Affiliate Programs Worthless for 80 of Affiliate Market

No doubt you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule – which states that20 percent of affiliates generate 80% of affiliate income, andconversely, remaining 80 percent of affiliates generate only20 percent of all income for most affiliate programs.There are ten basics that will put your affiliate marketingin the top 20 percent of affiliate earnings. Ten suggestionsthat will transform your affiliate income from a tricklingcreek that barely covers your hosting fees, to a roaring riverof extra disposable income.TOP AFFILIATE MARKETERS DO MOST OF THESE TEN ITEMS1.Top affiliate marketers cloak web site linksCloaking affiliate links should not be necessary, but is. Oddlymany site visitors refuse to visit your links if they see anaffiliate code appended to the URL when they hover their mouseover a link on your web page. Sometimes they will type theaffiliate domain directly to the browser address bar whileremoving your affiliate ID from the URL. To short circuit thisodd behavior, simply cloak the URL. How2. Top affiliate marketers write & distribute articleswriting articles about your market niche is essential to gainreputation as an expert in your field. But the biggest benefitcomes not just from writing those articles, but from havingthose articles published by other web site owners and ezinepublishers. Your article gains you both reputation and linksfrom other web sites from light bulbs the resource box appended to theend of each article. Here are major article distribution sites.yahoogroups.com/group/free-content/groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/goarticles.comideamarketers.com3.Top affiliate marketers focus on a market nichefilling a web site with content reflecting a narrowly focusedproduct or service niche is a well known method of gaining webtraffic in your area of specialty. An excellent resource thatcan help you determine relevant and focused areas to fill yoursite with is called NicheBot. They offer innovative tools toresearch and pinpoint market niches for your web site based onthe WordTracker Database and Google.nichebot.com4.Top affiliate marketers use autoresponder seriesAutoresponders are incredibly valuable tools that allow you tosend a timed series watch repair tools of email messages to those that sign up forthem. Most often those autoresponders are sent through a thirdparty provider. Some of the top providers are Sendfree.com andaweber.com, for a tutorial covering autoresponder basics, visit:website101.com/email_e-mail/email_autoresponder_basics.html5.Top affiliate marketers create web pages to pre-sellCreating either testimonial pages or review pages that discussand pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with isthe best method of getting increased orders for your chosenaffiliate programs. Many programs actually provide either anarticle or recommended text to sell their products for you andallow reproduction of those articles with your links embedded.6.Top affiliate marketers gather email addressesThe best affiliates collect email addresses on their web siteby offering free reports via the above mentioned autorespondersor by giving away eBooks or through newsletter signup forms.The best use all of these methods or more to build their listof email addresses. This also allows you to contact potentialcustomers that would otherwise never see your site again afterclicking away to the affiliate program web site. 7. Top affiliate marketers advertise SOMEWHEREDepending on your market niches you should advertise using PPCand/or ezine advertising. Some categories of Pay-per-click canbe prohibitively expensive, but advertising somewhere is allbut mandatory to gain substantial additional traffic to yoursite. There are some great bargains in ezine advertising andsome less popular PPC engines other than Yahoo’s Overture andGoogle’s Adwords. Try 7search, Kanoodle and FindWhat for lowerBids than the big boys of PPC.8. Top affiliate marketers optimize for search enginesSearch engine optimization is becoming more complex as moreand more webmasters participate, but the basics applied toyour site can increase visibility dramatically over time. Themost critical of the many SEO techniques is to use title tagsthat reflect individual PAGE content. Many webmasters write amaster title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worstthing you could do for search engine ranking. 9. Top affiliate marketers give away eBooks or freebiesEveryone knows by now that giving something away is a greattraffic generator and allows you to gather email addressesto allow contact of potential customers at a later date. Thisstrategy is employed by EVERY successful web-based company atone time or another. Think of all the free things YOU havecollected online over time. Screensavers, software, eBooks,discount codes, toolbars, white papers. They work!10. Top Affiliate marketers have their own mailing listsThe best of affiliate marketers have their own newsletter orezine and gather email addresses on their site to build theirlist of subscribers. Having this list allows regular contactwith potential customers interested in your site, your productand your market niche. If you don’t write your own material orthink you can’t produce weekly content, there are hundreds ofauthors out there that will gladly product articles for you.The article distribution lists provide free content and ghostWriters provide high quality content for a fee. If you implement ALL the above techniques, you are guaranteedto become one of the top affiliate marketers on the web. Thenyou can create your own product telling everyone how YOU didit, create your own affiliate program and have hundreds of usselling for you.