VIP Training for 4 Feb 2010 Part 1 – Basic Affiliate Marketing Guide

The two most common offers are CPA and CPS. You can be paid on a CPA(cost per action) in which the user signs up for a site, completes a form, signs up for a free trial etc. You can also work as a CPS(cost per sale) affiliate. With this type of offer you are paid a commission every time an actual sale occurs. It is important as an affiliate that you understand how the offers you promote work. That way you can match the right surfers (traffic) to the right offer. With this information you can also apply the correct technique to sell the offer to the visitor.

Where are all these surfers and how can you tell what they are looking for?

Search engines are a goldmine for affiliate marketers. Every time a user types in search keywords he is revealing his specific interest at that moment. Affiliates can take advantage of this information in two main ways. First, by SEO (search engine optimization), creating a website containing links to the offer and other content that interests, entertains, describes, and/or convinces, yet is related to the offer. And second, by purchasing paid advertisments which appear when surfers enter particular search keywords. Techniques and strategies based on both these ideas can be implemented individually or blended together successfully.

SEO techniques all strive to make a webpage, or entire site as attractive as possible to search engines for a given set of keywords. With careful planning and a lot of work, you can build a page that consistently ranks as one of the top results when someone searches for a keyword. The main advantage of this strategy is that it need not cost lots of money to implement. The main drawback is that it typically takes a long time for SEO methods to bear fruit. When it works your site ranks as one of the top results and people viewing those results are very likely to click on your link and reach your site.

Paid advertising is another way to catch the attention of surfers who use search engines. The three main search engines, Google, Yahoo, and Bing, as well as many “second tier” search sites offer ad services whereby affiliates and others bid to have their ads displayed whenever a given keyword is entered for a search. Depending on the service, your ad might consist of a few lines of text, a banner image, or even a video. When everything works right, surfers who see the ad will click on it and be taken to your webpage and then on to the offer. Typically, the higher your bid “per click” is, the better the chance your ad will appear to searchers who use your keywords. This PPC (pay per click) system of advertising can be tricky because bid methods and evaluations are different for each search engine. The great advantage over SEO alone is that PPC can quickly result in very large amounts of interested traffic.

Which is the better tactic? Typically the answer will be based on your needs and resources. Often a good answer is “both.” Some search engine ad platforms take the “quality” of the webpage into account in the bidding process so that a highly optimized page will win top ad spot for a lower bid price.

Mobile traffic is a relatively new area for affiliate marketers. Several companies, such as AdMob offer the opportunity to show small text ads, tiny images, or video clips to mobile device users.

Article Marketing is a great inexpensive way to promote a site. The affiliate writes (or outsources) a series of articles about a topic related to his site and then submits these to various online article indexes. The published articles or sometimes just the writer bio contain links back to the site. This normally attracts a very interested clientel, since the surfers who click the article links have already gone to the trouble to seek out and read articles on the topic.

List-buliding is a method of capitalizing on your previous success at advertising your site. Using some type of opt-in form you collect e-mail addresses from interested surfers who you can then revisit with other offers or information. Like article marketing, the strength of this type of traffic is that it is already highly interested in the niche of the site, compared to the average surfer.  Even better than article marketing, the customer has asked to be marketed to.