Affiliate marketing tips report

Affiliate Marketing Tips

Affiliate
Marketing Tips
Your A-Z Guide to Generating Affiliate Profits

By

Stephen Pierce

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In this new wave of technology, you can't do it all yourself, you have to form
alliances. -Carlos Slim Helu

What is affiliate marketing?

The definition of affiliate marketing depends a little on whether you are joining an
affiliate program, or setting up your own. If you set up an affiliate program, it can be
likened to having your own sales force to promote your product, and only having to
pay them when they make a sale. In this chapter, however, we will focus on joining
affiliate programs as an affiliate marketer, to promote other people’s products.

Affiliate marketing is great way to launch your online business, with relatively low
start up costs and hardly any risks. The principle behind affiliate marketing is simple;
you promote somebody else’s products on your website and they pay you a
commission for any sales you make.

In this report you will discover:

The advantages of affiliate marketing

10 expert tips for successful affiliate marketing

How to get started in affiliate marketing - Including where to look for affiliate
programs

Finding an affiliate marketing niche

Promoting your affiliate product - Including advertising and using websites or
information products

Common mistakes of affiliate marketers and how to avoid them

And much more…




The real advantages of affiliate marketing

Many people are making a living from affiliate marketing online. Here are a few of
the advantages to becoming an affiliate promoting someone else’s products, rather
than producing products of your own.

Low Risk. You’re not ultimately responsible for the product you are promoting
and you don’t have to spend your own money or time to create a product.

Proven Market. The products’ creators will already have researched the
demand for their product and will have some idea of their target market.

Keep your cash in your wallet. You have low start up costs. All you really
need to begin affiliate marketing is a website. You don’t necessarily have to
set up a new website, you can use relevant affiliate programs to optimize your
income from websites you already have.

No need to become an expert copywriter. Many of the tools you need will be
provided for you. The minimum you will be provided with is sales materials
such as banner ads and product benefits. Some affiliates are provided with
sales copy, sales letters, or even website templates.

Save time and money on operating costs. Affiliate marketers have low
overheads. By purely promoting someone else’s product rather than creating
your own you have no inventory to look after, no orders to process and no
customer service function to provide.

Passive income. One of the most enticing benefits of affiliate marketing is that
you can earn passive income. This means you stop trading hours for dollars.
You can review a product once, place the review on your website and that
review can potentially make you money over and over again. This is passive
income and affiliate marketing is one of the best businesses to get into for
anyone who likes the idea of passive income.

Flexibility. With affiliate marketing you can work as little or as much as you’d
like – you get back what you put into it. This means that your earnings aren’t
limited. If you simply want to work a few hours a week and build a business
that gives you extra spending money then you can do so. If you want to work
a little more and build a long-term business that gives you complete financial
freedom then you can do that as well.

There’s no denying that affiliate marketing offers many benefits. The best part of
affiliate marketing is that you can fit it into just about any niche or topic you’re
interested in. If your passion is pets for example, you can create an affiliate website
about pets and caring for pets. You can then earn money promoting products that pet
owners want. There’s something very appealing about making money doing
something you’re passionate about.

That doesn’t mean that every topic will be profitable but there are many that will be.
This report will help guide you in choosing the right affiliate marketing niche. Now
here are our top tips for succeeding in affiliate marketing…




10 expert tips for successful affiliate marketing

1. Diversify your product portfolio

Secure your income by promoting a wide diversity of
products for different companies. You can never be
sure how long a particular product will continue to sell
successfully so try not to put all your eggs in one
basket.

2. Dip your toe in first

Trying to start up too many sites and affiliate programs
when you start out as an affiliate marketer can mean
you don’t have enough time to dedicate to each one.
Beginning with one website and a handful of relevant
affiliate products will give you a chance to learn the
ropes. Once you have found the winning formula you
can repeat it over and over again.

3. Believe in your product

Make sure you test any product you promote
thoroughly before you begin to sell it. By promoting it
to your customers you are putting your reputation on
the line so making sure the product does what it is
supposed to do is just good business sense.

Check out the company selling the product you are
promoting. Is their customer service up to scratch? Is
their site professional and easy to navigate? Will they
treat your customers as you would wish them to?

4. Where do you send your customers?

Choose affiliate programs that link directly to the sales page for the product you
are promoting. If your affiliate link leads to a home page, your customers are
going to have to search for the product, meaning a lower conversion rate and
less commission for you.

5. Let’s talk money

Check out the payment terms of each affiliate program you join. What
percentage can you expect to get from each sale? Will you be paid only for a
sale, or will you get commission for each sales lead you generate?

6. Lifetime commissions equal lifetime profits

Try to find affiliate programs that have lifetime commissions. With a lifetime
commission you receive a percentage of the sale price every time a customer
you have recommended buys from the merchant site, whether they use your
affiliate link or not.




7. Pick up your megaphone.

You can have a great website promoting high quality affiliate products, and
fantastic sales copy that would convince the most skeptical visitor to buy, but if
you don’t have any traffic to your site you are not going to make a profit.
Successful affiliates spend around 75% of their working hours on marketing and
only around 25% on building, upgrading and improving their sites.

8. Sneaky or subtle?

Many internet users have become so accustomed to banner and sidebar links
that they tend to ignore them. Others are reluctant to click on obvious affiliate
links. Embedding subtle text links into your website content can make your
customers feel they are simply moving to another page of your site and tend to
attract more clicks.

The key to successful affiliate promotions is pre-selling on your site before the
customer clicks on the link. This way when they click on the recommended link
they are pretty much sold already.

9. Use your resources

When you join an affiliate program, check the company’s website to see if they
have relevant articles for you to download and reprint. Including these articles on
your site will increase your site content and you can include affiliate links at the
top and bottom of the article.

10. Build a customer list

Just because you’re selling someone else’s product doesn’t mean you shouldn’t
have your own list of customers. The wealthiest affiliates build assets. It makes
sense to build your own customer list rather than sending your traffic directly to
the vendor’s website.

By building your own list of subscribers, you have the opportunity to build a
relationship and promote products to them on a long-term basis.

Now that you know the basics of building your affiliate marketing business, lets
dive in and learn how to get started…




3 Steps to getting started in affiliate marketing

The stages to becoming an affiliate marketer are simple and reasonably quick.

Step 1 - Find your niche

Determining the type of affiliate products to promote is easy if you already have a
website that you want to optimize. You can simply choose products that are related
to your niche subject and either create new sales pages on your site or weave the
affiliate links into your existing content.

If you are starting from scratch then you are in a very exciting place to be! The world
is open to you, your interests, and your passions. Your first step is to decide on a
niche subject for your website. Look to your interests, hobbies and areas of
expertise; it is always easier and more satisfying to work with a subject you are
passionate about.

Be specific. Making your theme too general will make it difficult to gear your site to a
target audience and can make your choice of potential affiliate products
unmanageable. It is possible to promote organic gardening and nutrition
supplements or pet products and marketing software, buy why? You’re in the affiliate
marketing business to make money, right?

Great, let’s make some money.

Finding a niche within your chosen theme will help to give your site more direction.
Take the theme ‘parenting’ for example. Trying to design your site to cater for all
parents might be a tall order, but appealing to parents of a particular age of child is
much easier. Focusing on babies, toddlers or teenagers can help you to gear your
site more effectively towards your target audience.

Step 2 – Will your niche make you rich? Researching demand for your niche

There are several ways to find out whether your niche has enough demand to make
it work for you. Here are four suggestions to get you started:

1. Chat ‘em up. Join discussion forums related to your theme and see what
people are talking about. What question are they asking and what products
do they want? These forums can be a great place to promote affiliate
products when you get up and running, so building up your reputation as a
trusted expert in your field can be worthwhile.

2. Put on your spy gear. Or more simply, check out your competition. If there
are no online businesses operating in your chosen niche the chances are
there is no demand. Healthy competition should not be feared; if you have a
quality site and good products to sell you will be successful.

3. What’s the secret word? Do some keyword research to see what people are
looking for. Using a keyword research tool like Overture (now owned by
Yahoo!) is a simple way of finding out how many times a particular keyword
was entered into a search engine the previous month.




4. What will you sell? Make sure there are plenty of affiliate programs to choose
from relating to your niche. There is no point in setting up a great website for
affiliate marketing only to discover you have no products to promote. We will
discuss methods for finding affiliate programs in the next stage.

Step 3 – Make it worth your time. How to select quality affiliate programs

Businesses establish affiliate programs in two ways, either they will use an affiliate
network to advertise and manage their program, or they will manage it themselves.

1. Finding affiliate products through affiliate networks

This is the simplest way to find affiliate programs and can be a good way to find
products when you are starting out as an affiliate marketer. Affiliate networks
categorize programs to make it easy to find ones that fit within your niche. They
have clear policies and payment structures so your risk is very low.

One of the most popular affiliate networks is ClickBank.com.

About ClickBank.com

ClickBank is an online marketplace for all types of digital products from e-books
to software. Founded in 1998 ClickBank’s headquarters is in Idaho and they
have over 100,000 affiliate members.

If you choose to use ClickBank to search for affiliate programs you will have over
10,000 products to choose from. Commission rates vary from 1% to 75% .

It is free to open a ClickBank account and you can promote as many products as
you like using that account. ClickBank take a small fee from each sale before
your commission is calculated.

2. Finding independent affiliate programs

There are various ways of finding independent affiliate programs. If you are on
the mailing list for any online newsletters the chances are you will receive
promotions of affiliate programs on a regular basis. You may also come across
suitable affiliate products when you are surfing websites relating to your niche
catching up on the latest news and looking for ideas.

You could use search engines to look for affiliate products. Simply typing in your
topic with the word ‘affiliate’ will produce some valuable results. Making your
topic search as specific as possible is likely to produce the most relevant affiliate
programs. For example, outdoor affiliates will produce an abundance of results,
however, hiking affiliates or rock climbing affiliates will generate fewer, more
specific, products to promote.

Those are the three basic steps to getting started. Now lets look at one of the
most important steps for any affiliate marketer in more detail – finding and
researching a niche market…




Finding and researching a niche market

What is a niche?

A niche market is simply a smaller segment of a wider market which is interested
in a very specific subject.

For example, weight loss is a wide market, however, new moms who want to lose
their post baby weight is a niche market.

How do you know whether a market is a niche or not?

Simple, do the specific group of people you are targeting share the same needs
and problems?

For example, if your niche market is cocker spaniel owners then your market is a
specific group of people who all own cocker spaniels. They will all share similar
needs and problems because they all have something very much in common –
they are cocker spaniel owners.

Why is it so important to find a niche market?

Finding a niche market is extremely important for one main reason –
communication. When you know who you’re specifically speaking to through your
website, your promotions, your product reviews, etc. then it is a lot easier to
communicate effectively.

If you target a tight niche market then you’ll become an expert in what that market
wants. You’ll know what problems they have, what solutions they’re looking for
and what products can best provide the solutions to their problems.

Finding a niche market online is not only smart but necessary. As more and more
people come online it’s becoming increasingly difficult to cater to everyone. By
finding a specific group of people to cater to, then not only is your job easier but
you stand to make more money.

If in doubt remember the old saying – “Jack of all trades, master of none” –
Targeting a wide group is a little like that. You target everyone and end up
reaching no one at all, whereas with niche marketing you become the “master” of
your target market.

How to find affiliate marketing niches

Finding a niche market isn’t really difficult. If you look around, niche markets are
all around us. Think about the products you use everyday or the ads you see
while you’re watching television. What solutions are people looking for? What
problems do they have?

By simply keeping your eyes and ears open, you’ll start to identify different niche
markets all around you.




But other than keeping your eyes and ears open, there are some more technical
ways to find affiliate marketing niches.

The first step, as mentioned earlier in the report, is
to identify the areas you feel you know something
about or have a certain amount of expertise in.
While it’s not always possible to make money in a
niche you’re passionate about, it most certainly
helps to have an understanding of a niche or some
enthusiasm for it.

You will be spending a lot of time potentially
creating content and building your business within
your chosen niche, this may be difficult to do if you
find that niche uninteresting.

So jot down different areas you feel passionate
about or feel somewhat of an “expert” in. You don’t
need to know everything about the subject but just
enough to understand it well and to make your
research easier.

When you have a list of topics then it’s time to
research those to see if they can indeed be
profitable. But first, if you’re still not sure what
niche is right for you. Here are a few ideas to help
you find potential niches.

Finding potential niche markets

Visit Amazon.com – Amazon is a great source for
finding niche markets. There are books on just
about any topic under the sun. Have a look through
the different categories and the subcategories. You
can see how many titles are on sale under any
specific category. It’s also worth looking through
the customer reviews. This can give you a really good idea of what people are
looking for.

Visit Ezinearticles.com – Ezine Articles, like Amazon, is a great place for niche
market research. There are article categories on a large number of topics and
niche markets. When you look through the subcategories, take some time to look
at the different author websites.

Not only will this give you a good idea about available niches, but also help you
see what products and services are being promoted within those niches.

Browse through magazines – Magazines are good sources for finding niche
markets. If a magazine is selling, it means that it’s fairly successful. It’s not easy
to create and sell a print magazine so pay attention to the ones at your local
magazine stand. But most importantly look through the advertisements within the




magazine. These are the people funding the publication and the products they
are promoting can give you a lot of insight into your potential niche market.

Visit online forums – Online forums can give you a real sneak peek into your
potential niche market. By taking a look through forums you can see how
passionate people are about certain topics. You can also identify what their
problems are and what solutions they may be looking for.

Researching potential niche markets

During your search for niche markets you would have probably started to create a
picture of whether or not that niche could be profitable. However, there are some
specific ways to ensure that your niche will actually make you money. And while
nothing is 100% certain, you can remove almost all of the uncertainty with good
market research.

Here are a few ways to ensure your niche has money-making potential.

Do your keyword research – There is no substitute for keyword research.
Keywords online are a great indicator for the profitability of a niche because you
can learn exactly what your market is looking for. A good keyword tool will tell you
how many searches a keyword phrase has per month, give you additional
keyword terms and help you create a picture of your ideal target customer.

One of the best keyword research tools available is Word Tracker. It has all the
features you need to conduct proper market research and can potentially save
you a lot of time and money, well worth the small monthly fee.

You can also use the free keyword tool at Overture as a good starting point to
your keyword research.

Look at the advertisers – Taking a good look at the advertisers within your
potential niche will give you a great idea of the profitability of that niche. A good
starting place is to look at the sponsored ads that appear on your search page
when you type in your keyword phrase.

Jot down the advertiser websites and visit them to see what their approach is and
what products they’re selling. If there are a lot of affiliates advertising certain
products, it’s very likely that it’s a very profitable niche.

And don’t let competition scare you off. It’s better to get into a niche that has
potential even though a bit competitive rather than get into a niche that doesn’t
have very much or not potential at all.

Pay attention – Paying close attention to what people are talking about online
gives you a lot of information about potential niches. View different forums and
see what people are talking about. Also take time to read product reviews on
several websites related to your niche market.

Finding a niche online is important to the success of your affiliate marketing
business. The good news is that it’s not difficult. The tips in this report will




definitely help you get started on the right foot and place you well on your way to
finding a profitable affiliate marketing niche.

Now that you’ve chosen your niche, let’s take a look at setting up your affiliate
marketing website!

Promoting for profits

The simplest way of promoting your affiliate products is on your own website. Some
people choose to have a dedicated site for each product, and some prefer to weave
affiliate links into a larger information site, often it depends on the products you are
promoting.

Once you have mastered affiliate marketing on your own website you can start
looking at alternative methods of promotion. Embedding links in information products
such as e-books, reports, articles and blogs can be a profitable way to promote
products. Taking out ads to promote your products is also a method worth looking
into. Let’s take a look at both options a little more in depth.

How to use affiliate links for maximum exposure and sales.

There are various ways to promote affiliate products on your site. You can choose
any method, or try a combination of the following to see which works best for you.

1. Full sales page
2. Advertising
3. Embedding links in your content

Embedding links into your content is a more subtle way of promoting affiliate
products. However, if you provide great content then you are “pre-selling” your
readers. This means they are more likely to purchase the product when they click on
your affiliate link.

A typical way to do this might be to post a series of articles all relating to different
aspects of your niche subject, and each geared towards a particular affiliate product.
For example…

==============================

Example

Niche – Babies

Article subject Affiliate product

Setting up your baby’s nursery Baby furniture
Baby’s first weeks E-book on caring for new born babies
Getting out and about with your baby Baby strollers or travel systems

==============================




Your article will outline a need for your customer, and recommend the product as the
answer to that need. You can incorporate the promotion for the product within the
informative content, and insert a couple of links to the product sales page.

A high quality, well written article will encourage your reader to take your advice and
follow the link. By the time they arrive at the sales page of the product they will be
primed to purchase.

Other arenas for promoting affiliate products

Once you have your site up and running, and have some experience promoting
affiliate products, you can try some of these other methods to see which work best
for your niche.

1. Articles

Writing articles is one of the quickest and simplest alternatives to a website when
you are promoting affiliate products. If you have chosen four affiliate products to
promote, for example, all you need to do is write four articles, each geared
towards one of the products.

The most effective articles do not feel like a sales pitch but instead offer
information about a general subject that relates to your product. A good idea
would be to write about a problem or issue that your affiliate product will solve.
Recommend the product in a subtle way, highlighting its main benefits, and
include your affiliate link to the product’s sales page.

Once you article is written you can submit it to various e-zines and article
directories for other people to download. This creates a high level of exposure to
your affiliate link and can make you a great deal of commission, in a short period
of time, with very little effort.

Including a link back to your site in the byline of your articles can give you the
opportunity to capture the reader’s details for your list. Selling further products to
that person will already be easier as they have read one of your articles and
chosen to receive information from you.

2. E-books

Suggesting writing an e-book to promote an affiliate product may seem like a lot
of work to some people. It may be that you have chosen the path of affiliate
marketing because you don’t want to have to create your own product. However,
a well written viral e-book is a great way to increase your affiliate income.

So what exactly is a viral e-book?

It is an e-book that spreads quickly around the online community just like a
persistent virus. The purpose of a viral e-book is not to make money from initial
sales, but to gain maximum exposure to the affiliate links that are scattered
throughout the book.

How do I make my e-book viral?




There are a couple of steps to making your e-book viral. Firstly you should
create a high quality, information rich e-book. Then you should sell it for a
relatively low price, giving all the people that buy it the resale rights. With the
resale rights your customers will be able to sell or give away your e-book creating
maximum exposure to your affiliate links.

Why are viral e-books so effective?

While your e-book will evidently appeal to your niche market, it will also appeal to
the vast numbers of ‘internet marketers’ online, even those that have no interest
in your subject. People are always looking for quality products that they can sell
or give away for free, to gain credibility with their customers, or to use as an
incentive for subscribing to their list.

3. Free reports

Giving away a free report to anyone that signs up to your list is a good way to
increase your affiliate income. Your reports should be written around the affiliate
products you are promoting and should include affiliate links throughout. Reports
are not difficult to put together; they can be a small collection of articles, or a
series of tips relating to your niche. Whatever format the content is in, it should
be informative and useful and not a blatant advertising campaign for your affiliate
products.

You could create a multi-part report, with your customers receiving a part each
day for a week from the day they sign up to your list. Each part of the report,
which could be a short article, might relate to a specific affiliate product. Using
this method gives you multiple chances to sell to your customer. If they do not
follow your affiliate links the first day, they might on the second, third or fourth.

4. Blogs

If you already write a blog, you can incorporate affiliate links into your posts very
effectively. You can warm up your audience by mentioning the product a few
times in your posts before you actually provide them with a link. That way they
will already be familiar with the product and its benefits before they click on the
link.

Blog audiences are a perfect market as they already trust you and find the
information you provide useful or entertaining. This will make them much more
likely to buy a product that you have endorsed.

Mix it up. You don’t need to worry that if you have promoted a product once on
your blog, you can’t mention it again. As long as you leave adequate time
between posts you can write about it again. Try to come up with a different angle
for your post. Your new readers will be seeing the product for the first time and
your regular customers will see that you are being consistent in your
recommendations.




Advertising your affiliate product

As well as promoting your affiliate products on your website, or through information
products, you could choose to place ads for your affiliate program. Below we discuss
three types of adverts; pay per click advertising, classified ads and solo ads.

Pay per click profits

For those that are not familiar with the concept of PPC,
or Pay Per Click advertising, here is a brief explanation:

To take out a PPC ad, you pay to have your ad placed
on the results page of a search engine for a particular
keyword phrase relating to your product. You have
probably noticed that when you run a search in Google
the top two or three results are often highlighted.
These are PPC ads.

The cost of a PPC ad depends on the popularity of the
keyword phrase. People bid on the keyword and the
highest bidders get their ads displayed. Each time a
customer clicks on the ad you have to pay the amount
that you bid.

As well as search engine results pages, you can also
have your PPC ads displayed on relevant websites.
Google AdWords is one example of this type of service.
It looks for a particular keyword phrase on a webpage
and finds PPC ads for that keyword.

Here are some tips for promoting your affiliate products
with PPC ads:

Make the text displayed on your add as
specific as possible. You only want highly
targeted traffic to click on your ad or you will be
paying for visitors that have no interest in your
product.

Look for keywords that are as specific as possible to your product. The
people that enter ‘affiliate marketing e-book’ are more likely to buy an
affiliate marketing e-book from you than those that enter simply ‘affiliate
marketing’. Affiliate marketing e-book is a less popular keyword phrase and
so will demand a lower PPC rate, but you will get a more targeted audience,
an audience that is ready to buy your products.

Balance the amount you are paying and the commission you are receiving to
ensure you make a profit. As a rough guide look for keywords that have a
PPC rate of around $0.06 and affiliate products that have commission of at
least $30 per sale.




Keep a close eye on the amount you are paying out for PPC. This can
mount up very quickly and unless you know what you are spending you
might end up paying out more than you make.

Test and track. Your PPC account will offer you a multitude of tools to test
and track your campaigns. Use these tools. You’ll find that some ads
generate tons of traffic and few purchases. Some ads will generate few
clicks to your site however everyone that visits makes a purchase. It’s
important to track and test your ads and find the ones that bring you the
biggest bang for your buck.

Classified Ads

Classified ads are small, four or five line advertisements placed in e-zines. Some
internet marketers doubt the value of classified ads, but placed in the right publication
they can be a profitable way to promote your affiliate product. Spend a little time
researching your niche for popular e-zines.

The main advantage of using e-zines is that they are really inexpensive, so they are
perfect for when you are starting out and have little capital to invest.

Here are a couple of tips for running a classified ad:

Check the e-zine’s policy to see how long your ad can be.

Grab the attention of your readers with a killer headline. Use it to lure them
to your website where they can learn exactly how your product or products
will solve their problems.

Look at other ads in the publication and see what formats are effective. If
you are interested in a particular ad, the chances are your customers will be
too.

You will not have space to do justice to all your product’s benefits in such a
short ad. Perhaps consider using the ad to direct readers to your opt-in
page so you can capture their e-mail address and market to them at a later
date.

Solo Ads

Solo ads differ from classified ads as they are not placed in the e-zine itself, but are
sent out separately on their own. This means they can be a little longer, so check the
e-zines policy on length before you start writing.

Although some marketers believe that short ads are more effective as there is less to
read, the mainstream view is that a long ad is more effective if it is content rich and
well written.

Test both types to see which work best for you and your audience. Additionally, as in
all advertising, an attention grabbing headline is crucial in solo advertising. If your




customers open an e-mail and are not immediately interested in the headline, they
will close it down and delete it as junk.

Business Planning Exercise: Write an e-zine advertisement for your product or an
affiliate product.

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Common mistakes of affiliate marketing and how to avoid them.

There is no doubt it is possible to make an income from affiliate marketing online.
Forrester Research has predicted that in 2008 $280 billion in e-commerce sales will
be produced by affiliate programs and networks. Someone is profiting, why not let it
be you?

But what if affiliate marketing does not seem to be working for you? Here are some of
the common mistakes to avoid when you are starting out as an affiliate marketer:

1. All lookers and no buyers.

This problem is generally caused by failure to really pre-sell the products you
are promoting. Anticipating the needs of your audience and convincing them
that your affiliate product will address that need should increase your
conversion rate. A well designed affiliate marketing site will have your
customers prepared to buy the product before they even click on the link.

2. Human elements sell better than clever copy every time.

Don’t rely on advertising over testimonials. Although banner ads and
sidebars on your webpage can lead to affiliate sales, they are not as effective
as personal recommendations and endorsements. Online customers are
becoming immune to traditional advertising but the human element of a
recommendation can still dramatically increase your sales.

Even though your customers are probably aware that you make a
commission from recommending a product, they will reason that you would
not endorse something you didn’t believe in as that would damage your
reputation and credibility.




Do write a heartfelt enthusiastic endorsement. It may take some practice, but
it will be well worth the effort when the commission begins to roll in.

3. Taking names!

Don’t forget to ask your customers for their e-mail addresses, whether that is
to receive a newsletter, or a free report. If you don’t, you are missing out on a
great opportunity. Very few people buy from a site on their first visit. Do
capture their e-mail address you can gain their trust and ensure you have
many chances to sell to them in the future.

4. Connect with your visitors.

No matter how interesting and informative the content of you site is, most of
your visitors won’t stay and browse unless you have injected some of your
personality into it. Add some personal details, perhaps a photo, and try to
make the content sound as though you are actually talking to your visitors.

5. Repeating the same mistakes

Many affiliate marketers find they are only making a small profit from one
product, so they decide to promote a large number of products in order to
increase this income. All you really achieve with this is repeating a formula
that doesn’t work very well. If you are not generating much income from your
affiliate products look at different ways to market them. Having a few well
marketed products is always better than hundreds that get little exposure.
Don’t be afraid to try something new rather than simply repeating tried and
tested methods on a larger scale.

6. Tell before you sell.

To much sales and too little content turns people off. Whether you are
promoting affiliate products via a website or information products, your
customers will want to learn something from you rather than reading a blatant
sales pitch. As a general rule you should be aiming for 80% quality content
and 20% sales. Making sure you have valuable information on your site, in
articles and in reports will help you to build up trust with your customers,
which in turn will make them more likely to buy products that you have
endorsed.

Affiliate marketing can be an excellent way to get started in online business or a
powerful, profitable addition to a current business. There are amazing and wonderful
products to sell and wonderful companies to partner with. Being an affiliate marketer
isn’t just about making money, it’s about promoting products that you believe in and
are passionate about – this is key to becoming a super affiliate.




Affiliate Marketing Worksheet:

Marketing affiliate products is an excellent way to add income to your bottom line and
provide your customers with valuable and beneficial products.

What niche will you market your affiliate products to?

___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________

What products or services you’re already familiar with compliment your business or
your website?

___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________

After researching affiliate products, what products did you find that you may be
interested in promoting?

___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________

How will these products meet your customer’s needs?

___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________

How will you promote your affiliate products?
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________




Blueprint to success: Affiliate marketing steps.

Step 1. Find a niche. Begin with topics you’re passionate about or extremely
interested in.

Step 2. Research demand and supply for your niche. You can use keyword
research tools such as Word Tracker or use the PPC research tools provided by
Google. Then using a search engine like Google, you can enter your keywords and
find the supply. Enter the keywords in quotes for a more accurate number.

Step 3. Build a website around your niche subject. Most affiliate sites offer a
tremendous amount of content to not only attract visitors but to provide benefit and
increase search engine ranking.

Step 4. Find relevant affiliate marketing programs that compliment your website
concept. This will involve researching specific companies you have in mind for your
business as well as seeking new companies to promote. A good place to start is an
affiliate directory or a Google search. Simply type your keyword and the word
affiliate and begin evaluating the results. Your search will look like this for the niche
subject organic gardening; +organic gardening + Affiliate

Step 5. Begin creating content and preselling your products. Note that preselling
means creating content that generates interest in a product so that your visitor clicks
through to the product website.

Step 6. Use traffic generation tools discussed in Chapter 4 to send customers to
your website.




About The Stephen Pierce
Stephen Pierce, President & CEO of Stephen
Pierce International, Inc., (SPI) is a world-
renowned wealth-builder, internet marketer,
speaker and author.

Known as “The Success Sculptor,” Stephen is
at the helm of SPI, a multi-million dollar a year
empire that manages a portfolio of premiere
web destinations, products, services, and
provides a number of wealth building tools to
home-based business entrepreneurs, internet
marketers, and corporate marketing
professionals around the world.

A sought after media expert on personal
finance, Stephen has been featured on NBC
News, FOX News, ABC, CBS, Black
Enterprise, Day star, Keeping it Real with Al
Sharpton, American Urban Radio Network, and
the Tom Joyner Morning Show.

He also enjoys a lucrative national and
international speaking career. He can also be
seen live around the country on the nationally-
acclaimed Get Motivated Seminar Tour, where
he shares the stage with Colin Powell, Sarah
Palin, Bill Cosby, Goldie Hawn, and John
Walsh.

He has authored several books including, “Make Real Money on the Internet,”
“Secrets to Creating Wealth”, and “More Money, More Life” (audio CD), as well as a
host of on-line marketing portals, e-books, webinars, publications and presentations.

You can learn more about Stephen at www.StephenPierceInc.com.



Affiliate marketing tips report

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