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Copyright 2007 - All Rights Reserved - SuperAffiliateGuidebook.com- Affiliate Marketing History
- What Is Affiliate Marketing?
- Why Do Companies Use Affiliate Marketing?
- How Much Can Be Made As An Affiliate?
- Introduction To ClickBank
- Introduction To Google Adwords
- What Exactly Is Pre-Selling?
- Adding Value To The Product
- Writing The Pre-Sell
- The Pre-Sell Bonus
- Content
- Traffic
- Pre Sell
- Monetize
- How Your Web Site Looks
- The Biggest Payouts
- Lifetime Revenue Share
- Co-Branded Landing Pages
- Affiliate Advertisements
- Your Affiliate Payment
- Free Internet Traffic
- Multiple Languages
- Your Credibility
- Personal Affiliate Relationship
- Negotiate For A Better Commission
- Focused Marketing
- Visitor Bookmarks
- Diversify Your Efforts
- Selling E-Books Over The Internet
- Special Deals From Select Vendors
- Be Creative With Your Affiliate Links
- Various Web Sites For Your Niche
- Multiple Products For Your Visitors
- One Step Ahead Of Your Competitors
- Developing A Free Affiliate E-Book
- The Major Search Engines
- Top Internet Directories
- Advertise In Your SIG
- Participate In Forums
- Joint Ventures
- Viral Marketing
- Short Term vs. Long Term
- Reinvesting Your Earnings
- Marketing Multiple Products
- The Ultimate Conversions
- Tracking The Results Daily
- Optimizing Your Campaign
The affiliate program was invented by CDNow.com at the end of 1994 and it was pioneered by Amazon.com in 1996. Affiliate programs have been referred to as associate programs and partner programs, but they are primarily called affiliate programs.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting online businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and / or sale provided through their efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying a finder’s fee for the introduction of new clients to a business on the Internet.
Affiliate Marketing is the single fastest growth industry on the Internet. It is one of the fastest and most creative ways to make money and start your own career working over the Internet.
Why Do Companies Use Affiliate Marketing?Affiliate Marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to generate sales over the Internet. Certain sectors rely on affiliate marketing more heavily than others, but it is a cheap way for companies to get the word out about their products or services.
How Much Can Be Made As An Affiliate?The sky is the limit. There are affiliates that make anywhere from five to six figure every year, and many of these affiliates are considered super affiliates. A super affiliate is an affiliate with a constant flow of traffic, good conversions, and huge commissions.
Introduction To ClickBankClickBank is an affiliate program that connects thousands of affiliates with vendors that are selling digital products. A digital product is an e-book, video tutorial, software program, or other type of product that is digitally delivered over the Internet.
You would sign-up with ClickBank, get a free affiliate account and look for products within their marketplace that you want to begin promoting. Whenever you make a sale, your account is automatically credited with your commission. ClickBank issues checks to their vendors and affiliates every 2 weeks for commissions that were earned 2 weeks before that date.
Digital products are the easiest products to sell on the Internet because people will instantly receive the product and be able to immediately begin using the product. ClickBank is a very profitable affiliate program because many of the vendors offer a large commission to affiliates, which is often as much as 75%.
Many different affiliate programs offer smaller percentages anywhere from 5% to 25% of the retail price of the product. Digital products are easy to develop and that is why the vendors are able to offer such a huge commission to their loyal affiliates.
The ClickBank Marketplace is where you’ll find all of the digital products that are available for you to promote through ClickBank. You can easily browse the ClickBank product categories or search for a specific product or keyword. Also, you can arrange the digital products using different product indicators within the marketplace.
This is a screenshot of the Money & Employment category. You’ll notice the indicators are listed on the second line for each product.
$/Sale How much affiliates have earned per sale.%/Sale How much you earn as a percentage of the total price of the product. (Anywhere up to 75%)
% Referred The percentage of sales that were made by affiliates, with the rest being made by the vendor.
Gravity This number is used to compare products and see how popular a product is compared to another.
Introduction To Google Adwords
Google Adwords is a pay per click program for the Google search engine. The Google search engine comprises of organic search results and pay per click search results that are presented on the same page for every possible key phrase combination. With Google Adwords, you are charged a small fee every time that a visitor clicks on your advertisement and visits your web site.
Adwords determines how much you pay per click by using the “click through rate” or commonly referred to as CTR. If your ad is shown 100 times and it is clicked on 5 times, then your ad would have a 5% CTR. A 5% CTR is generally good but it depends on the key phrases, your advertisement, and many other factors.
Relevancy is important with Google Adwords. In order to increase your CTR, your keywords must be relevant to what you are selling. In this screenshot, you will notice the organic search results on the left hand side, and the pay per click search results that are listed on the far right. The “Sponsored Links” section is the section where all Google Adwords advertising is shown.
To learn more about Google AdWords, we recommend that you check out these e-books: Google Cash and Adwords 180. Approximately 5 ½ years ago, I was living in government housing and struggling to find a way to make enough money to get myself out of the hole that I had dug myself into. Being from a small town, I knew that the opportunities available to me were limited and the pay wouldn’t be anything more than minimum wage. I continued to struggle to find a way to make money, until I stumbled upon the opportunity to become an affiliate marketer.
I was randomly searching different online casino sites, when I accidentally clicked on the affiliate link for one of these sites. The headline read something like “Earn Up To $5,000 A Month!” and it immediately drew me in. Knowing that it was likely too good to be true, I still decided to read through the copy and see exactly what they were expecting me to do in order to make that kind of money. After reading through the copy, I decided that I would join the affiliate program and set-up a web site to promote their service. I even visited a bunch of their competitors, signed up with their programs, and put together a web site that showcased similar services that were being offered to people over the Internet.
My first web site was a banner farm. It basically had banners for each program with links for visitors to click on. Knowing absolutely nothing about affiliate marketing at the time, I thought it was an easy way to make some money. Shortly after launching the web site, I joined a forum where all of the top affiliates in this particular niche hung out and swapped ideas on how to make money promoting these services over the Internet. Initially, I asked for a review of my web site, and I was given the advice that was needed in order to develop the site from a banner farm into a affiliate site that effectively marketed these services to its visitors.
When I first launched my affiliate business, there weren’t a whole lot of ways to promote an Internet business except through the major search engines and directories. PPC search engines were just beginning to enter the mainstream at the time. I began submitting my web site to just about every place that I could find. Tirelessly, I submitted it to different directories every single day, and I began trading links with anybody that I could find with a site in my niche.
Over the first couple of month, I made a few dollars here and there. I continued to put a lot of time into developing and optimizing the web site, and during the 4th or 5th month, I began making enough money with the web site to start working on it full-time.
From that moment on, I was able to make thousands of dollars each month and the income continued to grow every single month.During the first few years, I concentrated on optimizing the site for the major search engines, and I began developing other sites that offered the same services but focused directly on one aspect of those services in order to attract people interested in the different aspects and in order to target a variety of different key phrases within the major search engines. By developing multiple sites that focused on different aspects, I was able to position myself well within the search engines for hundreds of different quality key phrases. By constantly developing the sites, adding new web pages, exchanging links with other prominent competitors, I was able to build this internet business into a money making machine.
Over those 5 years, many techniques have changed. The important thing was that I continued to develop my web sites. I adapted to the various marketing changes, researched new and innovative online marketing strategies, and continued to monitor consumer needs. I’ve been able to succeed as an affiliate in one of the most competitive fields on the Internet for over 5 years without investing a lot of time and money into PPC search engines, or other advertising opportunities that take money to get started.
You can still become a successful affiliate using the various free advertising opportunities that are available on the Internet, but it does take a good amount of time and effort to get things going.
The majority of new affiliates use PPC search engines, primarily Google Adwords, to generate instant targeted traffic for their business, which actually makes things much easier if you fully understand how the PPC search engines work, and how you can generate highly targeted clicks for less than 10 cents on the dollar.
The key to super affiliate success is with your long-term goals. To concentrate solely on PPC advertising will leave you wide open for problems if the PPC search engines change their rules or if the market becomes too competitive for an affiliate to be able to make enough of a profit minus the actual costs for the PPC advertising.
Use PPC as part of your arsenal, but you should also invest in developing and optimizing your business for organic search results, directories, and other traffic building opportunities.
I’ve combined many of the opportunities that are discussed within this e-book to develop my own business plan. You need to take everything that you learn from this e-book, and put together a business plan. Don’t start your affiliate business without a plan.
Success comes from within you. Once you have the knowledge to become a super affiliate, you must look within yourself for the desire, the motivation, and the will to succeed in this business.
There are four steps to success on the Internet. These steps are very simple, but they are often overlooked by affiliates that start out in the online affiliate industry. To become a super affiliate, you must follow these simple steps in order to maximize your results.
ContentThe search engines love content. You need to develop a lot of content that relates to your product or service. By constantly developing content for your web site, it will bring in repeat visitors and even help your positioning within the major search engines. Content is what brings in organic traffic from the search engines.
TrafficYou need traffic for your web site. Just because you build the web site, doesn’t mean people will find it. You must find a way to bring in a steady stream of traffic to your web site. Developing new content often leads to traffic, but you can’t rely solely on the major search engines, and you’ll need to find alternative ways for people to find your web site over the Internet and in the real world.
Pre SellOnce you’ve gotten the content and the traffic, then you need to pre-sell the products or services that you are marketing. If you are marketing products for an affiliate program, then it is important to pre-sell the products to the end user before they click on your link and take a look at the sales letter. Good examples of pre-selling are product reviews, strong points, or other information that would entice the visitor to click the link and read the sales letter.
MonetizeYou need to make money but this comes after all of the hard work. You can’t expect to jump into something and make money right away. You need to develop the content, bring in the traffic, pre-sell the products or services, and wait for the money. Don’t start off by thinking about the money. Start thinking about how to sell on the Internet, and the steps that need to be taken to market what your selling. Once you’ve mastered the ability to sell over the Internet, then making the money will be much easier for you.
It is said that 2% of affiliates account for over 90% of the affiliate sales that are made online. This means that most affiliates aren’t generating big profits over the Internet, and a small percentage of the super affiliates are generating the bulk of revenue for vendors.
Here is what makes a super affiliate:Super affiliates treat the affiliate business like a regular business. They invest a lot of time, money, and effort into the development of their web site, and they don’t slap a web site together with banner ads or a handful of links. They take the time to put together a business using every marketing technique in their arsenal in order to maximize the traffic, the conversions, and the profits.
The super affiliates really know how to pre-sell the product. They are able to review the product and provide the consumer with the information needed to make the sale. Super affiliates are able to push the buttons that turn a casual user into an impulsive buyer.
Super affiliates find a niche with a huge market and they stick with it. They don’t spread themselves too thin, and instead they make sure to concentrate on the industry that they know best. They can focus all of their time into one area and make the most of it.
They often look for new ways to make their business grow. It could be by adding new products to their web site, or finding new and creative ways to market the existing products. Whatever it may be, they are always on the prowl for new opportunities to make money on the Internet and they are constantly following the trends and gathering data from consumers within their niche.
First, you must identify who the super affiliates are. Hang out at any of the popular affiliate forums, and eventually you’ll be able to identify the users that are super affiliates and which sites they own.
Almost every affiliate forum has a “How Much Do You Make?” post which is usually by a newbie. Sometimes, you can figure out who the super affiliates are just from the responses that are posted in one of these threads. Once you have a list of the super affiliates for your particular niche, then you can keep an eye on their sites, and begin mimicking what they do in order to generate similar results. You can easily clone their promotions and take a cut for yourself. This is a good way to stay on top of your industry without doing the research that many of the top affiliates are doing in order to stay competitive within their field. Over the years, I’ve monitored the results of other super affiliates that I know personally in order to stay on top of any affiliate changes, new promotions, etc. that I may not have been made aware of.
You don’t need to find a long list of super affiliates. You just need to be able to keep an eye on a couple of the super affiliates for your niche, analyze what they are doing to bring in the traffic, maximize conversions, and generate profit for their business. Once you’ve figured out how they are doing it, then you mimic them.
It’s much easier to mimic a successful affiliate, then trying to reinvent the wheel with your own unique marketing idea. Your goal is traffic, good conversions, and huge profits. Anything that gets in the way of that goal should be discarded immediately.
New products always seem to convert better than all others. Some products are backed by an internet marketer that has joint ventures with many of the super affiliates and online marketing gurus. Some of these marketers are able to reach over a million names within the first week of launch using such a massive JV campaign.
Your timing is very important. If you get in on a product after a massive JV launch, then you’ll be picking up the crumbs that are left by other super affiliates which means less conversions and less profits. You’ll find the new products by keeping an eye on the top affiliates in your niche and by staying on lists for some of the top marketers on the Internet. Some of the top marketers get first pick at promoting the hot, new products and by watching what they do, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the crowd of affiliates that are going to start promoting it after the big players have drained the market.
If you are exclusively promoting products that are offered through ClickBank, then you should sign-up with Affiliate Alert which lets you search the marketplace using a series of indicators which includes information on how new the product is and how much momentum that the product has gathered since it’s debut. This tool lets you know when a new ClickBank product is worth promoting, so that you get in on the action before 99% of the other affiliates.
You want to be able to promote the ClickBank product before the market is flooded with promotions from hundreds or even thousands of different affiliates. You’ll always want to look for products that are less than a week old and rank within the top 25 products. This tells you that the product has just been released and that there are some super affiliates that are promoting it heavily.
With all of this in mind, make sure that the new product offers a high percentage payout and a good return on your investment.A pre-sell is an article that introduces the visitor to the product that you are recommending. Basically, you are pre-selling the product to the visitor by offering information as an authority, a satisfied customer that has purchased the product or someone that has experience of some kind with this particular product. A pre-sell could be a review of the product that is dressed up so that it doesn’t look like your sole purpose is to recommend the product in order to receive an affiliate commission from the sale of it.
You should promote products that you genuinely like. This will make it much easier to convincingly pre-sell the product to your visitors. The rules for pre-selling can differ slightly depending on what you’re going to be selling to your visitors. You should take a look at your affiliate competition for the particular product or service that your going to pre-sell before you begin.
Adding Value To The ProductWith a pre-sell, you should add value to the product by offering a bonus to your visitors. Don’t feel intimidated by this idea, because it’s fairly easy to create your own bonus that directly relates to the product that you are pre-selling. If you’ve already purchased the product, you can create an e-book or other bonus that directly compliments the product. A free bonus can be the extra leverage needed in order to turn a casual visitor into an affiliate conversion.
Writing The Pre-SellThe quality of your pre-sell is going to determine whether you are a super affiliate that makes $5,000/month through one webpage, or an average affiliate that is lucky to make anything in this business. A pre-sell consists of many things that you’ll find in a good sales letter. There will be a headline, a call to action, product points, your own testimonial for the product, as well as other information.
You will need an eye-catching headline that grabs a hold of your visitor and gets them to start reading your pre-sell. Don’t try too hard to get the attention of the visitors. You are interested in soft selling the product to your visitors, while leaving the hard sell to the vendor, once the affiliate clicks over to their sales page.
Some affiliates will develop a story about the affiliate product. A pre-sell largely involves your own experiences with a product that you have purchased, so you should write a story about how you purchased the product or how the product has changed your life. Something that has to do with you that has a direct tie-in to the product itself. A story often disconnects the logic from the brain and people no longer see the copy as an advertisement for a product. Make the story interesting and throw in some twists and turns to really draw the reader into the story. Always end the story by letting the reader know that you purchased the product or let the reader know in a subtle way, how the product helped you.
In your pre-sell, you should let the reader know who you are and make yourself sound like an authority as it relates to the product. The reader will take what you say seriously, if you have the credentials to make it look like you are an expert in the field.
Share your emotions about buying the product, if you hesitated, why you hesitated, and any other natural feelings that you had and that any consumer might feel if they were going to purchase the product. If you turned slowly to a product, then make sure to let the reader know about your experience. Don’t come off too strong in support of the product from the beginning, because you don’t want the reader to get the idea that this is a sales message. If you’ve had good results with the product, then say so... But slowly build up your excitement about the results of the product.
Make sure to hard sell the bonus to readers that decide to purchase via your link. Your bonus should solve any negative aspects that you may have mentioned within the pre-sell. Your negative comments gave the reader assurance that this was a genuine review, and your bonus will eliminate the negative, and it will leave no reason or excuse for the reader not to buy the product.
Finally, a strong call to action is necessary in order to get the visitor to click your affiliate link, and move onto the sales message. A few key points (summary) on how the product will help the reader at the end of the pre-sell is important as well.
Once you’ve finished the pre-sell, then you should compare it to those that are being used by your competitors, the top marketing gurus, or you can even visit the sales letter for the product that you are selling and look at their sales copy. They are hard selling the product with much stronger language, but you can still get a good feel for how a pre-sell page should be written by analyzing theirs.
Your Pre-Sell BonusThe best type of bonus to develop is a report, e-book, or a short video that actually compliments the product that you’re pre-selling.
You can develop a report or e-book using Word and then convert the document into a PDF using Adobe Acrobat or any of the free PDF converters that are available on the Internet. To develop a video tutorial, you can use Camtasia from www.techsmith.com which enables you to record your screen and use your own audio to narrate the video presentation. This is an excellent tool for developing videos to be used as special bonuses for your product.
Don’t make your web site look like a typical affiliate web site. The major search engines are constantly evolving and developing new ways to make their results more relevant to the consumer. They don’t want all of there search results to be cluttered with affiliate web sites, and that is why you should fill your web site with content that directly relates to what you are selling. Banners and other advertisements often tell the search engines that this web site is advertising something and that it is primarily an affiliate site.
Try to add more textual content and less imagery to your web site. Banner advertising gets the attention of the consumer, but you don’t want too much that it actually gets the attention of the search engines, and they decide to penalize you for excessive advertising.
If you look at the major search engines, many of the authority sites for popular keywords are non-profit organizations or other sites that don’t have a lot of outside links, or banner advertisements. These web sites offer a lot of in-house content for visitors to read.
The Biggest PayoutsWhen launching a business online, you need to be able to sell something that offers a big payout for you. Even if you’re promoting something that you have a passion for, you are still going to need big payouts in order to make it worthwhile. If you’re going to sell a product or service through an affiliate program, then you’ll need to find a program that will pay you a hefty commission from the purchase of the product or service. Also, you need to make sure that the hefty commission is for a product or service that has marketability over the Internet. I stay away from a CPA or a pay per lead type of program, because of the low profit potential.
Lifetime Revenue ShareSome of the affiliate programs offer lifetime revenue share to their affiliates. This is one of the best opportunities for new affiliates, because you will earn revenue off of the customer for the lifetime of the customers account. For example, if you are earning 20% of the cost of the p