Recognizing the most proficient affiliate marketing product to promote and sell in the market can be challenging at times. Many novice affiliate marketers have a tendency to join every program that they come across with, thinking that they will be able to generate more profits. The truth of the matter is, this is not always beneficial. Keep in mind that the affiliate service or product that you choose is vital to your online success. Thus, you need to research before you choose any product or service. Here are a few items you should consider:
• Select a product or service that is already in demand. Search for affiliate programs that exhibit high conversion rates. Also, if a product is on a merchant’s “best seller” list, then you know that there is a market for the item.
• Selecting a product that relates to your interest, while not absolutely necessary, is a nice bonus.
• Always look for quality of products than quantity of commission rates. Although, it is important to ensure that the commission fees are competitive, it is more important to ensure that the product is one that you want to be associated with.
• Make sure the merchant is reputable. Try to send an email or contact the administrator or support desk to find out how they easily respond to inquiries. You should obtain a reply within two to three days. If they fail to send you a reply, the company may not be as reliable as it should be.
• If you want to market more than one affiliate marketing product, you should ensure that you have enough time to promote many products, services, or programs. Remember that you can’t generate money if you don’t have sufficient time to market them effectively.
If your a new to affiliate marketing, finding a good affiliates forum should be the first task you complete. There will be a number of things you will need to learn in order to be a successful affiliate such as marketing techniques, keyword research or how to make a blog. An affiliates forum is fillled with individuals that are just waiting to share their knowledge with you. Here are a few tips to help narrow your search.
1. An affiliates forum must have active members. A forum can have a large membership with little activity. If you have to wait days for an answer to a question then you should find another forum. Take a look around to ensure there are recent posts. Although I prefer large forums a small forum can be just as educational. A smaller forum with very active members has an added benefit. It’s easier to form relationships and partnerships.\par
2. The affiliates forum should provide useful information. Remember you joined the forum to reduce your learning curve. Browse the topics to ensure information you need is being discussed. Also, if you’ve decided on a specific niche or product then you should join a forum that is specific to that niche or product. You can use any search engine and come up with dozens of possible forums. You don’t have to limit yourself to one forum, you might benefit by joining a few.
3. In addition to useful information the affiliates forum should provide services or tools that will make your daily tasks easier. These tools and services may also be provided by the forum members. It takes time to write articles, perform keyword research, and build links etc. so any assistance the forum can provide will be appreciated.
Finding a good affiliates forum should be one of the first steps you take on your path to becoming a successful affiliate marketer. While a forum won’t be your only source of training, it will often provide you with solutions for resolving your problems quickly.
One of the aspects of affiliate marketing that you will learn early on is keyword research. It sounds quite daunting, but all it takes is a bit of common sense, logic and time on your hands to ‘research’.
What you need to focus on are ‘long tail keywords’, these are the easiest to rank for not only as a newbie in affiliate marketing, but as an internet marketeer in general.
So what are long tail keywords? These are phrases containing at least 3 words that are typed in the search engines (Google for example) for people to find information on.
For example if you’re looking to promote a product on dating, you could write down things like ‘getting my ex back’, ‘how to get my ex back’, ‘ways to get my ex back’. There are lots of people who are searching for ways to win back their ex-es and thankfully Clickbank has enough products that you can promote for years.
Or if you’re looking at the diet niche, long tail keywords might be ‘the green tea diet’, ‘ways to lose weight fast’, ‘get rid of fat’, etc. Diet, fasting, fat and dating are NOT long tail keywords. These are whole markets and you’d really need gloves of iron to even try competing with these general terms.
One of the best sources of finding great long tail keywords is Micro Niche Finder. I can’t recommend this product enough, it’s really a superb piece of craftsmanship. With this software you can make your whole market research and much more. You can buy it directly here from the author,or if you’re still looking for reviews on it, I found this quite interesting article on blogspot.
To become a really successful and wealthy affiliate, you really need to focus on 5 main steps. There are some steps in between as well, but by doing these 5, the others come automatically with.
- Pick and research your niche – first you need to find a niche that you know something about, or you like it for one reason or another – or you can related to it somehow. Then go ahead and research it. Go to Amazon.com and check out the most popular books in the niche. Usually Amazon has a Table of Contents that is freely viewable. Check that out, see the topics, find some interesting tags and keywords. Write them down. The go ahead to the various free keyword research tools (Google’s tool being one of them and find some nice longtail keywords that you can use. Of course there are whole books written only about keyword research and there are specific software that will help you tremendously with it, like MicroNicheFinder that I totally use in my daily research, but I won’t go into details about research just yet, that is for another article.
- Find some great converting affiliate programs that you can advertise – some people like to start with finding a Clickbank product and then building the niche around it. I prefer it the other way around. I want to know that I have a hungry market eager to buy the products and then I’ll research for something that I know I can happily product because I know the market is already there.
- Create your website and build your content around it – first get yourself a domain name that is relevant to your niche, so that Google can see it as such. Then decide whether you want to create blogs around the niche, or landing pages that will have buttons where people will click to go to your selected product that you promote, or maybe you’ll do a sales page yourself or a squeeze page. The possibilities are endless here. But make sure that you don’t just point your domain to the seller’s website with your affiliate link embedded in it. People have grown accustomed to seeing these pages and they will be fast to clicking the back button when they see that you don’t offer anything of substance but a trick to lure them to buy the product.
- Get targeted traffic to your site – I have discussed getting targeted traffic to your site here, so I will not repeat myself. Make sure you go and read this article.
- Finally now is the time to monitor and tweak – see how all is converting, what traffic you are getting, and tweak if necessary.
- A last step, which is not really part of this process, yet, it is integral to your becoming a great affiliate is: do it all over again in another niche
What is SEO anyway? Most newbies have hears about SEO, but are afraid to ask.
Search engine optimization is the art bringing your site to rank well in search engines (particularly Google) so that when people are searching for the keywords your site is optimized for, they will find it in the SERPS (search engine result pages). Yes, it takes months, if not years, for a site to rank well for the keywords you are trying to optimize your site, so don’t get discouraged if next month you’re still not on page 1. You really need to be patient. Let’s covers some important SEO tips for you.
Make your proper Keyword Research
You need to choose a range of long tail (variations of a main word) and other related keywords, so that when somebody is searching for them, you will be found. Nobody really searches for ‘acne’, but they definitely search for ‘acne natural treatments’. Some topics have a range of keywords that relate to them so you really need to cover them all, including choosing synonyms (words that have the same or similar meaning), plurals and other words that people may use to find your site. The more the merrier, I say!
Tracking and Statistics
How can you improve something something if you don’t know what you need to improve. So sign up with Google Analytics and get used to using it on a regular basis. You can also use Awstats in your hosting Cpanel to track where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they are finding your site with and where they are leaving from. I’m using Awstats quite a lot actually.
Emphasize some keywords
You can emphasize certain keywords in your articles and blog posts by making them bold and italics, and also making them headers with the H1, H2 etc tags. This will tell the search engines that these are important words and should be counted as such.
Of course, there are much more than these 3, but these SEO tips should get you started on the right track to SEO your success.
When just start out in internet marketing, and you ask anyone what is the best way for a newbie to get going, you’ll usually get the answer ‘affiliate marketing, of course, join one of the affiliate programs on Clickbank’.
It’s true,affiliate marketing has really become a perfectly accepted and feasible business model for internet marketers and you can make a great living only by doing it. For example, most of the affiliate marketing programs are completely free to join and you will even have free access to a whole range of promotion tools to get you going in the business. So yes, it’s true you can make money with affiliate marketing for free if you choose to do so. No wonder everybody is recommending it wholeheartedly.
But…as with any business, there are certain pitfalls that you need to know about, so you can avoid them, in order to be really successful. If you choose to ignore these mistakes, you might find yourself working to no end to make only pennies from your affiliate marketing – and that will NOT make you free of your so dreaded 9-5 job that you want to get away from.
Mistake #1: Choosing The Wrong Affiliate Program
Before you run off to promote an affiliate program that you get attached to, you need to know why you want to select that program. The cute header and nice words, or your personal affinity to the niche subject won’t do here. You need a hungry crowd, meaning a targeted market that is in desperately searching for something.
Let’s say you researched a bit and found that acne sufferers are finding it really hard to get rid of their acne, but they want to do so using natural treatments.
Now you will go to Clickbank, for example, and find the right product to promote. You will search in this case an ebook on using natural treatments for acne, which does not harm to the skin, doesn’t need for the patient to spend thousands on pills and expensive creams, and is successful in a relatively short period.
Mistake #2: Going after Too Many Affiliate Programs
If you’re like me when I first started out, you will join several affiliate programs, as each sounds better and better in terms of payouts, etc. You will think that by joining more programs, you will make more money. Wrong. You will soon find yourself overwhelmed and will tend to give up affiliate marketing so much faster. When starting out go after only a few products all evolving around the same niche, so you can stay focused until you get those ones making sales. Once you’re comfortable using those, you can always expand, and dump those that proved to be non-money makers.
Mistake #3: Not Familiarizing Yourself With The Product
To properly promote a product or service it really helps to know as much about it as possible. As a matter of fact, it’ is recommended that you buy it and experience yourself if you really want to be able to talk about it well. Some programs allow you to buy their product using your own affiliate ID at Clickbank when it’s simply for learning, reviewing and promoting it. But it’s always best to first check with the product company, to make sure they approve. There may come a time when someone asks you a question about it and you have no answers. Knowing everything there is to know about the product will allow you to write a really good and unique review, which will separate you from the crowd who never bothered with this third step, and always copies boring reviews from others.
