Affiliate Marketing Fundamentals to Achieve Success

To achieve success with affiliate marketing, you need to put in the effort and learn how to make the fundamentals work in your favor.

Don't fall into the trap or a scam by just buying the latest business in a box program, setting it up, sitting back and waiting for the dollars to come rolling in...

12 Essential Affiliate Marketing Principles of successful affiliates:

1.  Find an Industry Demand or Target Market

• Brainstorm ideas and concepts for meeting the needs of the customer you are thinking of marketing to.

• Visit online forums to see what questions people ask and what problems they’re trying to solve

• Determine which keywords are used with high profit potential and low competition 

• Checkout your potential competitors by visiting their sites and taking note of their marketing strategies

If your product or service can be based on something you are interested in yourself (and fit the above criteria) the whole process will become so much easier for you and fun at the same time! This will help you to stick to the plan because you will work on a topic you are passionate about.

Have you brainstormed some ideas and concepts and checked for profitable target markets?  OK.

You are now ready to

2.  Join an Affiliate Marketing Network

An affiliate network will offer you a wide range of products from which you can choose to promote on your web site.

I would recommend signing up (absolutely free) with these ones below which are well known and from which I continue to make decent monthly affiliate income. They have literally tens of thousands of products which you can sell

• PayDotCom's Marketplace

• ClickBank

3.  Prepare for Your Web Presence

The best way to connect customers to merchants who will pay you a commission, is by building a website that attracts qualified traffic in volume, which can be directed to the merchant's site after you have warmed them up to the products you selected previously from the marketplace.

A resource that helped me create my web site is Site Build It! (SBI).  I have every tool I need (including registering the domain name) to successfully research keywords and niches, execute the web site building process, monitor my sales, track referrals to other sites, all while I'm building a profitable web business.

You need no special technical skills so even the rawest "newbie" can handle SBI!  But it's not just for beginners - Sophisticated Webmasters can integrate their tools too. 

Here is a few testimonials of other Site Build It! owners:

You may not realize it (although I suspect you do), but Site Build It! is much more than "the only all-in-one site-building, site-hosting, and site-marketing product" (I think that's what your site says!). It's actually a "9-to-5 life liberator"."
~ Jerry Mack (sales agent)

"It's been over a year now since I started my first web site, which ranks within the top 1% of sites on the net and receives up to 1500 visitors per day. I now have a second site, and plans for a third before the summer of this year. I no longer work from home in the evenings and my income is constantly growing. Right now, it's double what I was making when I was standing behind a chair."
~ Michelle Schill (hairdresser)

Next, you should 

4.  Register a Domain Name

When you register a Domain Name, it can be used for your e-mail address (for example; Ron@mydomainname.com) which also adds to the overall professionalism and integrity of your online business. Remember never to use free web addresses as they will not inspire confidence in your prospects.

5.  Professional & Reliable Web Hosting

A Reliable Web Hosting account will give you huge flexibility as well as a range of web site tools for managing your websites, pages and new domains. 

Beware of the free and cheap hosting sites that just sell bells and whistles but don't deliver on your real business needs.  In the end you pay a very high price because you have to upgrade to the expensive products.  
Don't fall into traps like that.  

Get reliable web hosting that will not penalize you when your business start to grow, but support you in such a way that you don't have to worry about learning the technical stuff if you don't want to, but allows you to be able to focus on building your business.

All set? You can now

6.  Build Your Web site

SBI monitors every aspect of traffic for you through a consolidated control center.

You are not limited to templates,  as they can be customized.  You can start from scratch and create your own flexible web page elements for a one of a kind look.. 

 The builder is also compatible with HTML editors, some of the more recently added pages of my site are uploaded HTML - so you can combine templates and your own HTML, but still keep the look and feel of your original site theme.

Since I also have access to detailed site statistics, I can easily see which pages are working and which aren't, so I could make changes accordingly. SBI finally eliminated the guesswork in running an Internet business, so I could focus on generating new ideas, rather than worrying about the technical mechanics of my web site.

If you are thinking of building a blog or web site, read this article by Ken Evoy. He will explain the major differences.

More proof of others using SBI here.

7. Add Content that PREsells

8.  Cloak All Your Affiliate Links

Here are a few reasons why it has become essential to cloak your affiliate links:

• Affiliate links can be very easy to spot and many potential buyers will not click on an affiliate link for some unknown reason.  They cut off the affiliate link part and go to the merchant's site directly. Nullifying all your marketing efforts.

• Some buyers even cut off your own affiliate link and add in their own so that they steal the commission you would have earned. This is terrible and you could lose thousands because of it.

• Affiliate links can become very long and looks terrible.  If you use a cloaker, your links are much shorter and you will not have problems when sending out follow up ezines to customers containing affiliate links.  No more links breaking. 

• Very importantly the cloaking must be done correctly so as not to upset the cookie tracking process. You will only be credited with the sale if your customer has the cookie enabled from your affiliate link in their web browser.

• Here is a decent link cloaker which I use personally and helped me to  improve my sales ratio very effectively because my links are protected.

Are you ready to introduce your website to the masses?  Then start a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign to

9.  Advertise for Instant Targeted Traffic

You can get a flood of traffic to a brand new site within 15 minutes of it being live on the net with a Pay Per Click Ad Campaign.

Whilst PPC campaigns can be extremely effective they can also cost a lot of money for no real gain for the uninitiated, ask me.. It is therefore advisable to acquaint yourself with the best PPC practices with either of the following:

Perry Marshall's free 5 day Adwords Course OR get
Personal Adwords Coaching if you are really serious about PPC.

The benefits of implementing a PPC campaign are as follows:
 

• The ads show up on search pages immediately

• They allow you to test different keywords, headlines, prices and selling approaches

• Not only do you get traffic immediately, but once you've figured out what keywords are working best, you can use them throughout your website copy and code, which will help your ranking in organic search results.

10.  Create Back Links

For your site to get traffic you need to create back links to it to give it credibility with the search engines.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to write relevant, informative  articles on your subject matter with a link to your site in the author's resource box.

Submit your articles to some of the many article directories (e.g. ezine articles.com) and the good articles will get read many times, put on other sites while your profile and website address points back to your own site.  

11.  The Power of E-mail Marketing

Use the Power of E-mail Marketing to Harness your Visitors and Convert them into Buyers.  

If you've read anything about making money online you will know that one of the most important things is to build a email list. This way you have another chance to communicate with visitors after they leave your web site.

You capture your websites visitors details, when they complete the sign up form such as the one on the left side of my web page. This can be used  to mail them newsletters, special offers and so on. You can be sure that the affiliate marketers who have the biggest lists are the ones who are making the most money.

To manage your ezine list you'll need an email auto responder that captures your visitor's details and mails them automatically when they sign up. You can mail them a series of pre-prepared communications or automatically deliver the download link for products you promised when they sign up.  

It is essential that you automate this part of your affiliate business - apart from adding credibility it will enhance your online sales without you having to do anything but prepare the communications in advance.

In my opinion GetResponse is arguably the best email package I've come across and has all the features I need to get the job done.  

This frees up a lot of time, because it works like a Virtual Assistant so that I can work on other things (or go on holiday when I need it) while the pre-programmed auto responder does the tedious routine tasks and basically keeps the business running on autopilot 24/7. 

12.  Add extra monetizers to your site

Adsense is a great way to generate a passive income from your web site.

First off you can sign up for Adsense for free (http://www.google.com/adsense). 

Once your account is open all you have to do is copy and paste the code supplied by Adsense into your web pages and wallah - instant contextual advertising to earn you money when it's clicked by visitors.

Never click on your own ads or try to generate revenue through fraudulent clicks as Google's intelligent tracking systems will discover this and ban you, your web site, URL and anything to do with you and you'll never be able to open an Adsense account again.

For other ways to add monetizers to your site, read some more articles on this web site. You can access them from the navigation bar on the left.

Work the plan, rinse and repeat

Continuously repeat the above process when developing new pages, adding products even websites and mini sites. Always attempt to improve on your previous work.

When you stay focused and committed you will see success.
Even when you make a mistake, don't give up.  Stop, think and decide how you will do it differently, then try again.  Failure is only when you stop and give up.   Keep pushing forward and you will succeed!