Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Today I will post about Affiliate Marketing, because many of you don't really know what affiliate marketing stands for and what it is. How can you make money and what are the means you can use to make your checks bigger from month to month?

Affiliate marketing is a well known and fairly easy concept. It is a marketing practice where a business pays one or more affiliates for each customer brought to the business by them.

The theory about affiliate marketing is actually very simple, and yet it's not an easy task to do successfully. Most affiliates only earn a few dollars of supplemental income a month, but the more experienced ones earn well over six figures a month.

To become one of the top affiliate marketers you'll need to decide how you are going to promote your affiliate products.

You'll also need to refer customers to the affiliate website. To do this you'll need to select a way to promote them and there are a number of ways to do that. Some are totally free and others might be somewhat costly. I'm going to list a few of the best affiliate marketing promotional methods, that I'm using and are working for me.

NOTE: Just because they are working for me, it doesn't necessarily mean they are going to work for you. You'll have to figure it out for yourself.

1. PPC: The most popular fashion of promoting affiliate products, and cheep. With PPC you bid on relevant keywords related to the product you are trying to market, or program. It's not easy as just writing an ad with a few choice keywords and leaving it at that, this will not get you any sales. To really excel at PPC you must be fairly familiar with how AdWords works and most importantly you must track everything to determine what keywords are generating conversions for you and which aren't.

2. SEO:this is the most difficult method of promoting affiliate products. SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the neutral on un-paid search results. It doesn't bring results instantly but it can be extremely rewarding in the long run.

3. Incentive/Loyalty: With the change in how consumers shop online incentive and loyalty websites have popped up where they share a portion of their affiliate earnings with users in the form of a reward, like miles, points, cash, donations to a charity or merchandise, and SFI is one of them.

4. Email: this is the best way to stay in touch with people. Even just a monthly newsletter is a good internet marketing promotion.

5. Social Media: it is the hottest sector online right now and only getting bigger and more powerful. This means that you need to be actively using social media sites and promote your products, programs or website/blog constantly. These sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Lifestream, MySpace, Netlog, Ping, Pinterest, OpenID, Buzzzy, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, and so on.

6. Website/content: you can promote your programs or products through your website/blog or through article marketing. Creating powerful content to grab the readers attention, in form of daily news, information, reviews, how to articles and so on.

7. Writing articles: This is the best and cheapest way to promote your affiliate products or programs. However, many of the best article directories don't allow affiliate links, you can link them to your website or blog, or cloak the link. Some of the best article directories are, Ezinearticles, Ideamrketers, Aricledashboard, Affsphere, Ehow, Flixya, Howhub and so on.

8. Traffic Exchange sites: another free way to promote your products or programs is through traffic exchange sites, but this can be a bit time consuming at the beginning. You'll have to earn points to use them for your promotion. And most of the traffic exchanges are filled with people who are there for the same reason so they really don't look at your websites but gather points. I do use them on occasion, when I need to pull in some extra PSA's.

9. Creating Squidoo pages: this is a great promotional method because squedoo is well known and high ranked at Google so you can easily end up on the first page of Google. You don't need a website. It's fairly easy to create a squedoo lens and to ad new fitures and there are many manuals and how to articles that can help you with that.

These are just some of the methods that I'm using to promote SFI program and TripleClicks products, I also use free classified ads sites to post ads, Craigslist, video marketing, PTC sites, forums, blogs and so on. I can't say for sure which one of them is the most effective because a few of them each month. For example I would post ads on classified ad sites this month and post on forums, and next month I would use PTC sites and article marketing.