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Saturday 13 June 2009

Understand the Basics of Affiliate Marketing!



There's no doubt that affiliate marketing can be extremely profitable, but with so much information around how do you know who to trust? When starting out, a beginner can easily become overwhelmed by all the different strategies, keywords and advice.

It's important to remember that making money as an affiliate is effectively a very simple process, and the more you over-complicate things the harder it will be to make money.

When you break affiliate marketing down there are three main steps:

1. Find a good product to promote.
This is where many people make mistakes. Always choose a product that is selling well and is popular, as this means people are buying. Remember that if there is lots of competition that's a good thing, as it means there are people willing to purchase the product.

2. Send traffic to the affiliate link.
This is probably the hardest part, but there are plenty of options when it comes to traffic generation (see below).

3. Get paid commissions.
For every visitor you send that buys the product you get paid a percentage. These commissions are then added up and paid to you either by cheque or directly to your bank account.

Of course, it is how you go about these steps (especially 1 and 2) that decides whether you will make a lot of money from affiliate marketing. However if you ever find yourself overwhelmed by all the available information just come back to these three points and remember the underlying simplicity of affiliate marketing.

Once you've picked your product it's time to start generating traffic to your affiliate link. There are literally hundreds of ways to do this, but many aren't worth your time and will get you very few results.

Some of the more popular ways of sending traffic to an affiliate page are: • Article Marketing • Forum Posting • Blog Commenting • PPC

This is definitely an area you need to track. For example, if you find that article marketing is making you a lot of sales but forum posting is taking as much time and not making any sales at all, then you know either to concentrate more on article marketing or optimise your forum posting strategies.

One very important technique when learning affiliate marketing or any business strategy is tracking your results. If you properly keep track of questions such as which products sell well, which articles attract the most views etc then you'll be able to see what works and what doesn't for yourself. For example, if you find that a particular product sells well when you send traffic through one technique but not through another than you know to concentrate your efforts on the technique that works to maximise your profits. It's vital to work out what is effective for you. Remember that affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme, but if done properly it can make a lot of money. Focus on learning what works and what doesn't, and this will allow you to hone your strategy to make the most possible profit.

Monday 8 June 2009

The Two Biggest Reasons Why Most People Will Never Make a Full-Time Income Online...

Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate!

The Two Biggest Reasons Why Most People Will Never Make a Full-Time Income Online...
It all starts when some well-meaning (yet misdirected) person encourages a budding internet entrepreneur to "start in a niche they know alot about", or base their business around "something they're passionate about"...

As horrible as it may sound - they've unknowingly sent the hopeful entrepreneur down a path of false expectations, poor results and eventually - failure. In fact, the myth of "do what you love and the money will follow" has been responsible for more failure than likely any other influence - perhaps even more so than laziness or a lack of perseverance.

Because the simple truth of the matter is that the only way you're going to make real money on the net is if your business is based around two crucial things:

1) Large Demand

2) Buyers

In other words - you aren't going to get rich selling a $15 ebook about growing square watermelons - even though that might be a great passion of yours.

The demand just isn't there. Maybe there's a few searches a day on Google for the topic, and perhaps there's some interest in the online "gardening enthusiast" communities - but you'd be hard-pressed to make even a few hundred dollars a month from ebook sales.

Similarly, you also aren't going to have a particularly easy time getting rich by building websites about some seemingly "popular" topics like humor, jokes, funny pictures and so on. And while there are a few ways to "monetize" your site (with AdSense, CPA Offers, CPM Banners, etc.), it takes literally millions of website visitors to make even just a few thousand dollars in markets like that.

The demand is huge - but the visitor value is extremely low...

Instead, if you want to make it big online - pulling down an impressive six-figure income - you need to tap into markets with tons of demand, where the majority of the visitors are valuable.
You need to capture tons of traffic that wants to buy something. If you take this approach, you'd practically have to hijack your own order links (or affiliate links) not to make a sizeable income.
In fact - did you know that some affiliates make several thousand dollars daily just by promoting a single product in hot markets? (Just imagine what the merchant is making...)

In some markets there's actually so much demand that the vendors are quite literally selling over a thousand units - or more - per day. Digital products, with practically zero overhead/delivery cost.

But it all comes back to tapping into valuable demand. In most cases, it takes no extra effort or "skill" to market to a valuable market than it does to struggle along with something you're passionate about.

These two factors - demand and buying traffic - are what seperate the "wannabe" marketers from the millionaires. Because there's no real secret - you just need to sell what thousands of people are already buying.

The ball is now officially in your court. Are you tapping into markets with massive, valuable demand?

Or are you struggling to simply make a few dollars occasionally with a business that's based on your own passionate interests?

Full detail at:
Super-Affiliate