Affiliate Marketing Newbies, Are You Doing It All Wrong?

Most new affiliate marketers make the mistake of sending their traffic directly to their affiliate link. If you're doing this, you're really depriving yourself of the income you've worked so hard to create. If you expect to make a decent income marketing other peoples products you're going to need a "Squeeze Page." What's a "Squeeze Page," you ask? It's a page which gives a brief description of the service that you're marketing. It has a form requesting the name and email address of the person viewing your page. If the person wants more information about your product or service, they put their name and email address in the form, hit submit, where they will be taken to a thank you page which includes an exact link to your specific product or service. Notice that said "exact link", this means you don't send them to your homepage where they could become confused searching through all of the products and services you are selling. If they become too confused they could just click away, losing them and your potential sale.You direct them to the exact page where they will see more of what got them interested in visiting your site. Nothing turns customers off quicker than directing them to some general website that sells a bunch of stuff. A rule of thumb is, for every affiliate link you want to promote; You'll need its own separate squeeze page. This is really the key to succesful marketing online. Keep it simple. Start out with one affiliate program, then plan and develop your marketing campaign, Keep your focus on this particular campaign, then when successful, simply duplicate your promotion through squeeze pages. You can also market your goods by designing your own website and/or blog. Blogs are the growing trend today and a whole lot easier to get set up. You can get a free blog through www.blogger.com and a website through www.freewebs.com. For those who aren't familiar with blogs, a blog is a type of website which can contain journal-like posts which are updated frequently. You can also post articles with a link back to your site which will get your site indexed by the major search engines quickly. This is especially true if you ping your blog each time you update. I use http://pinger.blogflux.com/ and http://www.pingoat.com/ This will trigger your site to be crawled by indexing< spiders, which will increase you site's popularity (thus increasing your search engine rank). Blogs can be created around any topic you choose, and are effective for marketing affiliate programs. After setting up your blog, you can create posts which contain a link or two to your website or an affiliate link which is relevant to the topic of your post. The benefits here are two-fold, you are advertising without "selling" (no one likes to be sold) and you are increasing the number of links to your site which will increase your rank on search engines. I also suggest you get your own domain name for your website. You can get a free domain with no ads through www.co.nr. From here you should create posts on your blog and ping it every time you submit a new post. Marketing affiliate programs and using their links can be risky. What I mean by that is most affiliate links can be hijacked by unscrupulous marketers. When I'm promoting an affiliate link I use a redirect code to hide the original link. I use this code: (html) (head) (/head) (body) (script language="JavaScript") (!-- window.location.replace('http://www.thesite.com'); //--) (/script) (/body) (/html) I used parenthesis so the code would show up. You'll need to replace them with these < > to make the code work. All you do is pull up notepad, paste the code into it then replace the http://www.thesite.com with your affiliate url and Save It As: anythingyouwant.html Upload it to your public html directory and your good to go. Just promote your redirect url http://yoursite/anythingyouwant.html Do these things and you'll be raking in the affiliate sales you so deserve.