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Can You REALLY Make BIG Money With Affiliate Programs?

Willie Crawford

Can you really make big money with affiliate programs? Can you earn a satisfactory income from commissions on selling others' products? That question has to be on a lot of people's minds. There are a lot of people considering setting up a website and marketing affiliate products. They wonder whether or not to believe all of the hype. There are also a lot of people who are already marketing affiliate products. Many of these are making very few sales, and they are wondering.... what am I missing!

To answer the first question... yes, you really can earn big money with affiliate programs. There's just a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Most people are going about it ALL WRONG. That's why the majority aren't making the big money they desire.

What are some of the things they are doing wrong, and how can they correct these things?

Far too many people are choosing the wrong affiliate products. They are choosing products that aren't a good match for their website visitors and ezine subscribers. Trying to market a product to the wrong audience is doomed to fail from the start. Instead, find or create products that meet the expressed needs of your audience. Marketing should not be about trying to convince someone that they need a product that they're convinced they don't need. Instead, it should be merely demonstrating that your product is the solution to one of their problems, wants, needs or fears. Selecting the right products or services is essential to achieve any real success marketing affiliate products.

Many people choose a product that offers too little return on the resources required to make a sale. The commissions earned don't cover the value of advertising and TIME expended. With these products or services, even if you make sales, you come out worse than you would be if you had spent the same time working at the local fast food restaurant or car wash.

The solution to the above problem is very simple. Market only products that pay a decent commission. There are many great products available that offer 40 - 100% commission. It generally makes little sense marketing a product paying only 20-30%. The one exception to this rule is products that pay a residual income. The best example of this type of product is web hosting. You earn a lower commission, BUT you earn this commission month after month. Therefore you end up earning more in the long run. If you do market products which are poor sellers, pay low commissions, and don't offer a residual income, drop them. You time is simply too valuable to do otherwise.

Even with the right product, you need to market it correctly. This is also where a lot of affiliates fall down. They market all wrong. What are some of the things you many be doing wrong?

1) Trying to sell an expensive product from a small classified ad. Many seasoned marketers recommend using the two-step method rather than trying to sell directly from your classified ads. With this method, your ad entices the reader to visit a website to get more information, or to request it from an autoresponder. With the autoresponder you get the prospect's email address to follow-up in case they don't buy at first. This allows you to provide a lot more product information (explain benefits to the customer) than you could in a small classified ad.

2) Trying to sell a product from an ad. With many affiliate programs, extensive research and testing has gone into developing a website that is an effective selling machine. With these programs, your job is to "pre-sell" the visitor. You get them interested and draw them to the website in a receptive mood. You don't oversell them though since the website can generally do the selling a lot more effectively than you ad can. Ken Evoy writes a lot about pre-selling in his 5 day course for affiliates. This is some of the best coverage I've seen on this topic and best of all it's FREE. To sign up for this highly recommended free course simply send a blank email to: tamsmentor100@sitesell.net

3) Running your ad in the wrong place. Don't run an ad in an ezine where the same product is advertised by 10 other advertisers in the same issue. This gives the impression that the market is already over-saturated. If you do run your ad in ezines that run lots of ads for the same products, at least make your ad read different. I'd recommend using a url featuring your own domain rather than using the assigned affiliate url. Then you simply use a cgi-script or html refresh code to forward the customer to the affiliate site. This has increased click-thrus considerably for me and many others who use this technique. You can have your own website up and running for $25 per month or less. There really is no reason not to use this method since it does increase your sales. If you'd like to get setup with a website quickly and easily, I highly recommend Host4Profit. I host a number of sites there and am very satisfied. However, at the low prices they charge you will not get as much tech support as with a firm charging $80 or more per month. If you'd like to check out this HIGHLY recommended host visit: http://williecrawford.com/cgi-bin/tk.cgi?warriors  Notice the url I used? This uses one of the cgi-redirect script I mentioned above. When I use this url in my ads it both tracks my response rates and distinguishes my ad from all of the others who might be marketing the same product.

4) Relying too heavily upon banners. If you are going to market an affiliate product from your website, text links incorporated into the copy on your website have been proven more effective than banners. They blend in with the page better. Many people have been conditioned to ignore banners. A good affiliate program will offer you a variety of banners if you still desire to use them. The best affiliate programs will constantly test their banners and ads and will tell you which ones achieve the best results.

The best type of text link to have on your site is part of a recommendation. To honestly make a recommendation for a product you need to buy a copy first. You should KNOW what your customer will receive and the only way to do this is to get a copy of what you're offering. That can also save you a lot of time since you will not waste time marketing a terrible product. If you order a product and are dissatisfied, you should return it and probably assume that lot of other will be dissatisfied with it too. So don't market that product! Your recommendations can also be in articles posted on your site. As you create these articles, also run them in your ezine and submit them to other ezines.

5) Offering too many different affiliate products from the same webpage. Ideally, a webpage would focus the readers attention on the exact action that you desire him to take. When you give your visitors too much choices, you fail to focus his attention. Give him too many choices and he'll never make a choice. This is the very reason that most fast food restaurants only offer 1 or 2 choices in children's meals. They know that if you give too many choices they'll have trouble deciding. Your visitors are much more sophisticated, but they are just as easily distracted :-)

You can REALLY make BIG money with affiliate programs. However, that does depend upon you doing a lot of things right. Fail to do these things right, and you're wasting your time. Do things right and receiving nice commission checks in the mail will be a regular occurrence. It takes a lot of effort and testing.

Willie Crawford is an internet marketing consultant who has aided hundreds in building very successful online businesses. Feel free to drop by his marketing discussion board at http://williecrawford.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi  today to discuss marketing and website traffic issues ;-)