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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!

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 40% [?]

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.

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 32% [?]

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…)

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 39% [?]

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…)

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 35% [?]

Getting traffic to your website is mandatory if you are trying to promote something you are selling or a message you want to spread.  Before investing any money or time in many other resources there are 3 methods you should put into action for getting website traffic without having to spend a dime doing so.

1. Linking
Links to and from other websites is perhaps the most powerful method of increasing your ranking and bringing in a steady flow of visitors.  The search engines will give your site the attention you deserve as long as you are linked to sites that are related to yours.

Linking must also be a gradual process.  Search engines will penalize you if they suspect anything unnatural about the amount of links involved in your exchange with other websites.

2. Meta Tags
Work on the Meta Tags in your site by including keywords that will reach your target market.  Meta Tags help the search engines describe your website. Some HTML knowledge is required but there are plenty of tutorials online, so don’t let it scare you.

You may also hear about the lack of importance some people place on Meta Tags, but I wouldn’t let that stop you from putting an emphasis on something that won’t cost you any money to do and could add some extra visitors to your site.

3. Keyword-Rich Content
As much as traffic is critical to the survival of your website the content placed on your site is the key to getting it.  Adding or writing quality articles that gives the reader reliable information will increase the visibility of your message and subsequently a steady flow of website traffic.

Using the right keywords in these articles will give you a stronger chance of reaching the all important rankings in the search engines.  There are a handful of free keyword suggestion tools you can use to help you find those keywords.  As you become more experienced with traffic building you will realize how incredibly important the right keyword usage is to your success.

Using the 3 methods above can get you on the right path to getting a consistent flow of website traffic and since it won’t cost you any monetary investment there is absolutely no reason not to take advantage of putting them into action. But if you would prefer a step-by-step action plan I offer a very powerful e-book called Flood Your Site With Traffic.

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 51% [?]

I bet you can’t tell me the best way to use ezine articles to promote one of our big selling products.

Go ahead. Give it your best shot. Out loud. Say it. Whatever comes to mind, just blurt it out.

I’m listening.

The fact of the matter is, most people don’t really understand how to BEST use ezine articles to promote an affililate product.

They know they are supposed to write an article, include some kind of clever offer in the text or in their resource box, and convince editors to publish their article. But that’s as far as it goes.

However… there is a *very* clever way to use your article to promote like you’ve never seen before.
And I’m going to share it with you right now.

There are only five steps. And they are all super simple…

Step 01: Choose the product or service you want to promote.
This one is kind of a no-brainer. It all begins with deciding what you want to promote.

It could be:

www.BigSellingNiches.com or www.BigSellingConversions.com

We’re talking about an actual offer you want to present that you’ll earn profits from when readers of your article make a purchase.

Decide what it is that you want to promote through your free ezine article. And then move on.

Step 02: Determine your “useful, but incomplete” approach.
I love to use what Jimmy D. Brown has coined as the “useful, but incomplete” approach when using freebies of any kind. (Ezine articles, free eBooks, reports, eCourses, etc.)

(more…)

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 72% [?]

WordPress is a real must have tool for any Big Selling Affiliate marketer but it comes a small price to pay. For your blog to be successful you need to keep it regularly up-to-date, which means you need to keep coming up with fresh content.

It’s this fresh content that gets you the attention of the various search engines who deliver you the targeted traffic you need to succeed.

That was until now…

Just the other day I came across this excellent free PDF ebook called: “How to develop money-making niche sites with WordPress”. I read through it and realized that this is a perfect training guide for the affiliates I’m training within my Big Selling Affiliate partners program.

This ebook takes you through step-by-step how to install and configure an SEO optimized blog you don’t need to keep updating every few days.

In previous posts I’d shown you how to write affiliate reviews, so adding them to a WordPress blog is the next logical step to take for all the reasons you’ll discover when you read through this excellent ebook I’m about to give you.

Here’s what you can expect to learn:

• Chapter 1: Getting and Installing WordPress
• Chapter 2: Basic WordPress Administration. 10
• Chapter 3: Installing a New Theme. 13
• Chapter 4: Setting up Adsense On Your Site. 16
• Chapter 5: WordPress Plugins. 20
• Chapter 6: Creating Your Site Content
• Chapter 7: Final Thoughts
• Appendix 1: Uploading Using FTP.. 33
• Appendix 2: External Resources

If you don’t already have a WordPress blog set up and running following the instructions within this book will help you take your affiliate marketing to the next level.

Here are the important actions steps for you to take:

Step 1: Download your copy of “How to develop money-making niche sites with WordPress“

Step 2: Print out and read through the ebook and follow the instructions on how to install your “set and forget” WordPress blog search engines will love.

Step 3: Read my blog post article here about how to write an affiliate product review for one or both of these products:

BigSellingNiches.com
BigSellingConversions.com

Step 3: Add those reviews you’ve written to your new search engine optimized WordPress blog.

Step 4: Look for other related products you can also review as an affiliate and add them to your WordPress blog.

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 56% [?]

Once you’ve registered your domain name it’s time to set up your website which will feature the affiliate reviews you’re going to write.

Previously I mentioned to you about the importance of branding. I know I’ve mentioned it to you time and time again, I do this because it’s such an important aspect of affiliate marketing that few people really understand and leverage.

Did you read this article post about how to write an affiliate review? Great! because here’s how to build a website where you can feature them all.

It’s this website where you drive a majority of your traffic, it’s also through this website that you build yourself a list of subscribers you can contact time and time again.

So are you ready to get started?

The first thing you should have done by now is to have registered a domain name for yourself with GoDaddy.com or another reliable domain registrar.

Here’s what I want you to do next…

Step 1: Go to www.Weebly.com

Step 2: Create a free account

Step 2: Give your website a Title (Make sure your title includes your main keyword phrase). Recently I created a short video that shows you a powerful method of keyword generation using the Google AdWords tool. You can watch it here.

Step 3: Add the elements your home page is going to need, I would select from there “Paragraph with title” and start from there. Remember what you’re creating here is a page for a review you’re going to write for a Big Selling product (as an affiliate).

Don’t worry too much about how it looks right now, you can easily edit things later on, including the design of the website.

Step 4: Once you’ve added the elements you think you’re going to need to get started you can begin editing them…

Step 5: Remember it does not have to be perfect! just get started.

One other thing you can do is add your own custom HTML which is perfect for adding your autoresponder form code. As I’ve suggested before you should include your optin form on every page of your website.

Be sure you have something of value to offer people inreturn for their details. For example you could offer them a copy of this report which you can add your affiliate links to.

Step 6: Once you have the basic structure of your page in place you can change the design of your website.

Step 7: Now you have your first page more or less set up you can start thinking about what other pages you’re going to have on your website. Take out a piece of paper and plan out the content of your site.

Here’s what I suggest you do…

1. Write an affiliate review of BigSellingNiches.com and BigSellingCoversions.com and feature them on your website. I showed you how to write an affiliate review here.

2. Set up one page for each of these reviews that you write

3. Create an “About Your Name” page which contains information about you, what your background is and how you’d like to help people (include your optin form on this page too).

Step 8: Now that you have your site structure in place it’s time to add the domain name you’ve purchased to your website.

All you do is go to the “Settings” tab at the top of the page, select “change site address” then select option C. All you do then is enter your domain name and press the continue button.

When you do this you’ll then be given instructions on how to point your domain name to your new website.

So there you have it, how to set up and create your own website, this is the simplest way I know of on how create a website with just basic internet skills.

Owning your own website with it’s own unique domain name name are essential first steps to take in becoming a successful Big Selling Affiliate.

You can do so much more with Weebly as I’m sure you’ll soon discover, including adding video and RSS feeds. I suggest for now that you keep things really as simple as possible then grow from there.

As I mentioned earlier perfection isn’t nearly as important as just getting it done and launched. The best approach to take is to just improve things as you go along.

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 49% [?]

Registering your own domain name is a critical part in setting yourself up as a Big Selling Affiliate because it plays a key role in your branding strategy. The bottom line is it influences your markets “first impression” of your business.

In fact your domain name is much more than the “www” address people use to access your website.

Consider all the different places your domain might be seen by a potential customer, for example…

• In your emails
• PPC advertising
• Forum and email signatures
• Newsletters
• Banner ads

I’ve mentioned in a previous post how you need to brand yourself as the expert in the market place and one simple way of doing this is registering a domain name like: YourNameRecommends.com or YourNameSuggests.com or YourNameReviews.com

This is powerful on many levels because it put you in the position of being able to build a name for your recommendations where you pre-sell our Big Selling products.

In addition to this a domain name like this is:

• Easy to remember
• Easy to spell
• Uses your personal name as a brand
• Uses a .COM extension (very important)

Once you’ve decided upon your .com domain name the next thing to do is to register it with GoDaddy.com. When you register your domain name you’re essentially renting it for 1 or more years, so during this time only you can use it. Every year you simply renew it so you can continue to use it.

Here’s how easy it is to register a domain name:

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 44% [?]

Becoming a successful Big Selling Affiliate is all about having the right mindset.

It’s a mindset of approaching affiliate marketing as a business, it’s not a matter of showing up and here’s $2,000. In fact there is no limition on how much you can earn as an affiliate, it’s only the limitations you add yourself that can hold you back.

You need to put in the same kind of time and effort as you would in any kind of business. This is only part of the whole picture because you also need to have the determination and belief that you can and will succeed.

It’s a case of if you believe you can or you believe you can’t either way you’re right! You really need to “believe” you can become a successful Big Selling Affiliate marketer.

It’s no use thinking I don’t know how to do HTML, or I don’t know how to build a list or whatever the obstacle might be. You need to have the attitude that whatever stands in your way can be overcome with your positive mental attitude.

Being an affiliate isn’t a 9-5 job where you have a boss to answer to, instead you need to formulate your own plans and goals for achievement.

So before starting out as Big Selling Affiliate you need to have a plan of action to follow which includes knowing the following:

1. How and where will you be driving traffic from?

2. How will you position yourself and your product in the market place? (I wrote an article about branding yourself here which is all about positioning yourself in the market place).

3. How much money do you have available to spend on advertising?

4. What is your expected return on investment for your first month? You need to plan for the 30 day delay in affiliate commission payments.

5. What are your mid and long term goals? Where do you see yourself in 6 months time, 12 months time?

It’s critical that you take forward steps each and every day that help build your business, no matter how small those steps are. It might only be 1 hour writing an article or a blog post, it’s all about long term results being built by consistent action over time.

You might consider writing and submitting 2 articles a week, or a short blog post every other day, or commenting on several related blog posts each week. As long as it’s consistent action that helps you build your business.

Being patient is critical! It takes time to build subscriber lists and becoming established in the search engines. So during your first month it might seem like you’re not making any progress at all. This is where you positive attitude and your long term plan comes in to place. These are the things that keep you focused and motivated.

This takes me back to what I mentioned earlier about taking consistent forward moving action with your business because as you move forwards 1 step at a time you build momentum. Imagine pushing a car from standing still, it takes a lot of effort to get it moving but once it’s moving it gets easier and easier to move quicker and quicker, this is exactly what I mean about being patient.

It’s all about being patient, staying positive, being consistent and being strategic.

To help you get on the right track here are 7 points you must take careful note of before you start your affiliate business:

1. Take one step at a time (this is all about patience)

2. Take massive action and put in the required effort until your plan works, but don’t forget to keep your plan fluid as you sometimes need to make course corrections to hit your target.

3. Focus on one proven business system at a time, if this is affiliate marketing stay with it until you have it working for you. Then grow your business using other systems.

4. Treat this as a long-term business, not as a hobby or something to pass the time. Seriously commit to being a successful Big Selling Affiliate.

5. Commit to learning basic internet marketing skills like traffic generation, article marketing, copywriting and testing and tracking. Don’t be distracted by all the other latest and greatest marketing systems and opportunities you’re going to see.

6. Create a plan for your business from day 1, decide what your goals are then work backwards from where you want to be to where you are now, then follow that path.

7. Give yourself deadline to work to because this prevents the urge to procrastinate and teaches you how to accomplish anything you set your mind to.

Become a free Big Selling Affiliate Partner here
Get your Big Selling Affiliate links and stats here

Popularity: 34% [?]