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A Basic
Guide to Successful Internet Affiliate Marketing
Copyright © 2005 Joan Maughan.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to start earning money online is
with Affiliate Programs. As with anything, there are the right ways and
the wrong ways to approach this type of business. The following basic
guide is designed to assist in finding the right Affiliate Programs, the
best affiliate products and to help you avoid some of the pitfalls.
What is an Affiliate?
Simply put, being an Affiliate or Associate, means you receive payment
for promoting and initiating a sale of someone else’s product. Usually
this is by commission at a rate set by the owner of the product.
Choosing an Affiliate Program
Presumably you have decided on a niche and have researched the
possibilities as far as supply and demand are concerned. It is imperative
that you find the market for your niche product before taking any further
steps. Without potential customers your efforts will be in vain. In saying
that, once you have become a successful affiliate internet marketer,
trying to open up new markets is more feasible – you will have established
yourself as honest and trustworthy, plus you should be in a better
financial situation to carry out extensive research and advertising.
The next step is to locate a suitable product. The following
Affiliate Programs provide a good range of very marketable
products, you are sure to find your niche products with one or more of
these groups. Commissions vary from group to group and product to product.
Commission Junction: Represent
Verizon, eBay and many others
PartnerCentric :
Represent National Geographic, Digital River, SnapFish, 21st Century,
Brian Tracy and many other great names
Clickbank:
Clickbank are the leaders in digital products. There is a huge range of
eBooks to choose from, plus new products are being added regularly.
In addition to the commission rates paid, it is also advisable to check
the “cookie age”. This can be anywhere from 14 days to never ending. I
would give preference to an Affiliate Program offering no less than 30%
commission and a cookie age of no less than 30 days. Of course, high
priced products could earn good income at a lower commission.
Promoting Your Affiliate Program
The vast majority of programs provide their affiliates with all the
necessary tools to start promoting and selling their products. One very
important point to bear in mind is that there are likely to be hundreds of
other affiliates using the same sales tools. In addition, “cloned” sites
are becoming unpopular with many search engines and sites are being
penalized.
A far better practice is to compose your own sales letters and webpage
content. It is not difficult to do even for newcomers to the game,
especially if you already own the product. By owning and using a product
you will find it far easier to write confidently about its benefits and
features.
Setting up Your Affiliate Website
To be a successful affiliate marketer, your website should provide the
following:
Writing a review of the product helps to build trust and confidence
with your customers. Link the review to your sales page.
Setting up Your Website.
You have a number of options here, depending upon your Webmaster
skills. One extremely easy to use program is XSitePro. It is an
ideal product for building Affiliate Websites and you don’t need HTML
knowledge, (although I firmly believe it is an asset to know the basics).
By following a step by step process you will be extremely proud of your
website creation. XSitePro is a very
reasonably priced product complete with video tutorials.
Sales Pages.
When designing your Sales Pages, make them simple. Forget the bells and
whistles; well written copy is far more effective than a whole lot of
graphics and flashing signs. There are many great books and eBooks written
on writing good sales copy. If you are intending to continue in the
Internet Affiliate Marketing business, I strongly recommend you invest in
two or three. Two very good books are –
Web Content Made
Easy by Gary Antosh, a downloadable eBook, and Ability to collect email details of prospects.
This is particularly important if you intend to build an Opt-in List of
future repeat customers. The easiest way to achieve this is to offer your
own bonus with each purchase. You can do this in a number of ways, e.g.
place a form on your Sales Pages and/or your review pages.
Once the sale is confirmed you send the bonus download link to the
buyer. As the sale is actually completed on the product website, if you
don’t capture contact details before the buyer leaves your site your
chance to sell future products to them is lost.
Disclaimer and Privacy statements.
You should include a basic Disclaimer Statement relieving you of any
direct or indirect responsibility for such things as earning potential. A
Privacy Statement will provide your potential buyers with confidence in
dealing with you.
Your contact details.
Again an important inclusion that assures your website visitors you are
contactable. I strongly advise you include a telephone number as well as
an email and postal address.
Ken Evoy’s free Affiliate Masters
Course is a must. You will find more information regarding successful Affiliate Product
Marketing at Affiliate
Programs plus more interesting articles here Article Index
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