As an experienced affiliate marketer myself, I can relate to the challenges faced by all of you out there just starting out. So lets take a look at exactly what affiliate marketing is and how to maximize your efforts to centralize your focus.
Affiliate marketing defined
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is a way to sell products supplied by other people for a commission on each sale. This benefits the product owner as well as the affiliate. The owner gets their product seen and viewed by a great number of people. You, as an affiliate, promote that product and find prospects who are interested in that product. For this work, you receive a portion, normally between 30% and 75% of the sell price, as a commission.
The problem with promoting numerous affiliate products
Usually, the affiliate program will give you an affiliate link to the products sales letter or home page. That link points back at you so the owner knows who to pay for that sale. The problem with this is that the links are very long, complex and cannot possibly be remembered later. So if you are promoting a number of different products, you will have to keep track of all those links and campaigns separately. That can be a burden, to say the least.
The solution that works!
The best thing you can do is to start a central affiliate web site where you can promote ALL your affiliate products in one place. This gives you one place to go and see your progress at any given moment. It also gives you one, central place to send all your prospects. Once there, they will not only see the product that brought them there, but ALL the products you have available.
Having your own web site to market your affiliate items has several major benefits, including:
1. Traffic generation is easier. Send all your prospects to one place for all the products in your directory, whether it is 10 or 1000.
2. Makes you noticeable as an individual. By drawing people top tour own web site, you can build those relationships and work them to other products that they may find useful.
3. Total control over the way it all looks. Present the links to the products in any way you like. You will have complete control over the layout and presentation.
4. Total control over the content. You will also have complete autonomy over the text that is placed on the site. As long as it doesnt violate the terms of the affiliate agreement, you can use it. This includes the anchor text (words that are hyper-linked to the sales page for the product).
5. Reporting is key. The host company always makes certain reporting available to even free members. You can target the times of day that people navigated to your site, which pages they accessed most often and where they came from. All is very good info for you to have access to.
There are more than just these benefits, but you get the idea. Having your own web site to bring visitors to is the most powerful way you can work your affiliate products/services.
Judy Hay is the webmaster of http://www.sizzlingsuccess.net Visit her site to get your own money making affiliate website set up for free.
