This is likely the one area where most new affiliates get confused, and there are several reasons for that confusion:

1. It is possible to do affiliate marketing without your own site or lead capture system.
2. Setting up a website and lead capture system requires technical knowledge that some people don’t have.

Let’s talk about the technical angle, first. Just how computer savvy do you need to be? If you are going the do-it-yourself route, you need to learn the following:

1. How to register a domain name
2. How to sign up for web hosting
3. How to make your domain name point to your web host
4. How to create a basic web page
5. How to set up an ‘autoresponder’

While there’s not quite enough room in the report to explain each of these steps in depth, I can assure you that they are quite easy once you’ve seen how to do them.

Creating a web page, for example, is a lot easier these days because most web hosts offer a “what you see is what you get” type of site design software that looks and functions a lot like a word processing program.
Also, you’ve always got the option of finding someone more technically savvy to help you - maybe a neighbor, relative, friend or even a freelancer that you hire to do the whole set up for you.

Now, let’s talk about this idea of doing affiliate marketing without a website.

The thing to understand is that your affiliate is your key to earning commissions. That link needs to be somewhere on a website, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be your website.

For instance, let’s say you created a promotional video and uploaded it to you YouTube. There’s a ‘description’ area that you can fill in for the video, and this information appears on the page YouTube creates to serve your video.

If you want to do so, you could drop your affiliate link into that description area.

Any traffic going through your affiliate link there would be YouTube traffic. You’re basically ’stealing’ both their traffic and their website capabilities. Make sense?

Some affiliate marketers love doing this sort of thing, but there is a definite purpose to having your own website, and to capturing targeted leads.

Why We Use Websites and Lead Capture

The two primary reasons for having your own website are as follows:

1. You can send whatever traffic to it you want, and control what that traffic sees when it arrives.
2. You need a web site in order to put up your “lead capture form” for collecting the names and email addresses of your visitors.

Again, let’s look at why you’d want to do things this way. First, why do you want total control over your traffic? It is quite simple: if you control what your visitor sees, then you control what he thinks.

That sounds more Orwellian than intended, but it is an important truth.

First impressions are very important, and you’ll be a lot more successful in your affiliate business when you control what information your prospects see about the affiliate product you’re promoting, and when they see it.

Second, there’s the matter of “following up” with your visitors. If someone comes to your website, looks around for a few seconds and then leaves, you’ve lost a potential sale.

A certain percentage of your visitors are going to leave, but many of them would be happy to receive more information (follow ups) from you.

In order to send them that information, you have to have a way of contact them. That’s why you collect their names and email addresses.

By giving you that information, they indicate their interest in your information, and you can follow up on that via email.

Instead of losing the visitor (a potential customer), you can ’slow drip’ information to him in order to ‘pre-sell’ or persuade him towards buying a particular product.

This method works because people like to be sold to, when you do it right. Give them free information. Show them the benefits of the product you’re promoting. Make them focus on the solution or end result of owning the product.

The ability to follow up is the number one reason for an affiliate to own a website and lead capture system. You can prep your customer to be in a buying frame of mind before he reaches the merchant’s web site!

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Popularity: 70% [?]

Many people first learn of affiliate marketing during the course of absorbing all the information they can about Internet marketing and home-based businesses.

The people selling you the information are, of course, Internet marketers.

Hence, many people decide to start their affiliate marketing journey by promoting Internet marketing related products.

Some ‘gurus’ will tell you not to do this, and to focus on an unrelated niche, instead.

There’s wisdom in this advice, but getting your feet wet as a newbie affiliate by promoting the products you know best is also a great way to start.

Is it competitive? Yes! Can you learn a lot from promoting Internet marketing products?  The answer: most definitely!

So, rather than try to persuade you away from promoting these types of products as an affiliate, I’d like to share with you some tips on how best to succeed at the game.

Success Tip #1: Promote What You Know
While it is tempting to promote the latest ‘big name’ Internet marketing product, I’d recommend avoiding that tactic unless you own a copy of it already and have studied it thoroughly.

The absolute best way to improve your copy writing skills, as well as build a trusting relationship between you and your potential customers, is to know a product inside and out. You should be able to provide a full review of a product’s ‘pros’ as well as ‘cons.’

Success Tip #2: Build Your List Relationship
You need to build a targeted opt-in list, and then focus on building the relationship with your list. This means you’ve got to send relationship-building material - such as free gifts, articles, etc - just as often as you send out promotional emails.

Your list can be a cash cow for you, but not if you treat them like a herd. Reach out and speak to your list’s interests and needs. Let them know you’re only one step ahead of them on the learning curve, and that you’re all in this Internet business together!

Success Tip #3: Brand Yourself
What do most of the top-name Internet marketers have in common?  They have visibility. The fact that you know their names points to how good a job they’ve done branding themselves. Each one has a ‘unique spin’ on the way he does business, too.

You’ve got marketers who brand themselves as ’super affiliates’, ‘expert copy writers’, ‘masters of traffic generation’ and so on. Many of them started out as affiliate marketers before they took the plunge into creating their own products.

So, ask yourself, what will separate you from the next affiliate promoting the exact same product?

If you’ll follow just these three tips starting today, I guarantee you’ll see a huge improvement in your results. You’ll convert more customers, earn more money and be well on your way to real affiliate success!

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Popularity: 80% [?]

One of the biggest mistakes made by novice affiliates is diving into their marketing campaign without a solid affiliate marketing strategy.

What does it mean to have a strategy, and why is it so important?  These are the questions we’ll examine in this article.

Any affiliate marketing strategy worth its salt will cover multiple levels of planning. In other words, your strategy should include things like: how you will present your offer to your market, how you will drive market traffic to your web site, how you will convert your customers.

Why?

Quite simply, you must learn to think of the entire sales chain from beginning to end. Conversion is crucial to each step in the process.

For example, getting someone to click on your pay-per-click advertisement should be considered a ‘conversion’ because the individual has taken the desired action of clicking an ad that leads to your site.
Once that visitor reaches your site, you must determine how you will convert them into ‘leads.’  Typically, you’ll capture the visitor’s name and email address to an opt-in list. In order to do this, you need a strategy for creating an attractive opt-in page offer.

Yet another strategy comes into play when you’ve gotten the lead onto your list. Your follow up email series must be designed to convert that lead into a customer.

However, conversions on new leads will not make up the bulk of your profits. If you desire serious affiliate income, you also need a post-sale follow up strategy.

What types of follow up offers will you send to your list of existing customers? This is important because the repeat customers are really your bread and butter.

Finally, think about how to expand your affiliate business.

Do you want to remain in the same market niche indefinitely? If not, consider your long-term strategy. You can replicate your current affiliate model into another niche.

This will add an additional stream of income to your bottom line, and is a great long-term strategy for building your own affiliate empire.

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Popularity: 67% [?]

Can’t seem to catch a break with your affiliate marketing efforts?

Spending too much money for too little return on investment?

Affiliate marketing can be as ‘easy’ as it looks from the outside, but you’ve got to focus on real, proven marketing tactics to make it work ‘big time’ for you.

Unfortunately, many people come to affiliate marketing with no idea what a truly successful affiliate marketing campaign should look like.

What you don’t know that you don’t know can hurt you!  So, let’s look at the top 3 reasons for affiliate marketing failure. If you’re having a rough time, I’ll bet you’re making at least one of these critical mistakes.

Mistake #1: Incomplete understanding of niche targeting
Have you ever asked yourself what it really means to target a niche? It’s not just about ‘widgets’ versus ‘blue cheap widgets’.  Key words can tell you a lot about the way a broad market breaks down into sub-markets, but they can’t give you the complete picture.

Niche targeting is as much about identifying the right *solutions* or products for the market as it is about identifying the market proper.

Any time you’re researching a niche, it is always a good idea to check out the top-selling books and magazines targeted towards that niche. What this will do is give you a better of idea about your market’s true needs and concerns.

Once you have this information, sit down and think about your ideal customer. What type of solution does he want?  Is your market looking for ‘fast’, ‘cheap’ and ‘easy’ solutions, or are they looking for something more comprehensive or of higher quality?

(more…)

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Popularity: 80% [?]

Affiliate videos are all the rage these days. The more personal, interactive ‘touch’ of video presentations adds up to more traffic and more sales when you execute the technique properly.

Getting traffic from videos requires more action than a simple video upload to YouTube. You’ve to couple together several parts into a strategic system before the ‘set it and forget it’ traffic starts to flow to your site.

Tip #1: Distribute widely
The secret to getting your video seen, then shared, is to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. This means submitting your video to as many sites as possible, not just the ‘bit three’ of YouTube, Google and Revver.

How about iFilm, Hello World, Vimeo and DailyMotion?

Did you know there are video channels on the social networking sites like Myspace and Friendster?
(more…)

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Popularity: 40% [?]

In order to generate real wealth as an affiliate, you must implement an income-building affiliate marketing plan that focuses on the long-term. There are three key areas one needs to examine in this regard:

1.    Leverage
2.    Recurring income
3.    Duplication

Leverage
The first step in building income is always in making proper use of the power of leverage. Investing your time and money wisely can help improve your existing business, and potentially double or triple your current income.

For example, maybe you’ve always wanted to create a high-ticket ‘follow up’ product to offer to your list of existing customers because you can’t find any comparable affiliate programs for such a product in your market?

If you’ll leverage your existing profits, you can hire someone to create such a product for you, along with all of the products images and web site graphics you’ll need to set up your very own merchant site.

What this will do is give you a new potential stream of income. You continue to make commissions on the existing affiliate product, while also generating sales where you get to keep 100% of the profit.

Likewise, if you don’t want to sell the product, you can use it as “bonus bait” for your existing affiliate promotions!
(more…)

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Popularity: 45% [?]