Affiliate Marketing Guide - Learn How to Make a Profit Today

By Dimmy Apostolovski

The wonderful world of Affiliate Marketing can turn dreams into reality and shatter them just as easily. For most, diving into Affiliate Marketing can be very daunting and confusing. The Internet is full of guides and programs designed to get you started, some are effective and some can be very misleading. The financial lure that attracts many into Affiliate Marketing is the main reason why potentially successful Marketers throw money around promoting products in the hope of striking gold and becoming one of the elusive "Super Affiliate Marketers." Ultimately what occurs is the Marketer quitting with his or her tail between their legs, having lost money on advertising, programs, courses, without posting any sort of profit. If only these Affiliate Marketers knew how close they were to turning those loses into substantial profits, if only they exercised some patience.

Fundamentals Exposed

Finding An Affiliate Program:

The most popular Affiliate program is Clickbank. Clickbank has 10,000's of digital products with Sellers (Merchants) looking to lure in Affiliate Marketers to promote their products. The key here is to market products that you believe in, check the sellers page, would you buy the product yourself? Check the commission offered by the merchant and the gravity of the product, and identify the sales trend. Typically products with a gravity of 100+ with a commission of $30 or more are high selling products. Obtain the hop link of the product, this is the link that identifies you as the person getting the lead to the seller and gives you your commission if a sale is made, you now have a product(s) to market.

Find A Niche

A niche is a market within a market. Say you wanted to promote a weight loss book, targeting everyone looking to lose weight will cost a bucket load of money for advertising. This is because you are not offering a solution targeted to anyone in particular. People have many reasons for wanting to lose weight, find a niche that you feel confident speaking to. This could be women wanting to lose weight after pregnancy, or women wanting to lose weight before their wedding day. This will allow you to create highly targeted campaigns, offering a product they are looking for.

Create a landing page

This is a website that you create to promote the product(s) you have chosen for your niche. This page could be a review page that may contain 3-5 products for the market/niche that you are promoting. Be honest with your reviews, a potential customer can easily decipher when you are rating each product highly without providing both the pros and cons of each product. . For example, you could review several acne cure products or a testimonial about how a particular product helped cure your acne. The hop links provided by Clickbank will be your direct link to the sellers page. An effective method to get visitors to proceed to the merchant page is titling links with "Click Here To Cure Your Acne in 24 Hours" or "Learn More About ... " Your page should be easy to follow, well presented and grab the visitors attention and keep them on your site without them rushing to push the back button on their browser.

Promoting Your Landing Page - Getting Traffic

Free Method: As the name suggests, this method is free but takes time to conquer. The method requires you to write articles such as reviews, testimonials or how to's that are targeted for your niche. These articles can be posted on sites like ezinearticles and many other sites that allow you to post links to your landing page. This method is free and can enable you to get targeted traffic to your site without paying for advertising. Another great place to post are forums, where you can answer questions or provide possible solutions to member's problems with the products that you are promoting, by directing them to your landing page.

Paid Method: This method is what kills most Marketers. Many will throw money away by paying for advertising that is not targeted for their chosen niche. Most will advertise words such as "Acne". By selecting keywords such as "Acne", the Marketer will receive ALOT of traffic, however this is not targeted traffic. You must remember that most people that click your ad, may only want to learn about what acne is or the causes of acne, and may not be interested in buying the product that is being marketed to them. In the end, there will be plenty traffic generated, but the cost of advertising vs the commission given for each sale will result in big loses. With advertising such Google AdWords you are paying Google money every time someone clicks your Ad, what you want is the cheapest possible click cost, by only having Ads that are relevant to your landing page, the product(s) you are promoting and targeted specifically to your niche. If these three dots are well connected, it will lead to sales and higher conversion rates.

Google AdWords Tips

If you are selling an Acne Cure product, you must target people who want a solution to their acne problems. Get into the mind of a potential customer, how would go about searching for a solution. Most likely you would not type into "Acne" in the search box, you would type search terms such as "How to cure Acne", "How to cure acne fast", "best acne cures available" etc. Create an Ad campaign that have long keywords, a good rule of thumb is 3+ words.

Work out how many sales you would need to make within a campaign budget to post a profit. For example, if the merchant is offering $30 commission per sale, and your average cost per click is $0.30 then you must make 1 sale per 100 clicks to break even. Longer keyword phrases are generally cheaper and highly targeted they allow you to receive more clicks for your dollar. Remember having 100 highly targeted clicks is better than 1000 that are not.

Patience is the key to a successful Affiliate Marketing career, the biggest killer for a majority of Marketers is their impatience to learn the three R's: Research, Research and Research. The number one reason why there are Super Affiliate Making $100,000's a year with relative ease is because they have learned the fundamentals and repeat these principles on each campaign they start. Exercise some patience and become one of the elusive Super Affiliate Marketers Today.

To learn more about Affiliate Marketing tips, secrets and how to start profiting from your campaigns today, please visit Affiliate Marketing Made Easy