Affiliate Programs - 7 Great Tips

We often get asked by affiliates about how to successfully deal with affiliate programs. There are many ways - and different Internet "gurus" will give you different answers. Here are the top seven tips that our top consulting editors normally give: 1. Make no mistake about it - merchants and Internet marketers are in business to make money for themselves. They are not interested in helping you to take cash away from them. Their mission is to make as much money as they can - and to give away the minimum they have to. Many merchants and marketers use "tricks" and "tactics" to ensure that they always get the best out of the deal. 2. You must be alert and awake - what tactics are merchants and marketers using to grab your traffic? Many of them will "steal" your traffic and you will not get as much as a simple "thank you" - let alone the bags of cash they all promise. 3. Do you carefully follow what the merchants and marketers tell you? They often give you "helpful advice" so that you may maximize your affiliate income. Here's the sad truth - if you follow them like "blind sheep" - you will increase their profits, not yours. 4. Do you monitor the level of traffic you generate for merchants and marketers? Does this convert to sales and cash? If not, what is happening to your traffic? You need to look into that. 5. Even when you get commissions, don't be too happy. The merchants and marketers will proceed to make 10 to 100 times more out of your traffic than they will ever share with you. 6. You are in business for yourself - when you market and promote affiliate programs, they must generate money and cash flow for your business. If you don't get reasonable returns on your time and cash investment, dump the merchant or marketer. The program is either not worth promoting or the merchant or marketer is abusing your efforts. 7. Promote affiliate programs under your own domain and branding - don't give free advertising to merchants and marketers who may not be interested in rewarding you for your efforts. About the Author Consulting Editors, Authors and Mentors - http://www.AskProfessors.com - creators of the Affiliate Intelligence system. Don't throw away money or traffic - get free updates or consult the experts via http://www.it-news.com/currenta.htm

Your Job As An Affiliate Marketer

As an affiliate, you are effectively a sales person for the site you are directing traffic to. However, to say you are a sales person in the proper sense of the word is not strictly correct, because the selling is done pretty much by the merchant. You see the merchant has already invested lots of money on their product and service, and on their marketing too. Your goal is to effectively deliver traffic to the merchants site who then takes care of everything from that point on. There are two ways you can deliver traffic: a) directly, when you send traffic straight to the merchant's site from its source and b) indirectly, when you first engage the visitor in your own website before sending them to the merchant.

We can summarise your activities as an affiliate as follows:

• Generate Traffic (Visitors) to Your Site

• Engage the Visitor and Make a Presell

• Direct the Visitor By Making a Call To Action (in this case to purchase the merchants product)

• Ensure the Viewer Returns to Your Site for Future Purchases

AffIiliate Marketing Overview

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business pays commission to an affiliate for every customer they direct to the product site.

• Probably the quickest way to make money online is to promote someone else's product as an affiliate. You see people have already invested a great deal of time and money in creating their product, and in many cases, have optimized their sales page. This is an ideal situation for us to make money online quickly as we do not have to develop a product.

• There are several key points to consider when selecting products to promote. I would advise to work with the Clickbank.Com marketplace because they have a huge number of established products to work with, and they also provide also vital statistical information that allows us to determine the probability of success.

• Once, we have chosen a product all we need to do is to direct traffic to our specific affiliate URL (web address). There are a number of ways to generate traffic, which I will discuss in more detail over the coming weeks. However, free traffic can take time to develop, pay per click is often the first choice because we can drive extremely targeted traffic in a matter minutes.

• We can either drive traffic (visitors) to the merchant's website through our affiliate link, or we can send the traffic to what we call a "landing page". A page set up by ourselves where we offer reviews on the product. This improves the visitor's experience as they recieve further information that will encourage them to consider purchasing the product. This is a great technique for converting visitors to buyers.