The most important thing to do to become a successful affiliate marketer is to make the decision to do it. Next is to decide which method you are going to use to market your affiliate product. Then you must stick with it for long enough to know what you are doing and why it is working or not and expand from there.
Article marketing is a great place to begin you affiliate marketing career. It can be very cheap, even free if you do it all yourself, and it is proven to be very successful and a favorite to many marketers already.The object is to write an article and submit it to the many article sites out there so that your name and backlinks to your site appear all over the internet.
Article directories, ezines and blogs are constantly looking for content and gladly print your article as long as it pertains to the subject matter they talk about. Since you provide them with free content they reciprocate by giving you a free link back to your site and some recognition as an expert in your field. The more links pointing to your site and the more places your name shows up on the internet means more vistors to your site and more sales of your affiliate product.
Since there are thousands of sites to submit your article to this can be time consuming. A solution to this are submission sites. They submit your article to many of these sites for a fee. It is a matter of time vs. money, what is your time woth to you and what can you afford?
There is a drawback to putting up the same article on all these sites. The search engines will penalize sites that have duplicate content. There is a service available that takes care of this and it also submits your site to the article directories. It is a valuable resource if you can afford it.
Once you have experimented with this type of marketing for your affiliate products another path is pay per click marketing. The biggest PPC company is Google's AdWords. While the results from this type of marketing are fast they can also prove to be extremely costly if you don't know how to do it effectively.
PPC marketing involves you choosing keywords that are related to your niche and placing a bid on those words. When someone searches for that term your ad gets shown. Depending how much you bid your ad may be first or it may not get shown at all if you don't bid enough. It is difficult to master how much to bid and on which words but once you find the right balance for the words you choose profits go through the roof!
You can also be a successful affiliate marketer by using your blog. You simply write a review of the product you are promoting on your blog and send traffic there. You can use sites like Squdoo to send traffic to your site and also create backlinks to your site. Also you can put comments on the blogs of other bloggers and leave a link there to your site.
To become successful as an affiliate marketer you must learn to focus on one method first then expand as your experience grows. If you try to do all of these things at once you will find that you quickly lose focus and get very frustrated . Pick a technique, master it and reap the rewards of being a successful affiliate marketer.
