Don’t Screw Up With Your Affiliate Business

Would you like to make money as an affiliate?

If you start affiliate marketing just by jumping into it with no advanced preparation, chances are quite high you will fail. I know this is the kind of thing that you don’t get from the typical affiliate marketing guide book, but this is reality. If you don’t know why people are failing with affiliate marketing, then the chances are good that you will fail too.

The reason why people are failing with affiliate marketing has little to do with the intelligence or willingness. Many of these people were actually very pump up.

There are just so many ways to screw up in the affiliate marketing game. If you want to give yourself a head start, focus on reverse engineering your competitors. This is a shortcut to affiliate marketing success. Best of all, you let your competitors do your homework for you. The bottom line is you build on their success while avoiding their failed experiments.

5 Ways to Use Reverse Engineer

1. Your Competitor’s Conversion Platform – If it turns out that in your affiliate niche, most of your competitors have put up blogs or search engines. Then there is a high chance that you should do the same. There is a reason why their websites use the same conversion platform. The reason should be obvious: it works. Focus on what works. Come up with your own unique version, but focus on what works. If you ignore this lesson, then don’t be surprised if your “hot idea” doesn’t ignite the imagination of your target audience members. It may be too experimental. It may be too weird for them to take chances with.
2. Your Back-link Profile – Your competitors are actually an open book. If they put up any kind of website or they publish an article on their site, you can easily see their work. You can easily look at how successful their work is ad far as the rest of the internet is concerned. How do you do this? Using tools like Majestic.com, you can see how many websites link to your competitors’ content.  More importantly, you would be able to see the identities of these websites and size them up in terms of quality.
   Have you noticed that a lot of the big movers and shakers in your niche link to some of your competitors’ content? You have all information you need to replicate that success. It all boils down to the willingness  reverse engineer what they are doing right as far as internet popularity is concerned.
3. Identify and Improve on Their best Content – A lot of marketers think that their target audience members are looking for new stuff. This is a serious mistake. If you pay attention to what your competitors are doing, you will realize that they only talk about a fairly narrow range of topics and themes. Stick to these themes and identify the best content. Then you come up with the same but better. This can give you a massive competitive advantage.
4. Focus on the Most Common Social Media Platforms – If you notice that your competitors are all on YouTube but hardly anybody is on Twitter, this is a red flag. This should mean that you should stop wasting your time on Twitter and focus more time and energy on YouTube. There is a reason why your competitors are congregating on some social media platforms and not others. Again, it all comes back to results. Somehow, someway, they are getting results form some social media channel and not others. There is no need to be a hero. There is no need to chart unexplored waters. Focus on what works t´for them.
5. Your Site Layout – If it turns out that your competitors’ websites tend to look similar to each other, pay attention. For some reason your niche audience tends to respond more favorably  ta certain layout than others. You might want to copy that layout and them improve on it. By copying your competitors most common layout elements, you get a priceless head start.

Keep the reverse engineering techniques above in mind if you want to get a solid head start in affiliate marketing. If you want to make more money as an affiliate marketer. Otherwise, you might just be one of the people fail at affiliate marketing.

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6 Steps To a Sales Conversion

If you are struggling to close a sale, maybe it is because you are not following the steps below. Please understand that if you want to close more sales as an affiliate, you must follow certain steps.

With these six steps you will increase your chances to success:

1. Be Relevant – The first thing you need to do is to offer relevant content to the right people. These are people who have certain problems. The content that you present must address those problems. People who have a certain problem are looking for solutions. They will be drawn to your content if it solves their problems.
2. Offer Valuable Information – When people go to your website, make sure you give them what they came for. They obviously have problems, so give them the solution for that. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. However, keep in mind that there is a big difference between conventional wisdom and tried and proven solution. You are going to use both. But you are going to tease them so as to get them to buy whatever it is you are promoting.
3. Shoot Down Alternatives and Position Your Offer As Better – This is where the rubber meets the rope. Your website is going to be informative. If people have a problem, you are going to give them the solution to their problem. You are not going to play around. You are going to offer real value. Here’s the trick. You are going to give the information, but you are also to tease them and tell them that if they are looking for something faster, more convenient, cheaper, or more powerful, click here.
   This way, they got what they cam for but you also opened their minds to something better. That is marketing. Because otherwise, you are just being a reporter. You are just basically giving them the stuff that they came for without getting anything in return. This way you will not make money as an affiliate marketer. You have to shoot down the common solutions to the problem that you are offering. Then, position your offer as something better.
4. Build Credibility Through Supporting Content – It is not enough for you to say that I have a better way of doing things. You have to walk your talk and present some case study. Show some video ir infographic to prove to the reader that you know what you are talking about. This build credibility because the more credible your solution becomes, the more likely people would buy it.
5. Filter Interests Using Deep Content – With each supporting piece of content that you link to your website, you are drawing the prospect deeper and deeper into the conversion funnel. You have to understand that there is going to be a lot of people reading your stuff. At the end of the process, only a very few will read article after article until they reach a sales page.
   Those are the people that you are trying to reach. Those are the people that you are trying to convert. You do this by making sure that each link that they go to leads to credible information with supporting content. The deeper they get into you website, the more finely the content is as far as their interests are concerned. You are always making an appeal to this solution. You are constantly reminding them that whatever it is that you are offering, it is far superior to the other generic information you have shared in previous pages.
6. Call Your Reader to Action Using Emotional Hooks – Eventually, you should lead your reader deep into the bowels of your blog or website and hit them hard . How do you do this? Present content that has a lot of hard hitting supporting information. Then call your reader to action by drawing a link between their purchase of the solution and the emotional payoff or the benefits that they personally get from the product. You have to stir people through these six steps otherwise it is going to be very hard to get that affiliate conversion. You cannot skip a step.

Make Money as an Affiliate

Why do you need to build a mailing list? A lot of people keep repeating the mantra, “the money is in the list”. They repeatedly say this mantra like some sort of religious duty. It almost borders on some sort of cult spirituality. Well, there is a reason why experienced and seasoned affiliate marketers keep saying this. After all, where there is smoke, there is fire. People will not risk their professional credibility in saying something that is patently false. They are not liars not are they rolling the dice with their reputation by steering people wrong. Instead, they are saying the truth. But you need to be clear as to why this is the truth.

Here are the four reasons why you should build a mailing list:

• You Won’t Convert With Ads Usually – When was the last time you visited a website , saw an ad, clicked it, read the sales page and whipped out your credit card to buy stuff? I would venture to guess that those times are few and far between.
  Usually, ads do not convert. What they do is create some level of familiarity with people. When a link is clicked, then people figure out what the ad is about. They keep seeing the ad and become familiar with it, eventually click on it again. They read more and ultimately some of them would join a mailing list where they would get marketed to several times. The more you get your offer in front of a person’s eyes, the more chances you get to make your case.
• Get Them To Come Back to Your Site – The vast majority of people who visit a website will never come back. Maybe they just did a one-time Google search. Maybe somebody just referred them via email. Whatever the case may be, they found the website, i it lacking or found the information interesting, but not interesting enough for them to buy stuff. For whatever reason, they bounced out and most of them don’t come back.
  When you get people to sign up for your mailing list, you get a chance to direct them back to your website when you engin update. Maybe you posted a new blog post. Maybe you are launching a new release. Whatever the case may be, you give people a u to come back to your site. You end up recycling a lot of the “dead traffic” that you could have lost permanently.
• Position Yourself as a Trustworthy Expert – When you send out update after update, you are basically telling your mailing list members to  pay attention to you because you know what you are talking about. The more emails they read, the more credible they find you. The more emails they open, the more they impressed with your expertise and subject matter authority.
  The key here is to get them to like you enough for them to feel that you know what you are talking about. IF you keep this up, they will trust you and it will only be a matter of time until they trust you enough to buy whatever it is that you are promoting. Of course, this takes time. Some people don’t need much persuasion. You only need to send a few emails for them to buy stuff. Others take a longer time to decide. Whatever the case may be, you put yourself in this situation.
• Use a General Info List to Filer Out Buyers – Finally, building a mailing list enable you to convert more of the people interested in your website. These people become mailing list members because they have visited your website. They are interested. Now once they are on your website, send out high quality updated to establish your credibility. Also, send out a one-dollar offer for a small book or booklet that you have published. You are not going to make money out of the one.dollar.deals. Instead, you are using it as a device to filter buyers from tire kickers. Tire kickers are people who would just want to receive Emails after email, but they would not buy anything.
  When you send out a one-dollar deal, you are making it very easy for people to segregate themselves. They are signaling to you that they are serious enough to buy stuff later on. You may only be making a dollar from this deal, but once you get them in your buyers’ list, then you can send them offers that charge more money. You chances of success are much higher because these people are tried and proven buyers.

Wrapping Up

Make no mistake. A lot of affiliate marketers are only able to convert their traffic into buyers because they set up a mailing list. Do yourself a big favor. Set up a mailing list. Create a relationship between your content and your audience. The more credibility your content is, the more likely the audience will trust you regarding the stuff that you are trying to promote.

This is very hard to do with ads. This is very hard to do with blog posts.

With mailing list, however, you can send updates after update to build credibility and authority to reach a point where your readers would click a link and buy stuff from you.

If you fail to wrap your mind to the reason above, don’t be surprised if your affiliate marketing business and self-publishing efforts are running into challenges. You have to learn from the hard lessons described in this blog post.

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