Basics of Affiliate Marketing
Posted by Andy Crofford
On Sunday I went over the basics of article marketing. Today I thought I would cover the basics of affiliate marketing.
Regardless of what some people say there is still money to be made in affiliate/internet marketing. Whether you want to make a little extra money or go full time affiliate marketing is a great option.
First I want touch on What exactly affiliate marketing is. Affiliate marketing is a method that allows you to earn passive income by promoting products and services other online businesses are offering. You can earn commissions by generating leads and sales for these companies.
To find these offers you will need to sign up with an affiliate network. Some of the affiliate networks I recommend are:
Azoogle
NeverBlueAds
Market Leverage
Xy7.com
These are just a few that I belong to. You want to make sure you belong to many affiliate networks so you have a wide range of offers to choose from.
If you would like to give affiliate marketing a try here are some tips to follow:
Select Your Niche
This is the most important factor to consider when doing affiliate marketing. The niche you choose can make or break you as an affiliate. My free guide “Niche Store 101 - A Beginner’s Guide to Building a Niche Store” has several methods for finding a niche that will provide you with a great starting point if you are not sure where to begin. To get this guide simply sign-up for my newsletter in the upper left hand corner.
Split Test Your Landing Pages
The most important thing after picking a niche is making sure your landing page works. To do this you will want to split test your landing pages. Split testing is really no fun at all but you must do it if you want to be successful long term. To split test a landing page create two pages and track how each one converts. This can be easily done by using a tracking code in your affiliate link (which you can setup in the affiliate network’s control panel) and a program called Adtrackz. This application will generate a link and split the traffic up evenly between your two landing pages. Once you determine that one landing page works better than the other replace the poorly performing page with another and keep split testing until you have your page fully optimized.
Offer Freebies
There are people out there who make a great deal of money offering freebies. That is because the write a report or eBook on a particular subject and make sure they include plenty of referral links in their free guide. Even if you are not an expert you can use the internet to do research and come up with a great report any way. Plus, after your research you will most likely be very close to being an expert.
Get Targetted Traffic
Now that you have found your niche, created some landy pages and created an awesme freebie it is time to get some traffic to your site. You can have the greatest landing page in the world but it won’t do you any good if you don’t have traffic.
There are several methods you can use to drive traffic to your site. First there is article marketing, which was covered on Sunday. The second is building backlinks to your site. The best way to do this is to set up and maintain social network accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed…) and let people know about your sites as well as comment on blogs that cover your niche. To find blogs within your niche you can use the LinkBuildingBible’s DoFollow Diver search engine. The LinkBuildingBible has a lot of great tips on building backlinks. You should definitely check it out if you want to increase your backlinks.
This article was intended to be a basic overview of affiliate marketing. Hopefully I was able to provide some helpful information.
CoolProducts Says:
September 12th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Andy, Great post.
This is an insightful post on a topic that’s picking up steam everyday. Keep up the good work.
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