I hope that you enjoyed my previous month focus which provided you with amazing ways to increase traffic to your affiliate marketing blog or web site. If you didn’t have an opportunity to read the articles from last month you can view my archives here. Also, I strongly suggest that you subscribe to my RSS Feed and sign up to receive free email notifications. This month my focus will be on teaching you how to increase your affiliate marketing sales by better optimizing your time, your work environment, and by showing you how to find new customers and how to sell to existing ones.

There are quite a few ways to increase your success with affiliate marketing. One of the best ways that I want to talk to you about in this article is with getting to know the owner of the products and services that you promote. There are multiple reasons why it is important to take the time to introduce yourself personally to the owners of the products and services you sell.

1 of the main reasons is simply because it naturally adds to your own self ownership of the items you sell. When you interact with affiliate treatment owners you in return get a more personalized feel for the products being sold. Over time through multiple conversations, you can learn the reasons behind why the products were created. Having that information gives you an edge over other affiliates who promote the same products or services.

A second reason why it is important to meet the owners of affiliate products is because doing so illustrates your level of sincerity towards being an affiliate marketer. Product owners and service provides want to increase sales. Naturally, they will latch on to their most effective affiliates or ones that show the most interest. When you contact affiliate drug owners and service providers and establish a business relationship with them, often they will provide you with special incentives to sell. They may offer special bonuses or even increase your payout percentage.

The third reason why it is important to meet the owners of various affiliate products and services you promote is because you can use that publicly to your advantage. What I mean to say by that is simple. If you have a blog and start writing content that informs your readers and subscribers that you are on talking terms with affiliate drug owners, it adds to your reputation and gives you more credit.

First impressions have a massive influence on sales. When you speak to your customers and tell them that you personally know the owner of the treatment being sold, that goes a long way and builds an excellent first impression. Also, if you play your cards right, you can even leverage your relationship with the owner. A great way to do that is by working special deals with the pill owner and extend the offer to your subscriber and customer base. If you can make an effort towards working a deal with the treatment owner, people will soon discover that you are offering the best deal on the treatment being offered.

If you’re new to online affiliate marketing, you may be looking at all the discussions on affiliate forums wondering, “Wow, these guys are making so much money – but it’s easy for them because they have a lot of sites promoting their products, and how can I accomplish anything if I don’t even know HTML nor have ever done anything online more complicated than simply browsing! And it probably costs a lot of money to buy domain names, host them and build sites on them!”

In reality, getting started in affiliate marketing is much easier than you think – and it’s possible to do it without even having a site of your own. You do not really have to spend the money on domains and hosting to get started and achieve your first sales. If your funds are limited, or you are unsure about the outcome of your new affiliate activity, investing money into it can wait until you see you are making money off it.

You see, there are 2 types of affiliates. First type relies on paid advertising (PPC) such as Google AdWords, second type relies on organic traffic – that is, the search engine visitors searching for the corresponding products. The PPC affiliates often drive the visitors directly to their affiliate URL as opposed to a standalone site (although Google has made it more difficult recently). But doing PPC requires an initial investment. The second type of affiliates rely on organic traffic from the search engines – and here’s where the opportunity lies for you. Just like for PPC affiliates, it is not absolutely necessary for an affiliate working with organic traffic to get a site of their own right away.

Here’s where the opportunity lies for you. Instead of registering a domain and buying a hosting account, go to Squidoo.com and register an account there. Then create a page about the treatment you want to promote. You do not need to know HTML, or anything else about building sites. Just fill out the forms you see there, add your banners, treatment pictures and – most important – your affiliate link, and you’re done!

Is it really that easy, you may ask? Well, you might want to research the topic you’re writing about, as creating a really good and interesting page (or lens, as Squidoo calls them) pays off – the better your lens is the more traffic it gets. Also, an added benefit of Squidoo is in it being an authority site – the one that Google likes. It makes ranking your page easier.

Of course, you still have to put some effort into promoting your page. Unlike with your own site on your own domain, you are a bit limited in ways you can use for promoting your page: you cannot submit it into directories, for example. But you can still bookmark it, place a link to it into your forum signatures, submit articles to article directories with links to your page, and so on.

Squidoo is not the only place that can get you started – you can also try Tripod, or Yahoo! Geocities, or Hubpages, or WetPaint. All these places give you a free account and web space, and do not require any HTML knowledge. Or maybe you fancy a blog over a static page? OK! Head over to Blogger.com and register yourself an account – setting up a blog there as easy as setting up a page in all the places I’ve mentioned previously.

OK, as an added bonus to this article, here comes my favorite technique: suppose you have created pages at all of the places referred to above. Now, to get the most benefit from setting them all up, link them all to each other. This way, promoting each 1 of them will benefit them all.

In the beginning, this may seem like a lot of work and a lot of time. But once you start seeing the traffic coming in through your affiliate links, it will be really rewarding! And when the sales start happening, you can invest into your own domain and host. Back when I was just starting out making money online, I did the same way – and now I have a bunch of my own sites making me money.

And don’t worry if things appear difficult or beyond your knowledge about the web – MoreNiche has many guides for people just like you in which you can find answers to all your questions, from putting up your affiliate links to promoting your sites.

About the author

IrishWonder is well known internet marketer within SEO circles.
He is also an author of the brand new Directory Marketing guide.

This post will be addressing a few common issues with newbie’s who want to make money online but find themselves failing.

Even worse, they are getting the wrong impression of internet marketing and often associate online marketing with scams and pyramid type schemes.

They are of course wrong and there are several reasons why this happens.

HYIP (High Yield Investment Projects)

This looks so lucrative on the outside but in essence it is more of a scam and only part of the members ever get results. There projects are very short-lived and works on the fact that they need more and more paying members so the first ones can get their payouts.

Once system can’t recruit new paying members (aka your downline) the project gets shut down and you loose all money invested not to mention any promised interest and future profits.

Fail.

PTC (Paid To Click) and similar schemes

Paid to click sounds again like a very lucrative opportunity – all you need to do is look at ads for x amount of seconds or click on links and money is made. While it is true, money can be made this way – but you need to look at the other side of coin – the actual payouts.

Often one gets paid half a cent per ad view (usually 30 seconds), so at the best 1 can make 1 cent per minute or 0.60 USD an hour so if you do it 8h a day, you cold end making $4.8/day.

Problem with this is not only small rate per hour but also the fact that no-one can do this 8h a day, because these systems will not give you that many ads to view.

End result – well, you might get $10 here and $5 for a months work but overly you are wasting your time.

Fail.

JUMPING

The jumping syndrome is something that is characteristic to all new internet marketers.

They jump from one opportunity to another without actually giving the first one a proper go.

The thing is – it takes time to master a strategy and then apply it fully, often it requires much deeper research. For example – for many people blogging has made them a nice living and in some cases gigantic fortunes. But there are ten times more people who fail.

They failed because they didn’t stick to the system long enough to master the strategy, didn’t produce enough content, didn’t use best practices and didn’t have a plan.

One week later they jumped onto video marketing, then article marketing, then spent $500 on PPC then joined next huge MLM company, then decided to earn with contextual ads, then ran to email marketing, then to black hat SEO and so on and so on. Every time scratching just the surface and then running to the next massive thing.

We know where it leads.

Fail.

The Solution

The simplest solution for you is to stick with MoreNiche, go trough the free marketing guides and video tutorials, set up a plan, review it with your affiliate manager and then MAKE IT HAPPEN!

Yes, it will take time and efforts but that’s the key to success.

Success.