Many people say affiliate marketing is one of the easiest way to make money online and the best part is, you don't even need to have your own product or website.
But there's more to it than just that.
You cannot be a super affiliate overnight, it won't happen. Every successful affiliate marketer follows an action plan, with each decision executed meticulously and at the right moment. In addition, there are three basic but very important tools an affiliate marketer must possess.
The First Important Foundation - Unique Presence
That's just a fancy way of saying you need to have your very own website, thereby creating an online presence. Your website must provide relevant information visitors are looking for. After all, content is king right? Right! But equally as important, is how you present the content. Is it done poorly just by putting up text after text at the expense of the visitors' experience? I always put up relevant images when possible and try to hire a good designer to create a professional looking site.
Your website must look and feel credible. You must convince the visitors that you are an authority on the subject and whatever products you recommend are going to benefit them.
The Second Important Foundation - Opt-In List
The Internet is not what like it was a couple of years ago. In that short time, the web has exploded exponentially. It is now flooded with marketers left and right. Almost everywhere you turn, you'd meet one.
With such intense competition, what makes your visitors keep coming back? You must be able to entice your visitors to keep coming back to your site and of course click on your affiliate links. So rather than relying on one-time
Visitors to keep coming back, use an opt-in form to capture their contact emails. However no one will simply offer their emails like that, you need to give them something in exchange, like a gift. Tell them they can receive a special gift by filling in their name and email address.
Once they opt-in, send them to the download page for the gift. Alternatively, you can direct them to the merchant you are promoting and send them the gift in one of your follow up messages later.
Now that you have a list of opt-in subscribers, you can send them any messages any time you want, including special offers or other products you are promoting in your niche.
The Third Important Foundation - Targeted Traffic
At the end of the day, what is the most important to your success is targeted traffic. Learning how to attract interested people to visit your site is an on-going process and nothing beats free and targeted traffic.
This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. A high ranking on the first or second page of the search engines will give you an endless flow of free targeted traffic. But it's easier said than done.
The key to ranking high for a particular keyword in your niche relies on link popularity. Who and how many are linking to you. If many highly ranked sites are linking to you. This is important because you need both quantity and quality. And one-way links are the most prized.
But which high ranking sites will link to a new site like yours? Don't panic, you can always start off with a
reciprocal linking exercise. First link to others, then ask if they will link back to you. If not just remove
their link from your website, if yes then you are on your way to getting ranked. Of course reciprocal linking is a whole area of study in itself which I will not deal with here.
One way of getting one-way links is to submit articles to various directories. This is one of most popular
method used by marketers. You one way links back to your site and you get exposure to targeted traffic.
I'll stop here for now, remember, the Internet is an ever changing landscape and who is to say you won't chance upon some revolutionary marketing method not done before?