Monday, September 29, 2008

How to make money online as an affiliate

It's still possible to earn a good income as an affiliate, despite the intense competition.
There are reportedly a number of affiliate marketers earning over six figures every year, but there are probably other affiliates earning even more than that, that we don't hear about. The only differences between you and them are that they have a huge email list and they have a well known name.

Even though affiliate marketing isn't quite the easy money making system that's going to earn you a fortune without any effort, there is still good money to be made if you know how to do it correctly. That means putting in the effort to get your big list, and branding yourself in the market.

You will have to get lots of traffic to your site. SEO optimization of your site will help, but this in itself will not help you much compared to off-site optimization, which basically means getting lots of links to your site on other sites. You can also pay for traffic through a traffic broker, or advertise your site.

Even having lots of traffic may not help you, as people will seldom buy a product on their first visit. You must have a means of contacting them again. You can do this by having a sign up form for a newsletter or some other freebie on your site: you must get that email address! Alternatively you could buy an email list, but make sure the list you buy is double opt-in, current, and relevant to your market.

All this is so you can have your own email list to which you can send future offers.
Continually sending offers to your own email list is the way to match the big boys and truly earn a comfortable income as an affiliate.

Essentials you will need:

The first and most important tool an affiliate marketer must have is his or her own website. You can get one of those generic affiliate sites that product owners publicise, but it’s best to alter it substantially, to differentiate it from all the other sites which your competition will not bother to change. Of course it’s even better if you have your own professional looking website which will attract prospects and motivate them to click on the links to the products you are promoting.

If you don’t know HTML, here are some site building resources:
Microsoft Front Page
Dream weaver (the one I use)
Nvu (free software)

The second tool you need is a sign up incentive.

In the world of affiliate marketing there will be thousands of other people selling the exact same product as you. Therefore you have to keep ahead of the competition to ensure that you get your slice of the market. This means that you will have to give out more incentives than others. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine to your prospects, together with as much free stuff as possible, to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can give them free software, free videos, and other freebies that will be entice your prospects to give you their email.

What you know and love is another important tool to use to make your website popular. One good way to do this - at zero cost apart from your time - is by submitting articles to article sites, preferably those with a high page rank.. You'll gain exposure for your name, and help with your search engine ranking by including a link back to your site in the bio box.

All this will help, but the primary thing is to make your website a place to which visitors will want to return, by constantly updating it with useful content.

People love articles that are interesting and helpful. Search engines love ever changing web pages. So, good quality content will not only keep visitors coming back; it can also get you a higher search engine ranking.

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