internet money machine: August 2009

Thursday 6 August 2009

making money through affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a great way to profit from the Internet. It is whereby you promote other people products and get commissions when there is a sales generated from your marketing effort.

Nowadays, so many people are being involved in affiliate marketing, which sometime make it harder for new affiliate marketers to earn a substantial income from this marketing way. Nonetheless, there are some things that you can do to make you stand out from other affiliates, which will increase your affiliate earnings along the way:

1. Do not drive any traffic, drive targeted traffic. Many new affiliates think that by just sending any traffic to a site, there will be sales. In affiliate marketing, the quality of the traffic counts a lot. You need "ready buyers" to visit your marketing page, so that they are more likely to take action and buy through your page.

2. Do not drive traffic directly to your affiliate sales page. By sending traffic directly to the sales page, other than losing out on the chance to increase the popularity of your website, you will also have a lesser sales conversion rate. Therefore, it is advisable for you to set up a simple website to talk about the affiliate product that you are promoting. You can provide a honest review on your website before taking them to the actual sales page.

3. Have an opt-in list. You need to capture your visitors' information such as name and email address. People will usually not buy on their first visit to a website. Therefore, if you do not have an opt-in list that captures their information first, you will lose them forever when they do not buy over at your affiliate sales page.

4. Put in lots of effort. I know that this may sounds a bit too general and common sense, but you may be surprised that there are still a lot of people who think that affiliate marketing is a quick get-rich scheme. There is no such thing as easy money without putting in effort in this world. For affiliate marketing, your aim is to create as many exposures for your affiliate links as possible on the Internet. This require you to always seek out for new marketing strategies, "planting" links, coming out with creative business strategies, etc. All these require a great deal of determination, discipline, initiative, and of course time and effort.

Although I may put it across that affiliate marketing is a hard work, but you can be sure that once you pay the price, you will definitely reap multiple rewards in the long run.

optimizing your site for affiliate marketing

Why does search engine optimization helps you in achieving affiliate marketing success? Before we discuss this topic, let me explain briefly to you what is search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is a process of choosing appropriate and targeted keyword phrases that are related to your website, and ensuring that these keyword phrases achieve high organic listings in search engines. High ranking in organic listings of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN will bring a lot of targeted traffic to your website when people search for the keywords that you have optimized. This will in turn drives more targeted and eager traffic to your affiliate product sales page.

As you are in the affiliate marketing business, it is always a good practice to develop your own landing page to promote an affiliate product. Some people call it "squeeze page", whereby you will capture their email address and name for future promotion. Be it a landing page or squeeze page, you will need to apply search engine optimization on it. This is to ensure that it appears at the top of search listings when someone searches keywords that are related to the product that you promote.

One very important thing you must note is that people searching for the affiliate product that you promote want information. Therefore, it is always a good idea to entice them with some free information on your landing page, either through your own website or blog, articles, or squidoo lens. If you have a landing page with information, do make sure that you update the content regularly. Sites which provide content that are interesting, well-written and regularly updated create highly engaged visitors who are more likely to return to the website in the coming days. Moreover, with fresh content, you will score well with search engines and able to be rewarded with good organic rankings for your webpages.

To successfully ensure that your webpage ranks well for the keyword that you wish to optimize, you need to include keyword phrases within your content. One thing to note is not to overdo it. By "stuffing" lots of keywords within your content, you may get penalized by search engines and lose your chance to achieve good organic ranking.

One technique I love to use is to write articles to promote affiliate products. For each article that I write, I will make sure it is keyword optimized, and stand a chance to rank high for a particular niche keyword in search engines. Then through my article, it will drive traffic to my landing pages, and in turn bring visitors to the sales page of the affiliate products that I promote. This is a combination of search engine optimization and article marketing to achieve affiliate marketing success.

why people fail in affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online. If you are new to making money online, you should consider affiliate marketing as it allows you to learn the most important thing of doing business on the Internet, which is to drive targeted traffic.

So how does affiliate marketing works? It is a fair deal between a product publisher and you, whereby you will earn a commission for each sale materialized. To entice people to buy the product that you are promoting, you need to have a good idea on advertising and selling strategies online. Nowadays, there are so many affiliate marketers that this market has become extremely competitive. This explains why it is so important for you to be different if you do not want to fail in this industry.

To succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to be creative and hardworking enough to employ different unique and effective ways to market a product. A lot of people think that they can make money online just by placing affiliate banners or links on their website. To really succeed in this market, there are more things to be done than just placing links and banners. It will also be good for you to know that there is no quick get-rich path and you should give up any thought of it now. You need to put in consistent effort and invest your time to build your affiliate business.

So why does so many people fail in this industry? The major culprit is that they are doing basically the same things as what other amateur affiliate marketers are doing. As I have mentioned before, affiliate marketing is not as simple as directing customers to the business site. Many people fail in this aspect because they are not willing to work hard. Instead of creating effective landing pages, they choose to drive traffic directly to the merchant's site. I am not saying this method does not work. In fact, this is a good start for you if you are new to affiliate marketing. However, once you get a hand of it and want to earn more, you need to do better than this.

Another reason why one fails is lack of preparation. One important preparation that you cannot afford to miss is researching. As an affiliate marketer, you need to do a research on the merchant and his or her product that you wish to promote. In order to give a full dedication and attention in promoting a particular product, you need to make sure that the product matches your interest. You should also get useful information by joining forums, comparing products and reading articles on affiliate marketing to get more tips from experienced marketers.

Lastly, you should have high quality content for your landing pages. With fresh and useful content, you will be able to entice your visitors and make them develop the desire to purchase the product that you are promoting.

Do not get disappointed if your first few attempts to promote a product earn you no rewards. Keep on trying and do not give up. Success in affiliate marketing needs perseverance, hard work, and determination from you.

You can now get more updated affiliate marketing tips from my blog below...

Click here: Affiliate Marketing Tips at http://www.SingaporeAffiliateMarketing.com

Please feel free to republish this article on your website, or distribute it to your friends or clients, as long as you leave the resource box intact.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cheow_Yu_Yuan

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THE MONEY IS IN THE LIST

List building is one of the most profitable ways to build your online business. With so much competition, you have to work so hard to get traffic to website. Why allow visitors to visit one time and then leave? You worked too hard to get them there in the first place. So list building strategies should you use so that you can contact your customers over and over again? First of all, you have to make list building your top priority. This is the most important step of any list building strategy. What this means is that every entrance into your website is there solely for the purpose of building your list. You want people to sign up to your list before they can go any further. Now this means that you have to have convincing copy on your website to make people want to give you their e-mail address. But if you allow them to get to the contents of your website first, most likely they will not voluntarily sign up for your list. The second step is your list building strategy is to create a squeeze page. A squeeze page gives the visitors two options - either sign up to your list or leave. While this sounds rather blunt, this is exactly what you want. If someone is not willing to give you their e-mail address, then most likely they will not buy anything from you anyway. Offering something free in exchange for their e-mail address will greatly increase your subscription rate. Once you get your customer's e-mail address, be sure not to bombard them with sales pitches right off. Sales pitches are the primary reason that people do not give their e-mail address away, and if all you do is hound them with sales pitches, then they will unsubscribe rather quickly. Instead, you need to build a relationship with them by helping them answer questions that they need answered. Then you can move into the sales pitch phase after you have built a relationship with them. One of the things i will be sharing with you is on

List building can often be a tricky task. Most people are not inclined to give their email ids to strangers, or any marketing device. It is extremely personal and so if you want to get hold of it, you need to come up with efficient and effective tactics. If you are not sure what to do, or how to collect the maximum number of email addresses for your business, here's a quick look at the various strategies that you can adopt:

• You can publish newsletters and offer ecourses to your niche market. People nowadays can go to any extent to get the information they want. If you can give them the required and relevant details of the product that you are promoting, you will soon see a host of people waiting to sign up for your newsletter or ecourse.

• Providing free ecourses is another effective option. If the ecourse you create contains good information, a sizeable number of people would want to subscribe for it. Make a slightly longish course, one consisting of at least seven sections which you can send by parts to their inbox.

• Social networking site is a great platform that facilitates list building. It has been seen that this kind of sites like Facebook, Twitter etc. have the capacity to generate more traffic than even Google.

• Free ebooks are also a good way to get email addresses. It need not be too learned or flashy, just make sure that you fill it up with relevant information that people can use. Design it in a way that only members have access to the whole of it. If you can create a useful and informative ebook, you are sure to get a lot of email ids to include in your list.

• You can go for writing articles that will help you to reach out to your target market. Use functional keywords that are pertinent to the subject you are writing on. The language has to be lucid and free flowing, such that the readers will be interested to know more about the subject. This will force them to click on the resource box and sign up with you. It is important that you submit your articles to the leading article directories that are frequently visited by Web surfers.

• Pop up windows can serve as great reminders, urging people to sign up for more information and thus help in collecting email addresses.

• Give free bonus offers to your website visitors if they sign up with you. Free offers always go down well among people and can contribute towards list building to a great extent.

If you use the mentioned strategies for list building, soon you will have a long list of contacts which will further enhance your marketing base, thus bringing in more profits for you!

I will show you how you can use a free auto responder service like getresponse or Aweber to build your opt-in list. It is a known truth that the money is in the List. When you can build a list of trusted clients or readership, you can sell to them over and over .