How to Be Successful At Affiliate Marketing!

Just like many other people affiliate marketing is how I have created a steady stream of income. There are many people that use affiliate marketing as a second source of income; I on the other hand can truly label myself as a full time internet marketer.

This has been a 6 year learning curve, but it has been worth every second . Internet marketing can be considered a “hit and miss” type of business. This is something that takes certain skills, mindsets, and a financial investment. 

The truth is most new affiliate marketers waste the majority of their start-up budget on things that don’t work and have proven to be unnecessary for their success.

How to Be Successful at Affiliate Marketing

Here are the most important things you need to know to be a successful affiliate marketer:

1. How to Generate Traffic

2. How to Choose the Best Offers to Promote
 
In order to make this clear I have to share my story. Being new at affiliate marketing, I put a lot of money into software and other products that promised me success that I never received. “Buy some my programs and…”

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against people educating others on how to become affiliate marketers; I am doing the same thing. My issue is people getting away from the core principles that helped them become successful in affiliate marketing. 

If you do choose to spend money on a certain course, just make sure that it actually teaches things like SEO and other techniques to help you generate traffic to your links. Although we all like a good pep talk here and there, it’s not worth spending your money on. Ok back to the information you really want.

Getting the Traffic You Need

With affiliate marketing traffic is the life of your business. This is more important than what you’re selling. How is this true? It’s simple, a lot of times you make your money off the traffic and not always from the sale. 

Where can you generate traffic? There are things called organic searches, Google Ad Words, Email Marketing, YouTube and more. No matter what platform you choose, be an expert at it and learn all there is to learn.

How Do You Know What Offers to Promote?
 
When you have a solid plan on what you are going to promote it will help you increase your success as an affiliate marketer. There are some products that will have a bad conversion rate no matter what you do. Pick products and offers that create solutions to people’s problems. 

This requires that you pay attention to the conversations people are having and the things they are complaining about. Finding products that create solutions to these problems are things you know are sure to sell.

So to recap the big secret to affiliate marketing success is to find out what the people need, and promote it by generating traffic. Traffic and a solid product equals affiliate success and the ability to carry my title as a full-time affiliate marketer.


http://www.grameen-info.org/how-to-be-successful-at-affiliate-marketing/

5 Off-Page SEO Tactics!

In “11 ecommerce SEO tips, from the trenches,” my post in August, I discussed how I manage on-page search engine optimization. But even the best on-page SEO may not be enough to get your ecommerce site ranked well in the search engines. Off-page SEO is also important to help you rank and drive traffic.

Think of off-page SEO as the promotion and marketing of your web pages. What I said in August is worth repeating: You don’t need to outsource SEO to do these tasks for you. With a little time, effort, and patience, you’ll be building your brand and off-page SEO in no time.

Here are five on-page SEO tactics that have helped my business.

1. Links
Don’t let the Google Penguin updates scare you from building high-quality backlinks. Links are still a major part of what drives a page’s popularity in the rankings and traffic. Avoid links from poor quality sites, paid links, and link schemes. How do you acquire these coveted high-quality links? Here are ideas that have worked for my business.

Join high quality directories. Not any old directory will do; I am referring to the top-of-the-line, well-established authority sites that actually get traffic and send referrals to you. 

Think Angie’s List for contractors, Wedding Wire for the wedding industry and DMOZ, which is notoriously hard to get in to. Don’t submit to every directory; chances are there will only one or two for your niche that are worth considering.

Get noticed by the media. Think it’s hard to get noticed? In the old days it was. But with sites like HARO — Help A Reporter Out — and PitchRate (among others) you can receive emails of journalists and bloggers looking for quotes. 

Follow the sites’ directions, send in a short catchy pitch, and you’ll be able to fetch a few links to your website in no time, and gain some good publicity.

Network with bloggers in your niche. Sponsored posts, advertorials, reviews, and guest blogs still go on. But I have only done a few and I don’t recommend it, as it can be a grey area now. 

I prefer getting to know a handful of bloggers in my niche and pitching unique insider stories to them that their readers will really care about. I’ve also done informational interviews that have brought links, visitors, and traffic to my site.

Comment on blogs. Don’t comment on hundreds of blogs. Instead, visit a few complementary blogs that you truly like and make meaningful, heartfelt comments on recent posts. Use your name, not your website or URL. Occasionally, I have had bloggers return the favor by linking to my items within a future blog.

Write fabulous blog posts and link to other bloggers or websites. I once wrote a post on wedding dress trends and linked to a major wedding dress company. I reached out to the company and tweeted that I had blogged about it. 

I received not only a link to my site from the company’s Facebook page (with over 200,000 likes) but also received a link on its “In The Press” page to my website — for free and without asking.

Ask clients, associates, vendors to link to you. A few will be happy to do it because of your working relationship. It doesn’t hurt to ask.

Those are steps I’ve used to receive quality, authoritative links to my site for free. If in the course of your link building you are offered the opportunity to choose the text — i.e., anchor text — to link back to your website, vary that text. Use the keyword lists you built from your on-page SEO efforts to build links with these keywords.

2. Co-Concurrence

The term “co-concurrence” has been floating around the SEO world for a while. It refers to the proximity of keywords to a link. 

For example, when an article about a certain topic includes your brand name, the search engines derive from the text that your site is associated with that topic, or keyword. I believe it works to some extent — you don’t necessarily need a link to make the connection with readers and the search engines.

3. Build Social Media Profiles
Not every social media site will work for your company. Know where your customers hang out and focus on those sites. Women, brides, crafters, and do-it-yourself moms seem to favor Pinterest over Twitter. Businesses seem to prefer LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter. 

Know where your customers are and send links, articles, photos, and media to those networks. But don’t only share your content. Like and share other’s content too and they will return the favor. Not all of these links will carry the same weight in the search engines, but they do build brand awareness and others may share your link.

4. Get Local
Make sure your profile — including a link back to your site — is visible in Google My Business, Bing, Yahoo, YellowPages.com, Yelp, local directories to your city, and reviews. Don’t forget to list your location on your website.

5. Affiliate and Email Marketing
While affiliate marketing and email marketing won’t directly influence your search rankings, they will help with brand recognition. As people begin to recognize your company’s name and search specifically for that name in the search engines, it signals to the engines that your site is important. 

A key to any off-page campaign is getting your name and your associated products and services into the hands of people who will talk, share, and search.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/columns/the-diy-entrepreneur/73997-5-off-page-SEO-tactics-from-a-do-it-yourself-merchant

Doing Affiliate Marketing The Smart Way!

New affiliates are encouraged to create their own websites, master SEO and update their websites frequently with fresh and original content.  The upside to this approach is that an SEO'd site will generate free traffic from search engines.

Also, you get to brand yourself and your readers will know where to find you.  The downside is that this approach takes time to deliver results. 

Also, with Google's frequent updates to their algorithms, SEO has been reduced  from being some kind of science to a hit and miss mashed with guess work.  Changes in a Google algorithm has had super-affiliates' incomes being reduced by as much as 90%!

This approach alone does not work very well for an affiliate marketer.  If you already own a website, it will be of huge help to start building a list, aggressively so. 

I believe that, as an affiliate your list is your only true possession. With a list of subscribers, you can switch affiliate programs as you see fit, as long as you  remain relevant to your list.

Building a funnel however,  ensures sustainability and growth for your affiliate marketing business.

How does an affiliate funnel work?

A typical sales funnel starts with a free giveaway in exchange for a subscriber's email. You will need an email marketing system for this purpose. As is  typical of a funnel, you may gain a large number of subscribers.

As you introduce your subscribers to your affiliate offers, the number of those who do click through may decrease.

The numbers of conversions or sales will even be lower.  This will be offset by the new subscribers you are gaining on a daily basis.

When using a funnel, your main focus is generating traffic to your free giveaway and nothing else. 

Affiliate funnels, once setup correctly, reduce the pressure of having to sell. Once your automated emails are setup, they do the selling for  you.

What do you need to setup a sales funnel?

1.  An email marketing & autoresponder system (try the 30 day free trial)

2.  Capture page or web form to collect email addresses-some auto-responders include these in your membership.  Get Response does have capture page templates as well.

3. A product to give away.  This could be a good ebook, email course, coupons etc.  This must be  relevant to your target market.

4.  Once all is setup, you need to work on TRAFFIC.

This is the simplified version of what is involved in sales funnels. New affiliate marketers may feel intimidated by auto-responders.  In fact, most delay list building for fear of messing things up while working with auto-responders.

If you are not ready to create campaigns and work with email marketing software, I'd recommend that you take a look at CBPassiveIncome. 

This is a licensed product that has the whole funnel setup for  you (with readily  monetized auto-responder emails). The license also includes a free giveaway and a website that you will use to capture emails.  It works for both experienced affiliates and new alike.

Download Patric Chan's free report and learn more

Read the report and perform your due diligence in determining whether this automated sales funnel is for you!

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