Learn Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is quite a basic concept - promote a product and make a percentage of the sale price in the form of a commission. Although having said that - it certainly isn't as easy to do in practise as it is to in theory. This is where highly productive marketing comes in. I am going to list what I consider to be 5 of the most successful marketing methods you can use to promote your affiliate links and get the most commission you possibly can using these methods.

1. Article Marketing - This is a great way to pomote you products in that it is easy and best of all its FREE!. Now the way to actually use article marketing to your advantage is not use is so much as a sales pitch - but rather use to express your knowledge and expertise around the actual niche of the product you are wanting to promote. For example if you are wanting to promote a weight loss product - you would write your articles around this particular niche - not the actual product itself. Remember articles are there as a 'teaser' - that gets the reader interested in what your writing and gets them wanting more - this way they are more inclined to actually click on any internal links you have included in the article. Now there are several article directories out there - you can do a simple search in google and find plenty - just be sure and read the guidelines as many do not allow blatant affiliate links. A way to get around this is to write your article and redirect it with another link to example your blog where you may have a review of the product you want to promote - there are several ways to get around this.
2. Domain Masking/Forwarding - acquiring you own domain name serves many purposes. The first is that your ability to advertise is as many more places is massively increased. For example if you have your own domain name that forwards to your affiliate links - you are actully able to use this in your articles - so people may be clicking on your domain name but the system wil actually redirect them to your affiliate link page of the product. There are several domain name registers out there - and you can usually purchase a name for under fifteen dollars - which lasts a whole year. Having your own domain name is also good if you are using the PPC (Pay Per Click) method of advertising. The reason being is that if you use the merchants url on your ad - well google only allow one url to be advertised at the one time. For example if you were using that weight loss product to promote and the url was w.w.w.weightloss.com(this url is fake by the way) - then your ad would not show up next to it - because google does not allow same urls to be advertised at the same time. So when you have your own domain name you can actually have your ad showing all the time becasue it's unique to you. The other reason for your own domain name is that people are more likely to click on this than your affiliate link - affiliate links are long, ugly and boring, and can sometimes turn a potential customer away because it may seem like an unusal link to click on.
3. Auto Responders - An auto responder is simply an automatic email service that will email hundreds of people at the same time that are on your mailing lists. It can be used to set up several messages that you can set to have your mail list receive at your specified date and time. It is said that the "money is in the list" - meaning the more people you have on your maling list the more you can promote products to. For example if you know that a product is about to go up in price and you feel your subscribers will benefit from you can literally send out thousands of emails about this to your list - many sales arise from this method. You may be asking - how do I get my own list? Well there are sites out there that you can actually pay to use their mailing lists, or the alternative is to set one up yourself. What this involves is setting up your own opt-in page so that peope can subscribe - usually you will offer them something for free that will encourage them to give up their email address. Then you will have your autorepsonder set up so that your customer receives automatic emails from yourself. You will need to take some time setting up your actual emails - but it is proven to be well worth it in the end. Top Affiliates will tell you they make several recurring sales using an autoresponder - so it is a very good investment. I will talk more about setting up an autoresponder in future posts.
4. PPC - This is Pay per Click advertising. What usually comes to mind when this method is mentioned is Google and Yahoo. PPC represents all the small ads you see on the right hand side on your webpage whenever you do a search on something - Google uses Adwords. This can be an extremely effective way of advertising - but to be effective it's something you really need to do alot of research with before actually starting a PPC campaign as it can very expensive to make mistakes. There are 2nd tier PPC sites out there that are much cheaper to run so it can be better to make practice with these before tackling the big ones like Google and Yahoo. You can find these cheaper ones by simply doing a search on google.
5. Squidoo - Squidoo is the last of my top places to advertise your affiliate products. Squidoo operates what are known as 'lenses' - basically put these are webpages you and I can use to really write about anything we want. So for the affiliate marketer you can write as much about a product as you want - with reviews etc - but you do need to make sure it's actually worth reading because if you blatantly try to sell people things then you won't have many visitors to your lens! If you manage to get several visitors then you may even reach the Top 100 lens in your topic - this is good becasue alot of people check Top 100 lists and you will receive even more exposure to whatever you are writing about. You can also find Squidoo on a google search.

Well these are 5 of my top methods to promote your affiliate links - I hope you have found them useful. If you would like more information on this topic please visit http://www.squidoo.com/secretaffiliateweaponscam

Thankyou :-)