TOP 3 AFFILIATE MARKETING TIPS

Regardless of what you may have heard about affiliate marketing, it is simply impossible for every affiliate out there to be earning $10 000.00 per month - there is simply too much competition. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying this kind of money can not be made, but to be making this kind of money you must really stand out from your competition. You must also be aware of the fact that in this business, money does not just fall into your hands! Every cent that is made by you in affiliate commissions requires your effort.
With this in mind, below you will find some very valuable tips on making money with marketing programs online. Be prepared to work for your commissions though, and you will be rewarded accordingly.

Tip 1: Google and Overture
The days of free traffic from the major search engines are slowly fading away with all the new competition joining the scene every day. You can however still design a good site, and work hard to rank it high in Google. To do this you need quality unique content that is updated often. An as many links from other websites as you can possibly get (Be creative)
Another alternative is simply paying for your clicks. This is called PPC (Pay Per Click) where you simply pay Google a certain amount per targeted visitor that they send to your site. You can get started using Google Adwords. If you want to rank high in Yahoo, simply concentrate on being number 1 in Google! If you are serious about making money using PPC, then I highly recommend you check out the Adwords Manifesto it has saved me a lot of money and revealed secrets I never even thought existed.

Tip 2: Your own email list
Sending offers to your very own email list is the ideal way to build true financial freedom and residual income. It has been proven that an average visitor to your site, who is interested in your product, requires 7 email communications from you before they make a purchase. Why work hard to drive traffic to your site only to watch them leave. If you want to be earning that 10k figure, start building your list today.
To do this, you simply ad a squeeze page to your site - this captures their name and email address. You can offer them some bonus, or free course. You can even scrawl the article directories, and use free articles as content for the messages you are going to send them (Obviously it must be related to your site) Aweber provides an excellent way of automating this whole process. They provide you with the code for the squeeze page, and periodically (as set by you) send out your emails to new subscribers in your list.

Tip 3: Create your own affiliate program
This is the most overlooked way of generating traffic to your website. If you have your own product, why not have someone else generate this traffic for you? If you knew that each person to your site who signs up to your email list generates $1 of revenue, would you be willing to pay someone else $0.25 for that same traffic?
You simply allow others to promote your site for you, and give them a commission on the product sales or leads they provide. Most common is providing them with commission on sales only. You can either install affiliate management scripts on your own site then manage the payment to your affiliate manually - or (the better option) you can simply register your site with an affiliate network such as Clickbank, PayDotCom or Commission Junction.
The average affiliate makes one sale every two weeks, or two sales a month. If you had 500 affiliates promoting your website, that's an additional 1000 sales a month! If your site is well-designed you will even attract one or two super affiliates - these guys will make more than 200 sales a week!
What it all comes down to is traffic. If you want to generate large volumes of sales, you must drive large volumes of targeted traffic to your site, then harness all the sales you can from them. All traffic needs to be paid for in one way or another, invest wisely in advertising!
If you want to get a head start in the affiliate marketing business, why not join Tissa Godavitarne's affiliate program. It is 100% FREE to join, is in an extremely popular niche constituting more that 30% of all Google searches and he includes your affiliate link in his personal PPC campaigns! Thats free traffic to your affiliate link!