Monday, February 8, 2010

Top Resources For Affiliate Marketers


By and large, the top resources for affiliate marketers aren't so different than the resources for standard businesses. Of course, affiliate marketers have some unique concerns: payment scale, new affiliate opportunities, where to place links, etc. But affiliate marketers are the most successful when they don't think of their sites as "dummy" sites, but full-fledged business opportunities. Another way of stating this is an affiliate marketing business and the host business are one and the same.

For both affiliates and marketers, one of the most important tools available is the site meter. Affiliate marketers should check in and out clicks. In-clicks will tell you what searches are being used the most often. You could then write some additional targeted content around this search term to bring in even more web surfers. Out-clicks are just as important. Out-clicks will show you which pages are the least popular. You will want to write some new content and/or redesign the page to help with a page's popularity.

The key to any web business is driving traffic. This traffic needs to be monitored to determine where the site has been most effective. Remember, anything can be improved. Even if you're very satisfied with the amount of traffic you're getting, there are still thousands of web surfers out there who have never heard of your site. Improved content, site functionality, and useful affiliates can all drive repeated traffic to your site.

A website should never be static. You should never just design a site, leave it alone, and hope for the best. It should be monitored and improved—possibly even on a daily basis. Blogging has been an important and highly succesful addition to the affiliate marketing industry. Every day, affiliate marketers can write new content aimed at drawing in a different demographic, or expanding the customer base of a current demographic. Forum software is another good tool for keeping people on site and interested in the site's contents. Both forums and blogs are good for bringing in new registration. An affiliate marketer should keep track of past browsers just like a standard business. Lead generation and organization are important for marketers as well.

Affiliate forums are some of the best places to find information on new affiliates. Certainly, there is stiff competition between affiliates, but there's also a willingness to help each other out. If an affiliate has a particularly bad reputation, you can get the lowdown in the forums. At affiliate forums, you can also find web design tips, read about past successes, and basically start to get a foothold in the industry. As link popularity is enormously important for search engine rankings, you can begin link-partner relationships in forums as well.

Why Affiliate Marketing Is So Important


 Much of the information you'll find online is aimed at affiliate marketers: Make millions online! While many of these claims are overblown, they also get the attention of small and medium-sized businesses that also want to cash in on the affiliate marketing gold rush. Becoming an affiliate is as lucrative a proposition as becoming an affiliate marketer. For this reason, you'll see new affiliate opportunities arising each and every day.


Look at what a business is getting if it starts an affiliate program: free advertising. That's the simplest way to put it. The marketer signs up with the business and agrees to put a link on a website. The business only has to pay for this service if a sale is made—normally for a reasonable commission. As this is a sale that wouldn't have been made without the affiliate marketer's site, it is money well spent.


Even if a sale is not made, the link provides a method of advertising that can increase name recognition. Most business owners know that people might not make a purchase until the fifth time they see a brand name or come surfing to a site. An affiliate program can spread the word about a business on dozens upon dozens of sites. When combined with more traditional types of advertising, this can be a great way for a new business to get a foothold or an established business to expand its reach. These links can help search engine ranking as well.


The trick to a good affiliate partnership is finding quality marketers. While you obviously want to have your link on as many sites as possible, you also want those sites to be adept at generating traffic and sales. The fact remains that a large number of affiliate sites are posted and then never updated again. A business wants to find marketers who will design a professional-looking site and market that site effectively. At affiliate forums, businesses can hook up with marketers to start a relationship. A business owner can get a sense of the marketer's skill and drive from his or her stable of sites.


There's a lot of competition for marketers out there, especially established, quality marketers. Your best bet is to offer very attractive terms—a higher commission than the competition or a unique link layout. It should go without saying that your own site is well designed. An affiliate marketer wants to make a sale just as much as you do, and marketers won't sign up with a site that is poorly constructed. Offer a good site and a good product and you'll bring in more affiliate marketers. All this said, it is no surprise that affiliate marketing is growing at such an exponential rate. It is as important to business as any other type of marketing.

Difference Between An Affiliate and a Super Affiliate


It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super Affiliate! Corny, but "super affiliate" is the new buzzword for affiliates who are both ambitious and successful at affiliate marketing. There are wild claims online about affiliate marketing: Make Millions Overnight! Never Work Again! Unfortunately, these claims are usually false. To go from being a plain affiliate to super affiliate takes a lot of work. In short, you need to be an affiliate of steel.

The vast majority of affiliate marketing sites online are run by people who have no great interest in turning a huge profit. For example, you'll find thousands of blogs where people put up a few Amazon listings and/or Google links on the off chance that a passing browser will click on them. That's all well and good, but this is no way to make a dent in the affiliate marketing game. To be a super affiliate, you need to treat affiliate marketing as a job, not just something that you do on the side to put a couple of bucks in your pocket.

There is a misconception that affiliate marketing is not a real business. After all, the affiliate is not putting out a product. This is patently false. Even though an affiliate marketer is not manufacturing a product, he or she is still offering the product up for sale. An affiliate marketer still needs to be in charge of search engine optimization, custom content, quality web design, financial management, and everything else that goes into running a successful e-business. As with any business, an affiliate marketing plan is only as strong as the amount of work you put into it.

A super affiliate will be able to turn as hefty a profit as a standard business—several sales a day on a number of different fronts. Remember, successful affiliate marketers don't necessarily stop at one site. They set up a variety of affiliate sites with a good web address, quality web design, and lucrative affiliate marketing opportunities. Additionally, once you start selling at an accelerated rate, some affiliate programs will promote you from regular affiliate to super affiliate. If you start sending sales and traffic to a business, they will reward you with better terms.

This isn't an easy proposition, but it is possible. Make sure that an affiliate program has a corresponding super affiliate program in place—better terms for more sales. Even if they don't, an affiliate with good terms up front can really pay off if you're able to make a several sales a month. Affiliate programs with great terms are also sometimes referred to as super affiliates. Find these and you know you'll have a good marketing in place at the start.

How To Make Money With Affiliate Programs



Affiliate programs can either be a way to put a little extra cash in your pocket or, hopefully, become a full time job. However, it's not like you can put up a bunch of affiliate links and expect to start making a mint. If you want to make a full time job's worth of money off affiliate marketing, you have to work at it full time. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it works 24/7—but this doesn't mean you should also put in several hours a day of your own time.

The affiliate marketers who have had the most outstanding success are normally those who have more than one site working at once. It's much harder to make a decent amount of money if you have one affiliate site at a time. Experienced affiliate marketers will have a number of different sites running at once, all with different types of affiliate links. What this means is that each affiliate site will need separate SEO: new content in the form of blogs, forums, articles, and other techniques.

A key to a successful affiliate marketing program is to make the affiliate site a useful resource. Just posting a bunch of links is not going to impress many web surfers. They'll leave and likely never come back. The trick to any web business is to keep people on site—this is true for the affiliate partner and it's true for affiliate marketers. An affiliate site shouldn't necessarily scream, "affiliate site." Instead, it can be a trusted resource on a particular topic.

Useful content is the best way to make this possible. Take a site that has a number of links to sports-related businesses (apparel, equipment, tickets, books, etc.). The affiliate marketer can then set up a forum that talks about different sports teams, strategy, and so on—potentially, this forum could bring in sports fans from across the country. Blogging is another great medium for affiliate marketing. On the same site, the blogger could write reviews of new equipment or write in depth trade talk about a variety of sports. These are just a few ideas but they show how affiliate marketing can—and should—be a serious, long-term proposition.

What it comes down to is that affiliate marketing is no different than running the host site. Both are about running a business, even if an affiliate marketer has no direct product or service to sell. An affiliate marketer should set up a site that is useful and informative—a destination that people will come back to again and again. In some cases, an affiliate site might even be more informative than the partner's website.

Only until these issues are covered can an affiliate marketer hope to make a good amount of money with affiliate marketing. Sure, you could put up links and hope for the best, but you should think about investing some time into the site if you really hope to turn a respectable profit.

How To Become An Affiliate



Becoming an affiliate is one of the easiest business propositions out there, which is why it is so quickly gaining in popularity. Businesses want to have as many affiliate marketers working for them as possible, after all, it's really just a form of free advertising. For this reasons, businesses make it very easy to sign up for an affiliate program. Find a program, sign up for free, and just like that you're an affiliate.

The most important part of affiliate marketing boils down to one word: relevancy. In order to be a successful affiliate, you need to choose partnership programs that correspond to the nature of your affiliate site. So if you are running a travel affiliate site, link to affiliate sites for airfare, travel packages, clothing, and other relevant sites. Linking to a pet product affiliate doesn't make so much sense.

This is core to why experienced affiliate marketers will have a stable of sites. They'll have their travel hub, pet hub, book hub, and so on. Some affiliate marketing links will cross over, for instance, everyone needs credit cards and even airfare deals could find a home on a pet site. The basic rule of thumb is that affiliate links should be on topic.

If you're just starting out, one method to starting an affiliate site is to thumb through affiliate marketing directories and see what affiliate marketing programs interest you: do they offer a good product, do they have good terms, do they have a good rating? You could then design your website around a particular type of product based on the affiliate program you have found in an affiliate directory. If you already have a running website, check directories for new affiliate marketing programs that correspond to the site.

At times, less is more. There are literally hundreds of affiliate deals out there with good terms and a good product. Don't just cram hundreds of links onto one page. Your affiliate links should be easy to read and access, and they should be organic: they should appear to be a part of the site, rather than an obvious moneymaking opportunity. The more relevant these affiliate sites are to the main theme of the site, the more likely it is web surfers will click on the link and make a purchase.