Affiliate Marketing: what to look for to get started?

Image via WikipediaAffiliate Marketing for Beginners
Avoid 3 Main Pot Holes in Setting Up Your Internet Marketing Program.

As you begin to look at where to begin when starting out on the Web, there are some key points to cover before you spend a cent on anything. Affiliate marketing is a business after all, so take the time to think things through before you do anything.

Among the first considerations is where you should start and with what product or program; that all depends on your background, your interests and where you stand on the selling spectrum.

Pot Hole One—What Are You Knowledgeable About and What Are You Interested In?

There are many programs that will promise rags to riches no matter what if you just follow the easy steps to heaven. Well good luck to you. The first thing to ask yourself is what do you really know and what do you really believe in when it comes to starting your business. For example, if you are passionate about bicycling and ride 25 miles a week, you could take a niche market segment and market bicycling accessories. If you are passionate about helping your child with his/her learning disability, you could concentrate on developing a resource report on all the things you have learned to help prepare that child for college. Whatever your experience you should gravitate to an affiliate program that fits your interest or passion if you have one.

You need to really believe in what you are doing and then select the product or affiliate program that you can sell on a natural and instinctive level. Your customers will feel and see it in your Web site or blog and you will see it in sales and profits.

Pot Hole Two -- Limit the Scope of Your Business

When you set up your affiliate online program, do not over extend yourself and join a large number of affiliate programs or sell too many products. It is best to start out with one solid affiliate agreement that pays a decent commission, say 50%, and concentrate on growing that business into a steady revenue stream. The goal is to start progressively and consistently increase your income with good traffic building and customer service techniques and practices. In this sense online business is no different than off line business; you want customer loyalty not customer service.

Once you have established your first solid business line, you can then move to a new one; one that will be based on customer feed back and market research you have gleaned from your first business line.


Pot Hole Three -- Sell What You Have Bought and Tested

In order to promote and sell anything, you need to know what you are selling. What are the features and more importantly what are the benefits your product or service offers? You should be intimately knowledgeable of the problems your target customers are facing and how you can solve their problems. What you are doing by working this way is getting your target customer to buy from you without the need to sell. They should see you as a resource and a trusted solution provider with just what they need to make their life better.

For that to happen you need to buy, test and confirm that your product or service works. What are the benefits? What are the deficiencies? How does it work for your target market? Once you buy into the business solution you are offering, you will not need to sell it because your customer will sense at a very basic level your deep commitment to the business solution.


Conclusion

Many affiliate marketers make the mistake of taking a Shopping Mall approach by just picking hot or top ranked affiliate programs and setting up quick and dirty sales pages to promote as many as possible. That approach has some short term buzz but no long term legs. That explains why they continually come out with new promotions every week to make up for the drop off in business that comes with poor customer retention.

So take the time to build your business, one block at a time. Create a place where your customer sees you as a trusted solution and your customer will return, referrals will grow and your income will grow with your internet marketing program.


May Your Travels Be Prosperous

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3 Key Steps in Finding a Profitable Market

How to target a market

If you are thinking of setting up an online business, one of the first things you need to think about is finding a profitable market in which to develop your business. You need to find your target market.


Profitability

How do you go about doing this? Look for a market with high profitability. You want to find a product or service for which there is high demand. High demand means good chances of high profitability. You also want to see high competitive activity or supply. Why? Because that means people are making money. It means there is a good chance you can position yourself to make a good profit if you plan your marketing wisely.

Categories and Keywords

Some typical areas of high demand and strong supply are categories such as internet marketing, stock, currency and index trading, health programs, weight loss and even gasoline efficiency for your daily commute. You can determine how these areas are doing by going on Google to find the dominant keywords for a particular product or service. Google Adwords is a great tool to use for this purpose. For example, look up affiliate marketing or currency trading and see the results you get. With the keywords from your research, you can then do a Google search to see what businesses pop up.

Check out the top sites both in the organic return down the middle of the page and on the top and right column where the paid sponsorships display the level of interest for paid leads. A presence of paid sponsors indicates that people are paying for ads and making money for the product or service you are researching. It also shows you what the competition is doing and what you need to incorporate in your own planning to get good results.

Marketplace Sites

Another option in evaluating the profitability of a product/service is to join Clickbank, Paydotcom, cj.com or any number of resell sites for product and services. With Clickbank, for example, pick a market category that fits your prospective product /service. There you will see the leaders in the category. You will also see the level of affiliate sales activity, the commission amounts being paid, information about the product and the contact information of the owner or originator of that product or service. This information will tell you, who is making money and what the business sector profitability is. With this information you can decide to rep a product or service or find something similar to resell or develop yourself.

Affiliate System

Once you have made your choice of a profitable market area, you want to find a specific product, preferably a digital product, that you can “front end” to get started. In this model you want to own resell rights and make your offering of affiliate resale rights at a very low cost, somewhere between $10 and $20. You offer your affiliates a commission of 75-100% for the delivery of leads to your web site.

This affiliate system will help you develop your customer base to which you can cross sell and up sell all sorts of related products/services and that is where you will make your income. These back end products can be cd’s, DVD’s and all sorts of software needed to carry an online business.

Part of the process of setting up your online business means you will need to register a domain name and sign up with a web hosting service. Your Web site will be the place for your presell, sales and order pages. You will also want to sign up with an autoresponder service to organize your email responses to your affiliates and customers.

Conclusion

When this early research and set up process is done, you will have a chosen a profitable market sector and you will have selected a list of products that you can front end and back end to grow your business. You will be ready to move to the next stage of your business development; working out a marketing plan to capture and grow your customer base and preparing the final stage of launching the actual business.

With careful research and preparation on the front end you will increase your chances of success when you are ready to make your move.

May your travels be prosperous.


Over the past 20 years Claude Pelanne has worked in a series of startup ventures including some of the first commercial webcasts. He is an internet marketer and serial entrepreneur. Get information on internet marketing at cpelanne or claudepelanne

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