No doubt you've heard of the 80/20 rule which states that 20
percent of affiliates generate 80% of affiliate income, and conversely,
remaining 80 percent of affiliates generate only 20 percent of
all income for most affiliate programs.
There are ten basics that will put your affiliate marketing
in the top 20 percent of affiliate earnings. Ten suggestions that
will transform your affiliate income from a trickling creek that
barely covers your hosting fees, to a roaring river of extra disposable
income.
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Top affiliate marketers cloak web site links
Cloaking affiliate links should not be necessary, but is.
Oddly many site visitors refuse to visit your links if they
see an affiliate code appended to the URL when they hover their
mouse over a link on your web page.
| Sidebar: Example affiliate URL to see what I mean
, hover your
mouse over this link and then look in the status bar
at the bottom of your browser. Then hover over this
link to see the same URL cloaked. The affiliate ID is
still embedded, but it doesn't show in the browser status
bar. Use your browser "View Source" command to
view the source of this page or copy the URL from your address
bar and visit our Source
Code Viewer to see how this works. Clever eh? |
Sometimes visitors will type the affiliate domain directly
to the browser address bar while removing your affiliate ID
from the URL. To short circuit this odd behavior, simply cloak
the URL. How? Visit this Link Cloaking Tool:
http://WebpositionAdvisor.com/tools/link_cloaker.php
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Top affiliate marketers write & distribute articles
Writing articles about your market niche is essential to gain
reputation as an expert in your field. But the biggest benefit
comes not just from writing those articles, but from having
those articles published by other web site owners and ezine
publishers. Your article gains you both reputation and links
from other web sites from the resource box appended to the end
of each article. Here are major article distribution
sites.
http://yahoogroups.com/group/free-content/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
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Top affiliate marketers focus on a market niche
Filling a web site with content reflecting a narrowly focused
product or service niche is a well known method of gaining web
traffic in your area of specialty. An excellent resource that
can help you determine relevant and focused areas to fill your
site with is called NicheBot. They offer innovative tools to
research and pinpoint market niches for your web site based
on the WordTracker Database and Google.
http://www.nichebot.com
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Top affiliate marketers use autoresponder series
Autoresponders are incredibly valuable tools that allow you
to send a timed series of email messages to those that sign
up for them. Most often those autoresponders are sent through
a third party provider. Some of the top providers are Sendfree.com
and aweber.com, for a tutorial covering autoresponder basics,
visit:
http://website101.com/email_e-mail/email_autoresponder_basics.html
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Top affiliate marketers create web pages to pre-sell
Creating either testimonial pages or review pages that discuss
and pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with
is the best method of getting increased orders for your chosen
affiliate programs. Many programs actually provide either an
article or recommended text to sell their products for you and
allow reproduction of those articles with your links embedded.
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Top affiliate marketers gather email addresses
The best affiliates collect email addresses on their web site
by offering free reports via the above mentioned autoresponders
or by giving away ebooks or through newsletter signup forms.
The best use all of these methods or more to build their list
of email addresses. This also allows you to contact potential
customers that would otherwise never see your site again after
clicking away to the affiliate program web site.
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Top affiliate marketers advertise SOMEWHERE
Depending on your market niche you should advertise using
PPC and/or ezine advertising. Some categories of Pay-per-click
can be prohibitively expensive, but advertising somewhere is
all but mandatory to gain substantial additional traffic to
your site. There are some great bargains in ezine advertising
and some less popular PPC engines other than Yahoo's Overture
and Google's Adwords. Try 7search, Kanoodle and FindWhat for
lower Bids than the big boys of PPC.
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Top affiliate marketers optimize for search engines
Search engine optimization is becoming more complex as more
and more webmasters participate, but the basics applied to your
site can increase visibility dramatically over time. The most
critical of the many SEO techniques is to use title tags that
reflect individual PAGE content. Many webmasters write a master
title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worst thing
you could do for search engine ranking. Learn more SEO:
http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/
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Top affiliate marketers give away ebooks or freebies
Everyone knows by now that giving something away is a great
traffic generator and allows you to gather email addresses to
allow contact of potential customers at a later date. This strategy
is employed by EVERY successful web-based company at one time
or another. Think of all the free things YOU have collected
online over time. Screensavers, software, ebooks, discount codes,
toolbars, white papers. They work!
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Top Affiliate marketers have their own mailing lists
The best of affiliate marketers have their own newsletter
or ezine and gather email addresses on their site to build their
list of subscribers. Having this list allows regular contact
with potential customers interested in your site, your product
and your market niche. If you don't write your own material
or think you can't produce weekly content, there are hundreds
of authors out there that will gladly product articles for you.
The article distribution lists provide free content and ghost
Writers provide high quality content for a fee.
If you implement ALL the above techniques, you are guaranteed
to become one of the top affiliate marketers on the web. Then
you can create your own product telling everyone how YOU did it,
create your own affiliate program and have hundreds of us selling
for you!
