How to make money in affiliate marketing? Let me share with you my 2 cents on making money in affiliate marketing…

1. Do a proper product research.  Some products just can’t sell. Before you start promoting any product, you need to do your homework first. Check out the products and make sure that they are selling well. Visit the sales page of the product that you’re going to promote and make sure that the sales page is appealing enough to convert sales. If there is an opt-in list on the sales page, join the list and see whether your affiliate links are still embedded inside their emails. This is to prevent losing affiliate sales when your traffic buy their products through emails.
2. Target a hungry market. If the market is not pack with hungry crowd, it is very hard to get substantial sales from the products that you promote. You need to target a market whereby people are eager to pay to solve their immediate problems. Markets such as Weight Loss, Acne, and Registry Cleaning are good markets to enter. Although these markets are very competitive, but there are enough buyers in these markets for everyone to make money.
3. Build assets. Instead of relying solely on Bum marketing and EzineArticles.com, you can build assets such as your own websites, short-reports, and lists. These assets are yours to keep and you will definitely be able to reap the rewards in the long run. For example, you can start building review sites or conduit sites and target the enormous long-tail organic traffic from search engines. These traffic will become automated and once you hit a winner, you can start duplicating more sites, targeting the same industry. To raise the level of entry of your competitors and differentiate yourself from other affiliates, building assets is really the way to go.
4. Track your traffic. You need to track your traffic and performance so that you will know what to improve on. To efficiently track your traffic performance, it is best to have your own websites. This is because with your own site, you can track all traffic that are directed from your website to the merchant’s sales page. From here, you will be able to know the conversion rate and improve on the weaknesses.
5. Drive more traffic. Not any traffic, but targeted traffic. Being an affiliate marketer is like being a salesman. It is all about the numbers and the quality of the prospects that you meet. (In the case of affiliate marketing, it is the quality of the traffic that you direct to the sales page) Once you know your conversion rate, things will become more clearer. Let’s say that you need 100 unique visitors to get 3 sales from a product that you promoting. With this stats, you can then assume that by driving 200 unique visitors, you will be able to get an estimated 6 sales. These are all very important figures that an affiliate marketer should take note of. Every affiliate marketer will have his or her own unique stats and conversion number… you need to know yours. So you should always try to drive more traffic to your site. Article marketing, Squidoo, blogs, forums and search engine marketing are all great ways to get more traffic for your site.

Last but not least, do not give up. Sometimes, there will be bad patches that you will go through… like enduring a few days or even weeks without sales. As long as you persevere on and do the necessary work, you will pull through and see light at the end of the tunnel.

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Being an affiliate marketer is not as easy as ABC. If you want to make a full time affiliate income online, you need to treat affiliate marketing as a business and run it efficiently. Affiliate marketing is a very competitive industry, with millions of affiliates competing for pies of share in different markets.  In today’s blog post, we will discuss some of the important mindset that affiliate marketers should adopt so that they will be able to succeed in affiliate marketing.

One of the most important mindset that affiliate marketers should have is to treat affiliate marketing as a full-time business. I know some of you may have your own commitments in other work, but the least that you should do is to have an objective for you to step into affiliate marketing. What is your short and long term goal for affiliate marketing? How much affiliate income are you aiming to make per month? How many days and hours per week can you commit in doing affiliate marketing? All these are very important questions that you need to answer for yourself. Once you have answers for these questions, you can then work backward to achieve each of the goal that you have set. For example, if you decide to step into affiliate marketing part-time, the first thing that you need to determine is how much are affiliate income are you going to make per month - realistically.  Then you can come out with the time per week that you can commit to learning and doing affiliate marketing…

A lot of affiliate marketers who just started out do not have a clear objective for themselves. This will make them lose the passion and interest that they strongly have when they first decided to step into affiliate marketing - which in the end make them fall short of their goals.

The next mindset that you must have as an affiliate marketer is to recognize that - the main job of being an affiliate marketer is to direct traffic as fast as possible to the merchant’s sales page. If you have the slightest chance to get your site’s visitors to click on an affiliate banner within the next 5 seconds, make sure you DO IT. The longer they stay on your website, the higher the chance they may just leave without visiting the sales page of your affiliate products. The sales page of your affiliate products should be the ultimate selling page. The merchants have already invested tons of money and effort to come out with a good-converting sales page, so why not let the sales page do the pitching? Try not to make the content in your mini-site seems like a sales pitch or whatsoever if you really want to get more affiliate sales out of it. At the top of your site, you should place call-to-actions (e.g. banners or bolded affiliate hyper-link) that entice visitors to click on your affiliate links right away. Always grab the earliest chance that you have.

Last but not least, you need to build assets for your affiliate marketing business. You need to build assets such as websites, lists, or even competing products in the future. Even if you wish to step into affiliate marketing part-time, I will recommend you to spend a little money on building a website or a review site. At least with the site that you have built, you are owning an asset that will make you money for years to come provided you spend effort to market it.

All right, got to go for lunch, blog again soon.

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Squidoo is a very useful channel to drive traffic to your website. On Squidoo, you can create lens with content of any topic that you wish to share with others. Within your lens, you can insert URL links, either pointing them to your own websites or directly to the affiliate product merchant’s sales page. Because of Squidoo’s popularity on search engines, you can use it to drive organic search engine traffic to your website by having unique content and link popularity.

Sometimes, people might think that by having unique content in your Squidoo lens, it can get rank easily for multiple long-tail keywords, driving traffic to their websites. Yes, I am not saying this is not true, but for it to happen, it may take you some time. To rank faster for multiple long-tail keywords, what you need to do is to increase the link popularity of your Squidoo lens by getting more back links to it.  Before I touch on the various ways to increase link popularity of your lens, let me explain a little further on why you need to ultimately get your Squidoo lens rank well for multiple long-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are search phrases that people type in search engines that you can’t possibly predict. For example, if your website is selling acne products, one of your main key phrase could be “acne treatment”. However, if your Squidoo lens is optimized for long-tail keyword, your lens will appear high on search engines when people are searching key phrases like “How to get rid of acne fast”, “acne free in 3 days”, “why do I get acne and how can i get rid of it”, etc. As you can see, these phrases are extremely long-tail and the searchers may be really desperate for acne cure which will most probably result in affiliate sales for you. Hope that from this short illustration, you can see the importance of ranking multiple long tail keywords on search engines.

To get your lens optimized for long-tail keywords, there are basically 2 very important factors that you need to take note of: 1) Unique content with the right keyword theme 2) Link popularity.

What I mean by unique content with the right keyword theme is to base your content around a theme that you wish to target. Let’s take the acne industry as an example. In the acne industry, after I did a quick research, I can identify 2 keyword theme. The first is to get rid of acne or acne treatment, and the other theme is about getting rid of old acne scars. Although both of these themes are about acne, but you can see that the need of the people searching for these 2 solutions are completely different.

To get your lens rank faster for multiple long tail keywords, you may want to consider boosting its link popularity. The gerenal rule of thumb for increasing link popularity is to get back links. For your Squidoo lens, there are a few ways that you can do it. Personally, I prefer using EzineArticles.com to link back to Squidoo. This means that I will write articles and submit to EzineArticles.com and point my articles to my Squidoo lens. These will help boost the Lens Rank of my lens and thus bringing more traffic to my website. I also make use of various social networking and book marketing platforms to boost my lens popularity. You can book mark your lens at Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc or include links back to your lens on your various social networking profile like Facebook and MySpace. You can also ping your site by using pinging services from Pingomatic and Pingoat.

Once you see that you have succesfully built a long-tail squidoo lens, you can duplicate your marketing process and create more Squidoo lens for the niche that you are in. This will greatly increase your chance of generating more affiliate revenue in that market.

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