Make Money with Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one is both so simple and yet so hard. It is so easy to implement that a child could set it up, unfortunately successfully earning money from affiliate marketing can take a lot of knowledge without which you could end up spending hours on end without much success.
Firstly let's define affiliate marketing so our inexperienced readers understand what we are taking about. The principle is simple, many manufacturers sell products and services through the internet. To increase their sales they offer individuals the opportunity to advertise their products for them and in return get a percentage of the value of the sale. The process of advertising these products for these companies is called affiliate marketing.
There are a number of key principles you need to consider before you can become a successful affiliate marketeer. Firstly, we need to understand what makes people buy products and services online, the answer is simple: they believe that the product they are buying are will add value to their lives in some way. The more value it will add the more they will be willing to pay. Therefore your first consideration will be picking a product that will add the most value to the customers as these product will naturally be easier to sell and if you choose the right product will almost sell themselves.
Other products you will have the produce a really good sales pitch to convince them to buy the product. So why would you choose a product that you have to try hard to sell when you can choose one that will virtually sell itself. This is the first mistake people make when entering the affiliate marketing arena. Product selection is the key.
The second consideration is one of exposure. You need to get your advertising seen by people. No people, no customers. Being able to drive traffic to your sales pitch or landing page is the one thing that can make up for choosing the wrong product as even the worst product will eventually sell if you drive enough traffic to it.
Choosing a Product
As you now know, affiliate marketing is dependent on finding a good product. The usual process for affiliate product selection is to join an affiliate marketing organisation and search through their clients to find products to promote. Believe it or not this not a great way to start.
Instead, start with a blank piece of paper and brainstorm what products sell. Start with industries, what are some of the most profitable industries in the world? Fashion, property, banking, tourism? Now narrow down your search and think of individual products in these industries. Once you have selected a product or two go online and find the manufacturers of these products. Virtually all of them will have an affiliate program. Sometimes you will not find it directly on their website but quite easily by searching for your selected company and the word "affiliate program" so say we find that laptops well and we wanted to become a Dell affiliate, we would search for "Dell affiliate program".
Once you find your desired affiliate program signing up is usually dead easy and completely free and your selected company will provide you with selling information and promotional tools and tips.
Promoting your Product
The next step is to design a landing page. A single webpage designed to sell the product. Most of you will have come across the generic landing pages before. With their large, bold and red titles with numerous free gifts when you order, their massive discounts ending tomorrow. It's clear to anyone that their purpose is a desperate attempt to sell the product so don't copy them! Instead your landing page should convey the benefits of purchasing the product, show your customers what value the product you are selling will bring them.
A good tactic to use is to pretend that you are convincing a close friend to by something. You obviously don't want them to get a bad deal so you provide them with the benefits they will gain from buying the product and leave them to make their own decision.
To create a landing page, list all the benefits your product will bring the buyer. Rank them from the biggest benefit to the lowest and then put them on your landing page in that order. You want to put the greatest benefit first to catch the readers attention and keep them interested while they read your sales pitch.
By the time they reach the end of your landing page they should be ready to buy, but in case they are not here is a small trick to prevent you from loosing that customer. Have a second similar product, and provide a link at the bottom of your sales pitch to the alternative products landing page. If they don't like your first product perhaps the second one will tip them over the edge and they will buy. In effect you will be find people from one landing page to another instead of them leaving your page and going somewhere else. The quick thinkers among you will take it one step further and have advertise your other products all over each of your landing pages.
Another critical thing to remember is to create a clean landing page. That means to prevent having a cluttered page. Make your sales pitch be the only thing standing out on your page, with the exception of links to your other landing pages. There shouldn't be any reason for your readers to become distracted by anything other then your pitch.
For our more advanced internet users, another useful tool is provide a free newsletter on your landing page, allowing customers to sign up allowing you to send them tips or advice along with more of your affiliate products.
Now that you have a landing page you will need to promote it, but how on earth will you get people to visit a page dedicated to selling a product? Well this can be done in a number of ways. You can promote your landing page just like any website by acquiring links from other websites. These can be attained through link exchanges with webmasters, posting in forums with a signature link, leaving blog comments with your url, submitting your page to directories and writing related articles to your product and submit them to article directories as well as asking individual webmasters to put your article on their site. An alternative and fast method is to use PPC advertising such as Google Adwords and buy your traffic. For more information on how to use Adwords with affiliate marketing see our make money with Google Adwords guide. For more information on the other website promotional techniques view our how to get traffic guide.