subject: Affiliate Marketing Tips For Your New Business [print this page] Affiliate Marketing Tips For Your New Business
Affiliate marketing can eventually become an autopilot type of venture after you get everything set-up and in place. The fabled 'autopilot' income is not a myth, but that will only come with knowledge and experience. The rest of our discussion will be centered on some methods that are still viable and worthwhile to incorporate into your online business.
How many affiliate marketers out there actually build there own email list of targeted subscribers? There are not a lot. However, creating and marketing to an email list can do wonders for your business and bank account. What you'll be doing is asking permission to continue talking to visitors after they're gone from your website. With affiliate marketing, people either buy or they do not, and if you do not try to capture their information then they are forever gone. Without trying to get their contact details then once they're gone, it's forever. But when you actually ask for their email address and add them to your list, you can easily persuade them about the product you're targeting and at the same time market other products in that niche in the future. Also think about the fact that your email list is extremely targeted traffic, and you can command their attention if you do it the right way. Most marketers offer an 'ethical bribe' or something for free in exchange for contact details. Apart from that, you can become creative and offer a unique or a valuable bribe such as a video course through email. But it's important that it is related to your product and market. Value and trust are critical, and they need to value your content and begin to trust you otherwise it just won't work. The best way to drive targeted traffic to your affiliate website is to get it ranked in the search engines for the relevant keywords. Naturally, you'll need to have good backlinks for your site if you want to get it ranked high in the SERPS. A good way to create high quality backlinks for your site is to write and submit targeted articles to article directories. Doing that will produce a one-way backlink to your site which is a good thing to have. This is indeed one of the most trusted ways to build your links, even though it is a bit time consuming. Another strategy involves posting quality comments on relevant blogs, and it's always a good idea to make sure the PR (page rank) is passed to your site in the form of a do-follow link.
As an affiliate marketer, you need to learn the art of reading your visitors/prospects and understand what they are looking for. Think of two things: Getting targeted traffic to your sites, and being able to offer them the solutions they are seeking.
So obviously the greater your knowledge of your target market, or audience, the more you'll know about their problems and concerns. There are many affiliate products that will not sell very well, for different reasons, but some marketers still try to promote them. A good way to directly interact with your visitors is to set up a blog where you can post different type of content that not only gives value but also gets you feedback. You could also employ polls on different pages on your blog, or static site, and ask different questions so you can get an excellent idea of what's on their mind.
The thing to remember is that when you're laying the foundation and building your affiliate business, or really any online business, the vast majority of the work is right in the beginning but in time it gets much, much better and easier going.
