The "WHAT" of Affiliate Marketing ???

[Marketa]

I have personally read on this Forum and many other
Forums, regards the "WHAT" of Affiliate Marketing,
which,obviously ushes forth many problems......
But !!!
I have never ever "Heard,nor Read" about the "HOW"
of Affiliate Marketing, which I am certain contains the 'key & solutions' to Affiliate Marketing......

[Linda Buquet]

Marketa,

Explaing the "how" is a very long story and there is no one school of thought. The best thing to do is study up over at AbestWeb and ask questions.

Anyone have any good advice to share with Marketa??

Best of luck!

[Perry]

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=10687

As you will see, I ticked off someone, but hey, that's the truth to affiliate marketing. Something no one dares post because of the backlash.

There's more to it than what I posted there, but my little fingers were getting tired.

The main thing to keep in mind is to not believe everything you read (includes my post, of course.) DON'T make goals based on what you read. Try the progarm out first, to find out for yourself...THEN make your goals.

For example, although detalplans is a good program, they say that the conversion rate is between 25-40. ... If I remember correctly. It's more like over 100, if not 150. They are still a good program to promote, and wwe recommend them, but we didn't work out our goals until we found out the truth on the conversion rate. We can now base it on the real conversion rates.

The second thing to keep in mind is that you can make money at it, but it takes a lot of stores. How many depends on so many variables, and how much you want to make.

Read my thread, don't take it as gospel...and find out for yourself. You'll see that I am pretty acurate.

One last thing. Don't rely on E-mails if you are having a hard time getting approved by a merchant, or if you are having problems in general. Call them on the phone. I have met a couple of nice affiliate managers that way. Well, I can only hope they are genuinely nice. ... They work on commission. :-)


Good luck.

[jackson992]

Hi Marketa:

Actually you can make your money from just one site:) 75% of my money is indeed from one site. The main thing you need to find is a niche you're successful at as that sells the best

[sbeco]

Marketa,

When I started to study the how of affiliate marketing I ran across a really good FREE PDF book that explained a lot of the most important things you need to know about "the how."

I put the book on the first page of my website. You can download it and read it and have a lot of your questions answered in one book. It's called The Affiliate Masters Course. The book doesn't cost a dime, but the information in it is priceless.

Good luck.

[Webdango]

Twp types of sites really:

Shopping
With a shopping site, you need to offer more than just shopping. Allow customers to compare prices or see what's available at more than one store. If you do that, you are provinding a shopping SERVICE, and this is what will keep people coming back. This is what I'm doing with decent success at Webdango and DealsOnComforters.

Content
You build a content drive site with imbeded links. Liek if you're hoddy is fishing, you build a siote about fishing with articles/reviews of fishing reels, lures and other equipment. In the aarticles and reviews you write, you provide links to specific products and merchants where they can buy those products. SFeader is my site for content: I provide book reviews and (hopefully) people will click through to buy the book.

Two most important things:
1. What product or class of products (or services) do you want to sell? If I sell 50 $6.99 paperback at 10% I just made $35. Ug. If I sell 50 comforters at 69.99 I just made $350. Better. And it's just as easy to sell a 69.99 comforter to someone looking for a comforter as it is to sell a 6.99 book to someone looking for a book. Research what you want to try to sell, check keywords, how saturated the market is, what some of your competitors look like. And remeber: It doesn't matter if there are 800,000 sites for selling the same thing you are trying to sell if you're in front of them onthe search engine.

2. Search Engine Optimization. Don't cheat! Study SEO Best Practices and build your site that way. Limited javascript, no flash, anchor text, <h1> tags, title. Build it as best you can the first time, because it's a pain in the ass to go back over 170 pages after you've already built them. I know this from experience!

Goodl luck!

[trogar]

If you want to read something that outlines some basic principles in selecting your affiliate programs, I wrote an article a while back on affiliate strategy. It takes into account some basic principles and guidelines you should use as a means to determine which types of affiliate programs to use on your site. Once you can establish the information I talk about in the article, then is the time to do research like Perry outlines in the thread they referenced. You can read my article at http://www.sanders-consultation-group-plus.com/html/tutorials/web-master-resource/marketing/affiliate-strategy-index.htm . It has also been published at NewbieHangout http://www.newbiehangout.com/articles/sanders/

After reading that, I would also suggest reading my article on emotional marketing at http://www.sanders-consultation-group-plus.com/html/tutorials/web-master-resource/marketing/emotional-marketing.htm . That one has also been published at NewbieHangout. Using these principles will help you to pick affiliate programs in line with your site, and help you to generate the feelings people need to make purchases. Once armed with this knowledge, I would suggest following the other research mentioned in this thread to finalize the programs that will work best for your site.

A final caution on this topic. No two people do things the exact same way. Therefore, something that works for one, might not work for the other. There are many factors that come into play here. I've mentioned some of them in my post, but there are many more. On a side note, do a search at Google on affiliate strategy and emotional marketing :o).

I hope this information helps you out marketa.