Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

by Kenneth Catto

If you're an affiliate marketer and you are directing traffic straight to your affiliate link, then you are doing it all wrong. By making this common mistake you are missing out on a huge income potential. A better way to set up your affiliate marketing campaign is to set up a squeeze page.

What's a squeeze page, you ask? It's a page which has an overview of the specific service which you are marketing including a form requesting the name and email address of the person viewing your page. If the person is interested in hearing more about your product or service, they will fill in the form, click submit, where they will be directed to a thank you page including an exact link to your specific product or service. Notice that said "exact link", this means you don't just direct them to your homepage where they will have to search through all of the products and services you are selling. You direct them to an exact link where they will see more information about the product that got them interested in visiting your site. Nothing turns customers off quicker than directing them to some general website that sells a bunch of stuff.

Something else to keep in mind is, for every product or service you want to promote; you must have a separate squeeze page for each. This is really the key to marketing online successfully. You should start out with only one affiliate program and create your marketing campaign, where you will focus on a couple of products to promote through squeeze pages.

Another way to market your goods is to design your own website and/or blog. You can get a free blog through www.blogger.com and a website through www.freewebs.com.

For those who don't know, a blog is a type of website which contains journal-like posts which are updated frequently. You can create a blog around any topic you choose, and sign-up for affiliate programs which correspond to your topic of interest.

Also, it's a good idea to get your own domain name for your website. You can get a free domain with no ads through www.co.nr. From here you should create posts on you blog and ping it every time you submit a new post. This simply means that you will request other sites to be notified that you have updated your site. This will trigger your site to be crawled by indexing spiders, which will increase you site's popularity (thus increasing your search engine rank).

After setting up you blog, you can create posts which contain a link or two to your website or an affiliate link which is relevant to the topic of your post. The benefits here are two-fold, you are advertising without "selling" (no one likes to be sold) and you are increasing the number of links to your site which will increase your rank on search engines.