Archive for Affiliate Marketing Guide

Tracking Your Efforts and Reaching Success as an Affiliate Marketer – Part 4

December 16, 2010 Affiliate Marketing Guide, e-Marketing 204 comments

7. Tracking Your Affiliate Marketing Results

In this last article of the article series about affiliate marketing I have explained about tracking results. If you are an affiliate marketer I can’t stress the important of tracking your results. You have done the hard part if you have followed this guide so far. So why don’t you use tracking methods to remarkably improve your conversions. If you use a website you can use Google Analytics to track your affiliate marketing efforts.

Planning Your Affiliate Efforts

Use these analytics to see from what pages your visitors are coming and leaving your site. Then improve those web pages for retaining your visitors. If many of your visitors leave your webpage once they visited the product ordering page, you have to think seriously about this. Because, you can’t make sales unless you have a better webpage to convert traffic to sales. So frequently analyze the behavior of the visitors of your websites and affiliate products. This is very easy as many affiliate companies offer good tracking reports.

8. Reaching the Success with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is really a giant industry on Internet. Almost all the successful internet marketers use affiliate marketing as their main source of income. But everything is very difficult when you are just starting. Affiliate marketing is not much different from offline marketing when we consider marketing principles. Simply you have to understand your users, your customers, and your products. Then link them using most effective ways. Imagine that you are a customer who is looking for a particular product. Think how you are going to search for a product and then buy it. Then reflect it into your affiliate marketing efforts.

You need to have the courage to face difficulties and early failures when you are a beginner to affiliate marketing. Even if you are an expert marketer in a different field, still these initial phases might be difficult for you. But plan clearly and act with the confidence. There will be nothing is standing between you and your success.

Best Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Program – Part 3

December 16, 2010 Affiliate Marketing Guide, e-Marketing 697 comments

6. Selecting a Promotion Method

Now you have to decide about how you are going to promote your affiliate product. To make money, you need to refer customers to the affiliate website. To do this you need to select a way to promote them. There are number of ways to promote a product. Some are totally free and others might be very costly. First you had better to think about free promotional methods. After getting some experience, you can start as a professional affiliate marketer who invests more and earn more.

You can use forums, your blog/website, social networking sites, email marketing, article writing, etc to promote your product (affiliate links, banners). It is up to you decide the ways you like. All of these are powerful ways to drive traffic to your affiliate website.

Ways to Promote Affiliate Products

If you have a blog or website with high traffic, you can put affiliate links in your website. If you frequently use forums, you can use your forum signature to promote products. If you can write articles, then you may use affiliate links in your articles. Social networking sites are another great way to drive traffic. If you have an experience about email marketing it is also a better way to do this.

6. How to Promote Affiliate Products?

Your effort on promoting your product is directly proportional to your earnings. So you have to make an effort to do this in the right manner. Once you completed these hard initial steps you can ease yourself later. You can select one or several methods to promote the product. Here I have explained the ways you can use to promote your product.

6.1 – Blog/Website

If you have a good website it is one of the best ways to promote your items. If you already haven’t, you had better to create a blog or website. It is totally free to start a blog at Blogger.com or WordPress.com. Blogger is very easy to use than WordPress. But it is advisable to create a professional looking attractive website with your own domain name. You can buy a domain name from Godaddy.com and host it at Hostgator.com. You had better to create a website related to your affiliate product. Then you can add content to your site and also your affiliate links and banners. You may write articles about the usefulness of that product, user reviews etc. You should be able to get the trust of the customer. Then only they might think about buying products from you.

Promoting Affiliate Products

6.2 – Article Writing

Article writing is one of the best and most efficient ways to promote affiliate products. People love to get information. They even love to get valuable information. If you can give what they want, you have the potential to earning more money as an affiliate marketer. Write useful and compelling articles related to your affiliate products. These must address issues related to your products. Weight loss is a huge niche in affiliate marketing. You can write an article like “best ways to lose weight for teenagers”. Here you can give some useful tips. In the end of the article include your details (in the resource box) with a link to your product website or affiliate product. Many article directories don’t allow affiliate links. You can create a free blog site or website and then simply redirect the website’s URL to the affiliate products. This is what many people do when they haven’t their own website. Write good articles and submit them to free article directories with a higher traffic and exposure. eZinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Articlebase.com, etc. are some of the best for this purpose. I hope to give a good list of free article directories soon.

6.3 – Social Networking

Social networking is another great and easy way to promote your affiliate products. But the problem with social traffic is that their conversion rate is very low. In other words people in these networks are rarely buy products from advertisers. Also they rarely click on ads. But if you can manage to get lot of traffic and develop a good relationship with them, then you can increase your affiliate sales. Twitter.com, Facebook.com, Myspace.com, etc. are among the leading social networks on Internet. Also these three websites have the most number of users on internet than any other social networking website. Social networking promotion methods are different from one website to another. Simply what you can do here is to give some useful information related to your products and include links to your products without spamming them. Never overuse promotion and you will be banned from those websites.

6.4 – Video Sharing websites

Video sharing websites like Youtube.com are becoming great resources for those who are looking for quick and easy ways to generate traffic to their websites and affiliate products. Upload great looking videos and include links to your products pages. You can use domain redirections as in the case of affiliate marketing to direct your visitors to affiliate products.

6.5 – Forum Marketing

Using forums is also one of the best ways to promote your products and make money in a quick time. When you select forums for promoting affiliate products make sure that they have the following features for a better success.

  • Related to your niche
  • Support signature links (better if they allow affiliate links)
  • Have a higher traffic
  • Reputed among the people (Some forums like Digitalpoint.com are getting bad reviews. You had better not to use such forums)

Write informational posts that attracts the readers of the forum. Include your signature link at the bottom of the post. Write an attractive signature links that attracts clicks. Offering a free product is one successful strategy to get clicks and attract visitors to your site. Send them to an auto responder box and offer the free product once they subscribed to your email list. Later you can send your affiliate product links with useful information for them.

6.6 – Free classified Advertising

Free classified advertising is another effective way to promote affiliate products. Write some ads that attracts reader attention and post them in the correct location. See what are the ads that work and doesn’t. Then improve them for better conversions. Use this list of free classified websites to promote your products.

6.7 – Paid Advertising

If you want to make a presence in affiliate marketing you need to master paid advertising methods like Google Adwords. This is costly but once mastered; you can automate your income and no need of time consuming free promotional methods. Google Adwords is the major paid advertising method that most of the super affiliate marketers use. You pay Google to place ads (The reverse process of Google Adsense) on search results and when a person clicked on your ad, you have to pay for each click. This is why these are called pay per click advertising. Other large companies also have similar advertising programs like Facebook advertising, yahoo advertising, etc. The good news is Google and most of other companies offer you free credit (Google give you $100 free Adwords credit to start your campaigns) to start advertising on their websites. Then you can test these programs and your ads without risking your money. Get the maximum benefit of this free ad credit and learn the basics. Then you are ready to start big.

In the next article I hope to discuss about tracking and your next steps as an affiliate marketer. Make sure to read this fourth part of the series also. Tracking your results is one important step you mustn’t forget.

How to Getting Started as an Affiliate Marketer – Part 2

November 19, 2010 Affiliate Marketing Guide, e-Marketing 791 comments

3. How to Start as an Affiliate Marketer?

Selecting the right affiliate program is the most important thing in affiliate marketing to become a successful affiliate. So pay your attention. This is the second part of this article series. Make sure to read part one of this affiliate marketing beginner’s guide.

First and one of the crucial steps is using a keyword research tool to find best keywords before joining an affiliate program. You can use a keyword tool like Google AdWords Keyword tool or SEOBook keyword tool. Both of these are free to use. If you are unaware of keyword researching just read this guide about performing a keyword research

Best Affiliate Programs

4. Selecting Profitable Affiliate Programs and Products

Then you have to find several products related to those keywords. (But this is optional if you have the courage to work hard) If you haven’t a desire about what you are selling, you might give-up it soon. So it is better to select something you like such as eBooks, phones, laptops etc. If you are new to affiliate marketing, you might have no idea about this. You can go to following websites and search about best selling products.

Clickbank.com and Commission Junction are two of the most popular affiliate websites. There are thousands of affiliate marketers with millions of different products to choose from. But, it is very important to select a product with following requirements. Otherwise it may be a waste of your invaluable time promoting useless products for almost nothing.

  1. Check whether the affiliate marketer can be trusted? You may search in Google (“— scam”, “is — paying” etc). Forums are best places to uncover the reality of affiliates. Check whether they already have paid to their partners using an affiliate marketing forum like Digitalpoint forum? Do they have a good reputation as a company?
  2. Sufficient commissions per sale – If you get about $1-$5 per sale it is not worth trying unless you can make lots of sales. So always look for products with at least $10 or more per sale.
  3. Good products – You need good and reputed products. It is better if you can try before sell it to others. If it has already have a bad reputation, then avoid them even they pay high commissions.
  4. Select best selling products (But there are some points to think too!) – If your product is not selling it is worthless. So check at amazon.com and ebay.com.
  5. Minimum payment and payment methods – Always good to have a low minimum payment and a payment method like PayPal or checks.
  6. Residual income – If you can have a product like webhosting packages, you have the opportunity of having a long term income from each sale.

Hostgator is Another Best Affiliate Program

If you are still curious about selecting a product, then select one the following one. They have a good reputation and worth to try. Go to one of these sites and join them as an affiliate.

  • Hostgator.com – One of largest webhosting company with % sale. You may earn $xx per sale for xx month host.
  • Etoro.com – Forex marketing company with up to $200 per sale. Provide very good support for affiliate marketers.
  • BarnesandNoble.com – Book selling company. They pay for every product bought by the customer unlike Amazon.

5. Getting Necessary Information about Your Affiliate Program

Once you have selected a certain product then it is necessary to get more details about the product and that affiliate company. This is also very important because each and every company have their own regulations. You have to understand them well. If you have violated their rules they may forfeit all your hard earned money and will ban your account.

First step is signing up at the selected affiliate website. Then read about their frequently asked questions (FAQs), terms of service (TOS), guidelines, etc. Then get the promotional items like links (your affiliate link), banners, and other promotional items.

Now you have done the most important parts. But the hardest and sweetest part is yet to come. Read the third part of this affiliate marketing guide to know how to promote your products.

A Rare Guide to Affiliate Marketing in 2877 Words – Part 1

November 17, 2010 Affiliate Marketing Guide, e-Marketing 521 comments

1. A Brief Introduction to the Potential of Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate marketing? Before answering that have you ever understood how some people make so much money without selling anything or even not having a proper website? Yes! That’s the power of affiliate marketing. Today affiliate marketing is the most dominant way to earn really big money. It is already 4 billion dollar industry in UK. None of other ways have the potential of making so much money with a minimum effort and the experience. That is why affiliate marketing programs are so exciting for beginners to learn the art of money making from internet and establish themselves a good foundation in terms of money.

What is Affiliate Marketing

The beauty of affiliate marketing is the fact that you don’t need even a penny to start making money. But, if you can invest some money, definitely your return will be multiplied several times.

Ok, just relax and take a deep breath. I promise you that I will give you the most important facts you need to know to be a successful affiliate. Even if you are already an affiliate marketer, this guide will be helpful to you also. Do you have the desire to see heavy checks coming to your bank account? Are you willing to make an effort to make it a reality? Then it is just a matter of time making it a reality. This will be a little bit longer, but I assure you this is worth reading and one day you may praise yourself about reading this.

2. What is Affiliate Marketing?

First let’s understand what is affiliate marketing? Imagine when you surfing a website (Say this is website A) you see an attractive ad about a mobile phone. Then you click on that ad and then you will be taken to a web site (Say this is website B) that sells the mobile phone. The mobile phone is very interesting so you decide to buy it. Let’s say that you have paid $100 for the mobile phone. Do you think that the ‘website B’ get the whole advantage of this deal. No! If the commission was 25% ‘website B’ earns only $75 for the deal and they will pay $25 to ‘website A’. The reason is the customer was sent to ‘website B’ (seller) by ‘website A’ which is the affiliate marketer. Therefore seller pays a commission to affiliate marketer as an appreciation to sending potential customers to his website. Then affiliate marketer earns commissions by doing almost nothing but sending customers to the seller’s website.

If you are a blogger who is making money with Google Adsense or similar PPC advertising methods, it may need to have several hundred visitors to earn $25 from Adsense. If you are an affiliate marketer you earn $25 from just one successful sale in the above example.

That is why affiliate marketing is excellent to start making big bucks. If you can send 2 such customers a day who buy phones, you will earn easily $1500 in the end of the month.
Now let’s go the second part of affiliate marketing article series where I’m going to explain how to get started as an affiliate marketer. Probably this is the most important part of this series. To reach the success you definitely need to make sure that you select right products and right affiliate websites.