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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!

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

Popularity: 10% [?]

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: 13% [?]

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: 11% [?]

All the experts agree… when you’ve mastered all 17 of these sources of affiliate traffic you can virtually write your own online ticket to online wealth and super affiliate stardom.

However…

I must warn you that it’s NOT easy and there’s a LOT of work involved (which is why most people don’t even master one source of affiliate traffic).

I know you’re different from most others, so here are the keys to ALL 17 sources of affiliate traffic. The trick is to master one at a time until you can command vast floods of traffic at will. Who knows you might not even need all 17!

To help explain these traffic sources I’ve created a mindmap illustration so you can see at a glance how everything fits together…

Click here to download the 17 sources of affiliate traffic

Let me know how you get on and which affiliate traffic sources you master.

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

Popularity: 65% [?]

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: 71% [?]

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: 64% [?]

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: 37% [?]

Writing a review on products you’re an affiliate to is a great way of becoming a successful Big Selling affiliate marketer.

The beauty of writing an affiliate review is it helps to establish you as an expert in the market place, it helps to give you credibility.

Your role is to act as a credible information provider of information people want.

Now another benefit of using this approach of writing an affiliate review and combining this with a series of optin forms positioned strategically throughout the review is you can use Google AdWords to help you drive traffic to this page.

At the moment Google is penalizing markers whose optin pages are low on content so including valuable information on your review web page is going to give you a huge advantage and improve your AdWords “quality score”.

Writing a great affiliate review is very simple when you know how, the review is essentially a short article that explains the benefits and drawbacks of the product you’re reviewing.

The biggest question to ask when writing reviews is do you own a copy of the product you’re reviewing?

Obviously if you own the product and have tried it out your credibility will be so much higher, but I realize that buying every product you review isn’t always possible when you’re first starting out.

Let’s assume you don’t own the product you’re reviewing in which case you need to consider things like:

1. How relevant is the product to the market (end customers)

2. What are the potential benefits to the market

3. Find other reviews about the product you’re reviewing, when you do this you can sometimes find useful pieces of information you might have otherwise overlooked.

4. What reputation has the product creator/owner for quality. If their reputation is great you can mention that what they’ve created before has been of excellent quality.

5. Search through the sales letter of the site for the product you’re reviewing looking for benefits and features you can mention in your review.

6. Search through forums and blogs for any other information you can find about the product.

Google.com can help you with this kind of research, just type in the “product name” + review or just search for “product name”. If there’s anything negative this is how you’re likely to find it.

7. Write to the people in the testimonials featured on the products sales letter to see if they can give you some feedback on the product.

8. Contact the product owner and just ask them for a review copy of the product you’re reviewing. You might have difficulty with this until you’ve established your reputation online, but it’s always worth a shot.

Eventually you could be in a situation where you have people approach you with a copy of the product for you to review.

The basic formula for writing an affiliate review is this:

1. Gather information
What are your impressions of the product before and after you bought it?
(Your answer):

(If you didn’t buy the product look for other reviews in forums and blogs, if you can’t find anything give your opinion based on the content of the products sales letter).

What are the top 7 things you learned from this product?
(Your answer):

What one thing did you find most useful?
(Your answer):

Who would benefit the most from this product, who is it not for?
(Your answer):

What was left out of the product?
(Your answer):

How quickly can this product help you?
(Your answer):

What other skills or tools do you need to get the most benefit from this product?
(Your answer):

Lastly can you recommend it?
(Your answer):

By writing out your answers you’re building the ideal structure to your affiliate review.

2. Flesh out your answers
Now just follow through with each of your questions adding to it some more with any other relevant information you might have.

Be sure to introduce the product you’re reviewing quickly.

Give a compelling reason for people to read your review, this could be a strong headline and/or you start with a major weakness.

By starting out on a negative note it’s easier to grab attention, it draws the reader in because it’s more compelling than this is a great product. When you do this be dire to spin it into a positive.

Keep your writing conversational balancing out the pro and cons in the same sentence or paragraph.

Add something personal about yourself because it helps people to warm to what you’re saying.

Make it clear that you’re recommending the product, how strong is your recommendation. Why not use a star or points system to show your rating of the product?

Lastly be sure to work in clear calls to action, tell people what it is you want them to do.

If you’re already a big selling affiliate I have a special offer for you…

The next 5 people who write a review on one of these products and use the formula I’ve given you above will get the product you’re reviewing for free.

www.BigSellingNiches.com/workbook.html
www.BigSellingConversions.com/onetime.php

Just add your review of one of the products above as a comment to this post and I’ll send you a copy of the product you’re reviewing free of charge.

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

Popularity: 61% [?]

I’ve got something for you here that’ll show you a really powerful way of generating a vast amount of high quality keyword phrases to use when promoting our products as a Big Selling Affiliate using PPC (pay per click) search engines.

Just press the play button on the video below and you’ll see how it’s done…

Here’s what others have said about this video…

From David
Very nice video about generating list of targeted keywords! I will get it a try. Gave you a review and thumbs up on stumble.

From Geoffrey Cummins
This is brilliant. Many thanks. Just the kind of no bs info us keyword newbies need.

From Margaret Hampton
What an incredibly practical approach. Thank you. My keyword lists for my caregiver and health care focuses just expanded exponentially!

From Titos
Excellent technique, man. You really gave us the Easy Button for keyword research.

Action step:
Watch the video above and start building keyword phrase lists for each of the products we have that you can promote as an affiliate.

Here are a couple of our products to help you get started in building your keyword lists…

Domain: BigSellingConversions.com Product you earn commission on: Make My Website Sell!
Core keywords: website sales, website conversions, sales conversions

Domain: BigSellingNiches.com Product you earn commission on: The Niche Checklist Workbook
Core keywords: niche marketing, market research, niche profits

It’s the “core” keyword phrases I’ve given you above that you can use as starting points to build your own lists of keyword phrases using what I’ve shown you in the video above.

All the keyword phrases you find using the technique in the video above will come in very useful once you start setting up your PPC ad campaigns. It’s those keywords you select that make your advertisement for BigSellingConversions or BigSellingNiches appear in those PPC search engines you’ve set up ad campaigns with.

If you have any questions just post a message and I’ll do my best to help you.

In my next blog post I’ll show you where you can get discounted and free PPC advertising from, so stay tuned!

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

Popularity: 26% [?]

This is where we will spend the bulk of our time.

This is the most import part of the strategy — determining what is going to set you apart from other affiliates and give you that advantage that will help increase your sales and profits.

Step one, quite obviously, is to develop your incentive. What is it that you want to give away?

Determine what it is that you wish to offer as your incentive for making the purchase from YOUR affiliate link.

And not just “another free eBook.” Good grief, hasn’t that been beaten to death already?

(more…)

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

Popularity: 18% [?]