Affiliate Marketing - Leveraging Your Biggest Asset

By Mike Mcmillan

Successful affiliate marketers must be very good at one thing: understanding the wants and desires of the people who populate the niches they market to. If you've been into affiliate marketing for any time, you know that the business involves much more than selecting a few products and setting up an AdWords campaign. In this article we will look at one of the most overlooked cash cranking techniques in affiliate marketing.

Let's begin in the ClickBank Marketplace. Specifically, let's examine the Marketing & Ads category--because that's where a lot of ebooks are sold which cater to helping affiliate marketers. Now, if you look at some of the top ten ebooks selling in the "Marketplace" you will find that many of the authors started out in affiliate marketing themselves. Guys like Alex Goad (Google Payload & Four Tier Annihilation), Chris McNeeny (AdWords Miracle, Day Job Killer, & Google Nemesis), Craig Becta (The Secret Affiliate Code), and John Cohen (Get Google Ads Free & Forced Money) got their feet wet in affiliate marketing before they became Clickbank Gurus by developing their own products.''

So why would one go from super affiliate to developing their own product? It's simple: They understand the power of affiliate marketing and they know where the super-affiliates hang out and how to reach them. Look, the top ClickBank publishers offer 70-75% commissions on their products and, on average, well over 80% of their product sales come from affiliates. This is no accident! As former affiliates themselves they know that in order to recruit a vast army of affiliate for their own products, they need to offer extremely generous commissions. They also know that the vast percentage of their sales will come from their affiliates.

The real question is this: Would you rather be one of thousands trying to compete with each other in an AdWords shootout trying to promote a product--or, have thousands of affiliates all banging each other in the head trying to promote your own product? The answer is simple--if you can do just three things, there is much more money in publishing an information product than promoting products of others. Those three things are: developing a powerful sales page, having a large mailing list of opt-in subscribers to promote your launch to, and knowing where and how to recruit large numbers of affiliate to help you launch your product.

This brings me to the crux of my discussion. Most affiliates would do well to develop some sort of informational product of their own to market on their blogs or web sites in addition to the products of other publishers they are promoting. I see affiliates devoting 30% of their blog or web space to AdSense ads in hopes of offsetting the AdWords campaigns they run to generate traffic. That 30% might be better devoted to selling their own simple information products.

Super-affiliates are pretty smart guys and gals--they've got to be to stay in the business. And, they understand the niche in which they operate. While they may not feel capable of writing a 150-page $98 super-ebook, they are certainly capable of putting together half-a-dozen 20-page $11.95 reports to supplement the affiliate products they promote.

Where will the next top-selling, chart-busting informational product come from? My bet is that it will come from an affiliate marketer who has written a couple of little reports that did well and he or she got the itch to take their product development skills to the next level.

Mike McMillan is a former inner-city teacher who left teaching in 1989 to devote full time to writing over 40 nonfiction books and ebooks. He has been interviewed on over 80 radio stations and televisions programs including ABC World News on the topic of self publishing. Mike's on-line self publishing course is offered through over 1,400 colleges and universities across the U.S. His newest ebooks include Big Money Writing Little Books, and Cleaning Out The Vault: Secrets of the eBook Power Sellers Exposed. Download Mike's newest eBook, Creating An Affiliate Army To Promote Your eBook, for free at http://www.extreme-self-publishing.com