The 3 Easiest Ways For Newbies To Start In Affiliate Marketing
With the aid of the Internet, you can almost have everything right at your fingertips. With just a few clicks you get access to thousands and even millions of pieces of information and data on virtually any field of interest. As years pass by, the Internet continuous to effect radical changes in many facets of human endeavors, including commerce. Experts say that the information space, commonly known as the “world wide web,” grows by over a million pages everyday as more and more people utilize the Internet for information, education, entertainment, business and other personal reasons. It doesn’t take a business-oriented individual to realize that this
phenomenon can bring about sky-high financial gains. The Internet’s fast-growing popularity in the recent years is surely an opportunity for business that any entrepreneur would not want to miss.
You might be thinking only businessmen can make much money out of the Internet, don’t you? Think again. You too can earn big bucks through the Internet even if you don’t have products to sell and high-profile and established company. How? That is through affiliate marketing. You might have come across these words over the net while surfing. Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing between a merchant and an affiliate who gets paid for referring or promoting the merchants’ products and services. It is one of the burgeoning industries nowadays because it is proven to be cost-efficient and quantifiable means of attaining great profit both for the merchant and the affiliate and other players in the affiliate program, such as the affiliate network or affiliate solution provider.
Affiliate marketing works effectively for the merchant and the affiliate. To the first, he gains opportunities to advertise his products to a larger market, which increases his chances to earn. The more affiliate websites or hard-working affiliates he gets, the more sales he can expect. By getting affiliates to market his products and services, he is saving himself time, effort and money in looking for possible markets and customers. When a client clicks on the link in the affiliate website, purchases the product, recommends it to others who look for the same item or buys it again, the merchant multiplies his chances of earning. On the other hand, the affiliate marketer benefits from each customer who clicks on the link in his website and who actually purchases the product or avails of the service provided by the merchant. In most cases, the affiliate gets commision per sale, which can be fixed percentage or fixed amount.
If you want to be an affiliate marketer and make fortunes out of the Internet, you may follow the following three most basic and easiest ways to start an effective affiliate marketing program. First is to identify a particular thing you are interested in or passionate about so you won’t be bored and forced to develop your affiliate web site later on. Focusing on a specific area you know very well will help you bring out your best without much risks and effort. You can add a personal touch to your site and give your visitors who are possible buyers an impression that you are an expert in your field. In this way, you gain their trust and eventually encourage them to buy the products you endorse. Next is to look for good paying merchants and products or services related to your interest and create now a website. In choosing the products, you must also consider its conversion rate
Make Money Through Affiliate Marketing.
3 Necessary Tools For The High Rolling Affiliate Marketer
Important Tool #1: Your Own Website
The most important and indispensable tool in Affiliate Marketing is your own website. The first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Therefore, you must first concentrate your efforts in building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.
The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to look for information, not necessarily to go and buy something. Above all else, make your website full of original, relevant and useful content. People will love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is still king and good quality content will not only build your credibility, it can also help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible expert in the field, making you a more trustworthy endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation is a good step in building up a loyal consumer base.
Now that we’ve covered those aspects of Affiliate Marketer, let’s turn to some of the other factors that need to be considered.
Important Tool #2: Incentives
Competition is extremely tight in the internet world. You must always be one-step ahead of your rivals to ensure that you capture a significant share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every possible means to encourage people not only to visit your site but also to click and proceed to the websites of the products and services you are promoting. Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can present free softwares, access to exclusive services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.
Important Tool #3: Link Popularity
The importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. The all-important web traffic is at the top of the list of the most important entities in the internet world. Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a high search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings. Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive reciprocal link campaign.
Now you can be a confident expert on Affiliate Marketing. OK, maybe not an expert. But you should have something to bring to the table next time you join a discussion on Affiliate Marketing.
The 5 Top Reasons Why Affiliates Join An Affiliate Network
1. Campaign Selection: An affiliate network gives affiliates access to 100’s of niche merchant’s products and services. The network uses it’s time and resources to find the clever publishers who have figured out new ways to drive converting traffic. It also provides a greater variety of top performing, reputable campaigns. In this way, affiliates will easily get exposed to upmarket products such as banner rotations. With a single affiliate network, affiliates can easily work with multiple advertisers, multiple offers and multiple payment style options such as pay per click, pay per lead, pay per impression, etc. all under one umbrella, the affiliate network.
2. One Single Relationship: The relationship between the advertiser and the affiliate is of utmost importance. These relationships are necessary for structuring increased commissions (if the affiliates volume increases), in advertisers delivering affiliate-specific content, and in the advertiser and affiliate working together to assist the affiliate in maximizing the traffic to his site. The affiliate only deals with one advertiser, namely the affiliate network, rather than each of the merchants individually. This frees up a lot of space on the affiliates calendar since the affiliate does not have to use any time building relationships with anyone except their affiliate network manager. Affiliate marketing is about relationships, and that is then all taken care of by the affiliate network. The affiliate network will provide top quality support and a great training area for the affiliate to build up their skills, learn and grow.
3. Real Time Tracking: Testing and comparing each and every change and idea is fundamental for taking an affiliate’s business from strength to strength. The most important tool for testing is real time tracking. This allows the affiliate to know immediately how their new idea is translating and helps to guide the affiliate as to whether it is an idea worth pursuing. The software to track impressions, clicks, leads and sales for each campaign can be both pricey and require a lot of upkeep. The network will provide this service for free to their affiliates. The network will also provide affiliate with advanced reporting tools for checking their stats, graphs for analyzing trends, and even cookie testing capabilities for monitoring fraud.
4. Risk of Payment: Every advertiser has an element of risk as to whether you will actually receive the payments from them. As many companies can be virtual or on the opposite side of the world from where the affiliate is based, it is often very difficult to avoid doing business with dishonest advertisers. This means that no matter how much revenue the affiliate generates, some advertisers will never pay the affiliates. Joining an affiliate network gives the affiliate much stronger protection. The network will have built strong relationships with a number of the advertisers it works with and thus there is minimal chance the affiliate will not get paid.
5. Monthly, Correct Payments: Affiliate networks ensure all payments are checked and paid monthly (or as alternatively agreed). This means that the affiliate does not have to waste valuable time checking and reconciling the advertisers’ figures.
The role of an affiliate is to maximize the traffic to their site and provide rich and useful content to their site. This keeps an ever growing visitor base arriving at their site, and ensures the visitors look around the site before exiting the site. An affiliate network encourages the affiliates to concentrate on these vital functions by assisting the affiliate in maximizing the spend of each visitor the affiliate attracts.
Keeping Affiliates Motivated
the software and help available now. However, keeping
your affiliates motivated and selling isn’t quite
as easy to do. If the success of your business rests
upon how your affiliates perform, you make want to
provide them with the right tools to get the job
done successfully.
If you are already running an affiliate program for
your products, you should know that a large number of
people who sign up for your program never to be
heard from again. You can however, reduce the number
of non productive affiliates by remaining in touch
with them constantly.
Remind them of their usernames and passwords, and
tell them where to log in to check their stats or
get creative. Always keep them informed of new
product lines or changes in policy or procedures.
The key to motivation is making sure that you stay
in touch. Always pay attention to who your top
sellers are, and make sure that you contact them
on a regular basis. Pay attention to who your worst
producers are, and make sure you stay in touch
with them constantly as well.
The main reason most affiliates don’t perform that
well is because they don’t possess any leadership
or guidance. This can easily be changed by writing
a marketing course, which you can even offer for
sale to non affiliates, although you should make
it available to your affiliates at no charge.
Keep your creatives and sales copy up to date. You
should also provide new material for your affiliates
to use on a regular basis. Providing them with
nothing but a text link and one banner just
doesn’t generate much excitement at all.
Provide your affiliates with sales letters, reviews,
ads, banners of different shapes and sizes, and
anything else that comes to mind. Be sure that your
affiliates know the material is there for them to
use. Always listen to your affiliates, and get
the proper feedback on your material.
You should also hold virtual meetings. Set up chat
rooms where your affiliates can attend virtual
meetings on a weekly basis. Be sure to answer any
questions, have motivated speakers, and aything
else you can think of to make the meetings more
motivated.
Given your affiliates the credit they deserve is
also very important. Each month, you should give
credit to the best performers in your affiliate
newsletter. Give small bonuses to those that
perform well, and you can even set up a payment
structure that rewards higher commissions and bigger
volumes of sales.
Always make sure you do everything you can to
help your affiliates succeed and make money in
your program. If they are making money – you are
succeeding and making money as well. In reality -
their success is your success.