Affiliate Marketing Secrets

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Affiliate marketing is a profession. Just like any marketer, a professional affiliate marketer should be prepared to promote just any product without prior experience with the related market. Sometimes it is a way to meet your monthly cap, you need to win a contest, or you find an under-promoted product that corresponds to a huge market but you just don’t understand why it is neglected. As you might have already learned, finding the market should be done before finding the product. In our case we just have to invert the process and do it backwards in this respect.

First of all, and before you start bidding on keywords or buying traffic, we need to have an idea who needs this product. Say you are stuck with a hosting offer and you want to promote it because of the high commission but you’d never been in the hosting market. You’ll need to come up with an idea about who might need hosting? Say you picked small businesses, network marketers, and a student union. Now you have to take them one by one and find out more about each market.

Once again, say you want to get small businesses to buy hosting from you. Divide that category into businesses that already have a website and those who’d never had one before. To approach the first group you need to investigate about their current hosting company and make sure that the company you are promoting is offering more, like more space, more bandwidth, easy to use, harder to hack… etc. If you can as well save them money your chances of getting them to transfer to buy your offer will be higher.

Since you are doing every thing online you’ll need to build a buffer website and make one page target small businesses with hosting with company A, another page for businesses with company B, and so on. Then get each group of companies to see their corresponding page. You can do that via email marketing (not spam marketing) or by advertising a survey page that includes questions about their current hosing and how satisfied they are. Let the survey take them to corresponding page on your buffer website.

Those who’d never had a website before require a different approach. They need to know first what they are missing for not having a website. Those businesses can be reached offline by phone. As you see, if you do your homework by knowing more about the market you can still promote any product. And your start point is: Who needs this product? Tailor your promotion to fit with your market, and pick the traffic that suits your market.

Formal affiliate marketing training, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. The good news is that I have a completely free affiliate marketing training seris posted on my website: http://marketing-online-101.com where I explain it the way I do it.

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Affiliate marketing is the process of paying someone to do the advertising for you, then you pay them per sale or action. This is affiliate marketing from the advertisers’ (the product seller) point of view. Affiliates don’t see it that way though.

As an affiliate here is my definition of affiliate marketing: it’s the process of match-making a buyer with a seller. This definition was first introduced to affiliates’ training by Travis Sago, the author of “Bum Marketing”.

Starting to make money on the Internet as an affiliate is one of the easiest business models. The low start up costs made it easy for everyone, whether qualified or not, to start an affiliate marketing business. 2010 witnessed the release of tens of affiliate marketing training courses that claim to be the best ever in the field. That made it even easier for new affiliates to start their businesses.

In the process of match-making a seller with a buyer, the affiliates spend money and/or effort gathering information about the product and what it can do to which group of people. Then they spend more money and/or effort on advertising.

In this process the affiliates are taking all the risk on themselves, and only get paid for their successful promotional efforts. All of the experimenting, tweaking, researching, and optimizing expenses are on them. This situation resulted in two kinds of affiliates:

1. Those who would do anything to get the most out of their promotional efforts, including unethical and sometimes illegal practices, and

2. The affiliates who try hard to make their living honestly but fail to break even several times and finally they drop the ball and look for something else to do.

The super affiliates are not necessarily unethical or using the so called “black hat” techniques, but for most of them success didn’t come over night. They learned from their mistakes and had their “light-bulb moments”. Each on of them has specialized in one form or another to drive the “hungry crowds” down their promotional funnels and only started experimenting with other methods after they mastered what they are doing.

Formal affiliate marketing training, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. The alternative is buying all of the affiliate marketing training courses and learning from them, or doing your own research and gathering the information that you need in order to start.
The good news is that I have a completely free affiliate marketing training sereis posted on my website: http://marketing-online-101.com where I explain it the way I do it. But without the right vision and business mindset all of the training of the world will be worthless. So learn first, plan, then execute.

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Whether you are new to affiliate marketing or an experienced veteran you’ll be asking yourself this question at least occasionally; where to start? There are several ways to start affiliate marketing, but they all fall into one of two main categories:

1. to start with the product and try to find a market for it, or

2. to start with the market research, then find a product that fits with it.

Starting with the product might sound like the easiest way to go, but is not necessarily going to be easy all the way. You might find a great product that other affiliates are aggressively promoting, but if you target the wrong market you’ll not be as successful as you want.

On the other hand, starting with the market research might seem harder, but if it is done properly the rest of the process will be almost effortless. Here is why:

By searching the market and finding out what people want, you are getting the advantage of knowing your market better than most of your competitors. Thinking like a customer is the best way to do the market research.

During the market research process you’ll gather information about your market that only you can match with a product that fits with your market. And if done properly, the thirsty market will absorb your product like a sponge absorbs water.

There are several ways to do the market research for your affiliate marketing, here are 3 of the most effective ones as practiced by myself:

1. Watch talk shows, commercials, infomercials, and the news to pick up new ideas for markets to explore. Right down the broad terms (like “back pain”) in your list of potential markets that you’ll research later

2. Check Amazon and eBay for the hottest trends. This will give you an idea of what’s selling right now so that you tailor your market research around these items. Focus on “who might want to buy this product” and do your research on that basis.

3. Check your “Spam” or “Junk” folder in your email for what spammers are trying to promote. Take ideas from these emails, but you don’t have to promote the same products.

Formal affiliate marketing training, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. The good news is that I have a completely free affiliate marketing training series posted on my website: http://marketing-online-101.com where I explain it the way I do it.

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Affiliate marketing involves 3 main activities: finding buyers, finding the products that they want, and bringing the two together. During the process of finding the buyers, an affiliate marketer is supposed to gather enough information to know what exactly do they want. This piece of information is the first guide on how to find a good product to promote.

The Product Itself:

The main reason you might consider promoting a product as an affiliate is that this product provides the solution that the buyers are looking for. If you can’t try it yourself search for people who did and make sure it really provides the value your buyers are looking for.

The Sales Page:

Whether it’s a long sales page or just a short description, make sure it displays that particular thing that your buyers are looking for. If they can’t see it in the sales page you’ll have a hard time selling it to them.

Another thing to look for is a professionally designed and written sales page. Nothing is more turning off than finding advertising or low quality graphics on the sales page.

Affiliate Networks Vs. In-House Affiliate Programs:

Affiliate networks, like ClickBank and Commission Junction, play the role of the organizer of the affiliate marketing process for both the vendors (also called advertisers) and the affiliates (also called publishers). The network guarantees that affiliates get the agreed upon commission, and that the advertisers get value for their money by monitoring fraudulent activities of some affiliates.

In-house affiliate programs, on the other hand, are run by the advertiser. Some advertisers are reputable, like Amazon and eBay, and are going to pay you if you generate a successful sale. Others will never pay you as long as they can get away with it.

So, if you are just starting stick to the big names and reputable affiliate networks. Fraud and the lack of accountability could cause you to work hard to generate the sales for the advertiser to get denied your commission at the end just because they can do it without being caught. The is the dark side of affiliate marketing that you don’t want to deal with.

Continuity:

Continuity means that the buyers get billed on regular intervals after the primary purchase. Only promote such products or services if you are going to be paid for this rebilling, and if it is very clearly stated, and is expected by the buyers, as in the case of paid subscriptions and memberships. On the other hand, if this continuity is hidden in the fine print and your buyers are not expecting it then stay away from it as it is most probably a fraud. Some advertisers (or vendors) do it in purpose. You don’t want to be a part of this.

Your Commission:

Sometimes this part is usually not well calculated by beginners in the affiliate marketing business. Sometimes you can find the buyers and do your search for a product, but the only product you find is paying $3 per sale or action. Make sure you don’t pay more than you get.

Formal affiliate marketing training, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. The good news is that I have a completely free affiliate marketing training series posted on my website: http://marketing-online-101.com where I explain it the way I do it.

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In affiliate marketing you are concerned about finding matching buyers and sellers, then about connecting the two together. In other words, bring the buyers to the seller, facilitate the sale, and get your commission.

There are several ways to bring those two together, but mainly there are two categories of promotional activities that an affiliate can use: paid and free.

Paid Advertising:

Paid advertising is the most reliable form on which you can build a business. Think about it this way: you can build a business only on what you can predict. Paid advertising is predictable. You pay a certain amount of money expecting a certain number of visits to your website.

The most famous form of paid advertising in the affiliate marketing field is PPC or pay per click. As the name says: you pay per visitor to your website. You need to submit your ad to the advertising network (mainly Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and MSN) and bid on the keywords you want your ad to show up for.

Other paid forms of advertising include banners (also called media buying), adware pop ups, and inline text ads.

Free Traffic:

This title is deceiving. Not because you don’t pay money for this kind of traffic it becomes free. You work for it, and your time is the most precious asset you’ll ever have.

Free traffic comes from search engines when you build a website and optimize it to rank for certain keywords when searched on search engines. Depending on your keywords this process might take any time from a few weeks to years in order to show on the first page of search results.

Other free sources of traffic include using social media and web 2.0 websites like blogs and article directories.

The huge defect in these methods is that they are totally out of your control. Search engines change their algorithms frequently and this means continuous optimization efforts. Also web 2.0 websites have their own rules that they also change frequently and they can delete your traffic generating contents at any time. I know this first hand.

Free promotional methods are only good for making money, but not for building a business with liabilities and commitments.

Formal affiliate marketing training, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. The good news is that I have a completely free affiliate marketing training series posted on my website: http://marketing-online-101.com where I explain it the way I do it.

Article Source:http://EzineArticles.com/?expert

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The simplest form of affiliate marketing is to drive traffic to your affiliate link, and every time someone buys through this link you get paid your affiliate commission. This form of affiliate marketing is also called “direct linking.”

Being the simplest form of affiliate marketing makes it the first option for an affiliate as long as it works. Sometimes this option is not the best one and hence an affiliate marketer will consider building a buffer web page and drive the traffic to it.

There are cases when you need to stick to the direct linking method, especially when you are just starting to test a market that had never been proven to be profitable. As long as the affiliate commission is high enough to cover the expenses of advertising, an affiliate can test a market by direct linking to different sales pages. This testing process can give you a lot of valuable data to use in further promotional activities in this “niche” if proven profitable. Even if your direct linking campaign is losing money, by gathering these data you can turn it into a profitable one.

How to Benefit from Direct Linking in Affiliate Marketing:

1. Through direct linking you can figure out the size of this market. The number of impressions and/or clicks that your ads get is a good indicator for how big this market is, especially if you are driving traffic from various sources.

2. Testing two or more sales pages (or products) can also give you an idea of what this market requires in a sales page in order to take action.

3. Testing different ad copies will also give you an idea of what words trigger more sales. This is extremely valuable when you build your own niche website.

4. By tracking your results during the direct linking phase you know exactly what keywords trigger more sales. This is the most accurate keyword research tool ever.

Formal affiliate marketing training, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. The good news is that I have a completely free affiliate marketing training series posted on my website: http://marketing-online-101.com where I explain it the way I do it.

Article Source:http://EzineArticles.com/?expert