Online Survival For Affiliate Marketers: Three Essential Tactics

Affiliate marketing is a high pass through marketing system; it's designed to deal with traffic and relevance and referrals, rather than the Hypo-Matic Marketroid Blast method used by Madison Avenue. Real world people giving real world opinions are the key.

It's still a competitive field, and while there are people out there who claim to have the "get rich quick" scheme to make it all happen, there ain't no rich, and it isn't quick. You will be able to make a good supplemental income from it, though.

Making more requires hard work and dedication and following three solid pieces of advice that have been true since the Internet was invented.

Tip number 1: Any product you're promoting deserves its own web page. Attempting to lump all your products into one page to save on hosting fees is the very definition of a false economy. Make a site of multiple pages focusing on related products.

Every product deserves its own review; this is where customers will get their initial understanding of the product, and it's the largest determinant on what turns browsers into buyers. Let customers write their own reviews; with applications like WordPress to handle this for you, there's no excuse not to let them do this. If you can get customers to give you true testimonials, with photographs, even better. It worked for print catalogs, it works on the web, and it'll work for you.

When you write the reviews of the articles, consider writing tutorials on how to use it. Make them attractive, make them compelling and, like people have said about sales copy since the invention of the printing press, end with a call for action.

Tip number 2: Free stuff brings people back. Free stuff brings people in. This is the basic driver on the "squeeze page" ' someone gives you their information for an autoresponder to get a free report. They get something they want, and you now have a channel to tell them about cool stuff you've found. Remember, it typically takes seven contacts to close a sale. By making sure there's relevant and interesting information in their inbox at specified times, you're encouraging them to come back to your site on a regular basis. Your content should be interesting in and of itself, but it should not read like a sales pitch.

If you can't write your own content, there are web sites on the web (like need-an-article.com) where you can hire writers to generate content for you. They already know to focus on the important points, like how your product can make life easier/better/more fun, or how the product helps a customer solve a real problem.

Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services. That's your ultimate goal. Do remember, when sending out your email reminders, avoid using using the word "free" because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first.
Tip number 3. No web spider ever bought anything from anyone. You want targeted traffic, which means your content has to be read by real people. Avoid excessive Search Engine Optimization. Sure, it gets you page ranks, followed by readers hitting their back buttons to get the heck out of there. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Make sure your content is fresh. You want at least two new articles per week, with 300 to 600 words per article. You need to constantly generate this new content to give your readers a reason to come back to your site and look at your affiliate links. These articles, posted to article directories, can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.

Remember that it's a numbers game, click through rates are around half of one percent; it takes 200 or more visitors to get a link, so you need at least 2,000 visitors per week to get 10 click throughs, and one sale.

None of these are difficult, none of them are rocket science. They do require planning, time management, and all the other icky things about being a grownup running your own business.