6 Steps To Success In Affiliate Marketing

6 Steps To Success

In Affiliate Marketing

by Richard Quek

Affiliate programs are suitable for those who do not have their

own product or service to promote. They can promote other

people's products or services as Reseller or Affiliate.

The commission income can be fairly substantial and there are

many super affiliates that are earning six figure income on

the internet promoting products and services for others.

Here are 6 Power Steps that will assist you in your Affiliate

Marketing venture.

1. Choice of Company

The company that you're going to represent must be established.

It must be credible and have an excellent track record.

Remember that you are going into a joint venture with them

to promote their product or service.

Here are other factors that you should take into account:

(a) The company must have products or services that are

unique, of value, and are in demand.

(b) The company should provide excellent support, training And

resources to assist you to promote their products or services.

(c) There must be excellent tracking employed by the company

to ensure that you will be credited for all your referrals.

The tracking should credit you even when your prospects

make a purchase months later.

(d) The commission rate must be attractive.

For ebooks, softwares and virtual products, an acceptable

commission rate should be between 40% to 60%.

Commission payments for physical products are normally

lower, between 5% to 15%.

(e) The company should pay commissions on at least 2 tiers.

This will make it attractive for you to refer others to join

you since you will be paid a percentage on their sales.

2. Cloak your referral links

There are many affiliates who lost their commission because

their prospects 'change' the referral links.

These affiliates took all the trouble to promote the products or

services but the commissions due to them are 'hijacked' by

the prospects because the prospects realized that these are

referral links and therefore changed it to their own link with

their own user name.

In order to avoid this from happening you should CLOAK your

Referral link. This will hide your referral link. There are various

ways of doing this. Here are some ways:

(a) Use a sub-domain name.

(b) Use a tracking URL. You can get this from many companies

that provide such services such as Ad-Alyzer, Adminder and

Hyper Tracker.

You can get a FREE tracking service from:

http://resultstracker.net/t.php?id=2066

(c) Use a Free Service that shortens your 'long' URL.

http://www.tinyurl.com

(d) There are many softwares available such as Affiliate Defender

And Instant Affiliate Masker.

3. Test and Track your Promotions

It is important to test and track all of your Ads and promotional

activities. You should be able to know the

ROI(Return On Investments) on all you various campaigns.

This will enable you to zero in on those that are productive and

provide you with the highest ROI.

You will avoid those that do not produce the expected results.

You could use the tracking services mentioned in step 2 above.

4. Build an Opt-In List

Most affiliates send their prospects to the web sites of the company
that they are promoting. They may end up making a few sales and
receiving some commissions. However, that's all that they will receive.

They have worked hard to convince the prospects but they have no
further contact with these prospects. These prospects are now
in the opt-in-list of the Affiliate companies that they are representing.

The smart thing to do is to capture the details of the prospects to build
your own opt-in list before sending these prospects to the Affiliate
company web site.

There are 2 ways to do this:

(a) Set up you own web site and collect the email addresses and

names of your prospects before sending them to the Affiliate

company web site.

You should create a web form to capture the email addresses

and names. This can be done using HTML or if you are using

an autoresponder, you'll normally be able to generate the

web form with the autoresponder. These web form can be set

up on your web site or as a pop-up.

(b) Plug into the systems set up by various companies on the

Internet. How it works is that you'll be provided with a

'special' URL to promote.

When your prospects click on this URL, they will be directed to

an 'emotional' flash presentation. At the end of the

Presentation, they will be required to fill in a short

questionnaire. There are 2 benefits here.

You'll be pre-qualifying your prospects and you will have a

copy of the questionnaire that they filled it. This will make it

easier for you to followup with them.

5. Autoresponder

The autoresponder is the heart beat of any Internet business.
It has been discovered that 71% of Internet sales are made
after 7 contacts. It is therefore important that you follow up
with your prospects. This is why the use of autoresponder
is crucial to your success.

6. Getting Traffic

There are many ways to generate traffic. Always keep in mind
that the more targeted is your traffic, the better will be your
conversion rate and the more will be your sales.

Here are a few ways that may be useful:

(a) Search Engines

This will be appropriate if you are having your own web site.

Concentrate on keywords that relate to the product or service

you are marketing. Make sure that the kewords are 'targeted'.

Submit to only a few of the top search engines such as Yahoo,

Google, Alta Vista, Netscape, Lycos, and All the Web

(b) Pay Per Click

For those who are new, the pay-per click search engines will

provide you with the necessary traffic. Just like with the search

engines, the keywords need to be targeted.

http://www.overture.com

http://www.kanoodle.com

Google Adwords is now gaining popularity and you may want to

check it out. It works like the pay per click search engines.

https://adwords.google.com/select

(c)Ezine Ads

This is one of the best way to generate targeted traffic to your
web site. The Solo Ad is the best way to advertise but it
may cost you a bit. It is important to choose Ezines that
relate to your product or service.

You can check out from Ezine directories:

Ezine Search - http://www.ezinesearch.com

Ezine Seek - http://www.ezine-universe.com

(c) Viral Marketing

There are many viral marketing programs that you can join.
The traffic may not be targeted but these are free traffic.

These are the 6 power steps that will assist you to have
the cutting edge in Affiliate marketing.

Following these steps will put you in the 5% categories of those
Super Affiliates who are making 'BIG' money on the Internet.

Richard Quek is the author of 4 books, 'Cappuccino & Success',

'The Insider Secrets to Network Marketing', 'The Internet M~oney

Machine' and 'Exposed!". Visit his website at:

http://www.internetmarketingtrainer.com

Email: info@internetmarketingtrainer.com

Check out Richard’s latest book, Exposed Traffic at

http://www.exposedtraffic.com

Copyright 2004 Richard Quek. Please feel free to pass this article
on to your friends, or use it in your ezine or newsletter.
It's a shareware article.

Affiliate Internet Marketing Success

By Shane Wilson

Affiliate internet marketing can be a very lucrative way to make
money online. There is an endless abundance of products you
can promote on and offline in every industry you can imagine.
The problem is that most do not have a clue where or how to
start. In this article you will not only learn where to start but
how to turn a profit as well.

Affiliate internet marketing is the business of promoting other
people and businesses products and services and receiving a
commission in return for your efforts. The problem is that most
people do not know where or how to start. This can be easily
resolved and here's how.

Many sites on the internet cater to affiliate internet marketing
and offer a place where you can find something you want to
promote. Two examples would be Click Bank located at
clickbank.com and Commission Junction located at cj.com. There
are many others but these are two of the best out there.

You can go to both of these sites and sign up for an account
for free. Once a member you can view thier market place and
find something you are interested in, for instance video games.
You will find many products you can promote on this or any
subject you choose. It is important when starting out that you
choose something you are interested in. I'll explain why in a
moment.

When you become a member at one of these sites you can
choose or are given a special "nickname" or unique numeric identifier
which you can use in an affiliate url or link given by each individual
product. This is explained in detail on both sites and is very
easy to do. Now, all you have to do is promote this affiliate link
with your unique "code" in it. Simple enough right? Ah, but
where and how to you promote this link?

Promoting your chosen product or service is not at all hard in
the affiliate internet marketing arena. This can be many ways
and I'll show you one that is absolutely free here. One way
to promote your chosen product is by way of a blog.
Here's how.

To set up your own blog for free all you have to do is go to
blogger.com. This site is owned by Google and is what many
people use when first starting out. All you have to do is set
up an account and choose the name of your blog and your in
business.

Once you have your product you want to promote and your blog
set up it's time to write some articles. Yes, you are going to have
to do some writing but it's worth it. This is why I said earlier to
choose something you are interested in or have a passion for.

Now, you don't just want to write any old article, you want to be
smart about it. Here's what I mean. You want to write an article
and subsequent ones with the prospective buyer in mind. How do
you do this? You do a little research.

You want to find out what and how someone is searching for the
product you have chosen online. You can do this easily. Go to
inventory.overture.com and type in the name of the product you
are wanting to promote. This tool will give you a list of all the
related search terms that people have actually searched for.

Here's an example. I just did a search on "God of War" which came
back with over 24,000 searches. This is a little broad and a
very competitive keyword phrase. You don't want to have such
a competitive phrase because you'll never get high rankings in the
search engines for this term without a lot of effort. We are looking
for what's called a long tailed keyword phrase.

Why? It's easier to get our article visible in the search engines for
free with a less searched and/or competitive phrase. Here's another
phrase I found from the list, "god of war the ps2 game". This has
130 searches and will do for our article.

When writing your article you want the title of your article to be
the exact search phrase from above, God of War The ps2 Game.
You also want to use this exact phrase a few times in the article
itself. In the article itself you want to break up your paragraphs
once or twice and insert your "affiliate link/url" for the product
you have chosen to promote.

Your affiliate link should be on a line by itself with a space above
and below it to make it stick out. You also want to write something
to the effect of "For more information on The God of War simply
follow the link below". You will want to put this call to action at
the end of the paragraph above where you have inserted your
affiliate link.

Once you have your article written then all you have to do is post
it to your blog with the title being "God of War The ps2 Game". After
you have posted your article you will want to go to a pinging service
and submit your blog. A blog pinging service basically let's the
search engines know that you one, have a blog and two you have made
a new post.

The two best pinging services you can use are Pingoat located at
pingoat.com and Pingomatic located at pingomatic.com. Simply go
to these two sites and submit your blog and they will send out a
message to many other sites letting them know about your blog and
it's new post.

It can take a little time for the search engines to come by your new
blog and put it in it's listings. In the mean time you need to write more
articles doing what I outlined above. The more articles you have
posted on your blog the better chance you have of gaining traffic
and thus sales from your efforts.

Here's a side note. You can also published your article to article
directories. You will have to remove your affiliate link from the article
in most cases but you can have a resource box. In this box you can
simply say thank you for reading my article. If you would like more
information then please visit my site here (insert your blog's website
address). Pretty easy right?

There is so much money to be made in affiliate internet marketing
that I believe there will never be a shortage. With a little effort
and work anyone can succeed in making money online. I hope you
enjoyed this article and good luck.

About the author:
Thank you for reading our article. To find more informationn on affiliate marketing and other great articles then stop by http://www.platinumaffiliatemarketing.com now.

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