Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Guide

In this affiliate marketing guide you will find lots of tips and best practise principles - for example on finding niches and designing landing pages. There are also some excellent videos, including a couple from world-renowned experts in landing page design and analysis. These were developed by Google and are part of the Web Optimizer program.

However, whether you are experienced in or completely new to affiliate marketing, I would recommend that you follow the link below to discover how Mark Ling created a $500 a week website live in front of an audience using a unique step-by-step formula that has been repeated by thousands across many niches.

The Affiliate Marketing Guide.

Affiliate marketers make money by earning commissions on the sale of other peoples' products. They do this typically by providing a hyperlink on their own website or blog or in an email newsleeter to that other person's sales page.

Simple isn't it! And that's why it is so attractive. No stock to hold, no products to pack and distribute, no after sales service to worry about.

The problem is that wherever there is the chance of easy money you will face competition. Many people enter affiliate marketing (encouraged by the purveyors of get rich quick affiliate marketing systems) only to discover that the easy money is not quite so easy after all.

This affiliate marketing guide will help to steer you away from the rocks and provide you with some solid tips about how to make some real money.

It is a basic fact of internet marketing that if you are not on the first page of the search results, you are unlikely to get many clicks. It is also true that unless you are a major site you are unlikely to get near to the first page on a broad search. For instance, if you type "books" into Google, you will be unlikely to find "Michael's Book Emporium" on the first page. The first page will be dominated by major players such as Amazon.

However, the more specific a search term is, the greater your chance of ranking. What affiliate marketers are aiming for is a balance between:

• the number of people searching on a phrase
• the level of competition for that phrase

An excellent resource to help you in this area is the Google External Keyword Tool. There are also a number of programs that will provide you more help. Have a look at the videos below for more guidance on selecting a niche.

Having researched and found your niche, the next step is to find some products to market. Although some companies manage their own affiliate scheme, most affiliate marketers prefer to work through an affiliate network. There are advantages for both parties in working with an affiliate network. (You will also find that many have a good basic affiliate marketing guide within their support section.)

The owner of the product or service gets access to an enormous number of potential affiliates and can focus on marketing rather than administration. For the affiliate marketer, there is the security of working through an independent third party - in other words, you receive your commission!

The most popular networks are given in the list below (sorry no links to the sites - HubPages sees them as actual affiliate links (and you can only have 2 in a hub)). In researching potential partners, you should take into account a number of factors. Using Clickbank to illustrate, here are the most important factors for an affiliate marketer to consider:

• the sales page for the product - the last thing you want to do is send good prospects to a page that doesn't convert them into customers. So, always visit the sales page and try to think like a potential customer - would you buy? How does the page look on first impression (first impressions count) and does it flow? As you will see, you will already have done most of the selling in your landing page - at the very least you need to ensure that the sales page does not destroy your good work. (With Clickbank you can miss out their sales page by changing the hyperlink so that your prospect goes directly to the payment page. This is illustrated on the video below.)

• What is the commission percentage and amount per sale? Most affiliate marketer would not consider a product offering below 50% and are generally only happy with 75%. This may seem like a high percentage but let me assure you, affiliate marketers have to work hard to achieve their sales. As for the amount, $15 is probably the minimum you should consider.
  

• Product Gravity (again in the figures beneath the product) - Gravity is a score that Clickbank assigns to each affiliate product according to a secret formula. It has to do with how many sales and how recently those sales have occurred. A high gravity means that affiliates are making a lot of commissions on sales. Low gravity indicates low sales or few recent sales. So gravity is an important measure of recent success.
  
  You do not want to select the product with highest gravity because that also means that there will be the highest number of competitors selling that product. It would be very difficult for you start with a product that has so much competition. I would recommend products with a gravity somewhere between 75 and 150.
  

• Percentage referred (statistics below again) - this is the percentage of sales made by the publisher that are referred by affiliates. A good product will have a score above 70% - much below that and you may have some concerns that your biggest competitor is the publisher themself.

• Keyword Search - finally how many results are returned in the organic and AdSense results if you search on the keywords for the product. AdSense listings indicate that you are not alone in thinking this may be a good product. However, if the AdSense listings carry on beyond the first page, you may be entering a very competitive market.

Another consideration that I would like to suggest in this Affiliate Marketing Guide is focus. It is not necessary that you actually know anything about your affiliate products' markets. The internet makes research exceptionally easy and, of course, the purpose of your pages is not to give the answer (otherwise why would they want to buy the affiliate product.) The purpose of your pages is to rank highly in the search engines.

That said, you can probably save yourself some time by concentrating in one area, at least for a while. Thus, you may wish to look at products related to dog training, dog psychology or dealing with aggressive dogs.

Affiliate Networks

• paydotcom
• commission junction
• clickbank
• amazon
• ebay partner network
• linkconnector
• linkshare
• shareasale
• affiliatewindow
  

Another approach to finding the best products is to use software tools that analyze the keywords used by the most successful affiliate marketers. Why reinvent the wheel when you can borrow someone else's?

A couple of products to consider are Affiliate Elite and PPC Kahuna. Find out more by following the link to Ideas for Marketing dot com.

There are two broad approaches to affilate marketing.

Pay Per Click

The simplest is Pay Per Click. With this approach you don't worry too much about where you appear in the search engine rankings - you buy your way to the top using Pay Per Click advertising. Google AdWords are a far and away the market leader. However, Yahoo and Microsoft in particular are keen to catch up and so you may find that the cost-per-click is much lower on these networks - unfortunately so is the volume of traffic.

Pay Per Click is the easiest way to make money and the fastest way to lose it. There is a real art-science to PPC and I would strongly recommend that you undertake serious research before undertaking it. There are many excellent courses. For an overview, follow the link for the Ideas for Marketing website.

Organic

The organic approach relies on search engine optimization, founded on keyword research, and targeted internet marketing to achieve a high search engine ranking. Typically this involves some combination of article marketing, videos, Web 2.0 sites (like HubPages and Squidoo) and possibly social network marketing using Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. All supported by social bookmarking.  My Internet Marketing Program Hubs provide an overview.

Combined

Of course, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive and many affiliate marketers will combine both methods.

The landing page is the page which the potential customer 'lands' when they arrive at your website, either through clicking a link on another website or a PPC advertisement. You have fractions of a second to grab them and then possibly another couple of seconds to gain sufficient interest to hold them on the page. First impressions are so important and you must consider every element:

• color scheme
• fonts
• images
• overall design structure
• whether to include sound or video or flash animation
• etc

If you have managed to grab their attention, you can begin to sell. I am sure that you have come across sales pages many times on the internet. Here are some principles to help you design landing pages that sell:

• Single Focus - the sale - No hyperlinks to other pages or irrelevant information - your landing page has only one objective - to get the sale.

• Don't Surprise People - your landing page should be a natural continuation of the prospects browsing. They should not be wondering what they are doing on a sales page - otherwise you marketing is off-target and if you are using PPC, that could be expensive.

• Make it Safe To Buy - the logos of trade associations, acceptable payment methods, and money-back guarantee seals can all be powerful ways to make your visitors feel safer.

• Use Social Proof - show how others like them have already bought the product. Most landing pages have a liberal sprinkling of testimonials, often with photographs of people that are likely to be similar to the target prospect.

• Encourage Reciprocity - Give them something for free - an e-book or short video tutorial. People feel the need to respond.

• Use Authority - Establish your credibility and expertise - provide facts and statistics. Refer to respected authority figures. Most people are looking to be told what to do by somebody who knows better - really!

• Use Scarcity - create a feeling of urgency. Make the offer time-limited or restricted in how many are sold.

• Have a clear call to action - have a prominent and clear call to action. Make sure that you spell out exactly what will happen if someone fills out the form or clicks on the desired link. Do not clutter the area around the call to action, let it stand out by its isolation on the page.
• Make the text short - don't confuse them or talk your way out of a sale.

• Make the text long - yes, I know I just said the opposite - the truth is that long copy does sell too. Well-written long copy can leave the prospect feeling overwhelmed in the sense of "How can I not buy after all that". The danger is, they simply feel overwhelmed!

Affiliate marketers need to be ruthlessly efficient. Every percentage point in your conversion statistics represents money. Google offers extremely sophisticated tools to help you test your affiliate marketing. In the video below, Bryan Eisenberg, best-selling author of "Always Be Testing" and Tom Leung discuss landing page design. They cover the principles of landing page design and how you can use Google Website Optimizer to find the design and layout that drives the most sales on your site

The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Guide would be failing if it failed to mention what many affiliate marketers to be the most potent weapon in their arsenal - the mailing list.

In fact many affiliate marketers make the vast majority of their earnings through their lists. They don't need to bother with SEO or PPC, they simply mail their list with the latest offer. If you have a list with 10,000 subscribers, a 2% response is 200 sales. Easy money - but there is a significant up front investment in building the list.

No affiliate marketing guide would be complete without some mention of the various technologies that affiliate marketers have used to increase conversions. Pop-ups and pop-unders became such a problem that most browsers now incorporate technology to prevent them spoiling your internet experience. Internet marketers needed to get a bit more subtle and so we arrive at scripts that give the impression of a page curling over or AJAX rollovers.

My personal favorite is the footer-slideup - it is the least intrusive, easy to clear and yet grabs the prospects attention. Follow the Ideas for Marketing link for more information on this type of script.

The Affiliate Marketing Guide

at Ideas for Marketing dot com