Maximizing Affiliate Sales

Any marketer knows very well that there are dozens of ways to advertise a product, any product. It’s not a big deal to come up with an idea that has a good chance of catching the eye of some surfer and get him to click on your affiliate links.

The real problem is to come up with something that makes surfers click through and actually buy something, because this is what puts money in your pocket. Nevertheless, affiliates are not in control of the conversion process, since this is the job of the merchant website, and the only thing you should focus on is to find the top selling products and the best places to advertise them.

Spotting the top sellers with MoreNiche™ is simple. You can check the live stats on the testimonials page and make up your mind about what you want to promote and where. Promoting MoreNiche™ products is easy and could turn out to be a very profitable thing for you to do.

However, the trick is to reach out and find ways of putting links in the path of surfers, because a single website will never get you far enough. But rest assured that the thing is easier than it sounds. There are lots of places to promote MoreNiche™ products.

Like chat rooms. Go on the popular chat programs and join the conversation if the topic borders on the things you are trying to sell or start a conversation yourself. Just be polite, be on topic and push your products in an honest and non-offending way. Don’t rush in yelling: “LOOK Y’ALL WHAT I’VE GOT HERE!” This will only get you banned.

If you think the company ads aren’t creative enough, or if you have specific information about your target customers, then feel free to adapt existing ads or write new ones from scratch. Nobody’s forcing you to go with an ad that could be improved.

Or write an e-book about the problem that the product you’re selling is designed to solve and present the said product as a very good solution. Put the e-book on your website and invite everybody to download it free of charge. People like freebies and will certainly welcome the chance to become informed without paying anything. Submit it to free e-book directories in order to reach more people.

People need to know that a product is actually working before they decide to buy it. If you’ve tried the program yourself, then write about your experience and a personal endorsement. Let everybody know what kind of benefits they can expect from using the product.

Maximize your chances by subscribing to more than one affiliate program and list all the links on your website on a directory page. Advertise your directory far and wide and then you may have affiliate networks trying to get your attention in order to be listed with the existing ones. Submissions are good, so accept every request.

Create your own signature file. Use a spiffy headline that’s bound to grab attention, talk about the product you’re promoting and keep everything simple and to the point. If the text is longer than five lines, nobody’s going to bother to read it, so take care.

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to advertise products on the Internet, because the Internet is nothing else but communication. Therefore feel free to mix and combine promotion techniques to suit your product and your view of how marketing should be done.

MoreNiche™ offer a wealth of resources to get you started no matter what your chosen promotional method. E-book promotion, article writing, blogging, SEO - they cover it all. If you are looking for more than just another affiliate program, and want to spread your wings further, visit MoreNiche™ and contact their specialists.

The biggest mistakes affiliates make

For those that are new to affiliate marketing, the whole thing can seem too good to be true. A real business from home that make you more then enough money to live on and you don’t even have to bother with products or shipping. Many new affiliate marketers simply jump into the business without properly researching it first and end up frustrated and angry that they aren’t making big time money within the first few days. Here is a quickie guide to common mistakes that affiliate marketers make and how you can avoid them.

• Patience is the key. For even the best affiliate marketers, it takes time to build a customer base. The people that are legitimately making $10,000 a month in affiliate marketing spent years getting to that level, not days or even months. For some that are new to the trade, it seems like that level of success is an overnight thing, but it isn’t. Once you pick an affiliate program, after researching it ahead of time, of course, you need to stick with it. You should change your content on a regular basis, update your site weekly, add in some holiday-themed pages and make sure you stay up to date on product information from your parent company, but the most important thing to do is to simply stay the course. If you jump ship after a month, the chances of your affiliate marketing site taking off are slim to none.

• The second big problem that many affiliate marketers fall prey to is subscribing to too many programs at once. By doing this, it makes it very hard to provide top-level page design and content relating to all of these programs at once. You should only subscribe to two or three programs at once. This will allow you to give these programs your laser-like focus so you can turn them into money makers sooner rather than later. Patience is, again, very important. It may seem like the best way to go is to load up your site with two dozen affiliate marketing sites but there is little chance that will make you any money. If your site is focused, you’ll be in much better shape.

The vast majority of mistakes that new affiliate marketers make are ones out of inexperience. They want to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. What they don’t realize is slow and steady wins the race. Dedication, hard work and focus are the best friends of affiliate marketers.

Search engine basics

Maybe the single most important part of running an affiliate website is understanding how people find your site and how to make your site stick out among the billion or so other sites on the Internet.

If you’ve been using the Internet for more than an hour or two, chances are you know what a search engine is. Websites like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com have developed into multi-billion dollar corporations in the last ten years.

Using search engines is extremely simple. You just go to the site, type in what you want to find and click enter. But how can you make sure that your site will be found? As it turns out, it’s all about the keywords.

When a site like Google or Yahoo searches the Internet to come up with results from a web query, it takes the number of keywords on a site into consideration. It also takes particular keywords or phrases into account, too. If someone is doing a search for “Book about Rolling Stones,” a site that has that phrase or a phrase similar to it 10 times is going to come up higher than a site that only mentions it once. That’s why its so important to incorporate keyword text into your web content so that when someone does a search for, say, “Oolong Tea from China” and that just happens to be what your site sells, your site comes up high on the list, not buried on the bottom.

The trick is to incorporate these keywords or keyword phrases into your web content, and still have your content make sense. This is a super-tricky obstacle to get around. The best advice I can give is to simply read around and see what other affiliate marketing sites have done. Remember, your content is a huge part of your site. If people don’t stay on your site for a minute or two reading your content, they will never, ever click on any links you have and buy any products you’re selling. You must find the balance between a heavy use of keywords and well-written text.

Knowing how to use search engines is a big part of affiliate marketing. You can have the best content, the most timely links and the best product in the world and you won’t do a lick of business unless people can find you. Learning the art of incorporating keyword text into your affiliate website may seem tough, but it’s the difference between making a few bucks here and there and making it big in affiliate marketing.

More common affiliate mistakes

In the last few years, affiliate marketing has exploded on the Internet. In pretty much every web search that is done during every second of the day on the Internet, people are steered towards affiliate marketing sites. Some work, some don’t and some are gone before they even have a chance to get going. Let’s go over a few common mistakes affiliate marketers make when setting up and running their site.

• Make sure you completely understand the affiliate program you’re signing up for. It can be really tough to turn down that one program that brags about the huge commission, but if the program is selling car parts and you don’t even drive, you might want to pass it up. If you know a lot about sports or pets or horses, try to find an affiliate marketing program geared towards your area of expertise. You might not become a millionaire overnight, but in the long run, you’ll make a LOT more money that way, and you’ll enjoy the affiliate marketing experience a lot more, too.

• If you have the option on your site for folks to sign up for emails, make sure the ones you send out are informative and fun and not spam. Yes, you want to make sure you get the links of the product you’re selling in the email, but you have to take the time to set it up so it doesn’t look like spam or people will get annoyed with your site, opt out of your emails and never visit your site again. It’s the difference between taking a bit of extra effort and not. If you’re willing to go the extra mile, you’ll see the reward in your sales.

• Try to write your own content. It’s not unheard of for a person to visit 4-5 different affiliate marketing websites and see the exact same content on all of them. The site creators simply used the same public domain copy and didn’t even bother to change it up at all. Don’t let this happen to you. The only way your site will stand out among all the garbage is to make sure your content is completely unique.

Making mistakes when you start a new business are common. It’s going to happen, so don’t panic when it does. But with a little research, and a bit of common sense, you can avoid most of the mistakes that plague the laziest of the affiliate website creators.

Marketing in niche markets

One of the great things about the Internet is how it works as a complete reference. The encyclopedia, the dictionary, the White and Yellow pages and even maps have all become antiquated with the invention of the Internet. How can this help you, the new affiliate marketer? It’s easy. The big money in affiliate marketing is found in niche marketing.

Before we get into it, what exactly is niche marketing? Niche marketing is marketing to a particular group instead of the public at large. Now, on the surface, this sounds a bit strange. Don’t you want EVERYONE to buy from your website? Of course you do, but making a site that appeals to everyone and writing web content to sell your product that appeals to everyone is impossible. That’s where niche marketing comes in. You pick a product, say, Hickory Farms meats and cheeses and you do your best to market these products. When you take on a niche product, you have to ask yourself a series of questions.

• Who is going to buy my product? Well, if you’re selling Hickory Farms products, chances are you won’t be selling to many teenagers. Your market is going to skew older, so you want to write copy that is going to appeal to an older audience. Hold off on the slang, the off-color jokes and the pop-culture references.

• What benefits does my product have? In this case, Hickory Farms is a company that has been making quality products for generations. You can play up the history aspect, you can play up the quality aspect. You can even play up the holidays aspect, since they are a company that always seemed to peak during the holidays. Every product out there, every single one, has a list of benefits you can highlight. Make sure you know them and make sure you tell your customers all about them.

• Do I know enough about this product to write new, interesting content about it every few weeks? This is the BIG question. If you’re passionate about Hickory Farms and you love their products, then you should feel confident that yes, you can write a new article about their product line every few weeks. If you agreed to participate in an affiliate program only because the commission was high and you don’t know thing one about the product you’re selling, you might want to rethink your choice.

While niche marketing may sound a bit odd on the surface, it really is the way to go. Making your site focused and concentrating your energy on a particular group will make it seem more legitimate and you can count on better business in no time flat.

Is affiliate marketing MLM?

Because affiliate marketing works so well and seems to genuinely benefit both the website that is advertising as well as the website that is hosting, people tend to look for problems that just don’t exist. One of the “problems” that has dogged affiliate marketing for years is the idea that is is a multi-level marketing scheme.

What is multi-level marketing? It’s much better known as a pyramid scheme. In most traditional cases, pyramid schemes are illegal. They work by constantly signing up new people to sell a product that doesn’t actually exist. The people at the top of the pyramid make money be collecting a commission off of all the sales that happen below them in the pyramid structure.

In recent years, pyramid schemes have tried to gain a bit of respectability by offering legitimate products like phone cards that made the whole operation legal. But, in essence, pyramid schemes are still tainted by the perception that they are inherently dishonest and, unless you start a pyramid scheme and are at the top of the pyramid, you’re earning money for someone else.

Affiliate marketing is, in no conceivable way, multi-level marketing. In most cases, a site that wants to advertise pays another site to direct traffic to them. There are multi-level affiliate marketing set ups that have one site direct traffic to another site and then that site directs people to the site that pays both previous sites, but even in this case, the customer isn’t tricked or misled and there isn’t any sort of financial transaction that takes place, either. Multi-tiered affiliate marketing is simply another way for web pages to create traffic and revenue.

The way earnings work for multi-level affiliate marketing is different than a pyramid scheme, as well. Is it true that in the end, the site that is being linked to makes the most money? Sure, but that’s because they are the ones offering the product or service. The other sites are simply steering customers to them. With multi level affiliate marketing, everyone makes money and assuming a legitimate good or service is being sold at the end of the path, the consumer ends up happy, too.

It can be a little confusing for those new to Multi level affiliate marketing to tell the difference between it and a pyramid scheme. But rest assured the two have very little in common, most importantly the fact that almost all pyramid schemes are illegal while multi level affiliate marketing is quite legal and a very effective tool in Internet advertising,

How to write articles to boost sales

If you’ve been checking out this series of articles, you’ve seen how important it is for any serious affiliate marketer to have good web content. Good content can mean the difference between someone clicking onto your site and clicking away a moment later and someone staying for a while and then clicking through to buy the product or service you’re trying to sell. But what if you just aren’t a very good writer? What if your mind is programmed for business, not English. Don’t worry, there are options for you.

• Search the public domain. There are millions of articles that are currently in the public domain that you can use on your web site free of charge. A simple web search can bring up hundreds of these kinds of articles. And the best part is you can edit them, change them, alter them or do whatever you want to them so that they sound exactly like you want them to. You don’t have to worry about paying any authors or stepping on any toes. This is an excellent way to go if you don’t want to write content yourself.

• You can pay companies to write content for you, and in most cases, it’s cheaper than you think. When you consider how important good web content is, paying someone a few dollars to write exactly what you need isn’t such a bad idea. Of course, some companies charge more than others and it always pays to shop around, but don’t shut yourself off to the idea of paying for content. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money and this is one of those cases if you don’t want to write your own web content.

• Maybe the best choice of the three is to simply read and learn. Spend a week or two clicking around on the Internet and reading the web content on other affiliate websites. Take as much of that content in and then try to write in a similar style about the product you’re trying to sell. You don’t instantly become the best writer in the world this way, but studies have shown that the more you read, the better writer you’ll be. Experience pays and the more you know about how to write in this style, the easier it will be.

Having solid web content can’t be overstated. You will never have a truly successful affiliate marketing website unless you have good content. If you can’t write it yourself, you do have other options, but the best thing you can do is to learn how to write in this style. It will be an investment that will pay off time and time again.

Get your Affiliate Site ready for the holidays!

For many affiliate marketing sites, the holidays are a dream come true. Some affiliate sites see their traffic double or even triple as millions of shoppers from around the world bypass the mall for the convenience and fun of online shopping. Most people would agree that if they had a choice between navigating snowy roads, finding a parking space and then battling crowds only to stand in a checkout line for 30 minutes or staying at home in their pajamas with a hot cup of coffee and doing their shopping that way, they would choose the latter.

So, how can you make sure that your affiliate marketing site is ready for the holiday shopping season? Let’s take a quick look at a few things you can do to spruce up your site and get it ready for that special time of the year.

• First off, if you don’t have your site all spruced up by the Monday after Thanksgiving, don’t worry about it. Evidence shows that “Cyber Monday” isn’t really the sole busiest shopping day of the year, but it’s more spread out between that date and the 15th. You can still revamp things and capitalize on the Christmas shopping season.

• Make sure you have a handle on the cut off dates for shipping. No matter what product you link to, they should have clearly posted dates for shipping, both domestic and internationally, for Christmas. Make sure you post those dates on your site, too, so that no one ends up disappointed on Christmas morning.

• If you deal with a major online superstore like Amazon, remember, you don’t always have to sell books or CDs. Some sites offer big rewards to affiliate marketers for gift cards, and since they are a smaller item to ship, they usually have later deadlines then gifts so people can order then after the cut off deadlines and still get them by Christmas.

• Try and concentrate on specialty niches. While it may be tempting to get into an affiliate marketing program with Sears or Wal-Mart, most people have these stores near them. If you with someone like The Sharper Image or L.L. Bean, you’re dealing with very high-end product that is unique. You’ll make more money and you’ll find that you’ll do better business on your site.

The holidays come only once per year and the chance to capitalize on it is brief. But if you tune up your affiliate marketing site in time, you’ll be full of extra cash as well as holiday cheer this season.

Creating multiple streams of income

One of the great things about affiliate marketing is the idea that you can subscribe to as many different affiliate programs as you can manage, all at the same time. We’ve talked in depth in previous articles about how important it is to have some focus on your website so that you can appeal to customers instead of appearing like a hodgepodge of links. It’s a fine line to walk between having multiple streams of income and having too many programs. Let’s take a look at the right way to handle this problem.

• Make sure your streams relate to each other. This is a tip worth a thousand bucks, alone. Think about it for a moment. Yes, you want to have more than one program on your website at once, but you don’t want 10 or 15 because it’s too much to manage. So, what’s the best way to go? Have 4-5 and make them all related to each other! Say your first program is through a company that sells pet supplies. You’ve written some stellar content on pets sine it’s a passion of yours, but you want more than one stream of income. How about a program through a gourmet pet food distributor? You can SHARE CONTENT then, since you already have great content written about pets to begin with. Want more? Find a company that sells pet treats from around the world. Or maybe one that specializes in pet medications through the mail. The choices are endless and by relating all of your companies, you won’t have to write separate content for each program. You’ll save time and make money!

• Have fun with your content. Let’s say you find an affiliate marketing program that you just have to add to your site, but it’s about a topic you don’t know much about. Don’t worry! You can still write interesting and informative content, even if it’s about a product you’re not an expert on. Try a list. Just flip through the TV listings this week and take a look at all the list shows on right now. People love lists. You can make a quickie top-10 list style article and relate it to your new affiliate program. This will allow you to diversify your business and add extra streams of income at the same time. You don’t want your site to be entirely lists, but one out of three or four is fine and it makes your site appear more fun!

Creating multiple steams of income is pretty easy when you look at it. Group your products under the same umbrella to save time or add a program that you can make funny and informative lists on. Your site will benefit and you’ll have happy customers to boot!

Choosing a “niche market”

Title: Choosing a “niche market”

Now that you’re considering opening your own affiliate marketing website, you have to pick a product to sell. In previous articles, we’ve talked about how important it is to pick a product you know a lot about since you’re responsible for writing articles that try to get people to buy your product.

But there is more to it then just writing snappy articles and providing a link at the bottom of the page. Knowing how to market your articles will go a long way in determining if your site is a success or a failure.

In the process of picking out a product, don’t be afraid to go “niche.” What that means, essentially, is don’t worry about picking an item that may only appeal to a small number of people. If you pick something like televisions or books, people can go down to their local Best Buy or Barnes and Noble and get those items. If you deal with a company that most people don’t have in their towns like L.L. Bean or Tower Records, people will be more likely to shop with your affiliate site because of the prestige of those companies. People can get a pair of boots or a CD anywhere, but getting those items from those stores is extra special.

Make sure your content relates to the demographic your after. If you’re selling life insurance, you probably want to have content that is going to connect with older folks, not the skateboarding crowd. And this advice goes the other way, too. If you’re selling skateboards, make sure your content is going to appeal to that generation. You wouldn’t want your content to read like an ad for life insurance. Of course, there are some products, like books and CDs, that cross generations, but you can still write your content so it aims at a particular audience. This is the other side of “niche marketing;” making sure that your content is written for exactly the people you want to buy from you.

Niche marketing can be a hard skill to master. Most people want to create a broad affiliate marketing site that doesn’t have a lot of focus so that it appeals to the most people. While this is tempting, you can be left with a site that appeals to no one at all. By zeroing in on the group most likely to buy the product you sell on your site, you can lock yourself into a niche market and, chances are, your sales will explode.