!

[Build An E-Mail List To Build A Business:]

Savvy business owners know that success depends on exploring the variety of marketing opportunities available. But in order to maximize promotional budgets, these business owners must increasingly choose the right marketing opportunity based on their skill and knowledge level as well as their promotional budgets. While you may already be reaping the rewards of advertising in the Yellow Pages, local newspapers, television or radio, or even using door-to-door mailers, marketing your products and services on the Web provides greater reach into your prospective audience and a more cost-effective way to secure mind-share and profits for the long-term sustainability of your enterprise. That’s a marketing opportunity that you simply cannot deny.

Online shopping seems to get more popular every year, but people still love to get out of the house and go shopping–and they always will. What’s changing is how shoppers prepare for their excursions. For example, a recent analysis by comScore Networks reveals some important numbers about local search. The study states that 63 percent of U.S. Internet users (approximately 109 million people) performed a local search online in July 2006, a 43 percent increase from July 2005. What’s more, during the second quarter of 2006, 47 percent of local searchers visited a local merchant after their search, aided by the fact that many local search engines offer location mapping as well. Simply put, those taking advantage of local search will see more customers than those who do not.

The following are some simple suggestions that you, as a brick and mortar business, can employ to get the word out about your product or service immediately and do it by only investing your time, your most precious resource as a small business owner, and not the dollars that keep your business profitable. While you should at least have a modest Web presence that users can use to learn a little more about what it is that your company actually does, the following tips do not require that you have a website at all and instead focus on how, along with some creative thinking, you can market your products, services, or solutions on the Internet by spending a few hours of your time each month and without breaking the bank.

Build An E-Mail List To Build A Business:

E-mail changed marketing for the better. As a direct response medium, e-mail enables you to keep prospects interested in what you are offering and informed about what you are doing or offering at a fraction of the cost of postal mail. While many people will tell you that you will need lots of bells and whistles to market effectively through e-mail, the truth of the matter is that there are several services and resources online to help you manage communications sent by e-mail while simultaneously building essential relationships with your client base that you need for long-term success. For example, anyone can set up an account on either Yahoo! Groups or Google Groups and have a ready-made platform to share messages (sales or marketing messages, too). If you are a plumber in Topeka, you can set up one of these groups and share information on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule about how to maintain a plumbing system or current discounts you are offering on sink installation. When someone needs a referral, chances are excellent that it will come from one of the e-mail subscribers who trust you because you are the one providing valuable information. The real benefit besides the free price tag is that all the hard work (coding, e-mail delivery, etc.) is done for you. All the group owner has to do is promote the group to their customers. The referrals will come over time as long as you are dedicated to its success

Social Networking:

There has been an influx the past few years in social networking on the Web. Destinations such as MySpace.com and others enable you to set up a presence on the Internet and network with those people using your products and services. Marketing your business on MySpace is effective as it enables you to build a relationship and network with your users and prospects. For example, a florist might want to use a site like MySpace to keep in touch with customers who use their services regularly. Business owners can get valuable feedback from these users to improve their services or get insight into why some use their solutions while others don’t. (Are the roses fresh? Are the lilies expensive?) In addition, as referrals are usually the lifeblood of any enterprise (large or small), MySpace users frequently search for and find recommendations from those in their network.

There are also some other important services on the social networking scene which you should investigate including Yelp.com and JudysBook.com. It is free to create a profile at both of these services and add information about your company. What makes these Web sites so important to your Web marketing is that the members of these communities routinely and actively share their experiences with other members. Asking your existing clients to share a review will ensure you receive exposure and in the end may just generate some new business.

Local Focused Search Sites:

When your prospects use the Internet, chances are good they will use it to search and find something – ideally your business and not those of your competitors. Most of these users conduct their searches at Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, or MSN, and lucky for you, these companies all offer you a free way to list your company. In addition, several of these companies enable local business operators to provide additional details such as hours of operation, area of focus (zip codes, neighborhoods, etc.), and, in some cases, details about their products and services. You can learn more by visiting your preferred search engine and conducting a search for the term “local business listings.”

Keep in Mind:
While many of the aforementioned services are complimentary, there is still some cost associated with marketing your company online – namely time. If you can set aside a few hours each month to generate some exposure through the free methods above, you’ll see the increase in new sales almost immediately if done correctly.

Also keep in mind that establishing stringent controls about your business information will play an important role in your success. Ensuring the consistency of your brand across various distribution channels will mean that all prospects will receive the same information and will not be mislead. In the end, when consumers trust you they will be back to spend again and again.

Small business owners would also be wise to track the results of their Web marketing. Being informed on what works and what does not will save you time and money. As a business owner, you can only lose if you do not engage in Web marketing. Now is the time, so get involved today.

America's Best is still giving their latest issue of their print publication to everyone free!

No credit cards, no surveys, simply fill out the mailing information form, submit, and enjoy the article when you recieve it!  No obligations whatsoever.

America's Best Magazine is not even able to be purchased or subscribed to right now.

We simply want your feedback, and want you to enjoy!

 /magazine/subscribe/Default.aspx

I recently had a phone conversation with a Pepperjam rep.  She explained to me that their network has 0 B2B affiliates, even though they really like our program, they didn't think their affiliates have the right kind of traffic.

She had no explanation why, aside from simply not having B2B Affiliates.

Does anyone know if there may be a specific reason for this?  I want to list my $100 CPA program on a network, but if the others are going to have the same feeling, I don't want to waste upfront setup fees only to find out, none of them focus on B2B programs, or recruit B2B affiliates.

Any comments are welcome! 

Here are a couple of website tools that allow you to "semi-auto" submit articles to some of the top social bookmarking sites.  Social Bookmarks and Blogs are a quick way to get your site indexed into google very quickly (sometimes in only minutes).

1.  socialmarker.com
2.  onlywire.com

Social Marker has more sites to submit to, onlywire is a little less glitchy.

If you know or have a list of other "semi-auto" article submission tools, please list them!

ABC is a nationwide organization providing a number of benefits and services to small business owners. 
Some of them are:
Web hosting, web design, online directory placement, marketing materials, member discount program, networking functions, subscription to America's Best Magazine and a number of other services.

The list is always growing, and we're always looking for new ways to help small businesses.

The best comparison would be similiar to a local chamber of commerce or BBB, but on a nationwide scale, and actually providing tangible benefits.

Very unique.  In 2 1/2 years, over 10,000 small business owners have signed up.  Each member pays $299 for a year long membership.

The affiliate program we are running, pays $100 out of the $299.  So you make 33%.  We are interested in growing our memberbase very quickly, in order to add more services.  So they affiliate program is designed to be aggresive with a high payout.

Hopefully you give it a try!  Any questions, please email me!

Thanks for having me on the board. If a mod could please delete my thread from the other area that has a post about my affiliate program, that would be great.  I don't want to cause a problem having 2 threads with the same topic.  I see 3 boards that have similiar topics. Of course I want to make sure I'm posting in the proper one!!

Hello to all Affearners Members!

I'd like to introduce our new affiliate program.  America's Best Companies is happy to announce that for any affiliate or individual website that refers a new signup to the ABC website, they will earn a $100 commission!

There are no minimum sales, and the payout is WEEKLY.  If you get a sale today, you get paid next Friday.  Also, direct deposit or check mail by options available.

This is an exciting, fast growing program, over 10,000 nationwide members to ABC in 2 years!

Details are on the website.  Signup is free, and once you create your account, you will gain access to all the tool using your username and password!

Also, we are looking for feedback, and want to make sure that everything you need to make cash now, is provided for.  Sometimes, dealing with the Merchant direct can get you better hands on service.

https:// /programs/affiliates/Apply.aspx

We have added more banner ads and text link selections.  Create Your Account Today (FREE) and view the options that are available today!

 /programs/affiliates

The ABC Affiliate Program provides you with official America’s Best Companies banners and links to place on your website, blogs, newsletters or online advertising campaigns. You'll earn commissions for every approved enrollment.

Once you are an ABC Affiliate, you will also have access to text links and several different size banner ads, including 468x60, 180x150, 300x250, 120x600 and many more. If you want to write your own content, please send us a copy for review at affiliates.

• Earn a $100.00 commission per enrollment
  Get paid weekly
  Customers can enroll 24 hours a day via the Internet
  Receive an email alert every time you make a sale
  Real-time reporting and sales support
  Access to marketing tips and online advertising tools