"Affiliate Marketing"What Is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate marketing is simply having other’s promote your products and/or services using Online and Offline methods to drive prospects to your website. You pay those promoters a commission for every prospect that makes a purchase. Every promoter signs up to your affiliate program and receives a special tracking code called an affiliate ID, which is automatically tracked by software. Here’s an example of what an affiliate ID would look like, and by the way it’s not pretty!J http://affiliatepartnersite.com/cgi-bin/54321 The number 54321 would be your individual promoter’s affiliate ID, which is what you’d assign to those that sign up for your affiliate program. Just as a side note, you should think of those who promote your products as business partners and not just some faceless person or website that’s going to make you some money. Always focus on how you could help them make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort on their part, and as a result you’ll be richly rewarded by the increase in profits. It’s a no-brainer that the more money your affiliate partners make, the more you make. My point is to never view them as dollar signs, but as your best friends that have a mutual beneficial relationship that creates a win-win situation. They’ll work even harder to make you successful after they see you really care about them. Take that advice to the bank! Why Is Affiliate Marketing Important?Jimmy Brown of Sales Army Secrets, says, “The #1 source of traffic for the overwhelming majority of Internet marketers (gurus included) is “partner traffic.” A.K.A. Affiliate Marketing Traffic! Derek Gehl of The Internet Marketing Center stated, “Starting your own affiliate program is quite literally your ticket to the ultimate performance-based advertising because you only ever pay for results!” The Internet Market Center makes well above 2 million dollars per year, on their affiliate program alone. The biggest reasons affiliate marketing is so important is it’s the number one way to explode your profits by leveraging the efforts of your affiliate business partners. Think about it… They’re the ones investing their capital, time, and effort into promoting your products and or services. As a result, you get the benefit of all those affiliate partners promoting for you without personally spending a fortune. They are the ones out there in cyber space experimenting, testing, and implementing the latest traffic generating strategies and tactics. It would literally cost you a small fortune to do all that testing on your own. This is a highly ethical way of doing business on the Internet. So, don’t feel like you are taking advantage of your affiliate partners, because you’re not. The reason I say that is because you have to value what you have brought to the table through your blood, sweat, and tears. That is your product and/or service. Without your product, your affiliate business partners wouldn’t have anything to promote to make money from. Just know you are the one with the ingenuity that brought the value. How Can Affiliate Marketing Help You Grow Your Home-Based Business?We’ve already briefly discussed how running your own affiliate takes care of your traffic generation by letting your affiliate business partners promote your products. First of all, with all of that automatic targeted traffic coming to your website sent by hundreds or even thousands of affiliate business partners, you will have the three most important elements to building a sustainable and successful business. Those three key elements you must constantly supply your Online business with are People, Profits, and Products. I learned that simple, yet profound insight from Jim Edwards. If you really think about what any business needs to thrive, it really does boil down to putting people, profits, and products through your funnel non-stop. That’s a challenging endeavor to take on if you were trying to go at it alone. Getting back on track… Here’s what free automatic targeted traffic sent by your affiliate business partners will do:
That takes care of funneling more people into your business. 2. A certain percentage of the prospects will purchase your products and/or service will sign up upon the first visit to your website. Then for the ones that don’t sign up; will sign up to receive your free information. They will eventually purchase after you ethically market to them over time. This takes care of generating a constant supply of ever increasing profits for your business.
By knowing exactly what your prospects and clients want, you’d be able to either develop them yourself or go out and create Joint Venture deals with other companies that already have them available, then offer them to your list and get a commission off of each sale. This takes care of keeping a constant supply of products and services flowing into your business. So there you have it… Starting your own affiliate program takes care of the most critical elements of building a successful Online business because it automatically produces all the traffic you’ll ever need and keeps a constant flow of People, Profits, and Products coming into your business. There are a ton of more benefits, but you should be very excited about what I’ve shared so far! Are There Any Dangers or Challenges Associated With The Use Affiliate Marketing?There's almost no downside risk with starting your own affiliate program, but I most mention one. The only word of caution that I give to you is to make sure your sales letter or presentation converts targeted prospects into sales, because the last thing you want to do is have your affiliate business partners send hundreds if not thousands of prospects to your website that don’t convert or convert very poorly into sales. You don’t want to ruin your relationships with your affiliate partners, because they will stop promoting your products and/or services if they are not getting a good return of their investment (ROI). This could leave you with a very bad reputation, which is something you don’t want to be known for in the Internet world. So, my advice is make sure your website’s sales copy converts visitors into sales. If you don’t have any access to a list of people to test your sales copy, you simply setup a Google Adwords campaign to send targeted traffic to your website. By doing this, you will see right away, usually within minutes or hours whether or not your sales copy will convert visitors to buyers. Once you have tweaked your sales copy and are converting a decent percentage of visitors to buyers, you could use data to approach other website owners that have the same profiled prospects to do a mailing to their list offering them your products in exchange for a piece of the profits you make. Once you have this track record under your belt, you’d be able to approach several other website owners and make the same type of deals. By the way, you could launch your affiliate program after you’ve tweaked your sales copy and are able to convert your visitors into sales, without having to take the wait approach like website owners that already have a list of prospects. Remember, the biggest danger of starting your own affiliate program is not taking the time to make sure your website converts visitors into buyers. I can’t say it enough!!! What Tools And Resources Must Be Used To Implement Affiliate Marketing?Affiliate Software: Affiliate software allows you to easily run, grow, and manage the team of people that promotes your products and/or services by providing them with support, promotional, and training tools. ClickMate - Easy Clickmate ClickMate is probably the most easy to use and highly affordable affiliate management program on the market. AssocTrac, created by The Internet Marketing Center, was the best affiliate manager software of all time but it is no longer available. Powerful Offers - NitroMarketing If you truly want to separate yourself from your competition and not be reduced to a commodity out there in the crowded affiliate marketing cyber world, this e-book is a must purchase you should add to your marketing collection. Period! Otherwise you’d be sending the same old boring offers to your clients and prospective clients. This e-book is so well written and spells out every detail in an easy step-by-step format you can’t possibly mess this process up. If you apply the information in the Powerful Offers e-book, you’ll be ahead of the majority of the affiliate marketers on the Internet, because most of them aren’t willing to go the extra mile to set themselves apart from their competition Click here for more information! Affiliate Directories:Affiliate directories are a great place to seek products and/or services to promote because they have been screened to block out shady get-rich business scams. Refer-it - www.refer-it.com Webmaster Affiliates - www.webmaster-affiliates.netAssociate Programs - www.associateprograms.com Affiliate Networks:Affiliate networks are hubs that list hundreds of third-party affiliate programs in which they manage. LinkShare - www.linkshare.com Commission Junction - www.cj.com |
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