Affiliate marketing generates 45% of worldwide eCommerce revenue. But only a handful of affiliates, estimated to be 1-2%, really makes it to the top to generate a full time income from their affiliate business. What separates a successful affiliate marketer from the one who is struggling to make a few hundred bucks?
Though affiliate marketing is touted to be the easiest make money online business, it may not be as easy as it sounds. Yes, you can start an affiliate marketing business without spending any money and effort but are you going to be a super affiliate who generates a full time income from her online business?
A successful affiliate marketer creates a business plan, executes it, track every aspect of the business, and tweak it to make it the most effective money generating machine. If your plan is to get Clickbank hop links for free and spam every forum, blog comments, and classified site, you will never be a successful affiliate marketer. To layout a your business on a solid footing, follow the step described below.
Create Your Own Website: Your own web site is the greatest important and indispensable tool in starting an affiliate marketing campaign. The number one step in any thriving affiliate marketing business is creating a good, believable and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first create an -easy-to-use website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the goods and services you are promoting and hopefully create a purchase.
Consequently, you must first focus your efforts in building a site that can cater to what your prospects need and desire. The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to search for information, not automatically to go and buy something.
Above all else, make your website full of original, pertinent and practical content. People love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is always the key and top quality content will not just raise your credibility, it can also help you fulfill a higher-level search engine ranking.
By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible authority in the field, displaying you a trustworthy endorser of the product or service you support. Establishing a good reputation is a good move in building up a loyal consumer base.
Provide Incentives: Competition is extremely fierce in the internet world. You should always be one-step in advance of your rivals to ensure that you capture a critical share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every conceivable means to inspire people not only to visit your website but also to click and go to the merchants’ websites that you are promoting.
Creating an opt-in email list is one of the ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to inspire them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can offer free software, access to unique services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.
Increase Your Site’s URL Popularity: The value of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. Attracting people to your site has to be the first action you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a top search engine ranking.
Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to establish search engine rankings. So, to elevate your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive link building campaign.
One of the ways to do this, at no cost at all, is by submitting articles, with your site’s web address in the resource box, to e-zines and free article directories. You may not only earn exposure, you may also have the opportunity to advertise for no cost, just include a link pointing to your site.
The more sites you send your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Ensure your articles are unique, pertinent and practical so that other websites may pick it up and post it.
Once you start mastering the three most important steps outlined above, you will discover hundreds of other free techniques to drive traffic to your website and other ways to monetize your web site.