Saturday, November 8, 2008

Affiliate Marketing Advice To Start Making Money

By Brian Armstrong

Clickbank is one of the easiest ways to get started promoting products as an affiliate. Unlike other affiliate networks, you don't have to have a website in order to be approved as an affiliate. In fact, you don't have to do much of anything to sign up aside from have an email address. You can use clickbank.com as a means to generate easy links that you can use in any number of different internet promotion strategies.

Many businesses don't want to manage their own affiliate programs so they sign up with companies that manage their affiliate program for them. These are affiliate networks that manage the relationships between the businesses and the affiliates. This means that as an affiliate, you can get access to several businesses through one affiliate network. Depending on the network, you may still have to apply to be accepted by each business individually.

Another popular type of affiliate marketing is called CPA which stands for Cost Per Acquisition. This is a scenario in which the company whose products or services you're promoting is going to pay you for a lead. So, when a visitor to your site completes some action, you get paid. This may be as simple as someone putting in an email address all the way through someone completing a survey or multi-page application.

You can promote affiliate programs through classified ad websites. Some easy ones to use for affiliate programs are backpage.com, usfreeads.com, adoos.ca, and check out as many local classified ad sites sponsored by either local newspapers, tv or radio. The benefit to these types of sites are that they have built-in promotion. The radio, tv and newspaper will typically promote through advertising their own classified sites which means they will get traffic. Craigslist is also a good option but must be used with care simply because Craiglist will "ghost" your ads which basically means they won't make it to the category listings on Cragislist which will severely limit their visibility.

If you're good at writing or can find a writer to assist you, article marketing may be an excellent way to go. Articles have the capacity to drive some great traffic to your website or affiliate landing page. In my experience, articles tend to produce about a 7% click through rate, or the rate at which people will click on the link in your resource box is about 7%. Some articles will do better than others which isn't unexpected. If you submit to article directories with a good ranking and good "authority", you'll have the chance to have those articles rank well in the search engines.

Social networking is very popular and often times a relationship through some of these social media sites can generate some good sales. People will buy things based on the recommendation of a friend or acquaintance. If you're participating in social networks where the interactions and relationships are based on a specific topic, find a product that you can promote that adds value to people within that category. If you're part of a network where the members of that network are all dog owners, promote a dog training video series or ebook about dog training.

Blogging is a good way to promote affiliate products. This strategy does require that you develop traffic to your blog. Unlike article marketing and social media sites that generate a good amount of traffic for you, a blog will require that you do the work to get traffic to that site. You're in luck, however, because search engines tend to like blogs for the most part because they represent updated, fresh content. You can use free websites like blogger.com to host your blog or a self-hosted blogging solution using some software, such as wordpress.

You can develop a more traditional website which would be similar to wordpress on a self hosted site. In fact, there would be no difference for the most part assuming you're using a program like wordpress to manage your content. The SEO tools and plugins that come with wordpress on a self-hosted blog scenario are very good. The idea here is to generate the kind of content that attracts people and keeps people on the site. Some ideas for how to generate this type of content can be found on copyblogger.com and problogger.net which are two excellent resource for how to make money using a blog.

Pay per click advertising is another way to drive traffic to your website or affiliate program. This is one of the methods that can have the best results based on the ability to track visitors and what actions they take based on what words they just searched for. With this knowledge comes significant power because if you can approach pay per click advertising scientifically and make this a "numbers game", you'll always be able to get traffic, test what converts and what doesn't and keep what works and drop what doesn't. This is a sure way to be profitable if you can get past the initial expense of the learning curve.

These ideas are just meant to introduce you to some of the concepts. You can do some additional research on any of these methods and find a lot of great free information online. Several websites offer great resources for how to get started with affiliate marketing. Good luck!

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