Hi Friends,
Anyone in this forum who is involved in AM and did it successfully ? If yes, what did you do ? If no, what was the stumbling blocks ?
I just read too many successful stories and begin to feel skeptical about it. Maybe its just a hype or maybe its not ?

Affiliate marketing is not just hype. You can indeed make money off affiliate marketing. I agree that many Internet marketers hype a lot of things these days. What you need to do is cut through the hype and try to see the logic behind it. Affiliate marketing is like salesmanship. We all know that sales persons have been around for a long time. Amazon (as I’m made to understand they are the ones that brought it online first) simply brought this brick and mortar strategy online.

What I will tell you, however, is that it’s easier to fail than it is to succeed online. I struggled a lot in order to start making any money online until I decided to learn the real “secrets” (the so called secrets are not really secrets at all) behind online marketing. Many merchants will tell you to simply copy and paste a code to your website and start making money. Yes this is possible if you already have a well trafficked website with the right audience too. If not then you won’t generate a single sale!

Besides traffic there are also some other things you will need to know. For example, how good the tracking software of the merchant really is. It’s very possible to generate loads of sales for a company and not get a single cent in commission. There a lot of things I can tell you about affiliate marketing, being an affiliate marketer myself and also an owner of an affiliate program, I really understand how the whole system works.

In a nutshell, do your research first before you decide to join any affiliate program. If you are not sure which kind of research you need to do post your questions here and I will help you out whenever I can.

All the best

Good day,

Great advice I have been successful in affiliate marketing because I did my homework and also I attend a IM University that has taught me how to do it.

It really shortened my learning curve.

I was doing it by myself but the learn by yourself was taking and costing me to much money.



Click here to Know Where I learned to Market and Make money with Full Support.!

Hi Blogmaster,

Thank you for your post. I read alot of books but still have no idea how to start. Some people says have yr own products, some says just do affiliate marketing..then after which traffic generation, tracking software, Seo, list building...all these got so overwhelming that I simply dunno how to start....

Is there a blueprint or maybe u can share how u got started....thanks a million...

Melvin, deciding whether to market as an affiliate or create your own products depends on various factors and your own circumstances. Either decision you make has it’s own merits and demerits. You will just have to decide which demerits you can put up with

Here are a few factors you may need to take into consideration when making this decision…

Having your own product gives you the freedom to set your own profit margins. You decide how much profit you want to make for every product you sell. You will also be able to set up your own affiliate program and decide how much commissions you want to pay your affiliates. Setting up an affiliate program is very easy and you don’t even have to buy affiliate software to get started. You can get a lot of experienced marketers promoting for you if you plan your affiliate program carefully.

Marketing your own product, however, brings with it a heavier burden. You would need to provide support to your customers and fast. This can be frustrating if you are marketing as an individual. The sheer volume of support queries you can get, especially if you are running a successful affiliate program, can wear you out. This is where affiliate marketing becomes attractive.

With affiliate marketing, the support that you need to provide is limited. If you decide to build an email list for your marketing campaigns then you may need to provide basic support to build a trust relationship with your subscribers. You can also simply direct all queries to your merchant if you like.

What I really admire about affiliate marketing, however, is the possibility of getting paid for leads you generate. The leads would not need to buy anything. This kind of affiliate program is usually found in affiliate networks, as bigger merchants are usually the ones that practice it. You can also drop none converting merchants whenever you like.

With affiliate marketing you can also launch your site much faster as you would not need to carry out some marketing research that is necessary when making your own product. For example, you would not need to research on a appropriate pricing strategy.

However, as an affiliate, you won’t have access to the merchant’s website files. Hence you will not be able to integrate it with your affiliate program. This means you would need to market all by yourself

Bearing these in mind, I say if you don’t have the money to outsource support or build your own support team, it’s better to start off as an affiliate marketer. It will also help you acquire the necessary skills you will find very helpful when you decide to finally promote your own products.

As you have noticed already, there are many ways of marketing your site. Which can be overwhelming All these help you build long a steady and long lasting traffic to your website. You will need a focused approach, however. Trying to implement them all at once will confuse your marketing strategy and makes it difficult to measure your success with a particular method. Try to dominate one strategy first and then move on when you build a steady and reliable traffic with that method. SEO is an ongoing process which starts the moment you start gathering content for your website. You would need to use appropriate keywords.

When first introducing a site, I always start by forum marketing. I love it because of the instead traffic that it builds. You also build a lot of one-way backlinks (for SEO) fast plus you can target your specific audience in their numbers. Put your site in your signature for the backlinks but for traffic you need to mention the site in your post. Make it the center of attention and you will get a lot of click throughs. Be very careful not to spam though. Mention it only when it is absolutely necessary. You can create the environment to make it necessary to mention it Just be creative.

A great way to get highly targeted forums is to search for intitle:”keyword forum” in Google. For example if I wanted to market a SEO related site I would search for intitle:"seo forum" in Google. I can then join these forums and start my marketing campaign

TIP: You will get more click throughs if you try to be the first one to reply questions. This way, anyone who reads the original post is likely to read your reply and click through to whatever site you mention in your post if it’s not familiar to him or her.

Hi Blogmaster,
Thank you for your detailed explanation.
I get a better idea now. I really appreciate your effort in detailing such a long reply. It really warms to know that you are willing to share so much info. I will visit this forum often to learn. Hopefully will be able to generate some income soon. Thank you once again.

No problem Melvin. You have started on the right track. When I started, I was nothing more than a webmaster. I just knew how to create website so I jumped into affiliate marketing without even trying to learn how to market effectively. It took me time to swallow my pride and decide to do some research I like helping people avoid the mistakes I made. So feel free to ask anything you like. I'm sure a lot of members around here will be glad to help too.

Hi Blogmaster,
Thank you. I really appreciate it.
I will learn as i go along.

Melvin

Yeah great post.

I've found that in order to be successful in affiliate marketing online you need to test your results and also follow those that have gone before you and succeeded, why re-invent the wheel.

Clickbank.com is a must to go there and sign up. The you need to start getting traffic via adwords and also submitting articles that are relevant to the topic. You landing page needs to have a optin form to get visitors email addresses so you can follow up with them. Send them to an autoresponder and let it do the follow up for you.

See example here http://www.ihavetoadmit.com/getrichquick3.htm

Then you must keep learning because there is so much to know when it comes to this internet thing and it changes on a monthly basis...


enjoy