Saturday, November 22, 2008

Beginners Guide to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

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.

CPA Networks are another type of network you can use to generate revenue. These can be easier to get a conversion because you're not asking someone to buy something, instead, you're asking someone to take some action, like fill out a form or complete a survey. Companies will pay you for this information or the work to get the leads.

If you were to take your links from Clickbank and try to find a place to start promoting affiliate programs, the easiest would probably be online classified ad websites. There are some major disadvantages. The main one being that because it's free, there are a lot of other affiliates trying to do the same thing so the number of clicks you get back to your affiliate program may be relatively small compared to other sources and the conversion percentage may suffer. The important part to promoting on classified sites and anywhere for that matter is to make sure you're using and keeping a record of the tracking IDs. Make a unique tracking ID for every site or advertisement that you use. If you don't have a way to track your results, when you start getting sales, you won't know where they came from and won't know what to duplicate.

Article marketing is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. Depending on which article directories you use, the idea is to write the article on a topic that is related to the product you'll be trying to promote and submit that article to article directories. The idea is to submit unique articles so that the search engines rank those articles which gets traffic to the articles and clicks to the links in your "resource box" or "author profile". I've found from personal experience that the click through rate for people who click on the links in your resource box is anywhere from 5 to 15% depending on the article and the specific call to action in the resource box.

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.

Another way to promote affiliate products is through blogging. Some people use the blog to specifically sell their products, other people will use a blog as a means to get traffic usually for some controversial topics or instructional topics then promote products as advertisements on their sites. Blogging can be a great strategy to help you get traffic to your affiliate promotions.

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.

This article is meant to simply introduce you to some of the ways to promote affiliate products and services. If you're serious about pursuing any of these methods, use the internet to find great content. Spend some time on some affiliate marketing forums and ask around what other people are doing and how they're successful. Remember, though, nothing can replace actually getting out there and trying these things for yourself. There's only so much you'll be able to do without trying this first hand. Good luck with your efforts.

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