By
Mary Leigh Cox
A great deal has been written on internet marketing in general,
and affiliate marketing in particular. But it takes quite a lot of
reading to get to the point at which you understand the entire process
in overview. The purpose of this article is to give that overview.
There are three important factors which together contribute to internet marketing success:
1. Marketability
The best way to determine marketability is to find products that are already selling well. How do you do that? Here are two great ways.
Firstly, go to ClickBank and search the marketplace for the particular type of product you would like to sell. Then use the dropdown to sort the list by "Gravity". Broadly, Gravity indicates what is selling the most, and most recently.
Another way is to make use of the "Popular" lists that most online vendors use. Find a vendor who runs an affiliate program (look in the footer for the "affiliate" link) and then go to their "Popular" list and choose one of those products.
2. Getting traffic to your website
The more visitors you have, the greater your potential to make sales. One of the key factors is identifying a micro niche market that is popular but not too competitive.
Essentially a micro niche is a description of three to six words long. So, for example, "affiliate marketing" is a niche. "Affiliate marketing for beginners" is a micro niche. There are numerous products out there that will enable you to discover quickly and easily which search terms are searched frequently.
That is not the end of the story as you also need to find a phrase that is not already catered for by too many websites. In other words, how strong is the competition? Which is better, a phrase that attracts 500 searches a month worldwide that has 1,000 websites relevant to it, or a phrase that attracts 1,000 searches a month worldwide that has 500 websites relevant to it?
It is also important to ensure that at least your home page, and preferably every page of your website, is search engine optimised ("SEO"). This involves using page names that are human-readable ("affiliate-marketing-for-beginners.php" rather than "?page=25.php"), making sure that the title, description and keywords tags in the page headers have relevant keywords in them. If you are using WordPress (as most internet marketers do), Drupal or Joomla there are plugins or modules which help you to do this.
It is also important to build backlinks. What this means is to ensure that there are a lot of links pointing at your site, preferably coming from sites that already have high page ranks in the search engines. This gives you a lot of what is called "Google juice". One way to achieve this is to submit relevant articles to sites like EzineArticles, Squidoo and others. Use all of these techniques together. The aim is to get your site onto the first search engine page (usually the top 10 sites) for your chosen search phrase ( i.e. your micro niche).
3. Clinching the sale
Now that searchers have found you, you want to sell to them.
Sometimes most of the content on your site will just be search engine bait, which has got you your ranking. The real selling might be done on the landing page, that is the page on which the searcher first arrives, which has no other purpose than to sell a product. This page might be a "squeeze page" which has no header, footer or sidebars. It will link to a vendor's site in several places and will be worded from the start to ensure that the searcher realises that he or she only has one chance to acquire this product or has some other incentive to click through to the vendor's site. You will already have set up an affiliate relationship with the vendor so that when the searcher clicks through to the vendor's site ("just to see what this great product is") a cookie will be downloaded to the searcher's computer, which marks that searcher as "yours". Whether the searcher buys on that occasion or returns later, this helps you to get credited with the sale and receive your affiliate commission (often as much as 75% of the sale price).
Other sites take a more long-term approach. They aim to persuade the visitor to sign up to their email list. They do this by offering incentives, for example a free "ebook" (a short manual in pdf form). Once signed up, the searcher receives a series of emails over a period of time. This process is automated, through what is known as an auto-responder. The website owner has already set up this series of emails, some of which will be informative (to encourage the reader not to unsubscribe) and the others will be seeking to sell products which will earn the website owner commission. It is easy to set up an autoresponder via email marketing providers such as Aweber and Constant Contact.
Other website owners will rely more or as much on their content. A lot of vendors (e.g. Amazon) provide code to their affiliates that can be pasted in, and hey presto suddenly your site is showing a beautifully-formatted internet store, which looks just like it's part of your site, but in effect it's just a branch of the vendor which earns you commission.
Article Source:
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mary_Leigh_Cox
There are three important factors which together contribute to internet marketing success:
1. Marketability
The best way to determine marketability is to find products that are already selling well. How do you do that? Here are two great ways.
Firstly, go to ClickBank and search the marketplace for the particular type of product you would like to sell. Then use the dropdown to sort the list by "Gravity". Broadly, Gravity indicates what is selling the most, and most recently.
Another way is to make use of the "Popular" lists that most online vendors use. Find a vendor who runs an affiliate program (look in the footer for the "affiliate" link) and then go to their "Popular" list and choose one of those products.
2. Getting traffic to your website
The more visitors you have, the greater your potential to make sales. One of the key factors is identifying a micro niche market that is popular but not too competitive.
Essentially a micro niche is a description of three to six words long. So, for example, "affiliate marketing" is a niche. "Affiliate marketing for beginners" is a micro niche. There are numerous products out there that will enable you to discover quickly and easily which search terms are searched frequently.
That is not the end of the story as you also need to find a phrase that is not already catered for by too many websites. In other words, how strong is the competition? Which is better, a phrase that attracts 500 searches a month worldwide that has 1,000 websites relevant to it, or a phrase that attracts 1,000 searches a month worldwide that has 500 websites relevant to it?
It is also important to ensure that at least your home page, and preferably every page of your website, is search engine optimised ("SEO"). This involves using page names that are human-readable ("affiliate-marketing-for-beginners.php" rather than "?page=25.php"), making sure that the title, description and keywords tags in the page headers have relevant keywords in them. If you are using WordPress (as most internet marketers do), Drupal or Joomla there are plugins or modules which help you to do this.
It is also important to build backlinks. What this means is to ensure that there are a lot of links pointing at your site, preferably coming from sites that already have high page ranks in the search engines. This gives you a lot of what is called "Google juice". One way to achieve this is to submit relevant articles to sites like EzineArticles, Squidoo and others. Use all of these techniques together. The aim is to get your site onto the first search engine page (usually the top 10 sites) for your chosen search phrase ( i.e. your micro niche).
3. Clinching the sale
Now that searchers have found you, you want to sell to them.
Sometimes most of the content on your site will just be search engine bait, which has got you your ranking. The real selling might be done on the landing page, that is the page on which the searcher first arrives, which has no other purpose than to sell a product. This page might be a "squeeze page" which has no header, footer or sidebars. It will link to a vendor's site in several places and will be worded from the start to ensure that the searcher realises that he or she only has one chance to acquire this product or has some other incentive to click through to the vendor's site. You will already have set up an affiliate relationship with the vendor so that when the searcher clicks through to the vendor's site ("just to see what this great product is") a cookie will be downloaded to the searcher's computer, which marks that searcher as "yours". Whether the searcher buys on that occasion or returns later, this helps you to get credited with the sale and receive your affiliate commission (often as much as 75% of the sale price).
Other sites take a more long-term approach. They aim to persuade the visitor to sign up to their email list. They do this by offering incentives, for example a free "ebook" (a short manual in pdf form). Once signed up, the searcher receives a series of emails over a period of time. This process is automated, through what is known as an auto-responder. The website owner has already set up this series of emails, some of which will be informative (to encourage the reader not to unsubscribe) and the others will be seeking to sell products which will earn the website owner commission. It is easy to set up an autoresponder via email marketing providers such as Aweber and Constant Contact.
Other website owners will rely more or as much on their content. A lot of vendors (e.g. Amazon) provide code to their affiliates that can be pasted in, and hey presto suddenly your site is showing a beautifully-formatted internet store, which looks just like it's part of your site, but in effect it's just a branch of the vendor which earns you commission.
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