Affiliate marketing is a very hot topic right now – who wouldn’t want to just start making money from selling someone else’s product or service online, without even leaving their home?
While affiliate marketing is not rocket science – it’s basically like selling things like Avon, Mary Kay, Kleeneeze…but instead of doing it in person, you do it online.
Affiliate marketing is simple to do, but it does require work, dedication, and patience. Some markets can be very competitive and if you want to be successful at it, you will need to invest time and effort, and possibly money (optional, of course), into your endeavor.
If you already have a blog, or are very active on Facebook or Twitter, then you could start to generate a passive income stream with minimal effort today.
Find a commercially viable product to sell
The first step in effective affiliate marketing is choosing a commercially viable product to sell. This is not particularly hard, but keep in mind that you have millions of products and services to pick from, some good and some not so good, so you want to have a list of criteria that the products you promote must meet.
Clickbank (www.clickbank.com) is an extremely popular website for affiliate products and services and it’s a good place to get started with affiliate marketing. Although it is a US website, some products and services are not country specific, and some are even UK based, so you just need to find something that fits in with what you’re looking for.
Clickbank also offers affiliate marketing tips, and you can see stats which tell you how well a product or service is doing. Some feel that these stats aren’t all too reliable, but if you find a product that you like, and one that has a good “gravity” and “popularity” measurement, then just go ahead and contact the owner of the product and ask him or her to show you some sort of proof of sales and conversions. This is very simple, and any merchant worth his salt will be happy to provide you with the details.
Make sure your affiliate sales can be tracked
Another of the most overlooked affiliate marketing tips has to do with traffic testing and tracking. As you probably already know or will soon realise, there are a million and one ways to get traffic to your affiliate offer.
How do you know which one to choose? You really don’t – everything is trial and error. And, what works for one person may not necessarily have the same results for another.
You have to try one for a while and see how that works, or try several at a time and compare them with each other. When you find some that are clearly outperforming others, invest more time, effort, and/or money into those and let the others go.
What support can you give your customers?
Last but not least, take a look at the support that you can offer your customers. Yes, that’s right. If you are selling a product (whether it’s yours or not), you should be prepared to answer questions about that product. While this may seem like a bit of a pain, it is also one of the factors that will separate you from other affiliates who are not answering questions. This also probably means that you will have to actually buy the product and not just promote it blindly, without knowing its real features, advantages, potential problems, etc.
If you want to learn more about Clickbank and/or selling affiliate products, join the Mothers Who Work Club today.
