Category Archives: Insurance

How Affiliate Marketing Works: The Basics

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Despite the popularity of affiliate marketing, some people still ask the question “What is affiliate marketing?” or “how can I make money with affiliate marketing?” This article will answer that question and tells you what you need to make money in affiliate marketing.

Simply put, affiliate marketing is a kind of marketing strategy whereby a person (the affiliate) promotes the products/services of other people or companies for a commission. The company whose product the affiliate promote is called the merchant. In some programs, you get commission when people just sign up or download a software through your link.

You can join an affiliate program through affiliate networks. An affiliate network serves as a broker between the affiliate and the merchant. The network handles payment processes and ensures that no one is dupe. Few examples of affiliate networks are ClickBank and Commission Junction (cj.com). While registering with an affiliate network, you’ll be required to provide some personal and payment information. Once registered you are free to choose and start promoting any product of your choice. For each product you want to promote, you will be provided with a special affiliate link. Whenever somebody makes a purchase through your link you’ll receive a commission. Apart from crediting you for a sale, another thing the affiliate link does is to drop a cookie into the computer of anyone who clicks on it. This way, even if the person who clicks on your link does not buy immediately, you will still be credited if the person comes back and buy within a period of 30 or 90 days, depending on how long the cookie is made to last.

The above is basically how affiliate marketing works, that is, you sign up with a network, choose some products and start promoting them through your affiliate links. This is not as easy as it sounds; the real work is in the promotion. There are many smart tactics super affiliates use in their promotion but the most important is lead capture. To make it big you must capture the email addresses of visitors to your website. This is because in order to persuade a visitor to buy, you must educate them on the benefits of the product while feeding them with valuable information. Having your visitor’s email means that you can sell more than one products to a customer.

Another important thing you’ll need to make money with affiliate marketing is traffic, you have to be conversant with both free and paid methods of traffic generation. You can get free traffic from article directories, blog comments, forums, social networking sites, search engines and free to use websites. Paid advertising can be in the form of pay-per-click, link advertising or cost-per-mile advertising.

There are other things you need to make money with affiliate marketing, for example, you have to choose the right niche and products if you want to see good result. You also have to learn things like search engine optimization (SEO), keyword research, HTML coding, how to use autoresponders effectively, how to write engaging articles, article marketing etc.

The final truth is that making money with affiliate marketing requires some work and effort. You must be determine and believe that you can succeed. Many new affiliate marketers fail because they lack an action plan. Your action plan contains a list of things you’ll do daily in order to achieve your goal. Having a sort of one week marketing action plan can go a long way to help you.

If you want to fasten your learning process and learn how to do things the faster way, then you have to get a good affiliate marketing guide that already contain a step-by-step one week marketing action plan.

My Affiliate Marketing Guide for You Part 4

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This article from the Affiliate Marketing Guide is going to take you through the importance of keywords, and how to develop a strategy that will optimise everything you do to ensure that you are attracting as much free traffic from the search engines as possible.

Let me say first of all, that, starting out the whole concept around keywords seems like a black science – at least that is what it seemed to me! However, once you get it clear in your head then it is simply a matter of following a process!

Very simply put, keywords are those words or phrases (also known as long tail keywords) that people type into search engines on the internet to find some answers to questions they have. The challenge is to find those keywords that you are going to focus on to get yourself on the first page of the search engines, be it Google, Yahoo or Bing, which is where you want to be.

So, what are the steps to finding the right keywords, and once found, what do you do next?

  1. Find keywords. One truism I am sharing with you on this – there is no substitute for continuous digging and hard work to determine your keywords. You simply have to put the time and effort into finding the right keywords for you. There are tools that can help you enormously in this exercise. For example, Google Keyword Tool is a fantastic resource and it is free! This will help you find out how many searches are made for those keywords on a monthly basis which helps you determine how big the market is for those words or phrases. But, be warned, the more popular a keyword is, the more competition you will face to get ranking on the search engines. There are other tools that can help you dig deeper and get a better understand of the competitiveness or otherwise of these keywords. Tools like Wordtracker or Market Samurai, and there are others, are really good for this type of work, but you will have to pay for them. You can get them on a free weekly trial to have a look at to see which you like best, but after that you will be paying. This is just grunt work that has to be done and there is no quick solution. However, done properly and it is giving you a great foundation for your business.
  2. Select your keywords. Once you have completed this exercise then select, say, the first 10 keywords that you are going to work on. The reason I say 10 is that you want to have a number that you are working on simultaneously so that you are driving traffic to your site, or blog, from as many different places as you can. Also, 10 is a relatively comfortable number to do a really good job on before you move on to the next batch. You will end up with a long list of keywords, but tackle them in blocks of 10 to make it manageable.
  3. Develop a strategy. Once you have your list you now need to have a clear strategy and plan as to how you are going to approach this part of your business. You will hear me say this time and time again in the Affiliate Marketing Guide that maximising the opportunity that using the correct keywords offers, is a critical element in the establishment and growth of your business. So, what should be included in your strategy? The first and, to me, the easiest approach to this is to ask – how am I going to communicate with my audience? If the answer is, for example, my website, my blog, articles, videos, social media, then I must have a clear strategy for each of those and they must interlink. So, how am I going to integrate all these routes to market into one clear plan? The answer to that question will give you the strategy that is right for you.

That’s it for Part 4 of the Affiliate Marketing Guide. I am writing these articles in separate parts with 3 clear action steps in each article to enable you to build your business brick by brick rather than giving it to you all in one document, that is more likely to result in overwhelm!