5 Things For Success In Affiliate Marketing

Mr Success — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 01:10:01 +0000

The following five points are things that I found I must be willing to do in order to achieve the level of success that I was expecting in affiliate marketing. I will explain each of these in detail.

1) Willing To Change:

Get out of your comfort zone!

We all have them… comfort zones! I know that I do. We do what we are used to doing because it comes EASY to us.

However, as you have probably heard before. You can’t expect to have something different by doing the same thing tomorrow that you are doing today.

With the internet things change pretty quickly, and what works today may not work tomorrow or in a year from now. So if you are going to get involved in online marketing, you need to get out of your comfort zone and be quick to change.

2) Create Relationships:

In any business, relationship is vital to success. Relationships will take you a lot farther in a much shorter time than if you try to get there all by yourself.

Ways to create relationships online is through forums, groups, social networking, email lists, seminars and any other way that you can think. You see, when you become part of a forum or group, you are joining a community of people that are involved in the same type of business as you or have the same interests as yourself.

You create relationships. Don’t try to sell to these people. Treat them as friends that you care about. The same thing goes when you join a social network, or when you send emails to your list of subscribers, or when you attend a seminar.

Then if by chance you are talking to or emailing people that you have a relationship with and they want what you have, they are going to by from you much quicker than they will ANYONE else on earth!
So get used to it because you will be hearing me say this time and time again throughout this book…

YOU HAVE TO CREATE RELATIONSHIPS!!!

Creating relationships is possibly the most important thing I can say.

And guess what? This is where I lacked the most in my internet marketing efforts. I had never been much of a socializer and therefore I didn’t create many relationships, but now that I have realized the importance of it, I have found relationships to bring me the most happiness and success.

And really, when it comes down to it, the most important thing inside or outside of business is our relationships with others. Right?

3) Have a plan:

Why a plan?

Because you have to know where you plan on going in order for you to get there.

You don’t go on vacation to a new place you have never been to before without getting the directions first do you? You have a plan to get there!

This is even more important in a business. A plan is REQUIRED!

And you can’t just say I plan on being successful.

You have to be specific!

You have to have a plan on making it happen. The plan might have to change in one way or another along the way, but you still have to start out with a plan.

For example, for the first few years as an online marketer my plan was simple; to put up as many web sites as I could and market as many products as I could so that I could earn as much money as possible.

I figured out what I needed to do in order to make that happen and I did it. And guess what? It paid off really well for me. As a matter of fact, a lot of the work that I did then is still earning me money.

So, in order to achieve your ultimate goal and have the success that you know is yours to have, then you must have a plan…

I’ll say it again…

If you really, really want the success that you say you do and plan on reaching your ultimate goal… YOU CAN!

But you MUST have a plan!

Think about it. See the end goal of what you want before you start. Think it through and write it out.

An example business plan might be something like this:

A) Find a Product
B) Get Traffic
C) Capture Emails
D) Product Pages
E) Email List for Future Sales

Now that would be an overall business plan. You would find a product to promote, get traffic or visitors to come to your webpage, on your product page you could capture your visitors name and email addresses, and then you can create a relationship with them through emails resulting in many more sales over the course of time.

There are many different ways to go about it. That was just a sample business plan.

For instance, lots of people prefer to send their traffic to a squeeze page to capture their visitors email information. Others prefer to send them to a page with a drop in form for the people to fill out to join their newsletter. And others would rather send them to a webpage with a form on the side of the page that allows the visitors to join a newsletter or ezine if they choose to do so.

Lots of people insist on one way or the other being the best way to do it. I say that you have to test yourself and find out which way is best for you and your product.

However, we will discuss that more later.

For the moment let’s act as though the above example is our plan. In that case you would still need to break each step into lots of smaller steps to create your entire business plan.

Let’s sort of do that here:

And yet that list could be broken down even further such as creating a keyword list, creating pay-per-click accounts with ads and campaigns, posting the articles in article directories, and on and on and on.

Now I’m not trying to overwhelm you.

I just want you to see the importance of having a plan!

You can’t just jump into something blindly and expect everything to go wonderfully. But with a plan you can evaluate each step and see what is the most important things that should be taken care of first and so on.

And just so you know, I am going to simplify it by giving you a simple five step plan that you can use over and over again.

But as with anything, I encourage you to modify it and make it yours because there is no one size fits all theory. And by trying different things you will find things that work for you that may not work for others.

4) Build my list

Ok, you may already know what I mean by building a list, but just in case let me clarify. When I say “build my list” I am simply referring to building a list of subscribers… people that have visited my web site and signed up for my newsletter or ezine.

Building a list of subscribers is not mandatory to your online success, but it is a very smart online strategy. The reason why I say that is because it is much easier to market to people that you have a relationship with than it is to market to
a complete stranger.

Moreover, it is much easier to market to people that you have already done business with before than it is to attract new visitors to your website every day.

I have heard and read for years the saying, “having a list is the most important thing”, and yet again I have heard it said, “the money is in the list”.

However, for my first 4 years I did not build a list at all! Well actually I did have people to sign up for a newsletter from one of my sites, but in a 2 or 3 year span I only wrote them a handful of times.

But… since I didn’t utilize the strategy of a list, I was leaving money on the table.

The reason being, it is a fact that it takes most people being exposed to a product six or seven times before they actually buy the product. And if you just so happen to be number 3 in the sequence, then you may have lost that sale
forever!

However, if they happened to sign up for your newsletter, then you could provide them with more information about your product or service thereby positioning yourself as the expert in this field. And then, when they get ready to purchase, it is most likely they will buy from you because they trust you.

Another advantage of having a list of subscribers is not only will you have the opportunity to sell them your initial product, but you can market to them and sell to them over and over and over again… sometimes for years down the road.

You see, when you write your subscribers on a regular basis, you are building a “Relationship” with them. And it’s just a fact that people will buy from people they know and trust before they buy from a total stranger.

Let me repeat here what I said above because this is of high importance!

You want to create a “RELATIONSHIP” with the people on your list.

For instance, your main purpose and goal should be to help those on your list in anyway that you can. You want to always be thinking… how can I be of service and help to you. If you do that, then when you present them with an offer, many of them will buy from you because we have created a relationship.

People value relationships!

5) Seeking The Advise Of Others

This is a very important aspect of internet marketing and one that you have already taken advantage of by buying this ebook.

For instance, in my case when I started out I had Rusty there for me who showed me everything from beginning to end, but not only that, every time I had a problem I would call him up and he would help me out.

One thing I know for sure, I might could have studied and figured out how to do what I do if I had gotten lucky and ran across the right material. But it is much better and easier to get help from someone that is already a success at it.

I have found out in more than one instance that by getting the right help you can save hours, days, months or even years that you would have spent trying to figure out what they could show you in a minimal amount of time.

There are other ways that I also suggest you seek out the advise of others. The first two cost nothing and are highly effective ways for getting traffic to your website (which we will talk about later) and for getting and giving advise related to a specific product or resource.

A) Forums and Groups
B) Social Networks
C) Seminars

A) Forums and Groups

Forums and groups are free to join and are like communities where people with the same interests hang out and discuss things together. For instance, if I was a guitar player and I wanted to associate with other guitar players, I would go to a community (forum or group) full of guitar players.

If I was an affiliate marketer, and I am, and I wanted to see what other affiliate marketers were doing and talking about I would go to a forum full of affiliate marketers.

By joining one of these communities you can ask questions, answer questions and discuss different subjects together. You can find answers to pretty much anything pertaining to your subject and you can see the latest things that everyone is talking about in that particular industry.

If something is changing or if there is a new way of doing things, other marketers in the forums are going to be talking about it.

B) Social Networks

Social networks, like forums and groups are free to join. They are websites like MySpace, Facebook and FriendWise. There are many others as well and these go right along with the same principal as forums and groups.

People hang out in social networks for the sole purpose of creating relationships and talking with other people that have the same interests as themselves such as affiliate marketing in this case. And just by talking with other affiliate marketers you will learn of things they do that you don’t and vice-versa.

C) Seminars

Seminars on the other hand are not free but are highly recommended whenever you can attend. Lots of the people that you meet at seminars you will see again and again if you attend many of them because these people go mainly for the relationships that they build there… and that is invaluable.

Also, besides the relationships that you will build, you will also learn of the latest strategies that other internet marketers are using to explode their businesses and which you may have never heard of unless you were there.

Sometimes these things that you learn could possibly even DOUBLE your business or more in a very short time… sometimes almost overnight.

Whenever possible… attending seminars are a must!

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5 Things For Success In Affiliate Marketing