Key Concepts for Successful Affiliate Marketing

When you examine what successful affiliate marketers do, have you noticed a consistent pattern? If you're not profiting with your current marketing methods, just take a look at what the successful marketers do:

Study and Research  Find out what a hungry niche market is looking for. When you can pinpoint what the market is looking for, it's easy to deliver the product to them. So explore, brainstorm and research before selecting a product to market to them. Spend some time on Google Trends and research.

Test it out - Before trying to generate huge amounts of traffic, create a small test campaign with a few ultra targeted keywords to see if it converts. Highly targeted traffic that converts to sales is the sign of a successful affiliate marketer. Testing it out first makes it easy to track because the campaign is small.

Doing your job  Affiliate marketing is all about PRE-selling. Let the merchant do the selling. Your role should be to provide value. Help your audience find what they are looking. Find a solution to their problem. Avoid the concept of sell/sell and embrace the concept of PRE-sell/sell. If you can put yourself in front of your customers pc and visualize yourself as them, you can certainly PRE-sell.

Capture Page  A well thought out landing page that is of high quality, relevant and full of keywords accomplishes two things perfectly. It creates your brand of high value and allows big daddy (aka Google) to see the keywords you advertise under as relevant. So learn to build it, and they will come.

Seduce Google  Make yourself attractive to Google and all of the other major PPC services out there. Pay less than all of your competitors when Google thinks your style of advertising is attractive. Pay TONS when you use PPC's the wrong way. An understanding of how these services work will help conversions.

Be Specific  Lots of traffic, no conversions and no money in your bank account is the result of bidding on keywords that are to general. Bidding on a term like "fishing gear" is not productive. How about "deep sea fishing gear albacore tuna" or even more specific than that. Make a customer say, "Awesome! Exactly what I was searching for."."

Build the list  If you don't capture your customer's email address you're leaving the money on table. For most customers, it is going to take around 6 contacts or so before they feel comfortable with you. So following up is key. Even better, is the option to market to them in the future for free.

I've never underestimated the importance of learning what the successful affiliate marketers are doing. Do it and be much better off.