The 3 keywords in affiliate marketing are platform, product, and funds.
Your product needs to be the first part done. It’s possible to sell without funds, you need a platform but that’s the next step, first you need a product. Way too many affiliate marketing companies sell products that nobody wants. Things like “free laptops” which nobody believes, and “ring-tones,” both of which spell spam all over them. The way that most people do affiliate marketing today is through commissions. They put up the links on their sites in the hope that other people will sell a lot of products through their account, and thus give them 3-5% of that for the referral. Though to some extent this will be successful, it seems like everybody is trying to do the same thing. I have yet to meet a blogger who is actually selling the products, as opposed to just going for referrals. Getting a good product can be challenging because it needs to be something original, but also something that everybody will want. For example alot of people try to sell amazon products. This I think is stupid because if they wanted to buy something from amazon, they would go to amazon and buy it. Unless you are writing the article purely to sell the product it doesn’t seem like that would work. I think the best way to be do both the referring and the selling, is with creating an e-book. Now if you haven’t thought of creating one already then don’t waste your time, you don’t have any new information to add. But if you do actually have good information, then creating an ebook can be really useful. Not only for publicity but you can make some good money from it. Now the key to selling it is to be original, and actually have information that nobody has told before. Now if you take this ebook, and put your referrals links in it, then you can be getting money not only for the ebook but also for the affiliates referral. Two birds in one stone. But the key to this is having a good product, so make it informative, original, and creative, and you stand a chance of selling it, but if it’s not don’t waste your time.
To successfully sell products you need a good platform from which to sell it. This can be the most difficult and tricky part. Because funds and product can be worked out, but if you don’t have a good platform your campaign will fail. The model platform is what shoemoney problogger, and johnchow have created, at this point all they need to do is give it a thumbs up in a blog post and it’ll sell. So we need to figure out how we can get our product out there. There are the obvious things of putting a link to it on our blog, but what if our blog isn’t popular? There are several makeshift platforms that can be good ways of getting your product out there.
1. Forum marketing
2. Commenting with your affiliate/ebook link as your url
3. Word of mouth
4. Make it into a 125×125 ad and advertise that
5. Host a contest to celebrate it’s creation, and post your referral links
6. Winning Free Reviews, or buying them
These are just some quick ideas, but I’ll be writing a more extensive post soon, because I googled this and found nobody has written anything on this, so make sure you check back for more ideas on advertising.
And the third key is Funds. Ever heard the saying, you need money to make money? Though this isn’t completely true it certainly helps. Anything you can do for free, with money, you can do better and more efficiently. If you are willing to make a gamble with some money then you can achieve a much higher level of success. I think the best strategy of all would be to create an incredible ebook, and then put some referral links and ads in it. And then buy a product review from John Chow for example. These cost 500$ but if you think about it, you could easily make that back with a good product. If you think of the thousands of visitors coming to his site everyday, you’ll only need a very tiny percentage to buy your product to make it worth it. However, this will only work if you truly have an awesome product, and if John Chow advocates it. This shouldn’t be too hard because you shouldn’t be creating an ebook that isn’t awesome anyway. If this gamble doesn’t pay off because John slams it, it properly serves you right for trying to sell spam content.
You can make money through the sales of the ebook and through the referrals. Say the ebook sells from 20$, which it could be more if it’s really that good. Then that’s 25 sales, which shouldn’t be that hard. Especially if you are selling it using the other ways as well. Now if you don’t want to use money you can still succeed, just it takes a lot more time and dedication. With time anything can be accomplished. Maybe you can exchange something with a lot of smaller bloggers to get reviews with them. If you start thinking about it their are lots of options. But I think the best strategies is through finding all the possible platforms you can, and utilizing them all to their fullest potential. With some originality and creativity anything can succeed, you just need the time to see it come to completion.
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