I’m not going to lie to you, I don’t know very much about affiliate marketing. I won’t sit here and pretend like I’ve made thousands of dollars on it, because I haven’t. But I have enough common sense to realize some basic strategies, and ideas that will be helpful. I’ve realized something today about Affiliate marketing that people seem to have missed. It seems very obvious but the past weeks have proved to me that people haven’t heard it yet.

Tip #1 (Very Important!!)

Don’t Follow the Crowd

Phrase it however you want, “don’t just copy what everybody else is doing.” Why does this have importance you say? Because all of the Affiliate Marketing and Make Money Online sites are copying each other. Now I realize you’re trying to make money, and yes it’s probably a great product. But I’ve already read a bunch of other reviews on it. I’ve read at least four articles in the last couple days on the OIOPublishers 90% sale, and Blogging to the Bank 3.0. (Notice, I didn’t put referral links on those, now that would’ve been sly…) And yes I realize you’re trying to make money from referrals. But seriously why would somebody buy it from you, if ten other sites are all saying the same thing. I’ve got nothing wrong with bloggers trying to make money, and go for referrals if you want. But either be the first one, or go for some originality. Try to find older products that new bloggers might not have heard about. The blogosphere grows by the thousands every day, there’s a high chance a lot of your readers won’t have heard of it. So try something new, don’t just advertise the same products as somebody else. I’ve even seen advertisements for both of these products on the same blog, only a couple days apart. Honestly, you make yourself look desperate. I don’t know how much it effects your readers or not, but I’m sure it annoys a lot of them. I bet you if you were selling a great product that wasn’t very popular yet, you’d make a lot more money in the long run.

Basic idea right? Well we’ll see… Comment if you’ve seen more like these. Aweber had it’s streak for a while, but I’m sure there are tons of others you’ve seen. They come suddenly for a couple weeks everybody’s blogging about them, and then they’re gone.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.