Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Techniques

There is a basic ground rules comes to almost any, and I’m sure you’ve heard it used over and over again and that the 80/20 rule.  Now let’s look at how this applies to affiliate marketing.

The rule states that 20% of affiliates produce 80% of all income while 80% of all affiliates generate 20% of the income

Now, I know that this is to be a stupid question but obviously you would want to be one of the 20% who is earning 80% of the money right

Well if you follow the basic steps, you will find yourself sharing the profits them most fortunate affiliates get.

1. The best affiliate marketers all cover their website links. This is what’s called cloaking affiliate links and I know it may not seem necessary but it actually is. Apparently, visitors will not tend to click on your link when they see that it’s leading to an affiliate program on your site once they point their mouse over the link.  The usual tendency, is for them to go directly to the affiliate domain that’s ignoring your affiliate link and essentially taking the money right out of your pocket. The way around this is to cloak for cover your affiliate links. There are a number of tools that are available for this you can look up cloaking links to cloaking tools on Google and get some great pointers the simplest one is to use a shortening tool like TinyURL.com or BudURL.com to protect yourself.

2. Successful affiliate marketers create and distribute their articles. In order to expand in affiliates and reputation in a specific niche, they use articles to promote specific affiliate products or drive traffic back to their own site so that way they can get off themes and subscribe. You can get the greatest benefit not just from writing these articles yourself but also from getting these articles published and reprinted by other site owners and easy publishers. Your articles will then give you both reputation and links from other websites because of the resource box attached to the end of each article.

3. Affiliate marketers focus on a market niche. Loading your website with content that is focused on a specific product or service niche is one way of getting more web traffic in your target market. there are a lot of is all over the Internet that can help you determine what niche is best for your website.

4. Top affiliate marketers use autoresponders.  an autoresponder is an important tool that makes you capable of sending a time series of e-mail messages to those people that sign up for them. Most of the time, these autoresponders are sent through a third-party provider.  Look specifically for a provider that will cater to your needs both in volume and functionality. While I’m not going to recommend a specific one here, make sure that your autoresponder company does not allow to just import any kind of list you want or else your spam complaints will eventually cause your e-mails to not be delivered.

5. Smart affiliate marketers build webpages in order to pre-sell.  The smart marketers either create testimonial pages or review pages that talk about and pre-sell the product or service you are going to be an affiliate for. This is the best method of getting increased orders for your chosen affiliate program. Many programs even include articles or recommended text that sell their products for you and permit you to duplicate those articles that your links embedded in them.

6. An outstanding affiliate marketer collects e-mail addresses. The best affiliates gather e-mail addresses on their website by presenting free reports through autoaresponders, giving out e-books, and newsletter sign-up forms. This method is best used in building your own lists of e-mail addresses to contact. This also lets you contact potential customers that clicked away once they got into the affiliate program website and didn’t purchase.

7. Top affiliate marketers market everywhere. You can advertise using pay per click or e-zine advertising depending upon your market niche.  Some categories of pay per click can be expensive, but advertising somewhere is needed to get additional traffic to your site. There are some good bargains in e-zine advertising and some less popular pay per click engines other than Yahoo or Google that you can check out.

8. Affiliate marketers optimize for the search engines. Search engine optimization is now getting more complex as new and more aggressive algorithms are being used by Google and Yahoo to list sites. It is very important for you to at least understand the basics of search engine optimization when promoting affiliate programs. The most critical of the many SEO techniques is to use title tags that show individual page content. Many webmasters write a master page title tag and apply that site wide, this is the worst thing that you can do for your search engine ranking. An alternative would be to use something like WordPress to create your site because of the very powerful built in SEO capabilities, I’ll get into that more in a separate post.

9. Affiliate marketers have their own mailing lists. The best of affiliate marketers all have their own newsletter or e-zine and gather e-mail addresses on their site to build their list of subscribers. Having a list allows you regular contact with potential customers interested in not only your site and your product but other affiliate products that are available in your niche.

If you understand and make use of the above-mentioned techniques you can be one of the top people that are making it big in affiliate market. Now take action and start promoting an affiliate program doesn’t have to be the best for the top one, just do something get out there and promote .it.

Making Money with Affiliate Marketing

When you’re offered an affiliate marketing deal that seems too good to be true it probably is.  This is nothing new, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before. The growing numbers of affiliate programs, online and off are all claiming to be the best as compared to the others.

Besides that, they will give you an initial impression that you do not have to do more than just place a banner or two on your websites in order to start earning money. Well obviously this isn’t the case, this may apply to some who have already built up a successful website with lots of traffic and a name for themselves. But for most people, affiliate marketing does require a little bit of work and time.

E-mail can always be used as an effective affiliate marketing instrument if done correctly. But it does require you to have a list of already established. All talk about list building a separate blog post but obviously in order to use this method to effectively marketing affiliate program you need to have a list.

Right now, promotion by e-mail rampant. But with that comes a lot of spam. If you want to use e-mail to promote your affiliate programs, need to be sure that you stand by what you’re offering and that you make yourself available for it questions and inquiries at any time. This obviously adds an additional level of customer service to any affiliate programs that you’re going to promote. Also, with some of the recent changes in certain federal laws, you need to very clearly disclose when you are promoting an affiliate program and being compensated for it.

It has been said that adding articles to your e-mail advertising works really well. Like putting up a summary about a product or service that can instantly get the attentionof your reader and allow them to click on the link to get more information which will take them to the sales letter for the product are promoting.

The advantage for the advertiser in this model is that they get highly targeted clients who visit their site. These people may become future customers if they ever find the offers interesting or relative to what they’re doing right now.

With any type of e-mail marketing that you’re doing, especially during a big promotion or product launch, you always want to make yourself stand out from the others. Don’t just use the standard cut and paste copy that you get as part of the affiliate program. Really take a minute to write up some compelling copy for your audience and make sure that you, when possible, also include a personal story or something that will set your e-mail apart from the others that they’re getting promoting the same product.

Now what I’m going to say may surprise some people, but I am not one to recommend jumping on board with some of these massive product launch promotions and being just another e-mail in the crowd promoting the same product as everybody else. I’d highly recommend that you take a few minutes when planning out what you’re going to promote and see how it fits with your audience. Don’t just promote something because everybody else is!

Also keep in mind that most types of advertising or promotion for affiliate programs don’t necessarily give out results instantly. Putting a banner on your website or affiliate marketing campaign and looking at your stats a couple of days later doesn’t necessarily give you an effective sample of the possible results that you can see from promoting that program. If you’re going to put something up on your website make it something that you’re willing to stand by fine and put it up there for a period of time I personally recommend at least a month.

And when it comes to statistics, always make sure to look at the statistics that you are getting for example from your e-mail delivery service as compared to the statistics that are coming from the affiliate program. All too often you’ll see a discrepancy in the number of clicks from your e-mail service as compared to what you’ll get from the affiliate program, now I’m not saying that that’s a good or bad thing. However do take that into account when you’re promoting something if an affiliate program consistently gives you inaccurate or differing results than your e-mail provider you need to decide what to do next.

Building Your Website…

I was speaking with Jennifer Haubein, one of my mastermind partners and she was telling me all about what her company is working on… Click on the image below to check out what her company is working on:

Simple Information Product Formula

Have you ever wondered how people are able to generate so many products, or are able to put out products very quickly?  Well, take a look at this “Super Simple Product Creation Formula”

Super Simple Product Creation Formula

1. Survey – Survey your readers, members, list and see what information in your niche they are looking for
2. Analyze – Analyze the results of the survey to identify the biggest problem or need that your audience has
3. Organize – Think about some specific points or sub-topics that you want to cover in your information product and organize them into a series of questions or a list of bullet points
4. Record – Recording is the easiest and fastest way to create product, get on the phone (using a teleconference bridge like ProConferenceCall.com which has a free 30 day trial) record the call either just by yourself or for Q&A format, get someone you know to interview you and ask the questions.
5. Transcribe – Take the recordings that you’ve made and have them transcribed into a text document that you can have edited and converted into eBook format
6. Packaging – Take the transcribed audio from step #4, the finished eBook from step #5, and maybe add a video or camtasia recording if appropriate and package it up as a complete multi-media training program.

This Super Simple Product Creation Formula is one of the tools that I use with my clients all the time to get them unstuck and moving with their info-product creation.

Getting Free WordPress Templates

Most people who start a WordPress blog for their business purposes think that they will not have to dabble much with the design on the blog because of their impression of running a “serious” blog and not a pop fan site. However, the truth is that commercial websites, such as your website, need attention to design much more than a fan site. After all, it has to have appeal if you want to attract people to doing business with you. The best part with WordPress is that it helps you do this. … Continue Reading

Make Your WordPress Blog More Impressive With Plug-ins

One of the best advantages with a hosted blog is that you have the freedom to enhance it in a variety of ways. With WordPress blogs, there are numerous plug-ins and themes that you can use to make your blog not only more beautiful and customized to your purposes, but actually more functional for you and the reader. It is not at all necessary to use any of these actually – you can start with your WordPress blog without the plug-ins and themes – but definitely when you are into the blogging activity, you will want to do it. So here is a little information on how you go about with the plug-ins. … Continue Reading

How To Set Up Your Own Hosted WordPress Blog

Setting up a hosted WordPress blog may sound technical to most people, especially people who are looking at blogging for their business, but if you go about it systematically, you will find that it is not all as difficult as it is cracked up to be. In fact, a little down the line you will begin to enjoy blogging as well as tweaking the blog in order to make it better and better.

Here are the main steps you will need to follow to set up your own hosted WordPress blog.

Plan it Out First!

Don’t be in a hurry to start your blog. Think what you will do with it. Think of a suitable subject, even though you are working within your niche, you want it to be special. Think of what name you will have for your blog and even a catchphrase which you will use for the promotion.

Get the Domain Name

You can buy a domain name from many websites. You can even buy a domain name and give a subdomain name for each of your WordPress blogs. There are many places that you can purchase your domains from, I like to support a local company, so I purchase all my domains from HudsonValleyDomains.com.  They are a reseller for GoDaddy which is one of the most well-known domain vendors, but they are a local company.  I would appreciate you supporting HudsonValleyDomains.com, but you can always go directly to GoDaddy.com.

Buy Hosting

You will have to host your WordPress blog. You can get the domain name and hosting as a package, however that may not be the most cost effective option. If you intend to have multiple blogs, look for shared hosting options. However, in that case, you will have to think which blog will be your primary domain.  I highly recommend a HostGator as a hosting company, this is who I use for this website and hundreds of other ones that I operate.  You can get hosting for a virtually unlimited number of websites on a shared server for one very low price (sometimes under $5 per month for all your sites combined).  If you go with HostGator, you’ll be able to skip the following steps because they essentially do it for you.

Download WordPress

Go to WordPress.org. You will find an orange button on the right side for downloading the WordPress folder. Click on it, the download takes place automatically. Then click on the downloaded folder to decompress the files in it.

Upload WordPress Files on FTP Server

Open the root folder of your FTP server and copy the WordPress files onto it. Wait for the files to upload completely.

Set up MySQL

WordPress requires the MySQL database to run. This is where the blog will store the necessary files for its operations. The database will manage the content on your blog and make things simpler for you. For setting up the MySQL database you will have to go to the hosting control panel and set up the MySQL database that you will find there. You can give this database a name of your choice.

Install WordPress and Set it Up

The installation of WordPress begins directly when you type in the name of the domain that you have chosen. This is a self-leading process. Once the installation is done, you can give it a proper web address and you will be prompted to select a username and a password, which you can change later.

With this much, you are ready to post on your WordPress blog. However, you can definitely tweak it further with themes and plug-ins to make it more appealing to your visitors.

If You’re Using HostGator

Once you get your account setup at HostGator, you can just click on the “Fantastico Control Panel” and then click on “Install WordPress”.  This will automatically do everything outlined in the above steps and setup your entire WordPress system for you.

Free Blogs And Paid Blogs – Is Free Always Better?

If you are intending to start your own blog for your business, you will find out that there are two types of blogs out there – the free blogs and the paid blogs. The paid blogging services will require payments to be made per month or per year to keep maintaining the blog alive on the Internet. Also, these paid blogs may charge for additional services that they provide, such as allowing you to post affiliate ads on your blog (and thus make money out of it) or even to give you a domain name that you use for your blog. Free blogging services are as their name suggests – you do not need to pay for any of these services. … Continue Reading

Turning Your Blog Into An Authority Center

If you play your cards well with your blog, you may very well end up fashioning a niche authority center that people from all over the world will want to visit to find out what the concept is all about. For you, the Internet may be a channel of promoting your business, but for the vast bulk of Internet users around the world, the Internet is still a source of information. … Continue Reading

Making Your Blog A Separate Business Venture In Itself

Do you know that there a large number of people who are making money on the Internet only through blogging? Now, you may be having a blog only to promote your main venture, i.e. your business, but you should not downplay the potential of the blog itself in making money for you. After all, why are you in business? Surely to make some good money! For that kind of objective, the blog fits the bill quite nicely. There are ways to monetize your blog and at the same time improve the potential for getting prospects for your business through it. What can be better than that?

Let us see some of the ways in which expert marketers use their business blogs to make money for themselves: … Continue Reading