Is This The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Formula?

Is This The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Formula?
By Jonathan Moss

Why affiliate marketing ? Affiliate marketing allows you to advertise products created by others on your website. You can then earn up to 75% commission for each sale you make. You can choose from affiliate programs that sell almost anything, but you tend to be able to make the most money through selling electronic products such as e-books, reports, software or videos. This article will provide you with some really valuable, time saving tips to help you make a start in affiliate marketing.

Why participate in affiliate marketing programs? Here are four simple tips.

- Find a program in a niche that you like and are interested in.

- Look for a program that is associated with experts.

- Find a product in a growing market to help ensure greater and future demand for the niche.

- Make sure the program has a good range of useful tools and resources to help you promote the product and grow your business.

When you have decided on your chosen niche and selected the products you want to promote, you must consider why customers would want to buy from your site. So, you must remember the following when designing your website.

- Develop unique web pages to promote each product you are marketing - your site must focus on each product individually and nothing else.

- Always include product reviews and testimonials on your site, and offer free content or reports to your visitors.

- List the benefits of the product and focus on points like how the product can make life easier and more comfortable.

- Write articles for e-zines and e-reports highlighting the uses of the product and include them on your site. Try to write a couple of articles per week (300-600 words). Remember that article sites and ezine sites (such as www.ezinearticles.com) are very popular with search engines.

Clearly you would like all of your visitors to click the order button, but converting them to customers is a challenge. On average only 1 out of 100 visitors are likely to buy. Therefore, if you can generate 1000 hits to your website every day, on average you can make 10 sales. But how do you get people to visit your site ?

I have already mentioned that writing articles is a way to get people to your site for free. Another popular way to generate traffic for your website is by paying for it using pay per click (PPC) advertising on the main search engines such as Google or Yahoo. PPC is one of the most cost effective ways of targeted internet advertising. The idea is that you write really good short adverts which appear on the search result pages, and you only pay when someone clicks on your link. Your ranking in the search engine results is determined by the amount you are willing to pay for each click on your advert. The highest bid will be ranked number 1, followed by all equivalent lower bids.

There are of course many other ways to get traffic to your site, and these can be found either by searching the internet, or by reading the answer to my next question. Where do you go from here?

The answer? You should subscribe to a course which can teach you the basics of affiliate marketing in an easy to follow, step-by-step guide. My personal recommendation is the fantastic free 27 day course by Matthew Glanfield. Matthew has been marketing online for over three years. In the second half of 2005 he generated over $100,000 of sales from just one of his affiliate marketing websites. He now runs a number of really successful websites to help others to be able to start their own Internet business.

This course takes you from planning on day one, to having a fully active website promoting your selected product by the end of the course. It is packed with valuable information and videos to get you on track as soon as possible. By signing up for this course you will also receive a free chapter from The Secret Formula For Successful Affiliate Marketing. This e-book is taken from one of Matthew's courses. You will also receive a copy of a brand new e-book called Copy 101 which will help you write really effective PPC ads.