Affiliate Marketing Tips For Beginners (6 questions and answers)†by Michael Rasmussen 2009-04-20 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1) I'm brand new to online marketing. Can you tell me if affiliate marketing is a good way to start? (asked by William Ackersly) ANSWER: The short answer is, "Absolutely!" There's nothing magic about affiliate marketing, but it's a great place to get started. The reasons are pretty simple: * It takes VERY little money to get started. I recommend having your own website, and you should have an autoresponder account as well. But that's really all you need to pay for. * It's easy to get started FAST. You can get set up within a day and easily start promoting products the next day, or even that first day. It's not hard. * The profit potential is great. Even if you've already got an online business, affiliate marketing is worth a look. It's a great way to supplement your income, and in most cases, it's easy to add affiliate marketing to what you're already doing. So, regardless of whether you're just getting started online or you've been at it for a while, affiliate marketing can be a great way to make solid cash. 2) How do I pick affiliate products that are likely to sell well? (asked by Bethany Simmons) ANSWER: The best strategy is to find products that are already selling well. They're likely to keep doing that! So how do you find them? Here are three quick ways: * Search the ClickBank Marketplace to find products with a good gravity score. I recommend looking for scores between 20 and 150, which gives you a popular product that doesn't have outrageous affiliate competition. * Monitor what other marketers are promoting. I suspect you're already signed up for several lists. Keep your eyes open for what they're promoting. The odds are good those products are converting well enough to make it worthwhile for you to promote them. * Ask the product seller how well it's doing. Most people overlook this one, but it really works. I've asked sellers how well their products are selling, and they're usually honest about it. If it's selling very well, they'll certainly have no problem telling you so. And of course, you can combine all of those methods to get an even better picture of what's selling well. Regardless of where you start your research, one thing you absolutely MUST do is review the sales page for any product you're considering promoting. Is the copy good? Does it make you want to buy? Is the sales page attractive? Does the payment link work? And you'll also want to sign up for and analyze any autoresponder for a free sales page offer as well. That will show you how aggressively the seller is following up with people to try to sell to them again...which can boost your commissions. 3) What's the best way to get people to take action and purchase through my link? (asked by Chuck Greene) ANSWER: The best way to get people to take action is to give them incentive to do it. The two most common tactics are: * Offering additional helpful information on a product review page. (I'll talk about review pages more in the answer to a later question.) * Offering a bonus to people who buy through your link. Offering a bonus for an affiliate product has become a sort of standard in affiliate marketing, but you don't have to be intimidated by people offering massive bonus packages. Your bonus just has to be attractive to prospects. For example, you could offer another related ebook that you wrote and have never released before. That's definitely unique. It might not be a huge bonus package with everything from video training to coaching, but it might be attractive enough to get somebody to buy. Here are a few other guidelines for offering a bonus: * Make the value of your bonus several times the purchase price of the product. Don't lie about it! Make sure what you're offering is really worth at least 50% more than the product, and preferably at least double. So your bonus for a $37 product ideally should be worth at least $75. * Get a nice graphic image for your bonus. This makes it look more attractive, professional and (most important) valuable. * Make people sign up for your list to get the bonus. That's that way to build your buyer list over time, which will help you boost your affiliate earnings in the long run. 4) What PPC strategies do you recommend for promoting affiliate products? (asked by Robert Williams) ANSWER: PPC is a great way to promote affiliate products, and it's easier to do than most people think. Here's the plan: * Use trigger words and question marks in ad headlines to get more clicks. For example, your headline might say, "Be An Affiliate NOW?" That attracts attention, leads somebody to want to answer the question, and uses the trigger word "NOW" to get people to act. * Target long tail keywords and product specific keywords. Long tail keywords are keyword phrases with three or more words. They typically get decent clicks with lower competition. That means you can bid lower for clicks, something like 25 cents or less, and still get good traffic. * Send people to a product review page where they can click your affiliate link to get to the sales page. This lets you "pre-sell" the product, which often improves your conversions. * Wait for 200-300 clicks. Ramp up your campaign if it's converting, move on to another product if it's not. Or you can try other keywords before switching products. It's up to you. That's the simple PPC strategy that keeps you from spending too much while you figure out what works. 5) What makes a great product review page? (asked by Ruth Ames) ANSWER: I've mentioned product review pages a couple times. If the concept isn't familiar to you, a product review page is a page where you offer additional information about an affiliate product, often as a "review" of the product. That helps people know if the product is worth buying. Your goal with a review page is to excite a buyer and make him more likely to click your affiliate link and buy the product on the sales page. Here are few tips for how to do that: * Use a headline that includes some controversy. That might be something like, "Is Product X Junk?" * Foreshadow the sales page headline when you can. So for a list building course that makes a bold claim on its sales page, you might say, "Can You Really Build A List Of One Million Like Product X Claims?" * Offer helpful information and personal proof. If you've used the product and got great results with it, talk about that! If you haven't gotten results, talk about your experience so far. * Use a bonus offer as an incentive to click your affiliate link. This tends to produce the best results. It almost certainly will get you more clicks through to the sales page. 6) Which is better, promoting high-ticket items that sell fewer copies, or promoting less expensive things that sell more? (asked by Ruth Ames) ANSWER: This is sort of the wrong question. The real question is how can you do BOTH? What you really want to do is start by promoting some less expensive stuff, then promote more expensive stuff later as sort of a back-end marketing effort. Once you've built a big high-ticket list, you can promote the more expensive products more often. Your list has build some trust in you at that point, and your high-ticket promotions are more likely to convert well. You can even start the process by promoting FREE products with reasonably priced back-end offers built in. I've used that strategy myself, and it works very well. Remember, affiliate marketing isn't just about making a pile of cash on a single promotion. It's about using affiliate products to build a business. If you focus on building a list and giving the people on it what they want, they'll buy over time.
Those are the basic questions a newbie would ask.Personally i still had some of it on my mind.Thanks for your nice information.It truly makes a great help to all the warriors.