Martin Lee Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is really about two things. The first thing is traffic generation. I will not be discussing about traffic generation techniques in this article as I will be covering them elsewhere. Instead, I will talk about the second thing which is the system that you use to send visitors to the merchant’s website. There are three approaches to doing it.

The beginner or newbie approach is to send visitors DIRECTLY to the merchant’s website. For example if you want to promote this Dog Training Product, you will drive traffic directly to the clickbank hoplink with your userid for this product (http://userid.cee123.hop.clickbank.net/). Or you could use url redirection or domain masking to hide the affiliate link.

But as long as traffic is sent directly to the merchant, I will classify it as the newbie approach. Essentially, there is no system used and most of the time, you only have one shot of making the sale. It is possible to get sales but you will not be maximising your profits.

The second or intermediate approach is to send traffic to your own site first before sending it to the merchant’s website. Using the same example as above, you can have a site on dog training. At this site, you can

1) Build a list by capturing the name and email address of the visitor. This can be done by offering him a gift (eg. free report on dog training) and will allow you to follow up repeatably with him later on. This increases the conversion rate and also allows you to promote other products later on.

2) Increase the conversion rate of the sale by preselling him on the dog training product. One way to do this is to write a personal review of the product (To find out how you can presell effectively, you can download this ebook).

Obviously, the second approach requires much more work than the first method but will bring you a higher payoff in the long run.

The third approach that can really take your income to the next level is to have your own product with an affiliate program. Now, you will have an endless stream of traffic coming to your main site for you to build your list of subcribers and customers. You can then promote other relevant products to them anytime you want.

This concludes an introduction to the three approaches that you can take to do affiliate marketing. In future articles, I will talk a bit more about each individual approach.

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