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The first thing to understand about affiliate marketing when you start out is that, despite all of the hype, it’s not necessarily a road paved with gold. For the new marketer there are a bewildering number sites offering this fantastic way of earning a lot of money in a very short space of time, and to a degree they’re absolutely right. It’s very possible to earn considerable sums. However to do this is not always as easy as it sounds. The experienced marketer relies on a number of devices to maximise his return on his investment.
Let’s look at a few of these.
The first thing that you’re going to need is a website. If you’re selling a physical product, then it’s a must. Potential customers will want to look at what you are selling. They’ll want to make comparisons, look at color, check availability etc. They’ll want to be able to order it directly from your website. It’s needs to be user friendly and professional. It has to be interesting and appealing enough to persuade the buyer to stay around to see what’s on offer. However, this doesn’t mean that they’re going to buy. In fact, most surfers are only looking for information, so you have to make sure that you’ve a lot of content that’s relevant, and most importantly, accurate. So how does this help you to sell? Google loves content. Most of all it wants it original and informative. What this does is improve your ranking with the search engines. The better the ranking, the higher you’re going to appear on the Google pages. The aim, of course is to get to the top of page one. The higher you are, the more chance you have of selling your product or service, but you won’t get there without a lot of hard work.
How are you going to make this happen?
You need to be popular. This means that you have to provide incentives to make people visit your site. Start an e-zine or a newsletter. If you can provide the latest information on popular products people will want to hear about it. Tell them about what you’re doing. Surfers like to identify with real people rather than a faceless company. Use lots of images with plenty of information about the product. Start a subscription service that offers weekly or monthly advice and information on the latest products. Offer special discounts to the members of you list. You could even offer freebies linked to bought products.
What else can you do?
I cannot stress too highly the importance of driving targeted traffic to your site.
It’s vital that you have links coming back to your site. One of the best ways, and it doesn’t cost you anything at all, is by submitting articles. Write about what you do best. Talk about what you consider to be the best ‘whatever’. How easy, or difficult it is to use. If you have knowledge in a particular field, use it. The more original and relevant your articles are, the greater the chances for other websites to use it. How does this help you? On every article site there is a resource box that will be attached to your account. This is an area that you can put relevant details about you and your business, and most importantly, back links to your site. The more the articles are read and distributed the greater the exposure your site is going to get. You need to distribute your articles to as many sites as you can to achieve the maximum benefit.
An additional benefit of articles is that the more that you have published, the greater your expertise is perceived, and you will start to be recognized as an expert in that particular field. This will in turn help to drive traffic to your site.
This is, however, just the start. It’s vital that you keep up the momentum by using every opportunity to promote yourself in every way possible.
As I said at the start, doing it properly is not easy. You could spend months in research finding out about the individual elements that you need to create a successful affiliate marketing business. Alternatively, you can fast track yourself a long way up the queue by using a specialist company that provides everything that you need to get up and running in a very short space of time. These generally provide an all-encompassing service that will create and build your website, submit articles on your behalf, organize and drive traffic to your site plus provide you with help and support every step of the way. These are usually on a paid membership basis, and can be extremely cost effective and time saving.
This is just the beginning. With enthusiasm and determination and the right advice you could build yourself a fantastic business and become quite wealthy at the same time.
Brian N Shaw is an author, internet marketer, coach and mentor with the Internet Training Lab.
You can find out about this one stop shop for all internet marketing training and resources at http://www.theinternettraininglab.com
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