I’ve recently noticed a lot of people who want to get started in affiliate marketing because they have heard about benefits such as: no inventory, no customers, flexible hours, an unlimited profit potential. The problem is that many people either don’t know how to get started, or they give up before finding success.A large part of finding that success is in properly promoting the right offers. In this article I am going to explain a few different ways that you can promote affiliate programs as well as how to find and choose good offers to promote.

Choosing Your Approach

There are many different approaches you can take as an affiliate marketer. You should first decide what types of promotion you are going to be using so that you have a better idea about what kinds of products and offers to promote. Here are a few different affiliate promotion methods:

  • Use an existing website with traffic – Probably the easiest and least risky model, if you are fortunate enough to have a high traffic website. All you need to do is test different offers, creatives, placements, and pre-sells. The downside is that you are limited to the markets of your websites.
  • Create a new website and generate traffic – Can be the most rewarding, but usually takes a lot of time to build up traffic. This is best used as a complement to an existing PPC strategy, once you know which keywords are the most profitable.
  • Send emails to a list of subscribers – Send emails to your own list, or you rent a list from someone else. This is still a staple for most internet marketers, but with spam laws and filters constantly increasing, this is becoming less and less lucrative. This can be a great complement to maximize the value of existing traffic.
  • Buy traditional CPM advertisements – Very steep learning curve and tough to initially profit from. Most ad agencies have very high minimum buys, and the majority of internet users are now blind to banners. If you have the resources to spend time and money testing before profiting, it can work.
  • Send PPC traffic directly to the merchant – Easy to get started with because no website is required, minimal startup capital is needed, and traffic can be highly targetted. This is the best method for beginners without web development knowledge because it allows them to test the waters without investing too much time and money.
  • Send PPC traffic to a landing page – Has more potential and stability than direct to merchant PPC marketing because you control the website and have the ability to add value for visitors.

In addition to the above six promotion methods, there are many unconventional, or “creative,” techniques. However, we won’t be discussing them in this article because they involve thinking “out of the box” and are very diverse and/or hit and miss.

This post is mostly about pay-per-click affiliate marketing, so the next half of it will concentrate on the last two methods listed above. The principles can also be applied to the other aspects of affiliate marketing, but I am not going to be explicitly focusing on them.

Finding Markets, Products, and Offers to Promote

The next step is to decide on what exactly you are going to promote. If you put too many resources into the wrong markets or the wrong merchants, you will be setting yourself up for failure before you have even begun. There are countless ways to find and choose merchants, so why don’t we break a few of them down into another list:

  1. Choose blindly – Be prepared to lose money in the beginning, but also be prepared to find profits in markets you never dreamed of. Simply browse through affiliate networks and randomly choose offers to test out. This goes along with my post on brute force affiliate marketing.
  2. Go where the big fish are – If someone else is cashing in on a niche, then there is no reason why you can’t too. Amit Mehta has mentioned several times that this is how he chooses affiliate programs. He recommends talking to affiliate managers and asking how much revenue their top affiliates are bringing in.
  3. Make an educated guess – Want to minimize your chances of losing money to “testing”? Browse through affiliate networks and analyze each of the markets. Check how much traffic is available, how many people are advertising in that market, how they are advertising, what they are advertising, etc.
  4. Copy other marketers – You could always just enter keywords into Google and search for other affiliate marketers in the paid results. Make a note of how many there are and what they are promoting, then watch and see how long they keep their ad up for. If it stays up for a while, you can bet they are making money, so go ahead and copy their technique.
  5. Keep an eye on your radar – Always be on the lookout for hot markets that you could enter into. You could find new possibilities while watching TV, listening radio, having conversations with friends, surfing the internet, reading magazines, reading newspapers, etc.

I am sure there are other ways to find and decide on what to promote as an affiliate marketer, but those are the only ones I can currently recall that I have used. The method that you use is entirely up to you, but I have had the most success with choosing a bunch of random offers, asking my affiliate managers what other marketers are doing well with, and also just observing the search results to find who is continuously advertising what (yes, that was 3 out of the 5 techniques that I listed).

If you are just starting out, I would suggest dedicating yourself to the first method, choosing at random. The great thing about it is that you have the ability to try out markets with little or no competition and can then build the skills and confidence needed to break into more competitive markets.

After Deciding What To Promote

As an affiliate marketer, finding and choosing products to promote is only the beginning of the process. Your next steps will be to build your keyword lists and campaigns, making sure to write good ads for each group of keywords. Don’t forget to implement some kind of testing and tracking so that you know what is working and what isn’t. After a couple days, weeks, or months (depending on the amount of traffic you are receiving), you will be able to start cutting your losers and expanding your winners.

If you are interested in learning more about affiliate marketing, you should probably subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss out on any future posts :wink:

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