New Complete Guide For Affiliate Marketing 2011

When it comes to financial freedom and being able to build an online business while enjoying the flexibility that comes only from working for yourself, calling the shots and designing your own path, affiliate marketing is one of the most viable opportunities online.

Millionaires are made within this industry.

Most of the wealthiest marketers and entrepreneurs that you know all share one common thread that connects them together and unites their success in one incredibly inspiring way.

They all started as affiliate marketers.

How else can you so easily begin to generate income without having to weave your way through any difficult learning curve?

What other method allows for such a fast paced method of building an online business with very little start up costs, enabling you to earn as you learn, from day one?
The majority of online business opportunities come with very stringent rules (and strings) attached.

Typically, you have to start from the ground floor up, working your way to the top at a painfully slow pace.
You're also, for the most part, single handedly responsible for creating products, building an online presence, handling support inquiries, all the while trying to steadily build and maintain a name for yourself, with competition fierce and eager to knock you off your temporary pedestal.

But affiliate marketing offers you the opportunity to take a very different path.

Rather than crawl through the trenches in what can feel like an endless journey, it instead, offers you the ability to catapult your efforts and skyrocket your income in record time.

The face paced world of affiliate marketing will keep you motivated, on your toes, excited and most importantly, wealthy.
As someone who has been working exclusively online for many years, there are few online opportunities I haven't explored.

Of them all, the one that consistently yields results and is based on proven strategies that have withstood the test of time, is affiliate marketing.

Whether you are a brand new marketer, or you are a seasoned professional, you can begin to generate an income effortlessly, in a very short amount of time.

You can control the amount of work you do, choose your niche markets, fill your digital arsenal with powerful products that consistently ring in sales and build your own online brand while being paid to promote someone else's.

It's a journey that will leads you to a very profitable destination, where YOU are in full control of your own financial future.

When starting out in affiliate marketing, there are a handful of "must have" affiliate tools that will help you get everything set up faster and easier. The first being a domain name.

As an affiliate marketer, you should get used to registering domain names and setting up hosting accounts because eventually, you will be doing this on a daily basis.

In fact, as you begin to promote the bigger launches, you will want to register individual domains for every single product you promote.

Here's what you will need to set up your first affiliate based website:

1: Domain Name You can register a $9 domain at www.Godaddy.com
When choosing your domain name, you want to be sure to incorporate keywords relating to the type of the product or service that you will be promoting.

2: Hosting Account
I personally use www.bluehost.com just because of its simplicity, dedicated support and affordable plans, however you are free to evaluate the many different hosting providers online and choose one that you are comfortable working with.

You should be able to set up a hosting account for less than $10 a month, to start. (Your hosting plan can be later upgraded if you need additional space or bandwidth).

One thing to keep in mind when creating your hosting account however, is that with my strategy, you will be setting up multiple websites and sub pages.

3: Autoresponder Account
In order to maximize your income, you will absolutely need to build a mailing list via an autoresponder service. I use www.MailChimp.com

4: Free copy of www.Wordpress.org
Apart from these few resources, you have everything else you need in order to to orchestrate a successful execution of your first affiliate marketing campaign.

The first domain that you register should be used as your central hub, the basis of your affiliate business and the entry point into your entire network.

You can choose to register a domain that includes your name, company name, or just a memorable domain name applicable to your niche market.
For example, if you were planning on promoting various products from within the weight loss industry, you could start with a domain name that is generic, so that you can use it for many different campaigns, but also relevant to your niche, encompassing keywords such as:

 "weightlossresources.com" "weightlossinformationhub.com".

This central point will provide you with a place to begin directing traffic, so that you can then funnel the traffic out through different affiliate links, promoting multiple products.

One easy method of setting up your central hub is by using a review-style template. By doing this, you can provide useful and relevant content (warming up your visitors) and then funnel them off to different merchant sites - tagged with your affiliate link.

I will show you how to set up a complete review site in an upcoming chapter. For now, let‟s dive into short term versus long-term profits.

Affiliate marketing is all about catering to an ever-changing demand for fresh products, services and information.

With trends and changes in industries making it a fast paced game, successful affiliate marketers need to stay on top, while keeping a steady pulse on the marketplace.
One of the greatest (and fatal) mistakes that new affiliates make is in failing to set up a network of campaigns that focus both on "current demand" and on "evergreen markets'.

Instead, they chase down leads for time limited releases and launches, having to start back at square one each time a new product is released.

You won't make this mistake.

Savvy marketers create a balance of both hot, short-term campaigns and ones that are designed to generate long term profits. These markets, (called evergreen) are ones that seldom change and consistently sell out every single year, as the market is replenished with fresh leads.

For example, the weight loss industry is one where there is always a circulation of new people entering the market desperate for information, help, training, or tips on how to effectively lose weight and maintain their progress.

Just the same, the dating and relationship arena is consistently replenished with fresh customers who are interested in receiving help in repairing or improving their relationships.

These types of markets are rock solid, and by creating campaigns around them you will always have a steady income from your campaigns, while you spend the rest of your time jacking up your income with an occasional short-term product launch.

At neck break speed, websites are launching high-ticket items while affiliates are eager to gobble up the first of the profits and solidify their campaigns so that they are sucking in the majority of the traffic.

These types of launches are usually time limited, meaning that after the initial wave of commissions, they tend to slow down and eventually stop altogether.

The great part about these short-term campaigns however, is in just how profitable they are.

Take the Internet Marketing industry for example.

A seasoned marketer releases a brand new method of generating fresh, instant content using an online script. Within a few days, every marketer is promoting the software, earning &98 on the front end with upgrades offered in the thousands.

Within a few weeks from launch day, the majority of the market has heard of this fantastic new tool and it becomes nearly impossible to get your affiliate link out in front of fresh leads.

The pool is only so big after all, and once the sharks have made their way through the waters, all that's left are a handful of guppies.
Most marketing guides tell you to avoid these short term promotions and launches, claiming that the income potential isn't worth the fuss. I beg to differ.

While the majority of your campaigns should always be focused on long term profitability, throwing in a handful of short-term cash machines never hurts.

In fact, I've added a few grand to my bank account nearly every month for the last two years just plucking out a few major launches, and spending a few days quickly promoting them. Which leads me to my next point:

The most important thing you can ever do as an affiliate is to stay on top of what is about to launch, what has successfully launched in the past (so you can scout out similar products), who is capable of really helping you make money in affiliate marketing with a good supply of affiliate creatives and media, and WHO to avoid.

While there are countless guides available online that will send you in circles all over the Internet "researching" affiliate products, I am going to save you a load of time and a world of hurt, and just give you the only resources you'll ever need:

www.JVNotifyPro.com
www.ClickBank.com

(For physical products, I recommend www.Amazon.com and www.CJ.com as the top two affiliate networks).
JV Notify Pro is THE community for finding out what upcoming launches are taking place.

You can browse through the forum and find dozens of hot products worth considering and can even gain the insider advantage to being able to communicate with both affiliate marketers and product developers (the guys launching the sites).

This will do two important things for you:

1) It will keep you on top of what is about to launch so that you can prepare your campaigns ahead of time.

2) It will give you the opportunity to see HOW other people intend to promote the launches so that you can focus on alternative, action-driven strategies that will help you gain top ranking in the search engines as each new product is introduced to the public. For example, rather than just focusing on exploiting blogs to position yourself in the search engines, you will know, in advance, of upcoming launches and can quickly register domain names, set up Squidoo lens, Hub Pages, articles sent over to article directories, etc.
 
You can learn a great deal just by participating in the JV Notify Pro community forum. It's a central location for anyone serious about making money in the industry.

The second site, ClickBank offers instant access to thousands of digital products, as well as membership sites that offer one-time commissions as well as recurring commissions.

ClickBank is one of the easiest marketplaces to use because unlike many other affiliate networks, you don't have to be approved for each product that you intend on promoting.
Better yet, you don't have to sign up to individual affiliate accounts but can promote as many products as you wish by signing up for a single free account.
When you begin creating your campaigns, you will want to drop by Clickbank on a regular basis to generate your affiliate links (known as "hop links") and to keep a pulse on what is currently selling and what types of products or markets seem to be experiencing a temporary lull.

You will able to determine the viability of a market by evaluating the information attached to every product featured within the marketplace.

When it comes to choosing products and testing the viability of a market, you need to take a very systematic approach.

1) Do you have an interest or passion for the niche market? While you can‟t base your decisions on personal interest alone, it does help to have a personal interest in the topics you are promoting.

2) Do you have experience in the niche? Experience isn‟t required, however if you have existing knowledge, expertise or experience with the topics, you will be able to accurately target your market, while presenting offers as someone who knows what they are talking about, rather than re-hashing the same old information that every other marketer is peddling.

3) Is this market one that contains hungry, active buyers?
This is an important aspect when choosing your niche market. You really want to do everything you can do to ensure that there is an existing demand for the info product you are planning to create. The last thing you want to do is spend the time, resources or money creating an info product that no one is really interested in.
 
Don‟t spend time trying to penetrate an untapped market, but instead, focus on niche markets that have already been proven to be profitable.

4) Is this a desperate market?
Are people anxious to find a solution to an ongoing problem?

Are they desperate to purchase the products because they feel they NEED to, rather than simply wanting to?

This is very important because not only are desperate markets easier to penetrate, but far easier to target.

In order to successfully launch your info product, you need to know everything you can about your target audience, including:
1) Exactly what they are looking for or need help with?
2) Where they currently go for help or advice?
3) What types of products are they purchasing?
4) Is there a desperate need in this market?
5) Are these buyers likely to become repeat customers?

You want to look for a market that can be easily targeted by a clear, identifiable problem, need or demand and fill in the gaps with an info product that offers this market with a solution to their problems.

In other words, pay attention to who you are selling to before you determine what you are going to sell.

If you are interested in promoting digital products as well as membership sites, here‟s my exact formula for evaluating products within the ClickBank marketplace.

To get started, let‟s visit the ClickBank marketplace at http://www.ClickBank.com

Click on the “Marketplace” link to enter into the marketplace.
There are two ways to search out current products within the ClickBank Marketplace: Enter in a keyword search term that describes a market you are considering. (Example: Acne, Weight Loss, Gardening, Cake Decorating, etc) and browse through the search results.

Search through the Clickbank marketplace by selecting existing categories and sub-categories without entering in a seed keyword.

I recommend searching through the categories rather than relying exclusively on entering in keywords. It will broaden your search and give you a better idea of what‟s currently selling and will also help you generate ideas for your own info product just by browsing through existing hot sellers.
 
Choose to sort your results by „High Gravity” and click “Go”.

In my example below, I chose the category “Money & Employment” and the sub-category “Home Business”. I then chose to sort listings by “High Gravity”.

Gravity is an indication of the overall popularity of a product based on the number of affiliates who have successfully referred customers to the merchant‟s website.
 
While the gravity of a product is not completely accurate, it serves as a reference when choosing between different markets. The higher the gravity of a product, the better the product is currently selling.

You can also sort products by popularity, gravity as well as the affiliate payout percentage for each product.

Each category within the Clickbank marketplace, also features sub categories based on smaller niches.

For example, the «Business to Business» category also includes:

Education, Publishing, Industrial, Management, new Products, Reports, Promotion and web design.

You will notice that with Clickbank, each product listing features specific information regarding its current stats.

Here is what these mean:

$/sale: The amount of money you earn for each sale.

Future $: Average rebill revenue.

Total $/sale: Average total $ per sale, including all rebills.

%/sale: The percentage of the product sale price that the sale represents.

%/refd: Fraction of publisher‟s total sales that are referred by affiliates.

grav: The measure of how many affiliates are promoting the product.

For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks Clickbank adds an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.

The Gravity indicator will tell you how well a product is selling. So a gravity score of 100 means a product is potentially selling better than one with a gravity score of 20.

It indicates the overall merit of a product, and while there are other factors to take into consideration, the gravity of a product is a VERY important aspect of choosing viable products.

Also, when choosing potential products to promote, you also have to consider the actual “estimated” profitability.

What commissions are being offered, what the pay offer really is, also taking into consideration any back-end offers, or upsells that you will also be able to generate additional revenue from.

I primarily promote products that pay out at least $25- 40.00 for every sale generated as a result from my marketing on the front end, unless the backend system is set up to actually convert higher and pay out a larger amount.

For example, you promote a launch that offers a $19.97 product on the front end with a 100% commission offer, however the backend is offered at $97, and offers a split rate of 50%. This may be a viable product worth promoting if the market is viable, the demand is there and the products are proven to be quality releases.
 
To begin compiling a list of potential products and markets worth exploring, open up a text file and save it as “Potential-Products”. This will serve as your swipe file of potential products to both promote directly, and use when providing alternative options as well as comparatively promoting one product against another.

Apart from single sale products, you also want to focus on recurring products available as well (membership site offers).

On ClickBank, you can search for existing subscription based sites by choosing the “Future $” option under the “Sort By” menu.

If you promote products that offer recurring commissions, you will be able to maximize the value of each customer that you convert into a buyer, and receive ongoing payments on a regular basis, as long as they remain an active member of the site.

When evaluating potential products, keep these 3 critical things in mind:

1) Desperate Buyers
2) Market Size
3) Available Products

Your landing page is where you‟re going to pre-sell the visitor into buying the product you‟re promoting, or where you‟re going to persuade them to join your list.
 
Assuming you‟re direct linking from your articles or social bookmarks, you‟re going to need a landing page, which grabs the visitor‟s attention with the headline.

What type of landing page should you use?

There three important kinds of landing pages that you can use depending on what you intend to do with the visitor:
 
Review Pages

If you want to become recognized as an authority voice in your niche, then review sites will help you build a loyal following and brand awareness as a credit source for help, information and guidance.
They also work INCREDIBLY well at driving in desperate buyers who are moments away from making the purchase.

Typical review sites review between 2 and 6 products, with the highest rated product being featured on top with close to perfect marks.

(More on review sites in a bit)

Presell Pages

A presell page is similar to a review page except that it focuses on a single product and employs subtle psychological triggers to persuade the visitor into becoming a buyer.

There are a few different approaches you can take with a presell page.

For example, you can do what I described with the review pages and that is to act as an authority figure.

Another approach you could take is to act like you know what the person is going through. If you are promoting a golf product, you can say how you were the laughing stock of your friends until you purchased the course and now you consistently beat them by a few strokes every game.

A concern that you may have at this point would be how you could offer an honest review of a product without purchasing it. It would cost you quite a bit to buy everything that you promoted.

The solution to this is to ask the product owner for a review copy. More often than not, if you approach them correctly, they‟ll be happy to provide their affiliates with review copies.

Squeeze Page

The purpose of a squeeze page is obviously to build a list. But many people neglect to include opt-in forms in their affiliate campaigns and therefore lose out on targeted and motivated prospects who are genuinely interested in purchasing products and services, but simply want a bit more information beforehand.

For example, you are promoting a product in the dating niche. Perhaps you already put up a review page and/or a presell page, but let‟s say you also put up a squeeze page.

While the other two types of landing pages converts prospects into buyers virtually on the spot, building a squeeze page won‟t necessary get you an immediate sale, but will allow you to market to that prospect over and over again in the future.

In your campaign in the dating niche, you‟ll be driving traffic from various sources like PPC, PPV or articles to your squeeze page where you will be giving away a free dating product in return for opting in to your list.

This can be a short report about 5-10 pages long, a product that you have rights to, or whatever. Make sure your copy and your free product is good enough so that your conversions are high.
 
Once you have acquired a new lead, that‟s where they enter your sales funnel. Make sure you create a follow-up series in your autoresponder to gradually get them to purchase the product you‟re promoting.

After I have taught you how to create landing page, we need to test it using PPV/CPV platforms. This is ideal when considering running your review pages, presell pages or squeeze page on PPV ad networks, because we can actually test forced popups on those sites. A VITAL bit of information when testing media buys using PPV/CPV platforms is that you should take your final conversion rate with them and multiply it by 10000% (Yes, ten thousand percent). Basically PPV marketing works like this: First, a visitor or user installs a program that allows a CPV network to serve ad's on their computer. Some people call this adware; and that may or may not be true. We’re not here to talk about the moral ramifications though.

For example, let’s say someone installs the program which is the partner with Hooqy. Hooqy can choose to serve ads to this user anytime they want; either via redirect or popup. At this point, Hooqy adds this person to their database and people like you and me can pay to serve ads to these users based on keywords, website urls, and a number of other criteria. A good example, is a user going to gamespot.com; we could bid on that url and whenever someone running Hooqy's software visited Gamespot.com the person bidding the most for each view (kind of like how PPC marketing works) would have an ad popup.

In this case, let’s assume I'm running a campaign for xbox360.com; so I could either plug in a URL for an affiliate landing page-or direct link, and send them straight to xbox360.com through my affiliate link. That’s pretty much the basic concept behind CPV.

A few CPV networks:

Hooqy.com - These guys have some best traffic I've ever bought through this CPV network, however the volume is a little low. Minimum Deposit: $25

Clicksor.com - Minimum deposit is $20

Adbrite.com - Adbrite is we’ll known for its cheap PPC service, but most people are unaware that they offer a CPV program as we’ll(They call it "Pop-up"). Minimum deposit is $15

DirectCPV.com - DirectCPV requires you to deposit minimum $100

Mediatraffic.com - This is one of the most popular CPV networks, so it can be a little more competitive. The initial deposit required here is $200