6 Top Tips for Promoting Affiliate Products

The affiliate business model is perhaps one of the easiest ways to make a living online...

Essentially it involves promoting OTHER PEOPLE’S PRODUCTS for commission, which means that you don’t have to worry about creating or sourcing your own products, handling payments or even dealing with customers.

In fact, all of the time-consuming administrative tasks are handled by the product owner himself, and the affiliate network that the product is being sold through (which we’ll be discussing in just a moment)...

As a result, affiliate marketing has been growing in popularity in recent years as people have begun to realise just how profitable it can be, and just how little “work” is actually required to do it.

All the BIG PLAYERS in the internet marketing arena are engaged in affiliate marketing, because it’s such an easy way to make money...

To begin with...

YOU DON’T HAVE to source or create your own product..

YOU DON’T HAVE to write a sales letter or advertise your product...

YOU DON’T HAVE to process customer orders...

YOU DON’T HAVE to set up a merchant account to take payments...

YOU DON’T HAVE to deliver the products to the customer, and...

In fact...

YOU DON’T HAVE to deal with any of the customers, AT ALL!

And all of that makes affiliate marketing the perfect first step for the beginner...

So then, where should you be looking for the very best affiliate products?

The best route for a “newbie” affiliate as far as I’m concerned is to sign up with an affiliate network. Although there are many, I’d recommend that you focus on the following four, as I’ve found these to be the best...

1. ClickBank

2. Affiliate Window

3. Commission Junction

4. PayDotCom

And when it comes to selecting which affiliate products to promote, there are a few general rules that you need to stick to...

1) Only Work with Quality Products!!

This is a VERY important point, as it’s no good being an affiliate for a product that won’t generate big sales.

The product you select MUST be good quality, so always take a look at the sales page of the product used by the product owner and take a good look at the product itself if you’re about to endorse it.

If the sales page is impressive but the product is disappointing there will be a lot of refunds and you’ll lose most, if not all, of your profits… as well as loyal subscribers if you’re marketing via an e-mail list.

That’s why it’s very important to choose a product that’s high in quality and has few returns.

You will experience a certain amount of refunds and returns but you want to minimise this and the only way to achieve that is to work with good quality products.

When choosing a product it’s important that you research it first as it will help when youbegin promoting and driving traffic to the site, i.e. you will understand the benefits and you can push them in your marketing.

There are three main ways of determining whether or not a product will be of sufficient quality and profitability, and they are:

• Purchase the product yourself and test it
• Take a look at what others are saying about it on online forums
• Look at other affiliates and see what they are doing. What type of keywords are they using to promote it?

One way of doing the latter is to type a search query into Google using a relevant search term and take note of the affiliate websites that are displayed in the search results. Usually, the more affiliates there are under a search term, the more money there is to be made within a particular niche.

Affiliate links are easy to spot, as they will contain “hoplinks” or even “cloaked” links when you click on them. We’ll talk in detail about hoplinks later on in this module.

2) Get out of the Internet marketing niche!

All of the affiliate networks listed above have many products that are not in the ‘make money’ niche that will be a lot easier to sell, many of which have some pretty heavy commissions that come with them.

Internet Marketing and money-making products are very hard to sell because the competition is so great.

You’re better off trying to promote something outside of this niche when first starting out (unless you have access to some ready-made and proven websites and marketing material).

ClickBank, for example, has products in a wide variety of categories, ranging from “health and fitness” and “sports and recreation”, to “computing and internet”, “home and family” and “fun and entertainment”, amongst others.

3) Never go for the #1 product!

When choosing a product to promote, the first thing we DON’T want to look for is the number 1 product. In all likelihood, it will have a pretty high gravity attached to it (meaning many affiliates are promoting it) which will make it extremely difficult for you to make one sale, let alone hundreds.

Instead, you want to look for a product that has a gravity of around 30 or 40, max. Now, I know what you’re thinking, these products won’t be the best sellers.

That’s not true.

There are many products in the top 50 that have gravity ratings of around 30 or 40. What I want you to do when you start out is find the first one with a gravity score of UNDER 40 (we will discuss ‘gravity’ in more detail in just a moment).

4) Check that the stats are good

The next thing you want to look at is the $/sale. You want it to be at least $20 per sale (as most affiliate networks deal in dollars I’m going to do the same here). Also make sure the % per sale is at least 50%. Higher would be nice, but no less than 50%.

Finally, you want to look at the % referred. You don’t want this to be more than 80%. Even though the gravity may be low, if this is high, that gravity has more weight.

A gravity of 30 with a % referred of 45% is better than a gravity of 25 with a % referred of 89%. Don’t worry if you don’t understand these terms just yet. I’ll explain what they all mean in just a moment.

5) Make sure it’s $20 per sale

Okay, why the $20 per sale?

I’m calculating this based on using Google Adwords, which most affiliates use, spending 10 cents per click and getting at least 1 sale for every 100 clicks. This will give you an expense of $10 and a sale of $20, giving you a profit of $10.

That’s why I draw the line at no less than $20 per sale.

While doing this search on my own, I found a product on the ClickBank marketplace that is currently ranked fifth under Health and Fitness. These are the stats that went along with this product.

$/sale: $53.24 | Future $: $00.00 | Total $/sale: $54.83 | %/sale: 60.0% | %refd: 43.0% | grav: 36.89

This is EXACTLY the kind of product that you should be looking for...

The Gravity is not too high, the % referred is very low, there’s over 50% commission and look at that high $ per sale. We couldn’t have picked a better product if we designed it ourselves!

It takes a little practice, but eventually you’ll find products in the marketplace that are going to be very easy to sell and will provide a very nice income for you.

6) Make Sure the Sales Page is Top Quality

The sales page is the page that potential customers land on, and is provided by the product or website owner. The whole point of the sales page is to get as many visitors as possible to make a purchase and/or sign-up to the subscriber list.

So the sales page of an affiliate product is an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT thing to look at when choosing an affiliate product to market.

This is why I usually recommend that you start with something of interest to you, because when you look at the sales pages you will KNOW if it’s good or not… Chances are, if you’re tempted to buy the product, other people will be as well.

Factors that make a good sales page are:

• It grabs your attention right away
• It keeps your attention throughout the page
• It gets you excited about the product
• It is appealing to the eye
• It shows proof that the product really works (testimonials)
• It offers a money-back guarantee
• It offers bonus products

So there you go!

If you pick affiliate products that have sales pages with all the key factors above, you will stand a much stronger chance of succeeding with your affiliate campaign.

Best Wishes,

Chris Cobb

For more information about me and my business, take a look at either of the following sites:

Chris Cobb

Chris Cobb

Chris Cobb