issue 24 - Affiliate Marketing Questions Answered

Dear Friend,

welcome to all new subscribers who joined during the past weeks. Many came to download the blogging tutorial and I hope you enjoyed it.

One new subscriber asked me a couple of questions about affiliate marketing and because her questions are so good and I believe that every new affiliate marketer has these, I decided to dedicate today´s newsletter issue to provide answers to those questions.

Remember - this newsletter is for YOU! Don´t be too shy to ask even the most basic questions. Your questions will help me to create a big FAQ list.

Enjoy !

Affiliate Marketing Questions Answered

Question #1:

What is the best way to protect one’s affiliate commissions? I read somewhere to use redirect pages but then I also read that they can be bad for SEO reasons.

Answer:

A redirect page usually uses a “meta refresh” tag in its HTML header to send visitors to a different target URL. This type of page is usually generated by affiliate link protector tools, but can be easily built manually, too. You just need the HTML code for a blank webpage and add the following meta tag to the head section:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”URL=http://www.targeturl.com”>

The problem with this type of redirect page is that it can be abused to show different content to the search engines while instantly redirecting visitors to a different webpage and that´s why it is bad for SEO reasons to use this method.

Sure, there are legitimate reasons for using meta redirects, for example when a webpage has moved to a different location, but then you would include a delay of a few seconds like this:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5; URL=http://www.targeturl.com”>

In the above example, the forwarding would take place in 5 seconds. You would also include a link inside that page that people could click on in case the redirect doesn´t work with their browsers. I´m using this method on the old URL for the blog submission page

Now, the best and easiest way to protect your affiliate commissions in my humble opinion is to use server side redirects. I´ve already explained in a previous newsletter how this is done with the help of an .htaccess file.

You can read this information in issue 021 of my newsletter.

Question #2:

Is there any source/ebook out there that you feel is really good for explaining what to do for successful affiliate promoting ? I would like to know what really separates the super affiliates from the mediocre earners.

Answer:

Actually, there are a couple of ebooks and membership sites out there that teach you how to become a super affiliate. But before I recommend any book, let me give you some tips that will inspire your brain to come-up with your own strategies.

To become a super affiliate, you basically just need to achieve two goals: Find a merchant / affiliate program that converts well and generate a lot of highly targeted, motivated-to-buy visitors to your affiliate links.

Sounds trivial, huh ?

Tips for choosing good affiliate programs / merchants are given in the answer to question #3. For now let´s take a closer look at the traffic component. What could you do to make people click on your affiliate links and buy from the merchants you are promoting ?

1. PPC - pay per click advertising.

The quickest way to get visitors to your affilite links is to start a ppc campaign. But the problem in many niches is that online shoppers don´t purchase right away, especially for higher priced items they will browse around and compare prices. So when you send them directly to the merchant you won´t make much money.

A better option would be to send these visitors to your own website where you can then motivate them to buy through your affilite links. This motivation can be achieved in many different ways:

- product reviews / comparison to help them make a better buying decision - price comparison to help them find the best prices
- incentives like discount coupons to help them save money

Why do you think coupon sites and price comparison sites are able to bid high prices for popular shopping related keywords ? Simply because they convert their visitors well into buyers.

2. SEO - free search engine traffic.

To sell a lot of products using seo techniques alone, you will need to achieve good rankings for popular keywords. It takes time and effort, but once achieved, you cannot be sure to keep these good rankings forever. You don´t control the search engines and therefore I wouldn´t put all my eggs into this basket. Don´t spend too much time in trying to get top rankings for popular keywords.

3. Build an email list

Yes, many top affiliates have big email lists and newsletters. Although spam filters and ISPs have made it more difficult even for legitimate email to arrive in people´s mailboxes, email marketing is still very effective.

You won´t probably become a super affiliate for a single merchant with a small email newsletter, but you have the opportunity to earn quite well by selling different products from different merchants over and over again to the same people.

And another big advantage of a newsletter is that you can build a strong relationship with your readers, provided that you give them original, valuable information. People who know and trust you are more likely to buy the products you recommend to them than people who visit your site for the very first time.

4. Viral reports / e-books

Here´s another way to get massive exposure for your affiliate links and make people buy products from the merchants you recommend: viral reports and viral e-books.

There are some basic requirements to make this technique work:

- your report should be on a hot, popular topic ( f.ex. parenting, time saving, making / saving money, health, fitness, dieting, etc … )
- it must contain valuable, useful information
- you must give webmasters and ezine publishers an incentive to give away your report/e-book. That´s quite difficult if your free report contains too many affiliate links. You might allow important ezine publishers to replace some of your affiliate links with theirs.
- you should set up a tell-a-friend system in the back-end to make it easy for readers to pass on your report. Of course, they will only do it if you provide good information.
- Original, unique content. Don´t use private rights e-books that hundreds of other people are distributing, too - unless you make substantial changes, turning them into unique pieces.

5. Create low-price information products with resell rights

Instead of giving away the reports / e-books that contain your affiliate links, you could sell them for a low price ( something between 15-30 $) and offer free resell rights as an added bonus.

This way, other people will have a great incentive to pass on your un-modified infoproduct and expose your affiliate links to many more eyes than you could possibly reach.

6. Know / Use the products you are promoting

Now, this tip is not for getting traffic, it´s about converting visitors into buyers. Don´t make the mistake to think only about web traffic - convertion is a big key to success, too.

So you want to sell this “how to get rid of acne in 3 days or less” ClickBank e-book ? It would be the best, you or someone you know had a great success with it and can write a honest and personal recommendation for this product.

Very few people don´t trust promising sales letters anymore. Today, you even cannot be sure anymore if the testimonials on the sales pages are real. People are looking for honest reviews, real success stories, credible recommendations, etc …

7. Get other people to write testimonials for affiliate products

Even if you don´t know anything about acne and want to promote anti acne products, then you could still create a well converting website. First, feature a couple of different products and invite your visitors to tell you their experiences with the products. Of course, you will have to offer them some reward for doing so. If you can´t come up with a valuable digital product as reward, consider paying them a shopping gift card or cash via paypal. It will cost you some money, but you will know which products work and the increased convertion rate due to the real life success stories will pay off soon.

8. Be creative

There are many ways to get more visitors and to improve the affilite sales convertions of your webpages. For some more traffic boosting tips, download and read the free Affiliate Classroom PDF newsletter issue of the month july, 2005.

At the moment, I can´t really recommend a single e-book that teaches you ALL aspects for becoming a high-earning affiliate marketer. Instead of buying a book, I recommend you rather buy one or two months of an Affiliate Classroom membership and learn as much as you can. Studying the materials inside the “affiliate classroom” you will learn more than from a single e-book.

Question #3:

I’m looking for a source that deals more on selecting the best affiliate programs and one that explains the correct do´s and dont’s. What would you recommend ?

Answer:

A very good place to inform yourself about affiliate programs and online merchants is the affiliate forum AbestWeb . It has forums for every affiliate network like shareasale, cj and linkshare and also many forums for individual merchants.

Another good place to learn about how to select good affiliate programs is the already mentioned affiliate classroom PDF newsletter:

The may 2005 issue includes some tips on choosing the right merchants and affiliate programs.

The august 2005 newsletter issue talks about bad, unethical merchant practices and how you can protect your affilite commissions.

And for the correct do´s and dont´s:

Issue june 2005 has a great article about duplicate content, how it can hurt your business and how you can stay on the safe side. This also includes the correct use of product datafeeds.

Simply download and study all the past issues. They are free.

Question #4:

What would your recommendations be for someone who has never designed a website. I want to build a 50 page SEO friendly site selling my products and affiliate products. I want to do things right but also want to do them efficiently and cost effective. Should I buy Frontpage 2003 and do it myself, go with Site Build It or some wehosting/site building provider or should I hire someone from Elance or such?

Answer:

First of all, I recommend you learn some basic HTML skills from one of the free online tutorials you get when searching Google for “free html tutorial”. You do not have to know each single HTML element and its attributes inside out, just the very basics.

Then, download the free HTML editor 1stpage2000 from Evrsoft.com. This editor makes it really easy to build websites and it has an extensive HTML and CSS reference guide built-in.

I´m in the process of creating an HTML video tutorial which will go far beyond HTML, covering topics like how to register domain names, how to choose the right hosting, the basic hosting features like setting up a database and email accounts, how to upload files, some required legal documents like privacy and disclaimers, protecting your contact info from spambots, etc …

I hope to have this completed before Christmas.

The basic understanding of HTML code will help you a lot when it comes to making small changes to websites built with tools like SEO Website Builder or XSitePro and you will be also able to create your own templates for these tools.

BTW - both tools are excellent. The big advantage of these tools is not only that they allow newbies to easily build search engine optimized websites but also that they make it easy to apply layout changes to an entire site with a few clicks.

My posters site is built using SEO Website Builder. It´s more than only a website builder, it´s a complete seo affiliate marketing guide that teaches you how to choose the right merchants, find low competitive keywords, organize your keyword lists and build your pre-selling content pages around these keywords.

You should also check out affiliate classroom´s september issue where you will find 7 tips for starting your first affiliate website. (you already should have downloaded it)

For webhosting and domain names, I recommend that you use a webhost that allows you to host domains you have registered elsewhere. This way you will have the flexibility to easily switch to a different host if you need to, without having to transfer your domains first.

I register most of my domains with Godaddy.com .

Webhosts I am currently using:

ThirdSphere, Dreamhost, 1and1, Bluehost, Hostgator

Dreamhost and Hostgator are quite cool if you are planning to build several niche mini sites. You can host as many sites as you want under one account, limited only by disk space and bandwidth, of which you get plenty.

Dreamhost, Hostgator and Bluehost also have one-click installs for Wordpress and other software scripts.

If you want to go with Dreamhost, I can offer you a 50 $ discount on your hosting fee ( only applies to 1 and 2 year pre-paid accounts ). This discount is only available for subscribers. You will find the coupon code inside the vault.

Well my friend, that´s it for today. I hope you enjoyed this newsletter and wish you a great week-end.

Truely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer