One of the easiest way to start your internet business with minimum capital is by using Affiliate Marketing.  Literally everyone can start affiliate marketing with any affiliate marketing network instantly without any trouble, and it have been proven that this type of internet business can bring very nice income in relatively short time. As long as you have internet connection you can start this exciting affiliate marketing. It is very easy to do and I will show you in details.

Affiliate Marketing Network – What is Affilite Marketing ?

The simplest way to describe affiliate marketing is to imagine that you become a salesman for affiliate products. There are thousands of products ready for you to sell, therefore you do not have to get into trouble of creating your own product, and for digital products such as e-books or tutorials,  the commission for sellers is huge, this lucrative high payouts usually above 50% (mostly 50% to 75%). And the good news is for most affiliate products or affiliate marketing network (such as Clickbank, Paydotcom, Commission Junction etc.) you can join for FREE and it is very easy to do.

When you decide to join affiliate marketing network and choose the products you want to sell, you will get special link called affiliate link that identifies you as the seller of this product that bring potential buyers to that particular product’s page (merchant’s site). If your potential buyers or visitors decide to purchase then the sales is credited to you and you will get the commission.  In short, your main duty is to generate traffic to your affiliate links, and then the sales process done by the merchants via affiliate marketing network.

How to Choose good Affiliate Programs ?

There are about a million available affiliate program. You have to choose which program or products you want to sell. One of the biggest and most popular affiliate marketing network portal is Clickbank (www.clickbank.com). If you join clickbank, you will have thousands of products to sell. To choose products to sell, you can consider these features :

• Products that have quite big demand and less competition (more on this subject later)
• High Commission : In clickbank, the normal commission is around 50% up to 75% or more per sales, therefore if you sell a product at $50, you will receive commission around $25 to $35.
• Tiered Commission : Some affiliate products have tiered commission structure, it means that beside selling the product by yourself, you also can recruit your own sales team and credited some percentage of commissions when each of your team sell the product.
• Recurring Commission : This commission scheme will pay you each time the buyers make payment, for example, if you sell a paid membership affiliate programs (usually monthly payment), you will get commission as long as your buyers keep their membership. This scheme usually pay less percentage but youwill receive perpetual income for months or years.
• Support from the Merchant : You have to make sure that your merchant or product owner provide decent or excellent support, therefore your refund rate will very low.

You Have Joined Affiliate Program – What’s Next ?

As I mentioned previously, your duty is to generate traffic to the product’s sales page. There are two main traffics that you can generate, free traffic and paid traffic.

Free Traffic :

• Article Marketing : this is very powerful strategy to generate free highly targeted traffic. Article marketing can be executed in several ways, and you don’t have to worry, it’s not hard to do (I will discuss more detail and indepth on article marketing later). The basic scheme is you write articles related to your affiliate product, post the articles on article directory site that have high page rank and with specific strategy, your articles will have greater chance to appear on google search engine first page. I highly recommend you to post your articles at Ezine Articles (Ezinearticles.com). It is true that it take sometimes for your articles to get approval, but once your articles published, you will see traffic flows almost instantly. Inside your articles (or bio box for ezinearticles) you will insert your link, it can be your affiliate link (notes : ezinearticles do not allow affiliate links, but we can get through this easily, I will show you how to do it), or for more advance marketer, it can be their landing pages (don’t be scared with “advance” terms, actually it really easy to do)
• Opt-in List – this is a list of subscribers that you have built through advertising or some other form of promotion. Examples are joint ventures where you give away something such as an ebook, software program and ecourse to get people to join your list. The major advantage of having your own list is that you now have a targeted group to send information about items that probably will be of interest to them for their consideration. Best of all, it’s virtually free advertising. This opt-in list can be generated through article marketing that directed to your landing pages which have opt-in form in it.

Paid Traffic :

• Ezines : you can advertise your products on ezine related to your specific product, this can generate high targeted traffic almost instantly. There are three types of ezines ads, Classified ads (standard 5 line text ad), Top Sponsor Ads (10-20 lines with your affiliate link located near the top of the page) and Solo ads (this ad is sent to the ezine’s entire subscriber list in an email).
• Pay Per Click Advertising : Google adwords if managed properly is the most popular and effective PPC advertising. In this PPC advertising, you have to know the good keywords for your products and then bid on those keywords. If you do your keywords bidding process properly, your ads will appear on the google first page in no time, and this can generate highly targeted traffic instantly.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing :

1. No Customer Service : You don’t have any headache on customer service, the product owners is the one who responsible and take care of this
2. No Products to Create : You don’t have to go through troubles and times of figuring what products to sell, there are ready for you to promote
3. Simple : It’s very simple, you only have to join the program, promote it, and get the commissions
4. Instant : No time wasted for product creation, you can start and earn almost instantly.
5. Statistical Data and Book keeping are provided, you do not have to create yourself, reports will be send to you.

Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing :

1. Bad Affiliate Programs : there are a lot of poorly run programs and dishonest merchant that steals commissions (a good affiliate marketing network portal such as clickbank, paydotcom, CJ etc. can reduce or eliminate these bad affiliate programs), and also merchants who do not provide decent marketing materials and do not have professional product sales page.
2. In order to be successful, you have to promote many products and you have to research them throughly, because you are selling those products and your credibility is at stake (especially for marketers who direct visitors through their own website and landing pages).
3. Sales Tracking : You have to promote more products, and the more product you sell, the more difficult for you to keep track of the commissions you earn.
4. Advertising Cost : If you decide to use paid traffic, you really need to structured it properly, otherwise it will cost more, time consuming and can eat up your commissions.

Conclusion

One of the easiest way to start your internet business is affiliate marketing by joining the affiliate marketing network. In order for you to get significant income or even a full time income you need to learn how to effectively run your campaigns for each products, using free traffic strategy and also to effectively run advertising campaigns for each product to promote and to keep your cost as low as possible therefore you can make profit out of it.

If you are really serious about building your wealth using affiliate marketing strategy, I do recommend Wealthy Affiliate. They provide proven methods and all resources that you need to start your own lucrative business, from training, hosting, strategies, tools and softwares etc. All are free for member of Wealthy Affiliate.

More article on this at Best Affiliate Program – Learn Affiliate Marketing get the Supporting Tools and Resources and Be a Wealthy Affiliate

One of the proven successful affiliate marketing strategy is by using your own landing page, instead of sending visitors directly to merchant’s site, so this is your first interaction page with your visitors after they clicking your link to get more information therefore it is very important to grab their attention. In order to achieve this, you need to avoid several very common mistakes as follows

1. No Highlighting in Attention Grabber and Graphics. When people visit your web page (your landing page in this matter), you have to remember that they merely scan your page instead of directly read your page words by words, therefore do not fall into one deadly common mistake of “Not Highlighting” your grabber elements such as graphics, headlines, captions etc.It is very important to keep your visitor by rising their curiosity otherwise they will leave your page in no time.
2. Site Map and Navigation Tools Very Much Look Alike. Visitors will lose their interest in no time if they can not navigate easily within your site. You must provide easy and clear direction for them to move rom one page to another and also to go back to the previous page, just in case they want to fetch prior information. Remember, some visitors are not too “techie” so you have to give them very easy direction.
3. Untidy and Confusing Appearance. Do you usually hang around on untidy, sloppy, unprofessional and complicated websites? I bet you don’t, you don’t want to waste your time or hurt your eyes by doing so. Your visitors more or less are the same as you are, they will stay if your website looks tasteful and professional.
4. Audio and Video Presentations. We may agree that Audio and Video presentation are attention-grabber, but you need to know where to put them and how they play them properly. If you consider to make your Audio and Video play automatically everytime visitors landed on your landing page, you make one big mistake. Not all visitors equipped with the same platform, and also the sound that come automatically from the Audio and Video presentations can be annoying for example if some one browsing in their office and somehow landed on your landing page, the sudden sound from your audio and video will usually trigger them to leave your site at once.
5. Information not Easy to Find. Several factors contribute to the ease of finding information. Remember the visitor came to your site for a specific purpose. Make this information easy to find by making the page easy to read.  Concentrate on:
   • Fonts : proper font sizes is very important in order to make it easy to read. Normally 10 to 12 pitch is quite good for most people. It also depend on your visitors type. If your visitors mostly are 50 years old and up (or up to 10 years old), it is recommended to use larger font size.
   • To avoid visitors for being bored, the width of each column on your site should not exceed 65 characters.
   • You also have to make your print easy to read for example, by experience it is recommended to use light background and dark print instead of using the other way round.
   • Another think you have to pay attention are : Paragraphs maximum 4 lines. Use bulleted lists instead of paragraphs when possible. Headlines should be simple and short.
6. You ask for Too Many Details on your  Opt-in form. Any forms the visitor needs to fill out should include very little information. Most people are unwilling to provide personal information such as phone numbers and addresses in a form requesting more information. Keep it simple and only ask for what you need to help.
7. The Ad Body is Too Long and Can Be Boring. The important thing is you keep your focus on particular information about the producst or services, put your company profile or staff curriculum vitae on another section otherwise your body ad will become too long and boring.
8. Call to Action and Action Button are blurred or missing. If your visitor has to search for the button to click to buy now, he or she may not bother. Have several on the page and clearly visible or when your visitor decides to click on it, he or she does not have to get out the pipe and the magnifying glass.

If you avoid those common mistakes above, you will have much greater chance to have successful landing pages. The visitors will have a good impression of you and your business. After you create your landing page, try to “step back” and visit your landing page as a visitor and try to get allined with visitors minds and “see” through their eyes. You willl be glad that you pay attention to these small but very important details.
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