Affiliate marketing can be a great way to make some residual income online. If you use your affiliate marketing properly, you can actually make a fair amount of money. But you have to market your affiliate programs and utilize the Internet to its fullest potential, otherwise your affiliate marketing will be a bigger waste of time than raking leaves in the fall. Here are some tips to help you take advantage of the Internet when you’re affiliate marketing.

START AFFILIATE MARKETING WITH YOUR OWN WEBSITE

The obvious starting place for an affiliate marketing campaign is your own personal website. Whether this is a blog, an online portfolio or an online business, affiliate marketing can make your site a bit more profitable. As long as you have some site traffic, affiliate marketing can work on just about any kind of site that you have. When you’re choosing affiliate programs for your site, do your best to make sure that they correlate to your content, or try to skew the link names so that they do, and make sure that the links that relate most closely to your content appear first. The object is to make sure that people go to the links, so make them as enticing as possible.

FIND MESSAGE BOARDS FOR YOUR AFFILIATE MARKETING AND MAKE POSTS ON YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS

If you can, find message boards to post your affiliate marketing links on that, again, relate in some way to the link. If you can, include links both at the end of message board posts and in the content. Gear your posts to the link, so that they seem like a natural extension of your topic. Before you start posting on all kinds of message boards though, make sure that the board allows affiliate programs in posts. If they don’t, then your post will be deleted, and if you break these rules often enough, you might be blocked from posting again on that or other message boards, especially if you are operating in a specific niche. Not only that, but people are less likely to click on links on a message board that frowns on affiliate marketing.

DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE POWER OF CHAT ROOMS AND SOCIAL NETWORK GROUPS

Chat rooms are a great way to get in touch with a number of people who already spend a lot of time on the Internet. Many chat rooms allow you to create a guest user profile or a one time only user. You can go in and promote your affiliate programs and convince people to visit the links in real time. This gives you the benefit of being able to respond to any questions or hesitations people might have immediately. You can really act as a salesperson, much more so than if you were to simply paste an affiliate program on a website somewhere.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE PYRAMID STRUCTURE OF SOME AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Many affiliate programs will give you partial profits of people that you sign up to become affiliate marketers. This can often be more profitable than using your own actual links, if you’re good at getting in touch with people. If you dedicate most of your affiliate marketing time to finding other marketers, then you can establish an organization that functions without a lot of input from you, leaving you time to grow your base instead of trying to find places to post your links. Of course, you should not neglect to work on your tier of the organization, both to make sure that you get some income from yourself, and out of respect for the person who brought you into the organization.

Expand Your Business with 3 Easy Steps - GET ORGANIZED!

 It's difficult to reach your business goals if you don't have the right materials and/or the information to help your business reach the success it's capable of.  These three insights will help you generate the business you've always dreamed of.

1.  Find Your Niche

Chances are, you already have a target audience that you are marketing your products to.  Let's face it, you're probably looking for ways to increase your market audience and profit...or you probably wouldn't be reading this article.  Here's the real facts... you don't have to find a wider audience to increase you sales.

Have you noticed similar characteristics that groups within your target audience have in common?  Maybe you have a group of businessmen, a group of young mothers, and a group of retirees that frequently make purchases.  That is just the set-up I'm talking about.

Pay attention to the individual characteristics of each group, and divide your advertising into similar segments, or niches.  Focus on the specific needs of the group in the advertising products you put out.  General advertisements are not as effective as more specific ads.  Hey, we all sit up and pay attention to someone who recognizes our specific needs and desires!

2.  Create A Unique Selling Point

Why should someone buy from you and not your competitor?  I hate to deal a blow to your ego, but it really has nothing to do with you , your product, or your service.  Yeah, its a little self-centered, but customers are attracted by offers that point out the things that benefit THEM.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, create a unique selling proposition that stresses the benefits the customers will receive from doing business with you.  Will they get faster service?  Go ahead and dramatize it, but keep the customer at the focus..."Get free overnight delivery!"  Hey, it tells the customer...you get quick service and a discount on shipping.   Two definite benefits in one statement.

Don't go out on a limb to create new products and services to get attention.  Just, add a special benefit to the ones you already have... maybe it's quicker service.  The most effective things to emphasize are benefits that your competition cannot or is not willing to give.  

3.  Offer Your Way To Greater Profits

How many times have you began manhunting?  Sure, as a marketer you scrounge and search for brand new or ancient methods of drawing brand new faces to your place of business.  The fact of the matter is that you don't have to find new customers for your sales to grow.

No, in fact you can take the current business you have and send your profits to the moon with one easy technique... make an offer.  

Greet every sale with an offer of an item that is related to the purchase.  The offered product doesn't even have to be yours.  The Internet is wonderful for affiliate marketers who can make great profits selling the material of others.  

Making your business grow doesn't have to be a stressful, backbreaking or frantic process.  Simply implement these three strategies, and watch it boom!

Continuously Moving Your Marketing Forward, Be Dynamic

 Marketing is an ongoing journey for your business.

That might seem like an obvious statement, but the actions of many small business owners might indicate otherwise. For many you build a web site, or create a brochure, or go to a few networking events and then you wait for results to happen. Effective marketing rarely works like that.

It takes regular and consistent effort to keep your pipeline full of good high-quality leads that you can work on converting into paying clients. It doesn't have to be an all-consuming effort, but it does take consistent effort.

Here are four ideas for continuously moving your marketing forward:

Study up on marketing. There is no shortage of resources out there including books, audio programs, tele-classes, courses, etc. Look for the ones that offer proven, hands-on strategies and tactics, not get-rich-quick schemes.

Form or join a "think tank" or "mastermind group." Find a group of people who will care just as much about your success as you do (and that you'll care about their success). This isn't just a group of friends who will tell you what you want to hear, but a group that will hold you accountable and support you.

Attend talks and workshops regularly. If you go an participate fully, you'll often get just a much from the other participants as you will from the talk itself. Brainstorm with those you meet and find out what's working for them in their business.

Get hands-on assistance. Working with a marketing coach or consultant who can help you focus, set goals, prioritize, create action plans, and help hold you accountable could be one of the best investments you make in your business.

Support from outside resources like these can help you shift your mindset and make marketing the ongoing journey it needs to be.

Autoresponder Access To Secret Pages To Increase Your Opt In, Marketing List

 People love to have access to things that other people can’t get. It makes them feel special, and it is a marketing tactic that really works. Granting access to secret pages works well on the Internet. It works best when it is limited. It helps to create a marketing list. For instance, you can grant access to only a lucky few, or you can have a time limit for accessing the pages. You can grant access to secret pages on your website with an autoresponder. 

The way this works is quite simple. You create a directory on your website that is password protected, with one login and password that everybody can use. You then create some valuable content for that directory. You can call this your secret vault or your private stash or anything else you want to call it – as long as it sounds like something that your visitors may really want to get their hands on. For instance ‘the secret tools that helped me earn thousands each month’ would probably entice many people who want to learn how to make money. 

Once you get the directory and the pages set up, put the URL of the pages and the login name and password in an autoresponder. Write a sales page and distribute it to your opt-in list, or have other list owners distribute it to theirs. Make sure you ‘limit’ the offer. Don’t let people assume that you are going to share this secret information with the rest of the world – they want to be the only ones with this special access! 

Keep access to the secret pages free. The goal is to get people to those pages, so that they can purchase your products or services. However, remember that you’ve advertised secret tools or secret information. Therefore, when they get to those pages, there must be something of value there for them to collect – for free in most cases. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you will be losing money by giving something away for free – you won’t. In fact, you’ve already gained by collecting the names and addresses of the people who were interested in your secret information!

Again, this is a marketing tactic that really works, and it is a great way to use an autoresponder. Once people have requested the information for your private pages, you can email them periodically, using your autoresponder, to let them know about updates to the secret site. While you are updating them, you can also tell them about other specials or new products in your line.