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Serious About Affiliate Marketing? Then Don’t Miss These Tips

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Affiliate Marketing

If you are a blogger or a website owner, you might already know what affiliate marketing is all about and also be making some great money promoting one or more affiliate products from your blog.

Affiliate Marketing is the easiest way to start making money on the internet and is your first step towards the long and intriguing journey as an Internet Marketer. The key to your success in affiliate marketing is a perpetual flow of highly targeted traffic. The higher and more targeted the traffic to your blog, the more profits you make.

But, before getting your feet wet into the “wild-whacky” world of affiliate marketing there are certain crucial factors that you must consider; which will not only help you leverage your sales but also secure your hard earned commissions from commission thieves.

In this post I am going to share some of those affiliate marketing tips that will benefit both newbies and seasoned affiliate marketers alike in making maximum profits out of their ventures

What is affiliate marketing anyway?

I thought I will start off with these 2 easy definitions that I found on the internet that will make it crystal clear what affiliate marketing is all about.

“Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. … ” (Source – wikipedia.org)

“A popular way to make money online where you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (affiliates) sell his own products or services, in exchange for a commission. Commissions can be fixed or variable, and based on clicks, leads or sales.” (Source www.dailyblogtips.com)

Crucial Factors to Consider Before You Start

Consider It As Real Business – Affiliate marketing must be treated as a real business which requires a lot of planning, discipline and consistent hard work to be successful.

There is a myth amongst some first time affiliate marketers and internet users that affiliate marketing doesn’t require any discipline, hard work or ethics and is all about spamming on various platforms like forums, websites, emails or social networking sites. It’s totally baseless and utter nonsense. The marketers who have adopted the path of spamming had to pay a heavy price by risking their business and reputation.

Thorough Market Research – This is the most critical step before promoting an affiliate product and highly crucial for the success of your business.

You must carry out an in-depth research of the niche market that you are planning to enter and ensure that there is enough buyer traffic that converts well to make your business profitable.

Some of the free tools and sites for performing market research,

  • Google Insights
  • Google Trends
  • Google Adwords Keyword Tool
  • eBay.com
  • Amazon.com
  • Dummies.com

All the 3 Google tools are a must for the success of any online business owner and will give you a wealth of insightful information about your market. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool will tell you how competitive a keyword is and whether it is easy to rank for that keyword on the search engines or not. So you must definitely make the maximum out of these amazing tools by Google.

My recommendation is to infiltrate into a market that has a moderate competition. You can easily find that out by typing  your targeted keyword into Google and hitting the “search” button. The higher the number of results (about XXXXX results), the harder it will be to rank for that keyword in the first pages of the search engines.

You can also visit online shopping websites like ebay.com, dummies.com and amazon.com and check whether similar products exist. If they do, you can be dead sure that there is a demand for such products and can definitely make some profit promoting them.

By the way, Amazon.com has a great feature called customer reviews, which will help you study the customer’s perception about similar products.

Try Out Before Promoting – It is always good practice to try out a product before promoting it.

This will help you write reviews that sound more authentic to the readers and there is a greater chance that they will buy it from your affiliate link. If it’s an eBook that you are promoting, you can ask for a review copy from the author, he will be more than happy to offer you one, and if it’s an online service you can ask the vendor to give access to the site for a few days.

Knowing Clickbank Marketplace – If you are an affiliate marketer you must have heard about Clickbank at least once.

Clickbank.com is the best place to start your affiliate marketing journey especially if you are a newbie. You can sign up for free and start promoting from over thousands of digital products under various categories. But while choosing a product, make sure you pick one with gravity of at least 7 and a low refund rate. Gravity indicates the number of affiliates who have successfully made sales in the past week and a half or so.

You can use this free online refund calculator to find out the refund rates of a particular Clickbank product.

Protecting Your Affiliate links – It’s very important to protect your affiliate links from those online thugs prying around to steal your hard earned commissions.

Protecting your affiliate links can be called cloaking. Cloaking doesn’t just prevent commission thefts but also hides those weird looking affiliate links from your readers.

Well, how can someone steal your commissions? It’s easy! When a potential thief finds a Clickbank affiliate link with a “hop=YOURID” at the end, they might sign up as an affiliate with Clickbank.com and buy that product using their affiliate link instead of yours, saving them money and depriving you of your precious commissions.

I personally use these 2 methods to protect my affiliate link.

  1. You can cloak your affiliate links by using this free tool called profit protector that you can download and use as a desktop application. I personally recommend this tool for protecting Clickbank affiliate links.
  2. You can also use a PHP 301 “moved permanently” redirection for your affiliate links for making it SEO friendly. All you need to do is put the code in a notepad, replace the location address with your affiliate link, save it as a (SOMENAME.PHP) *.PHP file and upload it to your server (preferably under a directory that’s named “goto” or “recommends”). Now, if you want to send your visitor to the vendor site through your affiliate link you can just use this PHP file. (eg. http://www[dot]yourdomain[dot]com/goto/SOMENAME.php). Please click on the link on point no. 2 to learn more about how to use a PHP 301 redirection on your affiliate link.

Review Sites Are The Best – Review sites work very well for promoting affiliate products.

In a review site you can compare, dissect and rate similar products and give your unbiased views about them to your readers. While reviewing affiliate products, you must never sound overly promotional like a snake-oil salesman hard-selling their products. Your reviews must sound un-biased and neutral to your readers. Nevertheless, there must be an easy to spot, strong “call-to-action” link (affiliate link) at the end of each review (eg “click on this link to visit the vendor’s site”) that takes them to the vendor’s sales page.

There are a variety of other promotional methods like article marketing, PPC ads, Social Media Marketing, video marketing and email marketing and so on that you can use to double or triple your sales. Interestingly, you will discover even smarter ways to promote your business if you are a person who always likes to explore new things, a keen learner who can think out of the box and can use a bit of creativity.

Conclusion

I think I have covered some of the most crucial factors to consider before starting with affiliate marketing. I hope these points will help you transform your business into a more streamlined and profitable one! You will surely start picking things up and learn the intricacies of this business as you go. Remember, Affiliate marketing is pretty exciting and lucrative – if done the right way. So all the best and wishing you all the success!

Please do leave your valuable feedback about this post as a comment!

Image © Tomasz Trojanowski – Fotolia.com

About

Deepak Eapen is a passionate writer who's been into Internet Marketing/blogging/SEO for the past 2 years and owns multiple blogs and websites in different niches. His Internet Marketing blogs are Eapen's Internet Marketing Tips and Techniques and Eapen's Internet Marketing Diary that he updates with unique and helpful posts on a regular basis. He's basically a Software QA professional and Content Writer with over 7.5 years of industry experience.

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{ 21 Responses }

  1. Samuel says:
    Affiliate marketing is an art that needs to be tested by each individual. Choose three to five products that are deemed worthy to promote and tried by you yourself. Excellent article on affiliate marketing. High recommend many read it.
  2. Dan says:
    This is what affiliate marketers should do, try out before recommending. Like if you're promoting an IM product, it's best if you have tested the product and show your own results.
  3. Gaurang says:
    What a Guide.I was Thinking of starting an Affiliate marketing but was unaware of the types of threats you've mentioned. Great post.
  4. Kimberly Gauthier says:
    OMG - people steal affiliate links? Dammit. I've been using Pretty Link Light, but only for links that I use often. Should I be using something for all my links? It's daunting, because there are so many. Thanks!
  5. Deepak Eapen says:
    @ Wbindia - Thank you Wayne for your comment ! Credibility is the foundation on which ANY business is built - offline or online. Do I need to explicitly bring that out ? That's common sense, right? And I didn't mean one must purchase a product by shelling out one's hard earned bucks to try out a product. No, that's not what I meant. You could ASK for a review copy from the vendor. He surely will give you one if you tell him that you are promoting his product. I am talking about eBooks here, in Clickbank, not exercise machines or any other physical Weight Loss products. Finally It's all about your conscience. You could really try out a product or feign yourself to have tried out the product. It's all up to you. I have written my point-of-view about promoting affiliate products what I felt is ethical. Your approach might be different. No issues. Thanks guys for all your valuable comments.
  6. Wayne says:
    Deppak- Very good and informative post- I would like however to offer two comments about affiliate marketing from my nearly 3 years of experience being online (June 2009). First, although you mention and recommend to your readers to try out the product first before promoting, I believe to be really successful you actually need to own the product you are trying to sell by promoting. There is such a thing called the "credibility factor. Especially in an age where everyone is blogging selling this system or that product and/or service online, you need to stand out from the rest of the crowd. If after all, why should I even purchase the product and/or service from you when I can just google to find a more cheaper price. In my SBI goal setting website, I only promote one product, the SBI webhosting and etools platform that is the foundation and building block for my web business. And although I am an SBI affiliate, I am first and foremost an SBI owner, and have been since June 2009, 2.5 years ago. I can talk passionately and enthusiastically about the SBI product and can tell about its many benefits because I own the product and can give first hand testimony how SBI has helped me earn money day in a day out. Secondly, and most importantly you need to estalbish the relationship building first before you start pitching products and/or services. Yes we are all in the business to make money, but without our visitors and would be customers, we would all have no businesses to speak off. There is way too much emphasis and hype on making the sale, buy this product and/or service ASAP without first making the emotional connection with your visitor. Relationship building before Revenue Counting. Remember: People don't CARE how much you KNOW, until they KNOW how much you CARE....not only good business wisdom and advise but more importanlty in the game of LIFE that everyone of us is apart and can ill afford NOT to pay attention to. Best- Wayne
  7. Harshad says:
    I don't agree with trying every product you promote. It is true if you are a blogger who is recommending a service or product but not every affiliate marketer can do this. For eg. If I have a weight loss site where I promote weight loss products, it wont be possible for me to try every product.
    • Hesham Zebida says:
      If you can not try the product, then simply don't recommend it!
      • Harshad says:
        So you think people who have online stores, amazon shopping stores etc. need to use each and every product before promoting it? No one does that.
        • Hesham Zebida says:
          That's a valid point Harshad, however most of amazon product has review and ratings on page, most of these are from people who actually brought the product, so that's not a bad idea! From the other hand, on most e-commerce (affiliate) sites, no one really engage with the site's visitors, you just through products on their way! But to be honestly, I think this concept isn't right! I mean why I will recommend something I really don't know whither it works or not, or it's good or bad, just because I don't know the people who will buy it? In my comment above, I meant to talk about blogs, especially recommending stuff for those who trust you as a person, and who actually know who you are! I personally don't buy anything from anyone who I don't know!
  8. Mitz Pantic says:
    Yes I agree with cloaking affiliate links and I do it manually. I also think it is very important to add nofollow to them though as they look like an internal link when they are not. :)
  9. Dan Lew says:
    Some nice tips there for anyone interested in getting into affiliate marketing. Once you are aware of the elements that go into play with affiliate marketing, it can be a very profitable part of any online business, this is what interested me in affiliate marketing in the early days not having to worry about shipping or providing services where a lot more customer handling goes into play.
  10. Mark says:
    Smart suggestion about cloaking your affiliate links, Depak. I actually did some empirical testing with this and it did indeed make a difference in terms of your inherent level of trust with Google. Now I cloak any and all affiliate links through a redirect and nofollow the redirect. Works much better this way :) Great post. Mark
  11. Robert says:
    I think one of the most important points you made there is to treat it as a real business. People think that it's something that you can spend 10 minutes on a day and actually make money from it, but in reality that's not how it works
  12. karthick says:
    good post deepak. I never heard about dummies.com website for market research. I gonna take a look at dummies.com. thanks anyway, useful tips.
  13. Affiliman says:
    Great tips indeed. Amazon is great platform but the commission is very low... Another key important tool is Google Alerts You can set up alerts and receive to your email notes whenever your targeted key word post or article have been published, this allows you to learn, understand and act within your very own niche.
  14. Bhupendra says:
    Affiliate marketing is not that easy what i have experienced it we need to provide really a great content with lots of details and yeah very true every time audience is the most crucial..but i think these tips really helpful. thanks for the article..
  15. Tushar says:
    I will always recommend trying the products before you decide to promote them. One wrong product can ruin your affiliate business
  16. Ryan Biddulph says:
    Hi Deepak, You hit on key points here. Do thorough due diligence. Dig deep. With research you gain confidence and have the faith to move forward with a certain conviction. Of course, do not allow your convictions to override good old fashioned testing. Try a strategy out, test, and tweak where necessary. The mental part of the game is huge. Without carefully-honed mental tools you will fail quite quickly. Believe in yourself and build your desire fire in order to tackle any obstacle which stands in your path. You might face tough resistance but if your mental game is tight you can do awesome things in affiliate marketing. Running an affiliate business is similar to running a brick and mortar business. Put in the time and you can prosper with it. Thanks for sharing your insight Deepak. Ryan
  17. Abhi Balani says:
    "...a lot of planning, discipline and consistent hard work", AND I think, PATIENCE also. :-)
  18. Obinna says:
    Thanks for these tips. I want to start affiliate marketting with amazon products. Hope these tips will help.