49 Affiliate Marketing Tips

By Luis Galarza - Internet Marketing Specialist.


Affiliate Marketing Tips For Beginners: This Is A Collection Of The Most Useful Internet Marketing Strategies That Can Help e-Business Newbies Start Making Money Online Selling Other People's Products!

Today I want to give you a list of affiliate marketing tips that can help any beginner make money fast and easy online. And for those marketers ready for the advanced level, this marketing tips can help you increase your commissions. As you know associates programs are the free path to start an online business and test a niche market or idea.

Before you read the promotion ideas below, I want to give you a few of the best
tips you should know about, if you want to become a successful performance marketer:

• Forget the fact that starting in this type of online business requires little or no money at all, because it will put in your mind that you won't require any work to make money... that thinking is what makes many performance marketing beginners fail flat on the ground. If you want to become a super affiliate you need to think about this opportunity as a real business. A business that needs a plan, needs time for development, needs money to grow, and need you to spend 80% of your time in marketing.
• Don't believe that if you open or have a web site they will come... The truth is that nobody will come if you don't have a good marketing plan full with proven strategies to make it work.
• Think innovation and test new Internet marketing strategies that you or some one else had created, track your results and keep doing the ones that work for you. And remember that if didn't work for some else it doesn't mean it won't work for you, just test it, see if you have space for improvement, tune it, and analyze the results before you trash any strategy.
• Careful about PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and Google Adwords, this type of online advertising works excellent only when you know what you doing. So, I recommend you to learn how to use PPC advertising successfully or higher someone that does. Check the Step-By-Step Guide To Selling Online training course, right now you can get 30 days trail for $2.95.
• Become your content brand or online authority... After you promoting other company products or services, you cannot be depending on the life and reputation of a merchant. If that merchant goes out of business, what will happen to you? The answer is nothing, if you been building your own brand. You need to become the authority by providing quality content to your audience, plus ethical business management, and build a strong relationship with then, and this will give you a long term online business.
  

I separate the tips in 4 groups, so just find the group that better appeal to your level of affiliate marketing knowledge. Let's start...


Tips For Beginners.

Here are some of the tactics you need to know before starting promoting any associate program. Remember that knowing your market and audience can help you deliver better solutions which will turn into more targeted traffic, and then into sales. Having no money to start or promote your small business can set your success back only if you don't have a plan, if you don't know how to find and use free online marketing resources available all over the web.

1.- Don't look for referral programs to sign up for... Your first step on any business should be finding a profitable niche.

2.- Do online marketing and keyword research to find money making niches. To do this look for products or services with high demand, and then make a keyword research to find what real people is as a "search phrase" to find what they are looking for on that niche. A free tool you can use is the Keyword Suggestion Tool from Submit Express. or if you looking for more advanced results I recommend you Niche Finder or Keyword Elite, both tools are great and can save you a lot of time.

3.- Make a list of long tail keywords targeting the niche you are most interest to start a business about. Keep a computer file with all the long tail keyword you can find. You can write content targeting this keywords.

4.- Remember to write a small marketing plan for each advertising campaign you want to use, set short term goals, each with a completion dates. This will make you finish the task on time.

5.- Set a daily business activity plan... this plan is to help you put one step ahead to your goals, and to make daily productivity actions for your business.

6.- Track everything you do... every link, your web site, your ads, sales copy, etc. You can read my post title "Become Split Testing And Tracking Maniac" for more info on advanced marketing tracking and testing.

7.- Protect your links and commissions with a link cloaker. To get you started fast just use Link Brander free tool to cover your long ugly links and also help you track click-throughs.

8.- When writing articles or content on sites that don't accept affiliate links just use Active.ws free URL cloaker and redirection tool linking to the Link Brander URL that is tracking your referral link, or link to a page with a pre-sell copy for the product or service.



Tips: When Direct Linking Is A Most.

9.- Don't promote any Clickbank merchant that has a link to their associate program on the page, specially if this link is right on the top of the page. Some of this merchants have excellent products that can make you money, below on the advanced marketing tips I will explain how to market this type of sites.

10.- Don't use any of the merchants advertising banners if they have their domain name or URL address in it. This will make some people to just type the URL on the Internet browser and bypass your referral links.

11.- The best program to promote directly when you have no money to build your own list are those that use a lead capture landing page, also called name squeeze pages. This way they collect the prospect email and they will do the selling for you, with email follow ups.



Most Recommended Marketing Tips For Beginners.


12.- Write article about a problem on demand and them tell your readers where to find the solution for that problem by providing a link direct to your cloak referral link.

13.- Submit your content to article directories to promote syndication of your content. But, for this to work re-write your articles and submit a different version of your content to each article directory, this will give you search engine traffic to each of your articles. If you have a site or blog just link to your site and get some good one way back links for better search engine ranking.

14.- Use different tracking links for each article, for each directory, and for each advertising campaign you will use to generate traffic to the merchant's product or service.

15.- When using PPC or any type of direct advertising, don't link to the merchant's homepage. To ensure your campaign success you need to link directly to the product's landing page.

16.- Use free online classified ads to pre-sell the merchant's products... this type of advertising will not generate much traffic or sales, but this still a great way to test your ad headlines, and sales copy.

17.- Free traffic exchange really work, but if you planning to do link directly to the affiliate program, don't use them. Check below on tips for web site and blog owners for more information about using free manual or automatic traffic exchange services.

18.- Free viral list building tools. This are great way to get access to a huge amount of opt-in subscribers that you can email your marketing message. You can send email ads to people you subscribe, and people they subscribe. It has ZERO Spam risk, because every subscriber knows that they will be receiving emails from their up-line or sponsors, and from pro members. Some of the best one so far are ListDotCom, and MyListMonster. To make this work you need to upgrade to pro or diamond members, so you get to email their current subscribers.

19.- Participate in online forums or groups and use a good signature file with a link to your site or blog or the actual affiliate program if it is allowed. Only use forums where signature files are allow. Be sure to read the site's terms and conditions before doing any type of promotions.



Web 2.0 or Social Media Tips.
Before you start with web 2.0 or social media marketing you need to know the main tactic to make your social media marketing efforts help you build your affiliate business.

...Don't Sell, Just Socialize!


20.- Use social bookmarking sites to submit your articles, blog posts, and related content to build a good social image. The trick here is submit 4 stories before submitting one of your articles or sites.

21.- Open an account to some of the most popular online social profiles that you can find. This will help you reach to a new audience which you may never had the chance to get to without social profiles. Point your site to your main referral cloaked link or better to your own web site or blog.

22.- Be part of the conversation marketing by opening an account with top social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and others. And get as many friends as you can. And link back to your main blog or site.

23.- Look for blogs on your niche and provide useful comments for their audience, the better your comment the more visitors your will generate to the merchant or to your blog.

24.- Talk about the news in your industry or give good advice about your market by using a podcast service. You start one at Podango for free.

25.- Micro-blogging your way to better communication with Twitter or any other service like it. Micro-blogging can be use to keep your audience up to date with your new articles. Also you can give notice of new products launch by the merchant you are promoting.

26.- Create video content and submit it to social video sharing sites like YouTube, Revver, Blip.tv, Veoh, etc.... The interactive power of video marketing can help you gain massive web authority, and increase sales. Check below for more video tips for affiliates. What works best are: Product reviews, site reviews, and targeted advice.

27.- Use content management systems (CMS) like Wordpress, Blogger, Joomla, etc. to gain more exposure from social sites, and search engines. Plus, if you don't want to build an email list, you can still get RSS subscribers and keep in contact with readers. Remember to have associate links in your blog content.

28.- Create Squidoo lenses and make money promoting affiliate programs available through Squidoo (Amazon, eBay, and more). Also you can use then to target any niche and promote other affiliate programs. The secret here is the more content the better.

29.- Create images or pictures for your blog that are relevant to your niche, then add your URL and tagline or Unique Selling Message (USP), then submit it to social picture sharing sites like Photobucket, and others.



Tips For Bloggers or Site Owners.

30.- Use affiliate links in the content of your articles and blog posts. This will increase your click-through rate, because not many people reads the "about the author" box.

31.- Write detail reviews about the products or services you are promoting, don't sell just inform. Provide as much information as you can to help your readers make a smart decision.

32.- Write pre-sell articles where you are going to talk about the problem the product is design to fix, and then explain how the product is going to help your readers fix that problem.

33.- Another way that actually works very good is by eliminating outbound links in your blog, and just offer a "resources list" on the top right or left side of your site next to your blog posts. This technique works well in combination with links in content.

34.- Another way is to provide a list of useful resources at the bottom of each blog post or article. This affiliate marketing strategy have high conversion rates because it doesn't interrupt the reader.

35.- Submit your blog to RSS and blog directories to gain more exposure, and back links. The more traffic you get the more exposure your campaign will have, which will result in an increase of your sales.



Video Marketing Tips For Affiliates.


36.- Make screen capture videos to do a review or to show all the benefits that the product you are promoting have to offer.

37.- Make videos that will show some of the advice people can learn from a book or ebook and tell them to go to a special URL to learn the rest of those techniques.

38.- Use short videos on your lead capture landing pages to increase your subscription rate... and build a list faster.

39.- Create a series of video courses to teach people the basics on solving an specific problem, and promote your affiliate link on each video.

For more information about video marketing read:

• 10 Viral Video Marketing Strategies.
• Video Marketing Start With Good Spreadable Content.
• Free Video Marketing Strategies For Beginners.
• 14 SEO Tips For Marketing Beginners.

OK, Let's Get To The Advance Affiliate Marketing Tips.
Now is time to go for the advanced level and become a super affiliate...

40.- Build your own list on every niche you are doing business in. Building a list of your own will give you email marketing advantages like; Long term customers, better relationship, an opportunity to follow up with a sales notice which will increase your revenue, and you can promote new products faster to a targeted list of active customers and prospects.

41.- Create mini-content sites with long articles about your niche.... then promote 2 or 3 merchants that sell the same product, and teach readers the benefits of each merchant and let them decide which one is better for them. Don't forget to have an opt-in form for your monthly/weekly online newsletter.

42.- Create a landing page for each product you promote through PPC or Adwords. To be approve by Google, is better to use a blog.

43.- Forget the 'Internet marketing' or 'Make Money Online' market, go for better high demand niches like golf, baseball, etc... You can have faster success on a high demand market.

44.- Advertise on high traffic websites or blogs related to your topic... You can increase your traffic, sales, and readers by getting your marketing message on popular blogs.

45.- Forget about using the banners or images provided by the merchant. Stick to text link ads for better results.

46.- Don't use the merchants marketing material because every other of their affiliates are going to use the same materials. Be unique and make more sales... This mean, make your own marketing materials.

47.- Send press releases to many free and paid services to gain more search engine traffic and quality back links to your site.

48.- Don't link directly to any merchant product or service referral link. All your marketing needs to be focus on bringing more traffic to your blog and then let the content do the rest.

49.- Give a free gift to your Twitter followers. The giveaway can be something like a free ebook or report, video or audio training, your print book with your signature, etc.. Just make it good enough for them to take action right away.


Soon you will be able to download the PDF version of this list which have more advance tips and detail information about each strategy.

Come back for more updates...

- Updated on June 10th, 2011.


Resources.

- Insider Secrets To Marketing Your Business Online. NEW!
- Secret Affiliate Weapon.
- Super Affiliate Handbook.
- Super Affiliates. NEW!
- Newbie Cash Machine.


In Conclusion: You don't have to do all this in one single day... pick some affiliate marketing tips from this list and make a daily activity plan to take step-by-step actions. Let me know if you have any other tip you can share with us.

To learn how can you be part of a small business association full with affiliate marketing experts ready to give you unlimited advice, for more information visit the IEC.


To your success,

Luis Galarza, Internet Marketing Consultant Massachusetts.
Affiliate Marketing.


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