Affiliate Programs Worthless for 80% of Affiliate Marketers

March 14, 2010

No doubt youve 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.

TOP AFFILIATE MARKETERS DO MOST OF THESE TEN ITEMS

1.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. Sometimes they 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 Tool:
http://WebpositionAdvisor.com/tools/link_cloaker.php

2.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

3.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

4.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

5.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.

6.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.

7.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 Yahoos Overture and
Googles Adwords. Try 7search, Kanoodle and FindWhat for lower
Bids than the big boys of PPC.

8.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/

9.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!

10. 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 dont write your own material or
think you cant 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.