Affiliate tricks and tips for newbies

Like in Link popularity forum I've decided to open thread for newbies. I hope, you'll give away your useful trick and tips.

Some general tips:

1. Professional design and quality content
Your visitors have to trust you, if you want to sell them something. Professional design is good start. Than you'll need something useful for visitors, something what will attract them(quality articles, videos, pics, other free staff).

P.s.: Don't forget on SEO. Try to make(or download) table free(CSS) design.

P.p.s.: If you haven't got design talent, you can get free designs here:

www.oswd.org
www.minimalistic-design.net

P.p.p.s.: You will need some unique articles, but if you want to give more articles to your visitors, copy articles from article directories(www.goarticles.com, www.ezinearticles.com)(duplicated content - NOT seo friendly!!)


2. Traffic

If you want to sell something, you'll need visitors. Unique visitor/selles ratio is depended on niche and quality of traffic and site.

Donts:
- do not run traffic from autosurf programs
- do not run traffic from unrelated sites
- do not spam!!!
It will just take you BW and it is not good for your trustrang.

Do:
- try to get targeted traffic from SE
- advertise your site with PPC program, like adwords

This is all for now. I would be glad if you post your tips and tricks. Sorry for my bad english.

 

nice tips, but it is not enough

 

I'll add more tips and tricks soon...

 

- Do not make a "flea market" out of your affiliate pages. Focus on tight niche.

- If you are new to affiliate marketing or Internet marketing in general, start with products that cost less even though it is very tempting to go for bigger comssions right away. More expensive products require much more skills to sell.

With less expensive products but more sales, you will get more comissions.

- Do have an opt-in form to capture your visitors' e-mail. Run free newsletters or e-courses (etc.) and develop your relationship with your visitors. Your conversion rate will go up (provided you do not try to push some sort of junk content to your subscribers!). Remember not to SPAM.

- Professional looking site design most certainly helps, but do not forget that your COPY sells.

- Do not ever stop testing every element of your site. Test one variable at a time. Have a log of your changes and their effects on your site.

astra

 

Read a couple of posts and they reminded me of some other important things in affiliate marketing:

- do your homework and research each affiliate program you join. Avoid the ones who have a high pay-out number. You might have to wait a long time and make lots of sales if your program pays you only after you accumulate a large sum.

- try and contact their supposrt and see how quickly they will get back to you. Make sure they are accessible at any time. You don't want to spend your money advertising for someone you won't be able to reach if you have a problem or question.

astra

 

excellent tips, if possible, write some more about how to get free trafic.

 

ok, so here are my tips,

free traffic to your website is not so hard to get.
1) blogs get more traffic than websites : so start blogging
2) add feeds, that's another method, if you are blogging
3) add sitemaps, so that you get your site fully indexed.
4)get free backlinks by submitting articles, so start submiting now.
5) get unique content for your website, as much as you can.
6) get classified ads, that's another method.
7) seo traffic for your website

i have given so much of links, so am not adding my signature to this post.

 

Thanks astra and uttoransen for your tips.

 

You are very welcome, bujes!

The ways to get free traffic were already described above. I just wanted to add that affiliate marketers need to work twice as hard to get traffic, because the conversion needs to happen twice to make a sale (in most cases). First your site needs to convert (so that your vistors gets interested in a product and clicks through to your affiliate site). And then the affiliate site needs to convert your referrals into buyers.

Therefore when choosing an affiliate program to join, make sure their site and sales copy are good. Ask for their conversion rate. If it's low you will be wasting all your efforts to send your traffic to a site that will only loose them all due to poor conversion rate.

astra

 

1.are u asking for screen shoots etc every time u want something to promote?
2.i have a blog and also a site,the blog has SEO tips and etc. and back links to my site, my site has 2 products now for sale, is it wise to use a site for many products or just a site that the main page is the main affilate product and the domain name is speaking for the affilate product also.

that's my 2 cent question...very important

 

They are usually provided by a good affiliate site.

That is entirely up to you. It is not suggested to have a whole ton of different products to sell at once as it will spread visitors' attention.

If you structure your site wisely and have products that are closely related to a specific niche or provide a solution to a specific problem, then, by all means, have more than one on one site (not necessarily on one landing page).

If you don't have much experience, go for one product and market it first, then add more gradually.

My 2 cent answer
astra

 

Very nice tips. Thanks

 

Hmmm so blog gets more traffic.

 

My tips:

* Be focused.
* Add new pages to your site every week.
* Make a new blog post at least three times a week.

 

I like blogs and Digg traffic is the best!

I have blog about cycling and I came on first site of Digg yesterday and I made 10 sales(total 135$ commission).

Tips:
- just start blogging
- write quality and attractive content
- add attractive video
- use digg and other social bookmark services
- sell cheap products, (i have sold 10 products for 27$ each)

 

when yopu say advertise on ppc. what excatly do you mean? advertise a website like mywebsite.com or do you advertise the providers website ie ringtonesking.com??

cheers
stelios

 

Here is my contribution http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=246124

 

www.google.com/adwords ...

 

I would say give away free reports related to your site topic.
Put video in youtube and you could even put up a myspace profile.