Affiliate Marketing Tactics to Survive Online

3 Online Affiliate Marketing Tactics You Can Use to Survive Online

Affiliate marketers are always on the lookout for programs and products that would give them the biggest commissions. Oftentimes, affiliate marketers believe that there is a magic formula for raking in money in affiliate programs. In reality, however, making money from affiliate programs involves a lot of hard work, perseverance and making use of good marketing practices that have been proven to work.

There are a number of tactics or strategies that affiliate marketers can use to increase their affiliate sales. There are three specific online affiliate marketing tactics that you, the affiliate marketer, can use to help you thrive in the online affiliate marketing world.

1. Promote affiliate products separately by creating different sites.

You may want to save money on web site hosting, but if you want to look professional -- both in the eyes of potential customers and the search engines -- you need to promote affiliate products separately. This means getting separate domains and creating separate web sites for the products you are promoting. You want each site to focus on just one product you are promoting.

It's recommended that you include product reviews and user testimonials for each product and publish them on their respective web sites. This way potential customers will have an idea of what the products can do. If you have first-hand experience about the products you're promoting, by all means write reviews of these products. You can also solicit testimonials from others who have bought the product. Testimonials are more credible if they are accompanied by real names and pictures. However, make sure that you have the permission of individuals before publishing their testimonials, name and photo.

Aside from publishing product reviews and testimonials on your sites, write (or hire someone to ghostwrite) informative articles related to the affiliate products you are promoting in each site. For instance, if you are promoting an e-book on how people can profit from Google Adsense, you can write can write a short but informative article about one of the topics or tips discussed in the e-book. At the end of the article, you can put your call-to-action, inviting readers that they can learn more about the topic discussed in the article as well as several more when they buy the e-book. Make your web pages attractive and your words compelling enough that visitors to your affiliate sites end up wanting to know more about the products you're promoting and eventually deciding to buy.

2. Create reports and give them away to visitors.

Make sure that your free report offers are highly visible on your affiliate web sites. If possible, place your free report offers either at the top left or top right of your main pages so that visitors see them right away. Now here's how your free reports work: interested visitors can receive free information in the form of autoresponder messages when they type in their e-mail address in the free report sign up box on your affiliate site. This is a great way for you to keep your sites and products fresh in the minds of your visitors. They may not buy from you the first time they visit your affiliate site, but research has shown that potential customers usually buy on your seventh contact with them. By offering a free report broken down into several follow up e-mails, you increase the likelihood of making that sale with each person who visits your site and signs up for your free report offer.

Keep in mind that once a visitor is on your page, there are only things that can happen: he will buy from you or he will leave your site. If this visitor signs up to receive your free report via e-mail, it gives you the opportunity to remind the potential customer about your site and the product you are promoting. When creating your free report, make sure that you put quality content. Give potential customers good reasons to buy the product. However, avoid making your follow up e-mails sound like a sales pitch.

In your free report, focus on how potential customers can benefit from the product you're promoting. Will it make their life easier? Will it help them accomplish things faster? Will it give them more free time to do other things? Appeal to people's desires. The subject lines of your follow up e-mails should also be compelling; they should encourage people to read the contents. However, when you're creating subject lines, avoid including "free" since older spam filters tend to dump e-mails with that word in their subject lines. You want to make sure that the people who requested your free report will indeed receive them.

3. Work towards getting targeted traffic.

Traffic is the lifeblood of any web site. However, if you want to succeed in the online affiliate marketing world, you don't want just any traffic pouring to your site; you want targeted traffic. Your affiliate web sites may be receiving thousands of visits each day, but if the people visiting your web site are not the people who are interested in the products you are promoting, those visits are virtually useless.

One way you can attract targeted traffic to your affiliate web sites is by writing articles and submitting them to article directories where they can be picked up by e-zine publishers and web site owners who need specific content. Make sure that each article you submit a resource box, which contains information about who you are or about the product you are promoting and a link to the web site. Aim to write and submit at least two articles each week. The articles need not be long; articles that are 300 to 500 words are ideal. If you don't have time or don't think you can write the articles yourself, hire a good ghostwriter.

Keep in mind that the articles you write and submit to article directories and publish in e-zines can generate as many as 100 targeted visits to your sites per day. Keep in mind too that for every 100 people who visit your site, only 1 or 2 are likely to buy the affiliate product you are promoting. This is why it's important that you continuously write and submit articles. If your articles can pull in as many as 1,000 targeted visits to your affiliate website per day, you can potentially make 10 affiliate sales per day.

All three online affiliate marketing tactics are not hard to implement at all. All it takes is some planning and time. Try one or all of them on a few of the affiliate products you are promoting and see how well they work. You will realize in time that these online affiliate marketing tactics do work and help you thrive as an online affiliate marketer.