Are YOU Looking for AFFILIATE MARKETING? Here's AFFILIATE MARKETING information for you!: 2008-05-18

Friday, May 23, 2008

Introduction

Introduction

Affiliate Marketing History

The affiliate program was invented by CDNow.com at the

end of 1994 and it was pioneered by Amazon.com in 1996.

Affiliate programs have been referred to as associate programs and partner programs, but they are primarily called affiliate programs.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting online businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and / or sale provided through their efforts.

It is a modern variation of the practice of paying a finder’s fee for the introduction of new clients to a business on the Internet.

Affiliate Marketing is the single fastest growth industry on the Internet. It is one of the fastest and most creative ways to make money and start your own career working over the Internet.

Why Do Companies Use Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate Marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to generate sales over the Internet. Certain sectors rely on affiliate marketing more heavily than others, but it is a cheap way for companies to get the word out about their products or services.

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How Much Can Be Made As An Affiliate?

The sky is the limit. There are affiliates that make anywhere from five to six figure every year, and many of these affiliates are considered super affiliates. A super affiliate is an affiliate with a constant flow of traffic, good conversions, and huge commissions.

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Introduction To Google Adwords

Google Adwords is a pay per click program for the Google search engine. The Google search engine comprises of organic search results and pay per click search results that are presented on the same page for every possible key phrase combination. With Google Adwords, you are charged a small fee every time that a visitor clicks on your advertisement and visits your web site.

Adwords determines how much you pay per click by using the “click through rate” or commonly referred to as CTR. If your ad is shown 100 times and it is clicked on 5 times, then your ad would have a 5% CTR. A 5% CTR is generally good but it depends on the key phrases, your advertisement, and many other factors.

Relevancy is important with Google Adwords. In order to increase your CTR, your keywords must be relevant to what you are selling. In this screenshot, you will notice the organic search results on the left hand side, and the pay per click search results that are listed on the far right. The “Sponsored Links” section is the section where all Google Adwords advertising is shown

To learn more about Google AdWords, we recommend that you check out these e-books: Google Cash and Adwords 180.

Four Steps

Four Steps To Super Affiliate Success

There are four steps to success on the Internet. These steps are very simple, but they are often overlooked by affiliates that start out in the online affiliate industry. To become a super affiliate, you must follow these simple steps in order to maximize your results.

Content

The search engines love content. You need to develop a lot of content that relates to your product or service. By constantly developing content for your web site, it will bring in repeat visitors and even help your positioning within the major search engines. Content is what brings in organic traffic from the search engines.

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Traffic

You need traffic for your web site. Just because you build the web site, doesn’t mean people will find it. You must find a way to bring in a steady stream of traffic to your web site. Developing new content often leads to traffic, but you can’t rely solely on the major search engines, and you’ll need to find alternative ways for people to find your web site over the Internet and in the real world.

Pre Sell

Once you’ve gotten the content and the traffic, then you need to pre-sell the products or services that you are marketing. If you are marketing products for an affiliate program, then it is important to pre-sell the products to the end user before they click on your link and take a look at the sales letter. Good examples of pre-selling are product reviews, strong points, or other information that would entice the visitor to click the link and read the sales letter.

Monetize

You need to make money but this comes after all of the hard work. You can’t expect to jump into something and make money right away. You need to develop the content, bring in the traffic, pre-sell the products or services, and wait for the money. Don’t start off by thinking about the money. Start thinking about how to sell on the Internet, and the steps that need to be taken to market what your selling. Once you’ve mastered the ability to sell over the Internet, then making the money will be much easier for you.

Super Affiliate

What Is A Super Affiliate?

It is said that 2% of affiliates account for over 90% of the affiliate sales that are made online. This means that most affiliates aren’t generating big profits over the Internet, and a small percentage of the super affiliates are generating the bulk of revenue for vendors.

Here is what makes a super affiliate:

Super affiliates treat the affiliate business like a regular business. They invest a lot of time, money, and effort into the development of their web site, and they don’t slap a web site together with banner ads or a handful of links. They take the time to put together a business using every marketing technique in their arsenal in order to maximize the traffic, the conversions, and the profits.

The super affiliates really know how to pre-sell the product. They are able to review the product and provide the consumer with the information needed to make the sale. Super affiliates are able to push the buttons that turn a casual user into an impulsive buyer.

Super affiliates find a niche with a huge market and they stick with it. They don’t spread themselves too thin, and instead they make sure to concentrate on the industry that they know best. They can focus all of their time into one area and make the most of it.

They often look for new ways to make their business grow. It could be by adding new products to their web site, or finding new and creative ways to market the existing products. Whatever it may be, they are always on the prowl for new opportunities to make money on the Internet and they are constantly following the trends and gathering data from consumers within their niche.

Mimic The Super Affiliates

The best way to become a super affiliate is to mimic what they do.

First, you must identify who the super affiliates are. Hang out at any of the popular affiliate forums, and eventually you’ll be able to identify the users that are super affiliates and which sites they own.

Almost every affiliate forum has a “How Much Do You Make?” post which is usually by a newbie. Sometimes, you can figure out who the super affiliates are just from the responses that are posted in one of these threads. Once you have a list of the super affiliates for your particular niche, then you can keep an eye on their sites, and begin mimicking what they do in order to generate similar results. You can easily clone their promotions and take a cut for yourself. This is a good way to stay on top of your industry without doing the research that many of the top affiliates are doing in order to stay competitive within their field. Over the years, I’ve monitored the results of other super affiliates that I know personally in order to stay on top of any affiliate changes, new promotions, etc. that I may not have been made aware of.

You don’t need to find a long list of super affiliates. You just need to be able to keep an eye on a couple of the super affiliates for your niche, analyze what they are doing to bring in the traffic, maximize conversions, and generate profit for their business. Once you’ve figured out how they are doing it, then you mimic them.

It’s much easier to mimic a successful affiliate, then trying to reinvent the wheel with your own unique marketing idea. Your goal is traffic, good conversions, and huge profits. Anything that gets in the way of that goal should be discarded immediately.

Finding New Products

New products always seem to convert better than all others. Some products are backed by an internet marketer that has joint ventures with many of the super affiliates and online marketing gurus. Some of these marketers are able to reach over a million names within the first week of launch using such a massive JV campaign.

Your timing is very important. If you get in on a product after a massive JV launch, then you’ll be picking up the crumbs that are left by other super affiliates which means less conversions and less profits. You’ll find the new products by keeping an eye on the top affiliates in your niche and by staying on lists for some of the top marketers on the Internet. Some of the top marketers get first pick at promoting the hot, new products and by watching what they do, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the crowd of affiliates that are going to start promoting it after the big players have drained the market.

If you are exclusively promoting products that are offered through ClickBank, then you should sign-up with Affiliate Alert which lets you search the marketplace using a series of indicators which includes information on how new the product is and how much momentum that the product has gathered since it’s debut. This tool lets you know when a new ClickBank product is worth promoting, so that you get in on the action before 99% of the other affiliates.

You want to be able to promote the ClickBank product before the market is flooded with promotions from hundreds or even thousands of different affiliates. You’ll always want to look for products that are less than a week old and rank within the top 25 products. This tells you that the product has just been released and that there are some super affiliates that are promoting it heavily.

With all of this in mind, make sure that the new product offers a high percentage payout and a good return on your investment.

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Pre-Selling

Pre-Selling The Affiliate Product

What Exactly Is Pre-Selling?

A pre-sell is an article that introduces the visitor to the product that you are recommending. Basically, you are pre-selling the product to the visitor by offering information as an authority, a satisfied customer that has purchased the product or someone that has experience of some kind with this particular product. A pre-sell could be a review of the product that is dressed up so that it doesn’t look like your sole purpose is to recommend the product in order to receive an affiliate commission from the sale of it.

You should promote products that you genuinely like. This will make it much easier to convincingly pre-sell the product to your visitors. The rules for pre-selling can differ slightly depending on what you’re going to be selling to your visitors. You should take a look at your affiliate competition for the particular product or service that your going to pre-sell before you begin.

Adding Value To The Product

With a pre-sell, you should add value to the product by offering a bonus to your visitors. Don’t feel intimidated by this idea, because it’s fairly easy to create your own bonus that directly relates to the product that you are pre-selling. If you’ve already purchased the product, you can create an e-book or other bonus that directly compliments the product. A free bonus can be the extra leverage needed in order to turn a casual visitor into an affiliate conversion.

Writing The Pre-Sell

The quality of your pre-sell is going to determine whether you are a super affiliate that makes $5,000/month through one webpage, or an average affiliate that is lucky to make anything in this business.

A pre-sell consists of many things that you’ll find in a good sales letter. There will be a headline, a call to action, product points, your own testimonial for the product, as well as other information.

You will need an eye-catching headline that grabs a hold of your visitor and gets them to start reading your pre-sell. Don’t try too hard to get the attention of the visitors. You are interested in soft selling the product to your visitors, while leaving the hard sell to the vendor, once the affiliate clicks over to their sales page.

Some affiliates will develop a story about the affiliate product. A pre-sell largely involves your own experiences with a product that you have purchased, so you should write a story about how you purchased the product or how the product has changed your life. Something that has to do with you that has a direct tie-in to the product itself. A story often disconnects the logic from the brain and people no longer see the copy as an advertisement for a product. Make the story interesting and throw in some twists and turns to really draw the reader into the story. Always end the story by letting the reader know that you purchased the product or let the reader know in a subtle way, how the product helped you.

In your pre-sell, you should let the reader know who you are and make yourself sound like an authority as it relates to the product. The reader will take what you say seriously, if you have the credentials to make it look like you are an expert in the field.

Share your emotions about buying the product, if you hesitated, why you hesitated, and any other natural feelings that you had and that any consumer might feel if they were going to purchase the product. If you turned slowly to a product, then make sure to let the reader know about your experience. Don’t come off too strong in support of the product from the beginning, because you don’t want the reader to get the idea that this is a sales message.

If you’ve had good results with the product, then say so... But slowly build up your excitement about the results of the product.

Make sure to hard sell the bonus to readers that decide to purchase via your link. Your bonus should solve any negative aspects that you may have mentioned within the pre-sell. Your negative comments gave the reader assurance that this was a genuine review, and your bonus will eliminate the negative, and it will leave no reason or excuse for the reader not to buy the product.

Finally, a strong call to action is necessary in order to get the visitor to click your affiliate link, and move onto the sales message. A few key points (summary) on how the product will help the reader at the end of the pre-sell is important as well.

Once you’ve finished the pre-sell, then you should compare it to those that are being used by your competitors, the top marketing gurus, or you can even visit the sales letter for the product that you are selling and look at their sales copy. They are hard selling the product with much stronger language, but you can still get a good feel for how a pre-sell page should be written by analyzing theirs.

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Your Pre-Sell Bonus

The best type of bonus to develop is a report, e-book, or a short video that actually compliments the product that you’re pre-selling.

You can develop a report or e-book using Word and then convert the document into a PDF using Adobe Acrobat or any of the free PDF converters that are available on the Internet. To develop a video tutorial, you can use Camtasia from www.techsmith.com which enables you to record your screen and use your own audio to narrate the video presentation. This is an excellent tool for developing videos to be used as special bonuses for your product.

Super Tips

Super Affiliate Tips

How Your Web Site Looks

Don’t make your web site look like a typical affiliate web site. The major search engines are constantly evolving and developing new ways to make their results more relevant to the consumer. They don’t want all of there search results to be cluttered with affiliate web sites, and that is why you should fill your web site with content that directly relates to what you are selling. Banners and other advertisements often tell the search engines that this web site is advertising something and that it is primarily an affiliate site.

Try to add more textual content and less imagery to your web site. Banner advertising gets the attention of the consumer, but you don’t want too much that it actually gets the attention of the search engines, and they decide to penalize you for excessive advertising.

If you look at the major search engines, many of the authority sites for popular keywords are non-profit organizations or other sites that don’t have a lot of outside links, or banner advertisements. These web sites offer a lot of in-house content for visitors to read.

The Biggest Payouts

When launching a business online, you need to be able to sell something that offers a big payout for you. Even if you’re promoting something that you have a passion for, you are still going to need big payouts in order to make it worthwhile. If you’re going to sell a product or service through an affiliate program, then you’ll need to find a program that will pay you a hefty commission from the purchase of the product or service. Also, you need to make sure that the hefty commission is for a product or service that has marketability over the Internet. I stay away from a CPA or a

pay per lead type of program, because of the low profit potential.

Lifetime Revenue Share

Some of the affiliate programs offer lifetime revenue share to their affiliates. This is one of the best opportunities for new affiliates, because you will earn revenue off of the customer for the lifetime of the customers account. For example, if you are earning 20% of the cost of the product or service offered, you will also earn 20% from all future purchases that the customer makes, and they don’t ever have to visit your web site again. If your site brings in a lot of new customers and then it has a slow down period without much traffic, you may still be able to carry-through with the commissions generated by your existing customer base. This type of program is only offered in select affiliate industries, but it makes it that much easier for affiliates to begin making money online.

Co-Branded Landing Pages

Some of the affiliate programs offer co-branded landing pages that you can set-up to sell their products or services. A co-branded landing page is a page that looks similar to the existing page for their products or services, but it has your affiliate coding embedded into it. This enables you to promote their products or services through a page that looks like theirs, but it is actually your page with your affiliate code already added. You’ll earn an affiliate commission off of every sale generated from these landing pages.

Affiliate Advertisements

Another important part of promoting a product or service is the creative talent behind it. If you’ve found something that you really want to promote online, then you need to go ahead and sign-up for an account, and then check out the banners, and other content that is available for affiliates to use in order to promote the product or

service. I’ve noticed programs that offer good commissions, popular products, but their affiliate advertisements are terrible. If you aren’t given high quality advertising, then you may not be able to get the conversions that are needed in order to make a profit.

Your Affiliate Payment

If you’re not marketing your own product or service, then you need to do some research about the reputation of the company that you’re going to work with. Do they pay on time? How do they pay? How many times per month? Some programs pay every week, and some only once per month. I’ve worked with programs that always pay late, and some that I’ve had to e-mail constantly to get paid. Make sure that you work only with those that have a reputation for paying their affiliates on time every week or month.

Free Internet Traffic

Your site needs traffic. There are many places where you can advertise your web site for free. The major search engines may provide you with boat loads of traffic, but every little directory may provide a few stray visitors that eventually turn into customers. The few seconds that it takes to submit to each one of the directories is well worth the free traffic that you’ll receive. Later, we will provide you with more details on how to effectively submit your web site to all of the search engines and directories.

Multiple Languages

The Internet reaches people in every county on the globe. When looking at my web site stats, I see visitors from dozens of different countries throughout the world. It is important to reach people that speak various different languages, especially if your product or service specifically appeals to those in certain regions of the world. You can hire someone to translate your web pages to different languages, or use the translator feature at Dictionary.com.

Effectively Promote

Effectively Promote Affiliate Products

We’ve put together a list of the best ways to promote your

business within the most popular traffic generating web sites.

The Major Search Engines

You need to submit your site to the major search engines.

Most free traffic comes from one of three search engines.

-Google

-Yahoo!

-MSN

Online Directories

You should add your listing to many of the free directories that are available throughout the Internet. Some of these directories will require that you provide a return link back to their site, but any free traffic is good traffic. You should add your site to all of the free directories because it will bring in some extra traffic and it will help to boost your popularity within the major search engines.

http://www.auroin.com/

This is a very popular list of free directories. They have sections with free directories that start at a PR-2 and go all of the way up to PR-8. Just go down the list and submit your site to each of the directories that directly relates to your affiliate web site or niche.

Advertise In Your SIG

Make sure to advertise your site in the signature file. There is a signature file for every e-mail that you send, as well as a signature file for every post that you make in any of the Internet forums.

Participate In Forums Related To Your Business

There are usually one or two popular forums for almost every business on the Internet. Find the most popular forums on the Internet that relate to your business and become an active participant. Visitors will see your SIG and possibly visit your site, while search engines will also see the SIG with your web site URL and boost your page ranking. Do a search within one of the major search engines using the keyword “forum” along with the keyword that best describes your particular niche. By doing this, a list of highly ranked forums will be displayed within the search results and you can become an active participant in these forums.

Joint Ventures

When you’re selling an e-book or other product online, a joint venture is an excellent way to draw in new customers. Some of the super affiliates have newsletters with hundreds of thousands of readers. By contacting some of the super affiliates and launching a joint venture with them, you could easily get your product in front of thousands or even millions of potential buyers quickly.

With a joint venture, you’ll need to offer extra incentives to these super affiliates in order for them to market your product or service to their visitors or mention it to their newsletter readers.

Viral Marketing

Viral Marketing is basically word-of-mouth advertising. One person sees something interesting and sends it to 2 friends, and those 2 friends send it to two more, and so on. It creates a ripple effect that begins to spread the word about your web site to hundreds, or even thousands of people with very little effort or cost on your end. Some of the most successful viral marketing

campaigns have been through free e-mail accounts, and e-greeting cards. Here are some interesting ways to promote your web site, product, or service using viral marketing over the Internet.

E-Books

Videos

Games

Sound Files

Articles

Utilities

People love to share interesting articles or files with their friends or family over the Internet. By offering something of interest to the mainstream Internet user, you’ll be able to profit from those users that see the item, and actually have an interest in the product or service that your web site sells. You will reach hundreds or even thousands of people, and a small percentage of those people will have a direct interest in the product or service that you’re offering.