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Affiliate marketing can be an excellent way of getting started in the online business world. You don’t need a product, you don’t need to be able to handle credit cards, and you don’t need a website. Many people are earning a good income from affiliate marketing and don’t know the first thing about web sites and web hosting.
That’s fine for people who just don’t want the hassle of managing websites. Maybe they earn enough money for their needs, they have a decent life and see no reason to change things.
This is where you can start to stand out from the crowd and get on your way to turning a good income into a living. Imagine boosting your affiliate income so much that you could give up your day job. In fact, your online affiliate marketing will become your day job, only you won’t have to work 8 hours a day at it, and you can choose when you work those hours. So how do we move up to the next step?
If you’re not interested in setting up websites, stop reading now. However, if you’re willing to give it a try, this is what you need to do to jump above the other affiliates.
Many affiliates use the following system to earn their money:
- Select a vendor’s product to promote
- Get an affiliate link
- Create Google AdWords ads to promote the affiliate link
- Customers follow the affiliate link to the vendor’s website and purchases the product (hopefully)
- Receive commission payment from vendor’s affiliate program (eg ClickBank)
Easy as pie! But what’s wrong with this scenario?
You’re Missing Out!
You have to analyse what’s going on behind the scenes. let’s say that 30 people followed your link and bought a product for $27. Your affiliate commission on each sale was $15, so you made a nice 30 x $15 = $450 from the promotion (less your advertising costs). The vendor made 30 x $12 = $360 from those sales.When those 30 customers purchased the product, the vendor captured their details and added them to his mailing list. And we’ve all heard that old chestnut; “the money is in the list”.
So what happens when the vendor releases a new, related product? He offers the product directly to those 30 people in his mailing list. They are a captive audience, and they are known buyers, so there’s a good chance that many of them will buy the second product, too.
So let’s say that 12 of the 30 people in the list buy the new product, which is also priced at $27. The vendor makes 12 x $27 = $324. This time, he has no commission to pay, and he has removed those customers from the general marketplace so that none of his affiliates will be able to make sales from them.
Don’t forget that the vendor could have several hundred affiliates bringing in customers in the same way, so in reality his mailing list is going to be a lot bigger than those 30 people you brought in. It could be in the thousands for a popular product.
The vendor also has the advantage that he can offer the new product to people in his list BEFORE it goes on general sale, so the affiliates have very little chance of being able to make a sale to them when it does become available.The problem is that the vendor is building up a nice big list, while you are doing all the hard work, and going through the expense of promoting the product.
You can’t stop the vendor from building their list and using it to sell new products before their general release, but you can steal a march on other affiliates when the new product does become available.
Build Your Own List
You need to capture the details of the buyers to build your own list. But with an affiliate link, how can you do that? It’s easy. Instead of promoting your affiliate link, you set up a website and promote that. On the website, you will present details of the product in question, along with an offer of some free reports. To get the reports, the buyers will have to enter their details into your squeeze page. Then you can lead them on to the sales page via your affiliate link.If you offer a lot more for the same money than the other affiliates who are only promoting the product, you have a much better chance of making the sale.
You might want to confirm that they actually went on to purchase the product before you send the free reports. This could be done by monitoring your affiliate account, or by getting them to send you a copy of their payment invoice.
The best part of all, is that some vendors actually provide promotional websites that you can download and use to sell their product via your link, so the sales copy is written for you. All you have to do is modify the site to advertise your free reports and include the squeeze page fields.
So What About the Free Reports?
Search around for reports related to the product you are promoting to make sure the offer looks attractive. You can usually find several with PLR (Private Label Rights) or Giveaway Rights.
An even better idea is to write your own giveaway report, because then it will be unique.What’s Next?
You have now begun to build your list. You know what kind of thing those people are interested in, so it’s a targeted list. So when you find another product to sell that might appeal to those people, email them directly. Your affiliate link will be in the email. You might want to cloak the link, but that’s the subject of another article.Your list contains your own captive audience of known buyers. Build your lists with every product you sell. Sell to them directly and your income will climb rapidly.
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I guess it was inevitable that I’d think of some more article marketing mistakes after publishing my list of 9 (see previous post).
So I’ll just add some more in here, and this time I won’t make the mistake of including a number in the title!Mistake #10 – My article is just an advertisement
This is a big mistake. As I mentioned in Mistake #5 in my previous post, the person reading your article is probably not ready to buy just yet. They are looking for information about something – not to be sold something. What you have to do in your article is tell them what they want to know, gain their confidence, and then lead them on to your website via the link in your Resource Box.As an example, let’s say you sell fishing gear. Somebody starts to get interested in fishing for salmon and wants to find out more, so they look for information about what gear they will need for that purpose, or for the techniques required.
So, write one or more articles about salmon fishing. One article could contain information about the type of equipment you will need. The next could contain techniques for fly-fishing etc.
On finding your articles useful and informative, they will realise that you are experienced in that field and will begin to trust your information.
Having educated them about their new-found interest, they might now be ready to buy, and are more likely to follow the link in your Resource Box.
Which brings me to…Mistake #11 – Unimaginitive Resource Box
Many people who submit articles to our site simply throw a link into their Resource Box and leave it at that.
Continuing the example above, the visitor has just read your article and wants to know more. Tempt them to your website by letting them know that there is more information there. (assuming there is more information!)
Example:
Read more tips on fishing for salmon at.
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As a partner in a popular Article Site, I see Article Marketing used, misused and abused. In this post I hope to demonstrate where people are going wrong, and give some hints and tips that will make your Article marketing more effective.
Many of the mistakes made are based on what people have heard or read regarding the search engines and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). That’s all very well, but the search engines continually evolve and SEO rules must evolve with them. Sadly, people get hooked on a concept and don’t adapt what they do to the latest behaviour of the search engines.Mistake #1 – Article Marketing is only for Creating Backlinks
This is a common misconception promoted by so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) specialists. Somebody discovered that the search engines give higher priorities to sites containing more incoming links (or backlinks) than those with fewer links. As article sites promote the re-publishing of articles on other sites, the number of links from each submitted article can grow considerably.
This led to people frantically churning out hundreds of articles to submit to article sites, just so that they could get a lot of links back to their website. Many people are still stuck in this rut, churning out numerous articles. In fact they are stuck so far into this rut that they make…Mistake #2 – The Content Isn’t Important; Just Get the Backlinks
People stuck in the “Get as many backlinks as possible” rut tend to write short, repetitive, uninformative articles. They don’t really care that nobody will ever read the article – they just want the backlinks, and they submit their articles to 50 or more article sites. Of course, after people started doing that, the search engines started finding duplicate content, and discounting the backlinks. So the marketers needed some way of doing the same thing without being hit for duplicate content. This led to the invention of Article Spinners or Article Rewriters – software that rewrites your articles automatically, creating hundreds of new articles. In fact, they are all the same article – just written using different words and phrases that mean the same thing. Unfortunately, this led to…Mistake #3 – Article Spinners Will Reliably Make 300 Different Versions of my Article
Article Spinners/Rewriters WILL take your article and make 300 different versions of it. But the majority of those versions will be complete rubbish. These programs work by replacing words and phrases with others of the same or similar meaning, using a Thesaurus and/or Dictionary. Some work better than others, but most just aren’t up to the mark. The users of these programs don’t bother to read through the generated articles, so they don’t realise what rubbish they contain. They blindly submit the generated articles to different article sites, filling those sites with incomprehensible rubbish.Mistake #4 – It Doesn’t matter if Nobody Reads the Articles
We get a lot of visitors to our article site. The majority of them are not submitting articles; they are reading them. They have searched for information on a particular subject and found articles relating to it. If your trashy, “spun” article comes up in their search, they’ll read the first few sentences, realise that it’s worthless and move on to the next article.
But imagine if that next article was useful, informative and written in good English (or whatever language is in use on that site). The visitor will read through the article right to the bottom. If they found the article useful and want to know more, they might just click on that link in the Resource Box, and the author of that good article may have got themselves a customer.Take a tour of the better quality article sites. You will find that the articles are moderated. If you submit trash, it will be rejected and never published on the site. You will have wasted your own time. The better quality article sites will also carry more weight to their backlinks. A single link from one quality site could be worth 20 links from sites containing unmoderated rubbish.
Mistake #5 – The Backlinks Generate Traffic Via the Search Engines
It’s true. The search engines will index the backlinks, and if the quality of those links is high enough, you might get a top spot on the search engine results pages, but it’s not guaranteed.
But go back and read Mistake #4. You can get traffic directly from the article site, via your Resource Box link. And at that point, you have an advantage. When somebody starts searching for information about something, they might not be ready to buy it yet. They want to do their research. If they find a link directly to your site in the search engines, they don’t want to be sold something – they are looking for information. If that person finds the link to your site at the end of an informative, well-written article, a psychological change has happened. That person now…
1) has more information on the subject
2) found the article useful, and has built some trust in the author
3) might be more inclined to buy something
4) might want more information so follows the link to find out more
When that person lands on your website, they are now more targeted than they were before reading the article.Mistake #6 – Quantity is Not Important
Many ebooks about SEO and Article Marketing suggest that you need write only 200 or so words in your articles. That might work for the “backlink rut” people, but if you’re going to use Article marketing effectively, you need to give more than 200 words.
A well-written article of a decent length is going to hook the reader more than a 200 word article. On our article site, the minimum is 250 words, but we suggest between 500 and 1000 words (or more if you wish).Mistake #7 – It Doesn’t Matter if my English Isn’t Very Good
The quality article sites which carry out moderation of articles will not rate your article if it is full of spelling and grammatical errors, bad English, and too much slang. Don’t forget that your article is being published worldwide. A slang phrase or colloquialism that you use in your article might not be understood by many of your readers. Even worse, it might have a completely different meaning – maybe even offensive.Mistake #8 – Everyone on the Internet Lives in the USA
On our site, we often receive articles that are very specific to a country – more often than not, specific to the USA. Don’t forget that what you are writing about may not apply outside your own country. Simply state at the beginning of the article that it applies to your location and may not apply elsewhere. In June/July 2009, our site received visitors from 139 different countries or territories.Mistake #9 – Make your Resource Box link a hyperlink
We have seen numerous articles submitted containing web addresses in the Resource Box, but they have not been entered as hyperlinks, making them less easy to follow.
An even worse mistake is not even entering a web address in the Resource Box! If you don’t enter a website address, you’re not going to get any traffic, and you won’t get any backlinks.Summary
Effective Article Marketing:
- Generates backlinks
- Generates traffic
- Builds trust between the visitor and the author.Steps To Effective Article Marketing:
- Read the Submission Guidelines of the article sites – they are all different
- Write informative, well-structured articles that encourage visitors to read them to the end and then follow your link to your site
- Enter a hyperlink to your website in the Resource Box.Related Reading:
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It doesn’t matter whether you are selling your own product, or working as an affiliate to sell somebody else’s product; you need traffic. What’s more, to be really effective, that traffic must be targeted traffic. There’s no point in trying to sell somthing to people who have no interest in it. They’re not going to even look at it, let alone click the Buy Now button.
As an online marketing newbie, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap known as “if I build it, they will come”. The newbie often lovingly creates their website sales page and puts it on their host server, sitting back waiting for the money to come rolling in. It doesn’t work like that. How is anybody going to buy the product from you if they don’t even know you are there, or how to find you.
Traffic to websites generally comes from three sources; Direct, Referred, Search Engine, and Bought.
Direct
Direct traffic is when people enter your website’s URL into their browser’s address bar and hit enter. Getting this sort of traffic implies that people already know your site’s URL, which means they must have obtained it from somewhere. These sources could be Personal Recommendation or some other external, offline location such as in a letter, newsletter, TV, Radio or Newspaper advertisement etc.Referred
Referred traffic is when people follow a link. These links might be found on other websites or blogs, forums, article sites, emails, or from a messaging service such as Twitter. As long as the link is found on a site containing subject matter related to your own, this kind of traffic is very valuable, as it will be very finely targeted.
Having such links is also very good for your website as the search engines regard it with more importance if there are many external sites linking to it.
In later articles, I’ll be covering getting links to your site (generally known as backlinks), quickly and easily.Search Engine
This is what most people strive for. Like it or not, when most people want to find out about something, they turn to the search engines. Get to the front page of search engines for your most relevant keywords and you’re likely to get a lot more traffic than if you appear on the second or subsequent pages.
The best thing about search engine traffic is that it is highly targeted. The person searching uses keywords to find what they want, and if those keywords are highly relevant to your site, you’re going to get traffic.In further articles on this site, I’ll be covering a few ways of getting excellent ranking in the search engine results within a short space of time, What’s more, they don’t always cost anything more than your own time to do them.
Bought Traffic
There are a number of sites on the Internet offering bulk traffic to your site. These are of variable quality. You could buy, for example, 1000 visits from one traffic service, but there’s no guarantee that the visitors will be interested in what you are offering. Other traffic services might supply more targeted traffic. The difficult part is determining which services will provide the best traffic for your product.
Bought traffic is very tempting when you’re starting out and not having much success. You might get one or two buyers out of 1000 visitors if you’re very lucky. However, you might end up spending more money than you make.Related Reading:
