Photo by terren in Virginia

Let’s be honest here. For 99% of Internet marketers affiliate marketing sucks big time.

You spend a ton of time and effort and energy (and sometimes money) to send traffic to a sales page that isn’t converting any traffic into sales.

What a waste!

More traffic?

The solution is NOT sending more traffic to a sales page that doesn’t convert.

Traffic isn’t your problem; conversion IS your problem.

Unfortunately you have no idea what the conversion rate is for a sales page until you send a bunch of traffic to it.

Worse yet, once you determine that the conversion rate sucks, there’s nothing you can do about it because you’re just an affiliate.

How to fix this problem

The simple solution is to stop sending traffic to affiliate offers and instead send the traffic to your own email list sign-up page.

Once people are on your e-mail list you can test different affiliate offers to see how well they convert. If one of the affiliate offers converts poorly you still will have your e-mail list.

Get to know your list

Part of the problem with affiliate marketing is that you are trying to sell stuff to people without knowing what exactly they are searching for.  You have no idea what problems and needs people have.

Through your email list you can interact with your subscribers and find out what they’re really looking for.

You can invite them to ask questions and expect answers.  (If you go this route make sure you actually answer their questions!)

I have even bribed people with a free product if they simply ask me a question.

But how do you setup an email list?

I have several posts that show you how:

• 12 Steps To Setup An Email Newsletter, Get Traffic, And Make Money
• 3 things you can do with your e-mail list to build traffic and make money
• 8 Tips To Get Traffic And Make Money From Your Email List
• 11 Email Marketing Alternatives to Aweber

I would estimate that 3% of affiliate marketers make 97% of the money. This means that nearly everybody who starts out in affiliate marketing will never make any money. Those that figure out how to do it correctly can become very wealthy. There isn’t a lot of middle ground. Either you make it and do very well or you never make a dime.

Find a market

So one thing you need to do to be successful in affiliate marketing is to first identify a market (not a product!). Figure out what people are hungry for and then look for product to satisfy that hunger. Most people starting out do just the opposite.

How many units do you need to sell?

Once you’ve found a market and a product you need to figure out how many units you need to sell to make it worth your while. For example if your goal is to make $6000 a month and you are trying to sell $1 widgets then you will need to sell 6000 of widgets each month.

This means you have to sell 200 widgets every single day. If you have a conversion rate of 5% (5 out of 100 visitors buys) then you will need 4000 visitors to your website every day so you can make 200 sales. That a fair amount of traffic for most niches.

On the other hand if you are selling widgets for $200 then you only have to make one sale per day. If you have a conversion rate of 1% (1 out of 100 visitors buys a widget) then you will need 100 visitors to your website every day to make 1 sale.

100 visitors each day is far easier than 4000 visitors everyday.

Selling more expensive products can cut down on the amount of traffic you need.

Affiliate networks

There are many different affiliate networks and each one has great products that you can promote. Just find a market first and then look for product. I would select the network that had the products that best matched my market.

What most affiliate marketers do

The other problem with affiliate marketers is that they all do the same thing. They all put up the same banner ads and try to generate traffic with the same methods and they end up not making any money.

For example, let’s say there is $500 a day to be made in the widget market. So if you’re the only selling widgets then you should be able to make $500 a day with a single sales page banner ad.

But when 500 people start selling widgets with the same sales page and banner ad then that $500 a day is split between 500 people. The average person is going to only make $1 per day.

So to make it in affiliate marketing you need to do something to make you stand out. You need to figure out how to give more value than anyone else. This could be in the form of comprehensive product reviews. This could be in the form of the building a community where you answer peoples questions and they trust you and so they buy from you.

Introduction

Below are 3 articles I wrote on advanced article marketing totaling 2,100 words and I have combined them into 1 post.

• 2 Secrets to get Massive Traffic from Article Marketing
• This Ezine Article Has Been Viewed 546,866 Times
• How to Write the Perfect Resource Box

I have also included some other tips for article marketing.

2 Secrets to get Massive Traffic from Article Marketing

Become popular

To begin I would like you to head over to ezine articles and find an article in your niche. You can do this simply by searching for the keywords that you are targeting.

The article that you find is not really important as long as it’s in the correct category. It’s the category that we really care about.

Once you’ve located the article in your target category, I want you to scroll down to the bottom of the page.

At the bottom of the page you’ll see something like the following:
“This article has been viewed xxx time(s).”

This is the statistic that says how many times the article has been viewed. This number will be important later.

Now I want you to scroll up and look for the text that says:
Most Viewed EzineArticles in the xxxx Category (90 Days)

These are the most viewed articles in your category in the last 90 days.

The funny thing is that once an article makes it onto this list the number of views it receives goes up dramatically.

This is because as people finish an article they are looking for something else to read in that same category. And they come across this list of the most viewed articles and click on one of them giving that article another view.

So if you can only get on this list you’ll get more views. More views means your article is put on more websites which results in more traffic for you.

How to get on the popular list

I want to show you a quick and easy way to get on the popular list. It’s a secret that the experts use all the time.

What they do to get on the popular list is buy traffic. And they do it for super cheap.

There are a number of places that offer traffic for super cheap.

One place I recently used was:
http://www.donkeymails.com

In just a matter of a few days you can get hundreds of views to your article and get it on the popular list. Doing this will dramatically increase your exposure and increase the number of views to your article.

It’s important to know that Ezine Articles does not like this and is cracking down on this. DonkeyEmails.com works right now (April 5, 2009) for sending traffic but at some point it may not work anymore as Ezine Articles cracks down on this even further.

Use RSS to increase traffic to your articles

At the end of any article on ezine articles there is a link to the author’s page. This page shows a list of the author’s articles.

Here’s an example:
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacky_Chen

And near the top of this page you’ll see the text:
“Jacky Chen – EzineArticles.com Expert Author”

Next to this text you will see a little RSS icon which has a link to this author’s RSS feed.

Now what you want to do is take this RSS feed and submit it to many RSS feed directories. This will help build back links to your article, getting more traffic to it.

On my traffic tricks blog I have a list of RSS feed directories that you can submit your feed to:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/981_submit-your-rss-feeds-to-rss-directories/

Pretty easy, right?

Take action

I have just shown you two easy ways to dramatically increase the amount of traffic from ezine articles.

Now it’s time for you to take action and implement what you’ve learned.

This Ezine Article Has Been Viewed 546,866 Times

Getting down to business

So we all know that article marketing is a good way to get traffic.

Well that is of course as long as our articles get viewed.

Today I want to tell you about an ezine article that has been viewed 546,866 times.

That’s right, over half a million times!

The article

The article is titled: “How To Lose Belly Fat With A 10 Minute Workout”

You can get to the article by going to this URL:
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Lose-Belly-Fat-With-A-10-Minute-Workout&id=95932

So the question is: How did they do this?

And how can I do the same for one of my articles?

The power of the title

I believe the secret to getting so many page views lies in a fantastically written title.

When someone sees a search result they quickly scan the titles of each article and decide whether they want to click on that title link and view the article.

Once they’ve clicked on the link the article is shown to them the view count is incremented.

So this could be a crappy article and it wouldn’t affect the view count because by the time you read the article the view count has already been increased.

So the secret to getting lots and lots of views is in having a powerful title.

So let’s take a little time and dissect this title. Let’s find out what makes it so effective.

The power of how to

People are on the Internet because they want information. They want to know how to do something, or how to lose weight, or how to stop snoring. The common thread among all of these is the phrase “How to”.

How to is a great way to start an article. Anyone with a problem or need is looking for a how-to article.

Write about what people care about

This should go without saying that you should write about things that people are interested in.

Weight loss is something that millions upon millions of people are interested and losing fat around the belly is something that many people are also interested in.

When thinking about what you want to write about make sure it’s something that millions of people care about. If millions of people don’t care about your topic then you’re not going to get a lot of views.

Time scarcity

If the purpose of your article is to show how the reader can accomplish something in a minimal amount of time then make sure you mention it in your title.

People don’t have a lot of time to spend on things and are always looking for ways to get the most out of a short timeframe.

The article with half a million views does this perfectly. It says you can lose belly fat end it only requires a 10 minute workout. 10 minutes is a short amount of time.

Think of ways that you can use this in the articles that you write.

Popular because you’re popular

If you go to the article with half a million views and scroll down past the bottom you will see something that says:

“Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Health-and-Fitness:Exercise Category (90 Days)”

This is a list of the most viewed articles. If you can get your article onto this list then your views will go up dramatically.

Many people searching for articles will find an article, and after reading it will scroll down to this list and click on another.

Lots of people view the articles in this list. If you can get your article on this list your home free.

Keywords are critical

If you view the source of this article you’ll find the following keywords in the meta tags:
“lose belly fat,yoga mats,exercise,fitness,health”

The keywords you choose are important.

Find the most popular articles in your niche and look carefully at their keywords.  You may consider using some of them.

How to Write the Perfect Resource Box

The purpose of a resource box

The purpose of the resource box is to get people to click on the link you provide.

And nothing else.

If people are reading your article then they are hungry for information and looking for more. They’re not looking for some long biography about yourself and how great you think you are. They don’t care.

What they want is more information and that’s exactly what you’re going to give them and nothing else.

Do not mislead your potential website visitors

In our quest to get people to click on the link provided in our resource box it is crucially important that we do not mislead people. It will damage your credibility.

Every day on different forums like the warrior forum for example, I see people complaining about marketers who use misleading tactics. They gain a bad reputation. So don’t do this.

Use A Single Link

In trying to get traffic to your sites from your resource box it may be tempting to plaster it with links to your sites. Don’t do this.

Pick the link that works the best and focus your efforts on getting the reader to click on this one link.

The link should be super relevant to the article

It should answer the reader’s question, “Where can I go to learn more about this?”

Make your resource box a continuation of the article

When people finish reading the article they frequently skim over the resource box. Sometimes they skip over it completely.

So the trick is to make it look like it’s a continuation of the article.

People won’t skip over your resource box if they don’t know it’s there!

Mention the link in your resource box in your article

Some article marketers have found that it’s very effective to mention the link to more information in the middle of the article.

So the reader is halfway through the article and they come across a statement mentioning that there is more information in the link provided at the end of the article. When the reader finishes the article they will be far more likely to click on the link and get more information.

Keep your resource box short

People have very short attention spans and it’s important to keep things short and concise.

Where to put your best tips

If you have an article on 10 tips on how to lose weight fast I recommend putting your second best tip first and your very best tip last.

The first tip the reader sees should be your second best tip and this will entice them to keep reading. After you send your second tip you should mention that you saved the best tip for last and hopefully the reader will continue to the end of the article.

If a reader finishes the entire article they are far more likely to read the resource box, see your link, and click it.

Another thing you can do is actually put one of your tips in the resource box. This makes it so people are more likely to read it.

Numbers entice people to click

When people finish reading the article they are usually looking for more information and one effective way to get them to click on your link is to say something like “Watch 3 videos on how I…” or “Get 17 more tips on how to….”

People are far more likely to click on your link if they believe in advance that they will be getting something of value. Using a number helps convince people that they will be getting valuable information by clicking a link.

Use the word free

I recommend that your resource box link to more information that is free whenever possible.

This enables you to use the word free to help entice the reader to click your link i.e. “Watch 3 FREE videos on how I…”

Things to include in your resource box

The list of things to include in your resource box is really pretty short. While there is some flexibility I recommend the following things:

A brief explanation of additional information using a number of some sort i.e. “Watch 3 FREE videos on how I…”

You of course also need your link

Things NOT to include in your resource box

Here is a list of things that I think should not be included in your resource box. Remember the purpose of your resource box is to get people to click on your link. That’s it. You have one shot at enticing them, so don’t blow your chance by boring your reader with unnecessary details.

• Your name
  People don’t really care about your name and I think it’s a waste of precious space.
• Your biography
  Again, people just don’t care and this doesn’t help convince them to click on the link.
• Your Ezine Subscription Address
  Your reader doesn’t care about this. It doesn’t help them solve their specific problem and it doesn’t help them decide to click your link.
• Your contact information
  Readers are lazy and very few of them when to take the time to compose an e-mail with their questions and actually send it to you. And if you think they’re going to call you with a question then you are mistaken. Leave this out.

Testing and experimentation

It’s important to test different strategies and see what works best for your niche. Some of the strategies I have outlined will work better than others for your niche. And you won’t know which ones work best until you test.

Ezine Articles & Twitter

Every time ezine articles approves an article you can have it tweet about it.

Learn More:
http://twitter.ezinearticles.com

Take Article Marketing to the Next Level

Learn Highly Potent Article Marketing Strategies Here

Caroline Middlebrook just posted a great article titled “Affiliate Marketing 101″

It contains great tips for anyone thinking about getting into Affiliate Marketing.

Check it out and tell her Nick sent you:
Affiliate Marketing 101

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/affiliate-marketing-101/

#1 Viral Video

You may already know. Producing an informative video and submitting it to YouTube along with your squeeze page’s URL can send a hurricane of traffic in your direction.

Don’t forget about the other video sites such as veoh.com, MySpace Video, and a South Korean-based video sharing site called CyWorld.com that actually gets more traffic than YouTube. Also consider carefully titling your headlines with highly searched keywords and adding a whole lot of search engine optimized content in your description. Search engines love video sites and so do web surfers.

#2 Submit to Social Networks

Your wish is to get hundreds of visitors to your squeeze page today. Submit your URL along with a description to social bookmarking/social content sharing sites for massive viral traffic. Some of the best are SpicyPage.com, Digg.com, and StumbleUpon.com. The tool OnlyWire.com is also growing popularity because it allows you to automatically submit to many sites at once.

#3 Ezine Articles and Content Spinning

This is perhaps the most popular way of driving traffic to a squeeze page. Write a 500-word article with SEO in mind and submit it to ezinearticles.com. Be sure to place a link to your squeeze page in your bio.

You can also take a single article and “spin” the words in the content around then submit each original article to other ezine directories such as goarticles.com and articlecity.com. Spinning content can be done manually or you may enjoy using a free content spinner like the one at jetspinner.com. You might also want to consider using different main keywords in each article, so you’ll have a better chance of your article coming up in different searches (compete for highly searched keywords as well as those terms searched for only 100 times per month).

#4 Topic Lens

You can get a ton of traffic from starting what’s called a topic lens at Squidoo.com or HubPages.com. Keep a lookout for future sites just like these.

A lens is a topic page that you update regularly like a blog. The communities rank your lens and it can get viral traffic that way. Best part is you can throw a link to your squeeze page even in your first sentence.

The main advantage you have by publishing and updating a lens is that search engines often rank lenses high in their searches. Lenses are also indexed into search engines quickly.

#5 Your Own Affiliate Program and Joint Ventures

If you haven’t already, consider burning $50 for your product to be listed at ClickBank.com. Offer 50% or more to potential affiliates browsing the ClickBank Marketplace. When they put your affiliate link on their websites, traffic should be sent directly to your squeeze page.

Affiliate marketers love affiliate programs with squeeze pages because, for one, they like the fact that you’ll be doing all the auto-responder and sales work. All they have to do is send traffic your way, and they do.

You can also get more traffic to your squeeze page by offering joint venture partnerships to related websites. One way to do this is by simply going to a website and making the owner aware of your affiliate program. Another way is to create an “Affiliates Page” somewhere on your website so that you can reach affiliate marketers outside of the ClickBank Marketplace. You can even use AdWords or another pay-per-click program and send website owners to your Affiliates Page.

There is a saying in carpentry that you measure twice and cut once. This is the essence of success in just about everything we do. We need to plan ahead. You can easily wreck your own marketing campaign if you just wing it.

It is entirely too easy to assume that because the web is so forgiving that you don’t have to plan ahead. If you put up a website and notice a typo or think the header graphic isn’t just quite right, you can just make the corrections and changes and upload the new improved site.

Marketing is a little different. You are sending the words out to the world and if you are not careful, the wrong message can be out there floating virally around and doing your whole marketing efforts a lot of damage.

I have heard horror stories of people who decide to use a pay per click approach and like some sort of gambler, keep pushing the same keywords and losing their entire budget until they are maxed out on their credit cards.

Or even worse, decide that some keywords will draw more traffic because they are more popular even though those keywords are not related to your website or only peripherally related.

Another dangerous marketing approach is to follow one of those famous blueprints that just don’t fit your topic.

The point of what I am trying to tell you is that there are many ways to implement marketing and even more ways to mess up the implementation. We get caught up in tweaking and testing our marketing campaigns but by this time, we are already likely in the middle of the campaign.

Sit down, look at your budget, list three marketing approaches and start with one. If it is article marketing, lay out the steps you need to take and drive yourself to complete the steps. Implement that plan and then move to the next approach and repeat the process.

Be sure to look at each step and ask yourself the question – “what will this accomplish in my marketing plan?” Write down the answers and keep coming back to check on the plan. Are the stated goals of that plan being met?

Do not wreck your own work because you are too impatient to plan. Otherwise you are like the person who leaves reading the manual until after their project is wrecked beyond repair. Do not wait until all else fails before you think about your plan.

There is one big pitfall to affiliate marketing and all other pitfalls begin with this one big pitfall. I saw it myself recently when a local woman asked me for advice. I agreed to drop over and visit her and see what I could do to help her.

Well, she says, the guy who signed me up makes thousands every month and only works at this in the evening. I have the whole day to concentrate on it. But I’ve been at this a month and the only sale I made was to my sister.

She went on to explain that she had been laid off work and their only child had gone off to university and she had lots of free time. She did not want to have to go back to work but university was expensive so she was in a big hurry to make money and only had six more weeks before her savings ran out. What she wanted me to tell her was which affiliate program she should try next because she had obviously made a mistake choosing this one.

So? This is fine and dandy. But where’s the pitfall? It sounds like a reasonable question you say because this is just what always happens to you. You sign up and pay your fees and then wait for the money to come in.

The big pitfall that underlies all other pitfalls in affiliate marketing is not having a plan. You need to set up your affiliate program and then begin working your marketing plan and wait for the business to build slowly but steadily.

She had been in the affiliate marketing program for a month and expected to see money rolling in immediately. She actually said that she had anticipated making $1,000 her first month and she had made nothing other than the percentage on the sale to her sister. And she would not even get that until she sold more because the payout only came when she reached a commission figure of $100.

But what had she done to tell the world about the wonderful product she was selling? Just about nothing. She had business cards printed up and she emailed her friends and asked them to tell their friends about it. Oh, and she had posted on a forum about how she knew about this great product but no one replied to her. Lately she had been doing research to find a better affiliate program.

Trickling out of this pitfall is the other main pitfall which is wasting time doing the wrong thing which leads to spending time looking for another better affiliate program without learning what went wrong with the first program. Focus on the process, not the program and you will make a killing in any good affiliate program you can find.

You can run a dozen affiliate programs at the same time but you need to build up your target market list and create some traffic to your affiliate site. If you had the best affiliate program in the world and relied on emailing your friends about it, how much do you think you would make?

If you spend six hours a day reading about affiliate programs and searching the internet for a better affiliate program while waiting passively for your poor neglected first affiliate program to bring in the bucks, you are not working. You are wasting time. That is like putting a pot of water on the stove and not turning the stove on and then grumbling because the water is not hot and wondering if you used a different pot if it would help.

Many people make decent money with ClickBank but only a few get the big bucks.

Only a select few know the ClickBank Secret.

What these successful people do is create a product to sell on ClickBank. The product doesn’t have to be something big or expensive.

They sell the product on ClickBank and offer affiliates the maximum commission, which happens to be 75%. The seller is interested in recruiting as many affiliates as possible.

On the product’s sales page the seller gives away something of value. To get the free item the visitor signs up for seller’s newsletter.

The seller builds an email list from the visitors that come to the sales page. Nearly all visitors that come to the sales page won’t buy the product being advertised. But quite possibly half of the visitors that come to the page will sign up for the newsletter so they can receive the free item.

And here’s the best part: ClickBank’s army of 100,000 affiliates are the ones sending the visitors to your sales page. Your email list is created by other people’s efforts. It costs you nothing.

Once you have your email list you send ads for ClickBank products in every newsletter you send.

And that’s the ClickBank Secret.

Just so you know we will go over creating and managing email lists in future lessons.

The auto responder service I use to manage my email lists is AWeber which offers a free trial of its services.

Today we are going to go over some various ways to make an income online by providing value to your customers.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a commission based system where a company recruits affiliates (people like you and me). Every time an affiliate refers someone to buy from the company, the company will pay the affiliate a commission.

It usually costs nothing to become an affiliate.

Most companies pay their affiliates between 3%-15% commission.

Commission Junction has a huge list of products for affiliates to market.
http://www.cj.com

Most large companies with an online presence (e.g. Amazon.com) will have an affiliate program.

ClickBank
http://www.clickbank.com

Many people have informational products that they are selling online. ClickBank is a place where people selling those products can list their products for a small fee. They are currently over 10,000 products in its catalog for affiliates to market.

With such a large catalog ClickBank also attracts many affiliates. They currently have 100,000 affiliates. ClickBank connects affiliates and sellers.

A couple things are unique to ClickBank:

First: ClickBank only accepts informational products (e.g. Ebooks, Ecourses, or anything that doesn’t have to shipped)

Second: ClickBank sellers offer affiliates commissions as high as 75%.

Build a website

Many people generate an income by building a website.

Generally websites fall into two categories.

The first is informational. The value they offer their visitors is by providing valuable information to them. They make money off the advertisements on their pages. The more information people get from the website, the longer they stay at the site, and the money the advertisers pay the website owner.

This is the model is used by newspapers.

An example of this is Digg.com
http://digg.com

The second way people earn from their websites is by selling actual products. These products can be created by the website owner or be affiliate products.

We will delve into the pros and cons of these two types of websites in future lessons.

Email Marketing

The most lucrative method is by having an email list of people that you send a periodic newsletter to. The value provided to the customer is the information given in the newsletter. If the information is crap then people will unsubscribe from the newsletter.

Like informational websites, the owner of an email newsletter earns money by the advertisement in the newsletters.

Affiliate marketing is a commission based system where a company recruits affiliates (people like you and me). Every time an affiliate refers someone to buy from the company, the company will pay the affiliate a commission.

It usually costs nothing to become an affiliate.

Most companies pay their affiliates between 3%-15% commission.

Some of the best places to find affiliate programs are:

Commission Junction
http://www.cj.com

Share A Sale
http://www.shareasale.com

Click Bank
http://www.clickbank.com

There are literally thousands of products for you to choose from. You can find something to market to virtually anyone.

When searching for a product to advertise on your website make sure the product matches the content of your website. If you have a website on baby names you wouldn’t advertise for computer equipment.

Be sure you feel comfortable about the product you’ll be selling. Would you want to buy this product?

Frequently it’s a good idea to purchase the product that you’ll be promoting.

After the product has arrived you should ask yourself these questions:

• How simple was the checkout process? How difficult would it be for someone new to the Internet to checkout?
• Did the product come as advertised?
• Was the shipping price reasonable?
• Were there any extra or hidden charges that were not advertised or expected?
• How long did the product take to arrive?
• Did the charge on your credit card statement clearly indicate that the charge came from this company?

If you had any problems with the purchase of the product or problems when it arrived then you should not market this particular product. If you had problems then so will people you refer which will result in fewer sales and more refunds & charge backs.

If you are paying to send traffic to the product’s sales page don’t risk a lot of money on any one product. Some products will cost you more money in advertising than you make from the sales of the product. I usually follow the Double Rule.

The Double Rule says if I am promoting something for $10 and I spend $20 in advertising without any sales then it’s time to cut my losses and try something else. To break even I would have to magically make 2 sales without any additional advertising costs. This is very unlikely and that’s why it’s time to find something else to promote.

The Double Rule also says that if you have made 2 sales but have spent more on advertising than you have earned it’s probably time to stop losing money and find something else to promote.

It’s critical you put limits on what you spend or you may lose your shirt.

Be sure you understand your program’s terms and conditions. What are their exact rules?

Make sure you check how often they pay you. Some programs pay every 2 weeks while others wait 120 days after the sale to pay you.

Some programs pay you no matter how much money you have earned. Others wait until you have earned $100.

The morale of the story is make sure you understand the program, policies, and the product you are promoting.