This is a guest post by Roderick Coleman from QueryAds.com – In this post he tells us 3 basic elements of affiliate marketing around which you need to practice your skills for coming out as successful affiliate marker.
One of the biggest problems with affiliate marketing is it’s really tough to break into from a standing start. It’s not simply as easy as sticking up a few review sites, with well-placed affiliate links, though when I first started, that’s what I was lead to believe.
You need a list, an opinion and a product to suggest, and you need to be selective. It’s not simply a case of putting up as many things in one niche as you can find – instead it takes a lot of solid work to become trusted, to be able to offer opinions that people want to hear, and most importantly of all, how and when to promote to people.
You’ll find that this results in less disappointed customers, and will help you improve the accuracy of the reviews you’re giving and standing by.
The ABC’s of Affiliate Marketing
There are three basic elements to affiliate marketing
- Someone to promote to (usually a list, a blog or a trusted website);
- Something to promote (that you’ve reviewed);
- An opinion on the product you’re selling.
While the third one is sometimes optional, and you can promote something (without reviewing it) the best affiliate marketers have a trusted opinion that people will follow and use when buying products recommended to them.
While sometimes it’s easy to simply recommend to people and leave them to make the final choice, experience suggests that the most important thing is that your recommendations are good ones the majority of the time
What to Share and What to IGNORE
The first question an affiliate marketer has to ask himself is what to promote. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that high ticket items mean high quality, which means they should practically sell themselves. That all you have to do is share them with your readers. Unfortunately, even if it were that simple, the question then becomes which ones do you promote?
One of the easiest ways to work with your affiliate marketing projects is to have a strategy – promote what you know, and in your niche. Unless you’re promoting something brand new, you can also check our reviews before you promote it to your lists.
One tactic is to work your way up – promote smaller items until your readers trust you, then work up to bigger items. Find a good balance of ‘small’ and large items to promote to your readers, but remember, don’t overwhelm them. Alternatively, become known for sharing the absolute best, no matter what the price tag.
Reputation
One of the biggest issues an affiliate marketer has to take on is reputation. You will get a reputation for sharing every product that crosses your desk just as easily as you’ll get a reputation for sharing the best things available to date and being selective. It’s your choice.
If you do choose to recommend everything in a certain niche, be aware that people will ask if you’re testing what you recommend – and if you don’t report things like bugs and other problems, alongside the good, they may be less incline to accept your recommendations.
On the flipside of this, if you’re only promoting what you test thoroughly, you’ll find that investing your time into testing items comes at a cost, so there has to be a happy medium for you. One way around this is to tell people it was recommended to you and that you trust that recommendation.
How and When to Promote
Many people find that they are buying products and services from promotions directly in their emails – this makes a massive difference to whether people buy or even just look at promotions – it’s why all the big dogs have their own lists and let other affiliate marketers promote to their lists. It is a booming multimillion dollar industry and there’s always room for honest marketers with solid opinions.
You don’t need to be a sales expert, but you do need to give people the information they want and need – and in many cases, they want and need ‘in the trenches’ opinions from people using the products or services that they want. And you can be that person.
Blog posting and mailing list promotions alike benefit from being posted on either a Tuesday or Thursday lunchtime – preliminary reports suggest that’s when people look at posts most readily in their inbox or RSS reader, but there aren’t any conclusive studies on when best affiliate marketer sales happen as yet.
Conlcusion
Whether you’re interested in affiliate marketing to monetize areas of an already established niche site, or you’re building a list with the express purpose of promoting to it, affiliate marketing can be lucrative if you remember the ABC’s, preserve your reputation and ensure you promote at the right time, and the right items. Then, you’ll be a successful and comfortable affiliate marketer, with a trusted review capability that can promote just about anything and be trusted.
Every one who wants to be affiliate marketer should make mailing list from beggining. Its very important thing.
Right on Roderick! These ABCs are crucial. This is not only for newbies but for existing slow and slacking marketing business.
You can be successful in online business by doing the right thing, it’s following the BASICS. Just like in SEOs, we often do organic techniques like as following the basics. Sometimes we do some articles, blogs and web reviews.
Hi Roderick
Lots of helpful information that those of us who want to plunge into the already crowded affiliate market need to take notice of to achieve success.
At the moment I am selling sourced products both offline & online. When I start adding affilate products to go with my already beautiful products I am selling this information will be useful.. This post has been really informative. Thanks Roderick. Much appreciated.
I agree 100% that you need to build a reliable reputation first before you can become a successful affiliate marketer. I often recommend to people wanting to make money online to start blogging first, build a name, before they start blogging to make money. It makes them more credible and would give them something to start with rather than selling things right from the get go.
This is a great post for newbies like me. Indeed, before before being the top of the line marketer, you have to start with the basics. If you mastered the basics you can play with new tricks and be the one to make new techniques for the biz.
Roderick – I totally agree, people will lead you to believe that affiliate marketing is as easy as putting up a few review sites, but really isn’t that simple and it requires more skill, determination, knowledge, and effort.
When it comes to testing a product to promote you can go a step further and contact the vendor (the people you’re promoting the product for) and tell them you’re interested in promoting their product and ask them some detailed questions about the product to help you better understand what you’re promoting.
If you’re lucky the vendor will probably give you full access to the product so you can take a look around and have a better idea of what you’re promoting. When you know more about what you’re promoting the better credibility you will have as an affiliate marketer.
I agree. Sometimes the basics are so obvious that we tend to get carried away looking for something more complicated to satisfy our complicated minds.
I’ve always heard about affiliate marketing with my techie acquaintances and have always been interested in trying it out. Sadly, I haven’t had the chance to as of yet. Thanks to your blog post however, I think I finally understand the concept behind affiliate marketing. I always knew that you earn through commissions. It’s just that I didn’t know how.
If you make a decision to run online business with affiliate programs for your own future, you need to prepare a good plan:
1. set goals for your future.
2. select niche and research affiliate products
3. acquire domain name, web hosting and web design
4. select traffic method and master it until you make money
5. focus it.