Saturday, December 22, 2007

Failure in affiliate marketing - why is this happening?


People daily are trying affiliate marketing, and you may be one of them. It’s true that affiliate marketing is a very effective way of creating income online. When it works out, both the merchants and affiliates benefit on every sale.

Profiting from affiliate marketing is dependent on your advertising, promoting and your strategies for selling.

Affiliate marketing gets more competitive everyday, so you must find a way to counteract this. Our job is to find ways to be creative in our efforts. We must continue to use unique and effective ways to persuade buyers to purchase products.

The upside of affiliate programs is that they are more effective, involve little or no risk, are cost efficient, when compared to traditional advertising. Advertising is the most important part of affiliate marketing. Unfortunately, affiliates are meeting failure in affiliate marketing, and most of that comes from not enough hard work. Setting up an online business, like all businesses, requires hard work and dedication.

Here are a couple things you should look into, to ensure that you don’t meet failure in affiliate marketing.

1. Failure in affiliate marketing is also caused by a lack of preparation. A big part of preparation is researching. As an affiliate marketer, you should pick a product you’re interested in. This’ll ensure that you’ll have the right dedication to your affiliate products. You can get information by joining affiliate forums, comparing the affiliate products that are available and reading difference sources online. You should research out products that will convert sales at a high rate for you. Most affiliate networks, like Click Bank, have conversion rates.

2. One thing that can not be overlooked is your website. You should know what you’ll call it, the layout, the general design, the content and ads you’ll place. It’s important to have an easy to view and appealing site. Having an ugly site turns away visitors. Even if your site has the best content and offers, no one will pay attention if your site needs to look better.

3. You need to make sure your site has quality content. Content is very much KING in affiliate marketing. If your content is good, you’ll drive traffic to yourself. Content means having good information and combining it with good keywords that will draw in the search engines. You must absolutely hold your visitor’s attention! Otherwise they’ll never go to your affiliate program’s sales page.

4. Make sure you pick a good domain name for your site. Picking a bad name also turns off visitors. For instance, if your domain name doesn’t seem relevant to the content, people may not buy from you! Even if you have the best content and offers!

5. One of the most important things to do is continue with the learning process. There is always more to learn and it can’t be learned all at once. Improving your marketing strategies only improves your profit. Failure to keep learning can create overall failure. The internet and the way affiliate marketing is promoted changes all the time. We have to learn to adapt to these changes. Work on the basics, like advertising, setting up web pages, using pay per clicks and search engine optimization techniques. Always study your markets and see how you can best your competition.

6. Make sure not to give up! People sign on to affiliate programs daily with the hopes of instant wealth. When the wealth doesn’t come quickly, they quit, just as quick. Keep working hard and preserve, hard work and patience goes a long way!

To your success!

Free tool to build up successful affiliate marketing and affiliate programs

Time and time again, it has been said that affiliate marketing is, without a doubt, the quickest and most efficient way of earning a living online. There are a variety of reasons for this. For starters, most affiliate programs do not require any enrollment fees. There is no financial investment on the part of the affiliate. Secondly, the affiliate is only tasked with pre-selling the affiliate merchant’s products. The sales page, the payment processing, the digital delivery, and the post sales services shall be borne by the affiliate merchant.

These shouldn’t mean that the affiliate should want in commitment, however. As a matter of fact, an affiliate’s success wholly depends on how much commitment he could give the program, and how much effort he could invest to pursue such commitment.

Sometimes, this requires some monetary expenses. Getting a web host, for example, as well as a domain name, would necessitate some cash to be laid out. Getting professionally made graphics to make his website attractive can also cost some dough, in the event that the affiliate cannot do this for himself. PPC advertising can equally be just as costly, if not even more, if the affiliate would ever decide to utilize this option.

But not everything needs to come at a price. There are vital tools that would help ensure the affiliate’s success, and they can be availed of for free.

Here are the top five tools under this category. Knowing them would give you the edge you need. Using them would give you the head start that would push your online enterprise to the next level.

1. WordPress. WordPress is a movable-type blog. It is a software program you could download and use to create your own blogs which you could upload in your own server. You won’t have to settle for the words “blogspot” or “livejournal” or “xanga” to be attached to your URL. You could host your blog under its own domain name, or as another page in your main website. Blogs are great marketing tools. They get indexed quite quickly by the search engines, and often, the figure prominently well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They could also give your main website the backlinks it needs to boost its own page rank. Additionally, a blog can be customized to become your main website. The primary advantage of this approach is the convenience you’ll receive when it comes to publishing content. Download the WordPress client for free from http://www.wordpress.com.

2. NVU Website Creator. Macromedia Dreamweaver is too expensive? Microsoft Front Page is too complicated? Then the NVU Website Creator is the program for you. This software program streamlines the website creation process through an interface that is easy to use, but powerful enough to make professional-looking web pages. Download the client for free from http://www.nvu.com.

3. Backlink Builder. If you’re maintaining your own website, either as a review center for your affiliate program’s products, or as an affiliate mall for the same, or even as a blog which promotes the aforementioned digital items, you will need to build a thorough list of backlinks to increase your page rank. The higher your page rank is, the better chances it will have of appearing in the first few pages of search engine results. Don’t know where to start? Use the free tool available at http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php to discover all the places where you could leave some links to your website.

4. Keyword Selector Tool. Keywords are the primary ingredients of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. You will use them for your meta tags, your h1 tags, your ALT tags, your page title, and your content. You will even use them for the articles you will submit to the many article directories in the World Wide Web. The proper use of keywords would result in the more efficient documentation of your website so that the search engine spiders will have an easier time finding your web pages for any relevant query. And since 80% of the traffic that you will be able to generate for your website would come from the search engines, keywords become the most essential aspects of your site building efforts. Need to find the right keywords? Go to http://www.nichebot.com and use their powerful tool to determine the profitability of the keywords related to the affiliate products you will be promoting.

5. Statcounter. You will need to study your website’s statistics so that you’ll know what you’re doing wrong, as well as replicate what you’re doing correctly. For this purpose, simply copy and paste the code that will be provided by http://www.statcounter.com to get in-depth reports about the performance of your website.

All of these tools would improve your performance as an affiliate. And the fact that they all come without charge just makes the deal even sweeter. Try them out. Chances are, you will realize that the best things in life can be free after all.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is an arrangement between an online merchant and affiliate (you), in which the affiliate earns a commission for generating sales, leads and/or clicks for the merchant's web site.

For example, many credit card companies will pay you between $5 and $20 in commission for each visitor that you send to their site who completes a credit card application, and up to $55 for those whose applications are approved.

That's a great commission, and although many companies pay less, there are also many companies that pay much MORE!

Here's another example.

If you promote this software called HyperVRE which is $147 dollars , if people buy it,they will pay you %30 commission,that is almost $50 dollars.

"Fantastic!", you say.

You're absolutely right!

How much you will earn depends in part on the products you choose to sell, and if you are a beginner in affiliate marketing,be sure to check out Super Affiliate Handbook ,it will show you exactly how to find the best companies and products to promote.