5 Affiliate Marketing Tips

This post was written by konagirl on June 29, 2009
Posted Under: Affiliate Marketing

Everybody that is relatively new to affiliate marketing is looking for the golden goose niche market that will make them an overnight success and instant millionaire, however, there is more to it than that. It takes dedication, determination and hard work to accomplish your goals and it will not happen overnight. It can take months and sometimes years. It is not as easy as some scammers, I mean marketers, would lead you to believe.

Over the years online, there are timeless strategies that have been used successfully and these same strategies are still being used today because they work. These 5 affiliate marketing tips will help you to succeed in today’s online world.

1. Have A Your Own Website or Blog

Every product that you promote needs it’s own website for promotion. Do not put all your eggs in one basket by lumping everything together on one site to save on hosting fees. Your site should focus on the one product that you are promoting and nothing more.

You should have a well written product review as your content and if you have testimonials from other people, all the better to include them too. Do not make your content reviews sound like a sales pitch, but more like a news reporter giving your honest opinion. You can turn your product review into several pages by making each page highlight a separate feature of the product that you are promoting. Remember to add the benefits. Thinking as the customer, ask yourself, “What’s In It for Me?” – WIITFM. It is important to list the benefits as everyone wants to know WIITFM!

2. Give Away A Free Report

Give away a free report, free e-course, free e-book, or free consultation, in exchange for their email address. Give away anything of value free, to build your reputation and to build a trusting relationship with your subscribers. The form on your page to collect their information should be located at the top of the page, on the sidebar, above the fold, if possible. This way it can be easily seen and not missed.

3. Get An Autoresponder

You will need to have an autoresponder set up to collect the email information and to send out the free product you are giving away. The autoresponder will also send your preset follow up messages to everyone that signs up on your form. If they didn’t make a purchase with their first visit to your site, the follow up messages will remind them of the product they were thinking of buying when they landed on your site in the first place.

The follow up messages should not be pushy sales letters, but rather persuasive ones, and should again list the reasons why the product will make their lives easier, better, healthier or more entertaining. WIIFM. You get the idea. You want to use a positive, upbeat approach. You want to inform them that they will be missing out on something fabulous, or meaningful, or a solution to their problem. That this is something they must have to make them feel better, more productive, leaner, smarter, save them time or money. You need to let them know why it is they need to have your product or service.

I have found myself unsubscribing to a newsletter fast, if all I receive are sales pitches without any useful content, so give out really good information that will benefit the subscriber along with your sales pitches. You might want to consider sending them something they can benefit from every 3 or 4 days and a product “reminder” every seven days. Always over deliver. Remember to refrain from using the word “Free” or “make money” in your emails as the spam filters will throw them into the junk or spam mail or not deliver them at all. Yahoo and AOL are notorious for bouncing emails back as undeliverable. Giving a “gift” usually makes it through.

4. Targeted Traffic

To get the kind of targeted traffic that is looking for your product, write articles that relate to it and submit them to the article directories. Remember to add the link back to your website in the bio/response box. That way, people that are interested in your topic will follow your link to your site because they are interested and want to find out more about the subject.

You can also submit short articles to blogs or forums that relate to your subject by posting your articles. People that are already reading the blog or are forum members, will follow your link back to your site to find out more.

Try to write 10 articles a week with at least 500 words. Make use of the Private Label Rights e-books and software packages that are sitting on your hard drive collecting dust and rewrite them and repackage them to make them your own brand new products. You could even turn these articles into the report that you are going to give away for free to your subscribers or you could turn them into an e-book to sell later. If you don’t have any Private Label Rights already, then do your research as there are many websites where they can be purchased.

Usually the conversion rate ratio is 1 sale for every 100 visitors, or 1:100, so if you can generate a 1000 targeted hits a day, the odds are, according to the researched statistics, that you will have 100 sales a day.

5. Set Up a Schedule

As an example:

Day 1 – Devote your time to writing your autoresponder messages.
Day 2 – Load your messages into the autoresponder.
Day 3 – Do nothing but write your articles.
Day 4 – Submit your articles to the article directories.
Day 5 – Submit articles to bulletin boards, blogs and forums.

Setting up a schedule that works for you will help you to stay focused

These tips are not difficult to accomplish, but they are time consuming, and they do require that you take action and do the work. They will not get done if you keep procrastinating, so set up your schedule, get to work, and you will begin to see checks being delivered to your mailbox.