Free Internet Marketing Tips and Resources Blog by Stuart Stirling

The Most Critical Aspect of Affiliate Marketing is.....

The most critical aspect of affiliate marketing is promotion. Or in other words, advertising. Many affiliate marketers fail in this aspect because they lack the initiative to work hard to get the 'right type' of qualified visitors to see their offers and take action.

Unfortunately, affiliate marketing isn't as simple as sending just any old type of web surfers to a sales page and hoping for the best.

If you want to earn big commissions, you have to invest time and hard work to promote your products the 'right way'.

As earlier mentioned, the competition is very high and customers nowadays are wiser than ever. They are used to seeing amazing offers and compelling sales pages. They are after the best offer possible and they will be very selective about it. After all, who doesn't want to get the best purchase!

The biggest part of the preparation is doing market research.

You must research your target niche market.

• What are they buying right now?
• Where do they hang out?
• What products are available?
• Is it a lasting market/product or just a fad?

Good ways to research a potential affiliate program you are considering promoting is by joining affiliate marketing forums, comparing different affiliate programs and reading articles about affiliate marketing.

These days affiliate commissions can be very high, especially for digital info products such as ebooks. 100% commission affiliate programs are not uncommon with lower priced products. These lower priced products are usually easier to sell and affiliates love them because they get paid 100% of the sale and usually instantly into their Paypal account.

This way you can get info and tips from experienced affiliate marketers on how to choose the best merchants and products with highest converting products for your chosen niche market.

If at first you don't succeed, keep on trying! Don't get disappointed if your first attempts at affiliate marketing do not pay off.

Thousands are attracted by the possibility of generating sky-rocketing incomes through affiliate marketing and so they sign up for any old affiliate program without carefully understanding anything about the offer, the market, how to market to that niche market or how to market in general.

When they don't get instant results with one affiliate program, they throw that one to the side and sign up for another program! I'm sure you do not want to be one that gives up so easily!

Keep persevering, don't give up, and you will start to make money.

Send more traffic, learn more about your market and promote like a maniac!

The question then will be, how much money do you want to make?

To Your Affiliate Marketing Success!
Stuart Stirling

Free Download Offer - Discover the BEST 7 ways to promote your favorite affiliate links without a website of your own and without spending a dime on advertising!

Go and download it free at www.AffiliateMoneySecret.com now!

Labels: 100-commision-affiliate-program, affiliate-marketing-for-beginners, affiliate-marketing-help, best-affiliate-programs, free-affiliate-marketing-ebook

posted by Stuart S @ 7:48 AM 0 Comments Links to this post

Start Your Affiliate Marketing In 6 Simple Steps

Affiliate marketing is a quick'n'easy to start business model to make some relatively easy bucks online.

Theses 6 steps are brief and quite simple. However, all 6 steps are important to ensure your affiliate marketing success.

1. Choose a Niche Market

Why to choose a niche market first instead of product? First, what if you find a product you like but there is no market for it? Second, you want to be able to put more products in your pipeline later down the track. So first, search for available products or services you can sell as an affiliate.

You have to choose a market which suits you too. Obtain detailed information about it. Know what types of people you're going to target. Do they have money? Where do they hang out? Waht are they buying already? Research things like that first. When you think you have found a profitable market, go product hunting.

2. Pick a Product to Sell

When you have picked a specific niche market, now it is time to select a product to sell as an affiliate. Of course you will want to choose a product specific to your niche. You can't sell lawn care ebooks to fishing fanatics.

You will probably feel that you want to promote and sell all the products at the beginning, but it is advised not to do this in the start. Start with one or two. If you choose a ton of products to promote in the beginning, you will lose track of everything and end up going no-where.

Choose a product that is good value and has a nice commission payout for you. Make sure you choose from a reliable website so you can rest assured you get your affiliate commission and they are contactable in case a problem arises.

3. Set up an Autoresponder Email Series

After you get started with your affiliate campaign, you need to create a follow up email series, which is also called an autoresponder series. This is the magical part that will put your affiliate marketing on autopilot.

Follow up, follow up, follow up! An autoresponder will do this automatically!

This series must have good information about your niche market and also info about the products you are selling that will make your prospect want to buy your recommendations.

For example, if you are selling golf clubs, you can build an email series telling them about how to improve you swing and how these golf clubs will help you improve.

Try to be creative. Mix in the sales pitch quaintly and tell your visitors how they can purchase those golf clubs. You can also compare different golf clubs, state the benefits and advantages. Write about some major golfers in the world.

It is typical that during first few weeks, prospects do not buy. It takes them time to warm up with good info and good deals. Make about 10 short emails in your series spread out over about 2 months. It can be longer, but preferably not shorter.

4. Build a Squeeze Page to Capture Emails

Once your email series is in place, create a page on your website where you will capture information (names and email addresses) about your prospects so you can send them your follow-up series. This is often called a "squeeze page". If you are building a business, having your own web site is a necessity. It may cost some money but it will be 100 times harder to get this system in place without your own website.

Not only can you have your squeeze page on your website, you can write about and display your affiliate products to the website visitors - and make you look like an expert.

5. Get Targeted Website Traffic

Once your auto-pilot affiliate money machine (website and auto-responder) is up and running, all you need now is traffic!

It depends on your niche as how to go about getting traffic. Where do people interested in your niche hang out? If it's Youtube, make videos and upload to youtube. If its forums, hot the forums and add your links in your signature. Email marketing is often effective but be careful about buying email lists.

6. Find additional related products

Once you have started to drive traffic and are building a list of prospects and hopefully seeing some sales, its time to add some new products to your products list. Again, make sure they're related to your target market and offer value

If it's the "Make Money Online" niche you want to target and don't know how to do anything technical like set up a squeeze page or find hot selling products, I recommend Affiliate Cash Secrets. They have done 90% of the work for you. All you have to do is follow their easy strategies and your first affiliate commission is around the corner.

Anyone can get started with Affiliate Cash Secrets because it's all plug and play. Theres no guess work, just follow the steps and affiliate dollars are yours!

To your success,
Stuart Stirling

Labels: affiliate-marketing-for-beginners, affiliate-marketing-help, easy-way-to-make-money-online

posted by Stuart S @ 4:27 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Affiliate Cash Secrets Membership Candid Review

Is Affiliate Cash Secrets membership a rip off?

I've been a member of Derrick Van Dyke's Affiliate Cash Secrets website since it started over 12 months ago now and it hasn't been all smooth sailing.

In the beginning it was free to join and stay a member. For a new site, it was still very impressive. It had a downline builder and a squeeze page you could download and use on your own website to build a list.

I used these tools to get a few extra hundred subscribers and some extra profit over a few months.

Then came the downfall....

In a space over the last 6 months, I could have sworn Affilaite Cash Secrets was falling apart. It seemed like Derrick was changing the system almost every week. I couldn't keep up with the changes and I doubt that anyone else could.

So I said "Bye-Bye".

But something amazing happened.

Late this year, 2007, Derrick finally got his head screwed on right. It took a lot of tinkering and frustrated affiliates like myself, but he has made what I can consider almost the "perfect turn-key affiliate marketing system".

Here's a 1 minute break down of the "NEW" Affiliate Cash Secrets system:

1. You sign up for a free 7 day trial getting you full access to the
system. Your login details will be emailed to you. After the 7 day trial
is up, you'll be paying $29.95

2. You "Set Up" your system which is a squeeze page (4 to choose from) that
is all hosted on the ACS website. You just fill in forms with your
auto-responder info, affiliate links and follow up emails (all form
filling-no HTML required).

3. Read the "Traffic Tactics" page to see how you can get traffic for free.
You will learn how to use ad swaps, blogging and social networking sites to send
traffic to your squeeze page and build your list.

4. You get subscribers to sign up and download a free report with your
affiliate links embedded inside (that happens auto-matically in the "Set-up").
Your subscribers also get a series of follow up emails with your affiliate links
in them. These emails are pre-written so you just need to copy and paste them in
your auto-responder.

Some other cool extra features inside include....

• Ad/campaign tracking software
• Affiliate program that pays you $20 per month for every paid member you refer

It's really simple, but this is the exact same way I and all other online marketers build there business but with one difference.

The great thing about the Affiliate Cash Secrets is that EVERYTHING is there in the one place. It's turn-key. It's simple and fast to set up. If you're half familiar with computers, you can have eveything set up and ready to make money in less than 2 hours.

The list building tools are there. The products are there. You don't need to know anything about niche research, keywords, or anything techie like HTML, web hosting, FTP or cpanel.

The downsides....

Of course, nothing is ever perfect (but Affiliate Cash Secrets is not far from it). There are some "not so good" points about.

For one, you need to sign up and pay for an auto-responder acount with Aweber, Prosender, Get Response or Email Aces. This can hurt a newbie with no income stream. But the cold hard truth is, an auto-reponder service is absolutely 100% necessary to be successful online. Not 2 ways about it. You must bite the bullet on this one and get an autoresponder.

Next is, you've got the same squeeze page as 10,000 odd other people in the world targeting the same group of people. Everyone knows that originality wins at the end of the day. Derrick has got 4 different squeeze pages offering 4 different reports, but still, you're not the only one using them. And as more people join, the more watered down the effectiveness will be.

Finally, the navigation of the site is still a little confusing. There are many sub folders within subfolders, making it a little time consuming to get around and easy to get lost at first. The best way to deal with this is the watch the tutorial videos and just take some time to get used to where it all is.

All in all, Affiliate Cash Secrets is perfect for newbies starting from scratch. It's a complete system that makes it easy to start building a list and make their first dollars in commissions fast.

I have my membership and will stay a member. Not that I don't have my own business building system in place, rather, I will stay a member to keep it high on my list of recommended tools to help those who want to start making money online easily and in a hurry.

It's like the "microwave dinner" of online money making affiliate marketing systems. Not the perfect meal, but it's ready in a minute, provides enough "nutrition" and still very tasty!

For more information, click here to visit Affiliate Cash Secrets website and sign up for a free 7 day trial membership...while they last. Apparantly, numbers are limited.

Stuart Stirling

Labels: affiliate-cash-secrets-review, affiliate-marketing-for-beginners, easy-way-to-make-money-online, make-money-fast

posted by Stuart S @ 1:04 AM 0 Comments Links to this post