Thanks to affiliate marketing, the concept of working from home has never been more doable or accessible.  Promoting and selling vendors’ items online – and sharing a percentage of the revenue that is generated through such efforts – is surprisingly easy and can be incredibly lucrative.  The primary thing to keep in mind when trying to break into the affiliate marketing game, though, is “marketing.”  The vast majority of the work that you’ll be doing will revolve around gaining exposure for your website and the products that are promoted within it.  Luckily, there are several great tips and strategies related to affiliate marketing for beginners; familiarize yourself with a few of the best ones below.

Affiliate Marketing Tips

Our Top 5 Affiliate Marketing Tips:

Sell What You Know

Passionate salespeople tend to outperform less enthusiastic ones.  When you genuinely understand and enjoy the products or services that you sell, customers can sense it and those products and services become that much more appealing.  We’ve all met the bored salesperson with the monotone drawl – unenthusiastic online affiliate marketers can come across in much the same way, repelling customers and running into dead end after dead end.

Although it may be tempting to engage in an affiliate marketing program that offers the absolute best revenue sharing percentage or other key perks, if you’re uneducated, inexperienced and unenthusiastic about the things you’ll be marketing the extra compensation isn’t going to go very far.  Instead, look for an affiliate marketing program based on something you know and love.  In turn, you will be able to write more compelling and engaging content, which will attract more customers to you. In the long run, you’ll carve out a great niche for yourself and your sales will start flooding in.

Choose A Great Domain

One of the biggest mistakes affiliate marketers make is skimping on their website.  Rather than investing in a proper domain name – something that typically costs about $10.00 per year – they try to avoid that extra cost by using a free web hosting service like Blogger.  While the platform and tools that go along with sites like WordPress and Blogger are great, having a domain that ends in “.blogspot.com” is not.  Search engines tend to overlook sites with long, convoluted extensions and yours will probably get lost in the shuffle.  Think up a clever, catchy and unique domain name and invest in it – one ending in .com is generally best.

Create Killer Content – Or Pay Someone Else To Do It For You

These days, it seems like every site on the Internet is trying to sell something.  People are fickle, and simply slapping up affiliate links along with images of the products that you sell just isn’t enough. What draws people to your site and its products and services is content.  Regurgitating something that someone else has said is pointless; you need to create compelling, well-written and informative content, and you need to update it frequently.  If you have a knack for writing, enjoy it and have the time, do it yourself.  If writing isn’t necessarily your forte, hire a professional – it is well worth the money.

Submit To Article Directories

Assuming that you’re heeding the first bit of advice in this article and are selling something that you know and love, writing informative articles about it should come pretty naturally.  Those articles can be submitted to various article directories around the Internet, along with links to your website or to specific landing pages. In order to attract attention and traffic, those articles will have to be professional and should include a decent percentage of strategically selected keywords.  Educate yourself about the top article directory sites, then start generating articles for them.  Over time, your affiliate marketing business will truly start booming.

Landing PagesCreate Topnotch Landing Pages

Landing pages are the bread and butter of many top affiliate marketers.  Basically, a landing page is a place where a person is directed after clicking on a link or an ad. In a succinct and direct way, landing pages convey what the visitor can expect and don’t require a lot of reading or involvement.  They can be used in a number of different ways, too, including:

  • To Direct Traffic To Your Site – The most popular and basic goal of many landing pages is to funnel visitors to your affiliate marketing site.  Such a landing site will include compelling language within a link – usually called “anchor text” – to direct people to your website.
  • To Extend An Offer – Landing pages are sometimes used to direct people to special offers, deals or sales on your affiliate marketing goods.  Sometimes, clicking the link on a landing site might send a visitor directly to the sales page for a specific product; other times, clicking that link might send them to a group of related products. The choice is up to you.
  • To Allow People To Participate – You can use landing pages to link people up to follow you on Twitter, sign up for an email group or to become a fan of yours on Facebook.  The possibilities are endless, and they all add up to excellent marketing tools.