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

Focus and determination are the only things that separate the beginners from the advanced. The ones who decided they are not going to give up and they are going to make it are the ones who have succeeded and relished in the benefits.

No matter what your level of experience in affiliate marketing is, there are still simple mistakes that any affiliate marketer is bound to make (even some gurus commit them). Mistakes that can really deter your efforts and make you want to give up. Many marketers end up in some of these sink holes.

But you can avoid these pitfalls and continue on to a very successful affiliate marketing career. Here are some of the common (but oftentimes overlooked) mistakes to avoid:

Affiliate Marketing Mistake # 1: Overloaded Website

One of the most common mistakes every affiliate marketer makes, or has made, is overloading their site. When you try pumping your website full of affiliate links, banners and fancy advertisements, your potential customer can get confused and just close out the page.

On top of that, the load time of a page that has endless graphics and fancy ads on it is ridiculous. I don’t know about you, but when I try to open a page and it takes longer than a few seconds for me to see what’s going on, I simply exit the page.

Instead of countless ads and banners, mix in some text links. Research has shown that people are responsive to text links because they get to see what they want laid out in front of them.

Affiliate Marketing Mistake # 2: Sending Your Customers Away

Too many affiliates get the potential customers to the main product page, without ever capturing information. Now what happens if they aren’t interested in the product at that moment for whatever reason, maybe it’s price or they just aren’t into it like they thought they were? If that’s the case, then you’ve lost this consumer forever.

Instead of directing them straight to your affiliate product, you need to direct them to a squeeze page. Offer a free quality report or e-course, so that the potential customer has to give out their name and e-mail address to get it.

This way, even if they are not interested in the product you are promoting right now, you still have their contact info and you can follow-up with them.

Who knows, they might be in the mood to buy some other time (after they got more information about it) or when you come up with a special offer. And aside from the affiliate product you’re promoting, you can continue to market other products to them in the future.

Affiliate Marketing Mistake # 3: Not Cloaking Your Affiliate Links

Affiliate marketers seem to forget that there are unethical people in this world, or maybe they just think it can’t happen to them. Whatever the case may be, affiliates need to cloak their links.

When you leave your oftentimes long affiliate link “naked,” it is incredibly easy to change the affiliate id or number, and you would have wasted your efforts and lost your commissions.

There will always be people out there who will try to steal from you and others, but there is a simple way to deter them. Simply cloak your affiliate link using a url shortener or a link cloaking software to help keep the thieves at bay. Don’t become a victim and make sure to hide your affiliate link in any way possible.

Affiliate Marketing Mistake # 4: Thinking That It’s A Get Rich Quick Scheme

So many marketers get in this business and believe that they can become a millionaire overnight. This is just not true. If you are in this mindset, then you will fail miserably in  your affiliate marketing career.

As in any business you need to work at it, even if you have a huge bank account to start with. Stay focused and determined to make it, don’t think it will happen overnight because it won’t.

Too many people get discouraged when they throw up a blog with a few affiliate links in it, and they don’t see their account jump into the hundreds of dollars. It is very possible to do this with affiliate marketing; but again, it will probably not happen overnight. If you work hard, keep testing at what works and what does not, then you will ultimately succeed.

Affiliate marketing has become one of the biggest markets out there. A lot of people are making a lot of money consistently, and oftentimes passively. They got there from good old fashioned smart work, and avoiding certain common mistakes that affiliate marketers are bound to make if they’re not careful or aware.

Here you have learned some of the most common pitfalls that every marketer has fallen victim to. Take what you know now and avoid these traps. Stay focused and determined; and inevitably you will succeed.

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