Now that we’ve straightened that out, here are 5 affiliate marketing strategies to help anyone create a profitable affiliate business, and keep it successful for a long time to come.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy # 1: Drive Hordes of Traffic to Your Website.

As an affiliate marketer, your most important job is to drive as much traffic as possible to your affiliate website. Don’t leave traffic to chance. If you really want to succeed in affiliate marketing, then you need to do all that you can to get people to visit your site.

There are many ways to do this – article marketing, video marketing, pay per click, joint ventures, ezine advertising, web 2.0… the sky’s the limit. It’s  a good idea to diversify and use a variety of traffic methods. Don’t put all your eggs on one basket, but focus more on those which are bringing you better results.

And then there are unconventional traffic techniques that some marketers overlook – like the power of word of mouth. Maintain a trustworthy website and reputation, and make it easy for your visitors to bookmark or to recommend your site to their friends.

Of course, part of driving traffic to your site is keeping it updated as well, so you can get visitors to return and make your site look good in the eyes of the search engines. After all, who wants to visit a website that’s old news?

Affiliate Marketing Strategy # 2: Choose Your Ad Forms Wisely.

The form in which your ads take can make or break your career as an affiliate marketer. Avoid graphic-heavy banners on your website. These showy banners are a huge turn off and reportedly get very low hits anyway.

If you have a choice, opt for the simpler banners since they’re direct to the point and don’t take too long to load. When choosing banners, make sure that what you decide on won’t clash with the theme of your actual website.

Aesthetics also plays a huge part in visitor interest. Text links have proven themselves very effective since they’re quite subtle and are actually very bandwidth-friendly (a plus on your side!). And instead of using obtrusive pop-ups (which are the bane of Internet users), go for the ones that only appear when the visitor exits the site.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy # 3: Build a List.

While some people don’t think that having a list is all that important, it’s actually one of the reasons why some of the websites that have been around for a long time are still functioning quite well today.

Having a list keeps a steady stream of people flowing into your website. And while there are other ways of driving traffic to your place (see the tips above), having a list keeps you head to head with all the other big names in affiliate marketing.

That’s because you have an available audience who you can promote to, and follow up with, every time you want. And as long as you have built a solid relationship with them, they are more likely to buy from you than cold prospects would.

Sure, you can go ahead and try working your website without a proper list, but I assure you that you’ll only be wasting time. Sooner than later, you’ll be clamoring to create your own list.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy # 4: Review Your Product.

When people visit your site, they want to know why they should even consider parting with their head earned money for what you’ve got on the table.

Creating a sensible review (with pros and cons) can help them make up their mind. Besides, your site should act like the authority on whatever it is you’re selling. It would be better if you have actually used the product and honestly relate your own experiences.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy # 5: Don’t Count Your Chickens Before They’re Hatched.

Small-time success in affiliate marketing can blind a person and cause them to start acting like crazy. However, this industry can be fickle when you least expect it. You might be basking in hits this month, but you might also end up suffering through a dry spell the next.

The lesson here is to not let one success steer you away from your end goal. My advice is to hold on to that bit of money for a while and continue working at your website. Dream big if you want, but don’t let those dreams get in the way of actually doing the work it takes for them to become reality.

Affiliate marketing strategies can advance your way to success. However, well-chosen ads and good reviews aren’t the only factors for longevity. If you really want to make a career out of affiliate marketing, then you’ve got to pull all the stops.

Learn everything you can about the industry and don’t let an opportunity to gain more knowledge pass. Keep an eye on your website and create insights from every new experience. After all, it is only with considerable time and effort that you will really succeed.

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
MemberSpeed Inc
Follow us on Twitter:
http://www.Twitter.com/webprofitplans

And with so many people doing affiliate marketing these days, you really do need to separate yourself from the herd. You need to use every opportunity you have to advance yourself. Find out what these affiliate marketing secrets are and make it big.

Affiliate Marketing Secret # 1: Find A Specific Niche.

The Internet is a vast wasteland. People looking for one thing end up finding something completely different. That’s why it is important to find a specific niche.

Don’t contribute to the already tangled mess that is the web. Instead, stick to a specific niche to help prospects get to where they want to go in the first place.

For example, instead of focusing on health in general, why don’t you narrow your niche down to bodybuilding, weight loss or reflexology?

The more specific the niche, the better your chances are of actually attracting the right visitors. Besides, having a specific niche actually helps you get a higher page rank which everybody knows is a very good thing.

Affiliate Marketing Secret # 2: Know As Much As You Can About the Affiliate Product.

To be able to market something properly, you need to know all there is to know about the product you’re selling. The more knowledge you have, the better you’ll be able to persuade people to check the said product out.

For example, have you ever tried selling facial cream to a person without even knowing what it’s good for and what it has over the other facial creams out there? Knowledge is power. Don’t take the product for granted.

Familiarize yourself with it and anticipate any questions a curious customer might ask. Even better if you can use it and experience the benefits yourself. This alone gives you an advantage over other “blind” affiliates out there.

Affiliate Marketing Secret # 3: Cloak Your Links.

A lot of people tend to be suspicious and disapproving of affiliate links. Thankfully, there are cloaking technologies available for those who want to disguise their affiliate links. Besides, there are a lot of advantages that come with doing this.

Some cloaking software or sites help you determine the number of people who have clicked on your link. This is actually very vital information because now, you have an idea of which links are doing well and which ones can be taken off.

Affiliate Marketing Secret # 4: Use Article Marketing To Build Your Reputation.

Article marketing is one of the most effective ways of promoting a particular brand, service or website. It gives you an air of credibility, marking you an expert on certain matters.

People who have read your article and learned something valuable from it tend to look for you the next time they need advice. They start to trust you and your judgment. After all, if the expert says that this website or that this service is very reliable, who are they to argue against it?

Look around and do your research. Find out which articles are the most popular and which ones bite the dust. You might be able to pick up a few tips and tricks on how to go about creating your expert persona.

Once you “caught” them with your article, direct them to your pre-sell page.

Affiliate Marketing Secret # 5: It’s All About The Pre-sell.

Instead of directly sending your target customers over to the actual website, have them take a short detour to your pre-sell page.

A pre-sell page can be a squeeze page, review page, or a page where people can read customer testimonials and teasers on what they can expect from the actual product. (Make sure you have permission from the product owner to post a teaser or excerpt on your webpage.)

A squeeze page is where they can sign up for a free course pre-selling your affiliate product. You can then follow up with them as many times as you like.

A review page where you’ve written down the pros and cons of the affiliate product. People’s defenses tend to go down when you reveal any flaw about the product. Just make sure the pros significantly outweigh the cons.

The idea behind pre-selling is that you want people to feel comfortable about buying the product. Think of it as having your in-laws visit for a few days. Instead of simply showing them to the guest room, don’t you try your best to make them feel at home first? You serve them drinks in the living room and show them around the house.

In affiliate marketing, it’s your way of fattening the product up and getting your prospective clients excited about it as well. If done successfully, you can expect a steady stream of loyal customers and even significantly increased traffic.

When you think about it, affiliate marketing secrets aren’t really secrets. Once you gain a better understanding of the business, you tend to find these things out (and more) for yourself. A lot of these secrets can even be considered common sense.

But now that you have an inside look into the world of competitive affiliate marketing, I assume you’ll be on your way to applying these strategies and on your way to uncovering more affiliate marketing secrets on your own!

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
MemberSpeed Inc
Follow us on Twitter:
http://www.Twitter.com/webprofitplans

Here are 4 proven methods to becoming a better affiliate marketer:

Affiliate Marketing Technique # 1: Write Content that Sticks.

Now just because you have a blog or website with several affiliate pages, and you’ve been updating regularly, doesn’t mean your old content should be voided.

If you write timeless, original and quality content, then you can still get some decent traffic and attention to the older content… even when your updated pages are shown first.

That’s because such content will be treated highly by people and they will spread the word about them – bookmark them, share them with their friends, etc. Moreover, search engines love unique and helpful content, so you have more chances of maintaining a high ranking in the search engines.

Even when newer information gets added, old quality content still sticks around the web… and you’ll continue getting those commissions and leads. This would benefit your affiliate business for potentially months (or even years) to come.

This valuable, long standing content will ramp up your sales and boost your online reputation.

Affiliate Marketing Technique # 2: Really Know Your Audience.

You should dedicate as much time as possible to really get to know your audience, and anticipate their needs. Anticipating your audience’s needs is what will keep you ahead of the game, rather than trying to catch up when they need something you are not offering.

For example, if you’re in the Asian cooking niche, then it’s a good idea to have more ebooks or recipes about Asian dishes rather than recipes on how to cook pasta or such. You can use these short ebooks as powerful presellers to the affiliate products you’re promoting – give them away to unleash a lasting viral effect.

Knowing and understanding what your target audience needs will help keep you out in front of the curve; and when they need something new or different than what you started out with, you are more than ready to accommodate them.

Catering to your audience’s specific needs and wants will boost your credibility and result in more affiliate sales.

Affiliate Marketing Technique # 3: Keep All Affiliate Ads Relevant.

Keep any email or classified ads, banners or graphics relevant to the theme or topic of your affiliate site. If you have a site or blog about golfing, then you do not want to put up ads about computer stuff just because many other marketers have one. Someone searching your site for golfing equipment or tips is likely not interested in computer information.

Some people prefer adding adsense in addition to the affiliate product ads to maintain a balance between their pay-per-sale and pay-per-click earnings. This is fine, but I suggest you test this to be reasonably assured this is more profitable than just focusing on affiliate ads alone.

Obviously, you can’t control what comes out from adsense. More often than not, the ad would be relevant to the topic of your site. But sometimes you may have a niche within a niche, and Google doesn’t quite recognize it. Whatever the case may be, just check up on your ads and make sure they are relevant.

If they aren’t, then you may need to try placing them again and waiting a couple days to see if it grabs on to what your site is about; and if it doesn’t, then just remove them and find an affiliate product to take its place.

As long as you stay on track with what your site is about, then your commissions and reputation will grow steadily.

Affiliate Marketing Technique # 4: Be Honest About Your Affiliations And Promotions.

The days when you could put a few links up on a page and let it run wild are long gone. Visitors these days are quite intelligent, and they can spot an affiliate link a mile away.

Now this isn’t a bad thing, as long as you are open and honest about your affiliations. When you are straightforward about who you are promoting – and even why you are promoting them (i.e. they are a good company with a good product) – then your visitors will be more than willing to listen to you.

If you try to be underhanded, then there’s a pretty good chance your visitors will simply close out your site and go to the vendor’s site directly just to keep you from gaining any commission. They may even sign up for the affiliate program and replace your link with theirs. This happens quite often in the internet marketing niche since your visitors are also familiar with the way affiliate marketing works.

One effective way to be frank about your affiliations and still get an edge is to offer your own unique bonuses to the affiliate products you’re promoting.

Honesty goes a long way; and these days people looking through the web are not stupid. In fact, if you are being dishonest and sneaky, the word will spread about you and your site, which could completely destroy any chance you have of becoming a better affiliate marketer.

Exposing the negative aspects of an affiliate product also has its advantages. When you share with your audience the negative sides, they would begin to trust you and drop down their defenses and focus on the positive aspects. However, just see to it that this “flaw” is a minor one and the positives would significantly offset it. If it’s a major flaw, it’s not worth promoting.

Implement these affiliate marketing techniques now, and watch your affiliate earnings and reputation skyrocket.

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
MemberSpeed Inc
Follow us on Twitter:
http://www.Twitter.com/webprofitplans

Here are 4 proven methods to becoming a better affiliate marketer:

Affiliate Marketing Technique # 1: Write Content that Sticks.

Now just because you have a blog or website with several affiliate pages, and you’ve been updating regularly, doesn’t mean your old content should be voided.

If you write timeless, original and quality content, then you can still get some decent traffic and attention to the older content… even when your updated pages are shown first.

That’s because such content will be treated highly by people and they will spread the word about them – bookmark them, share them with their friends, etc. Moreover, search engines love unique and helpful content, so you have more chances of maintaining a high ranking in the search engines.

Even when newer information gets added, old quality content still sticks around the web… and you’ll continue getting those commissions and leads. This would benefit your affiliate business for potentially months (or even years) to come.

This valuable, long standing content will ramp up your sales and boost your online reputation.

Affiliate Marketing Technique # 2: Really Know Your Audience.

You should dedicate as much time as possible to really get to know your audience, and anticipate their needs. Anticipating your audience’s needs is what will keep you ahead of the game, rather than trying to catch up when they need something you are not offering.

For example, if you’re in the Asian cooking niche, then it’s a good idea to have more ebooks or recipes about Asian dishes rather than recipes on how to cook pasta or such. You can use these short ebooks as powerful presellers to the affiliate products you’re promoting – give them away to unleash a lasting viral effect.

Knowing and understanding what your target audience needs will help keep you out in front of the curve; and when they need something new or different than what you started out with, you are more than ready to accommodate them.

Catering to your audience’s specific needs and wants will boost your credibility and result in more affiliate sales.

Affiliate Marketing Technique # 3: Keep All Affiliate Ads Relevant.

Keep any email or classified ads, banners or graphics relevant to the theme or topic of your affiliate site. If you have a site or blog about golfing, then you do not want to put up ads about computer stuff just because many other marketers have one. Someone searching your site for golfing equipment or tips is likely not interested in computer information.

Some people prefer adding adsense in addition to the affiliate product ads to maintain a balance between their pay-per-sale and pay-per-click earnings. This is fine, but I suggest you test this to be reasonably assured this is more profitable than just focusing on affiliate ads alone.

Obviously, you can’t control what comes out from adsense. More often than not, the ad would be relevant to the topic of your site. But sometimes you may have a niche within a niche, and Google doesn’t quite recognize it. Whatever the case may be, just check up on your ads and make sure they are relevant.

If they aren’t, then you may need to try placing them again and waiting a couple days to see if it grabs on to what your site is about; and if it doesn’t, then just remove them and find an affiliate product to take its place.

As long as you stay on track with what your site is about, then your commissions and reputation will grow steadily.

Affiliate Marketing Technique # 4: Be Honest About Your Affiliations And Promotions.

The days when you could put a few links up on a page and let it run wild are long gone. Visitors these days are quite intelligent, and they can spot an affiliate link a mile away.

Now this isn’t a bad thing, as long as you are open and honest about your affiliations. When you are straightforward about who you are promoting – and even why you are promoting them (i.e. they are a good company with a good product) – then your visitors will be more than willing to listen to you.

If you try to be underhanded, then there’s a pretty good chance your visitors will simply close out your site and go to the vendor’s site directly just to keep you from gaining any commission. They may even sign up for the affiliate program and replace your link with theirs. This happens quite often in the internet marketing niche since your visitors are also familiar with the way affiliate marketing works.

One effective way to be frank about your affiliations and still get an edge is to offer your own unique bonuses to the affiliate products you’re promoting.

Honesty goes a long way; and these days people looking through the web are not stupid. In fact, if you are being dishonest and sneaky, the word will spread about you and your site, which could completely destroy any chance you have of becoming a better affiliate marketer.

Exposing the negative aspects of an affiliate product also has its advantages. When you share with your audience the negative sides, they would begin to trust you and drop down their defenses and focus on the positive aspects. However, just see to it that this “flaw” is a minor one and the positives would significantly offset it. If it’s a major flaw, it’s not worth promoting.

Implement these affiliate marketing techniques now, and watch your affiliate earnings and reputation skyrocket.

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
MemberSpeed Inc
Follow us on Twitter:
http://www.Twitter.com/webprofitplans

A plateau can be due to many things; but most commonly, it’s due to the fact that affiliate marketers exhaust their efforts. The problem is that everyone knows the basic ways to promote products and they just use them.

Now these efforts are fantastic and work quite well, which is why everyone knows about and uses them, but you need to expand your efforts to avoid a plateau – or pick yourself up off of one.

Here are some proven techniques to become a better affiliate marketer:

Affiliate Marketing Strategy # 1: Think outside the box; take your efforts further than your computer.

Now everyone knows about using the computer to promote products in their niche. But what a lot of people tend to overlook is offline efforts. You don’t have to stay solely online to advertise your websites and the products you’re offering in a specific niche.

Do you know how many people read your local paper? Tons! Do you know how many people check out the classifieds in the local paper? Tons! You could be taking advantage of this right now; and if you’re not, you’re missing out big time.

Getting out an ad in the paper provides you with a massive amount of exposure. If you’re promoting a service, you can put out an ad in that section of the paper. If you are promoting a job opportunity, then the “wanted section” is the place you want your ads to be.

Determine where your promotion fits in the best and place an ad there. You can even do the same in magazines. In the back of basically every magazine, and throughout the publication, are ads. You can talk to the publishers about placing your ad in the magazine along with the others.
A targeted magazine is a great place to promote and earn big time, especially when you have a targeted audience.

If you’re not quite ready for an advertising budget, you can simply print fliers and put them in high trafficked areas.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy # 2: Harness the power of videos.

You Tube is a huge community, and many videos there end up with several thousands (sometimes even millions) of views.

If videos are so lucrative, why aren’t many affiliates doing them? Creating videos seems to put people off, because they think they need some extensive technical knowledge to come up with a “masterpiece.”

Fortunately, you don’t have to be some software guru or anything like that to create a video. Nowadays, computers come with some kind of webcam and video creation software you can use to easily create videos.

Even if your computer doesn’t have any of that, or maybe you don’t want to make a video with your face in it (maybe you’re camera shy), there are free programs that can help.

The most used and popular one is CamStudio, which allows you to turn presentations and  screenshots into videos that you can then stick up on YouTube and other video sharing sites.

Tap into the power of videos; you won’t be disappointed.

Affiliate Marketing Strategy # 3: Simplify your site and eliminate distractions.

A lot of times you see affiliate websites that are jam packed with everything you can imagine. They have ten different affiliate products, a dozen banners and lots of ads. You might think that the more ads you have, the more chances you can sell something and make money, right?

Not exactly. There are a couple problems with this approach. First, a site with tons of banners, ads and graphics will not load very quickly and this could drive people away.

An affiliate website should be straight to the point. You can have more than one product on a page (example if you have a review site), but don’t put up tons of banners and graphics that distract your visitor. Having too many products being sold on the site could actually confuse people, which prevents them from making any decision at all.

Some affiliate marketers include Adsense ads in their sites to balance their pay-per-sale and pay-per-click income. This is fine; but if you’re promoting affiliate products in your site, one set of adsense ads is enough. One suggestion is to actually test your sites whether promoting affiliate products alone, or combining adsense with affiliate promotions, can get you the best results. If the adsense ads are only preventing you from earning the highest possible income, then chuck them out.

As an affiliate marketer you may hit a plateau, but you don’t have to stay there. Implement these affiliate marketing strategies and you will easily get off the plateau that’s stopping you from becoming a super affiliate.

Warm Regards,
Jeremy Gislason
MemberSpeed Inc
Follow us on Twitter:
http://www.Twitter.com/webprofitplans