December 16th, 2010 
Jase6. 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.
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.
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.
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