Tips on Promoting Affiliate Products: Dos and Don'ts

Everyone should know by now that promoting affiliate products is the fastest and easiest way to make money online. However, you need to equip yourself with the proper knowledge and skills in order to stay in the affiliate marketing game. This can prevent you from making unnecessary mistakes and fall into the pitfalls, but not making any money. Here are the Dos and Don'ts when promoting affiliate products to keep you on the right track.

Dos
1. Search for good quality affiliate product that can convince you to buy it yourself.
If you are not convinced, then how are you going to persuade others to buy?
You will find it a lot easier to promote products that can offer significant benefits to the buyers.

2. Promote product, which you feel passionate about instead of popularity.

3. Make use of the data, information and statistics provided by the vendors on their Sales page. These include author’s background, statistics of the problem to be solved, solution available, product benefits, customer testimonial, and the offer.

4. You need to test your affiliate HopLinks regularly to make sure they are working accordingly.

5. Utilize the marketing tools provided by the vendors in the affiliate member area. Make good use of the keywords, banner, email copy, etc to help promoting the affiliate product. At the same time, try to learn other online marketing methods to maximize the exposure of your affiliate products.

6. Be flexible about your techniques, and be willing to make changes if something isn’t working. Different techniques work for different types of products, so what worked for you in the past may not work in the future. The business of affiliate marketing changes very quickly, so you always need to be ready to adjust to market trends, new products, and other unforeseen circumstances.

7. Keep your HopLinks in a file for easy reference. You may want to keep a simple not to help identify the product of the HopLink.

8. Use an inoffensive affiliate nickname, as it will be visible to your potential customer.


Don’ts

1. Don’t Spam.
Spamming does you nothing except to get banned by the Affiliate Marketer Contract.

2. Don’t use “negative” advertising campaigns.
While some affiliates think it’s a good idea to create ads like “Is Product X a scam?” and then link to the product. Many vendors are opposed to people associating their product with being a scam. It’s better to highlight the benefits of a product right off the bat, instead of introducing fear about a product and then trying to sell a customer on the product anyway.

3. Don’t think that you must buy the product before you can promote it.
You’re not required to buy the product in order to promote it. However, by owning and using the product itself can sometimes lead to new ideas on how to promote the product.

4. Don’t offer cash bonus or cash equivalents (such as gift cards) for customers that purchase through your HopLink.
This normally baned by the Affilliate Marketer Contract. However, you can offer other types of bonuses like additional ebooks or related products, to encourage customers to buy through your HopLink.

5. Don’t expect high traffic with free promotional techniques.
While free promotional methods such as search engine optimization (SEO) and social media can eventually lead to lots of traffic, beginner affiliates will likely not drive much traffic from these methods until they’ve had time to build up their efforts, reputation, and search engine rankings.

6. Don’t mask or store your HopLink in a frame. For your HopLinks to be properly tracked, they must not be stored in a frame. If your domain is masked, your HopLink will be stored in this manner, and therefore will be unreliable.

Don’t promote the “resolved” form of a HopLink. An example of this would be www.examplesite.com/?hop=yournickname. Instead, you must use the HopLink format ending in hop.clickbank.net so the Hop can be tracked correctly, ensuring you receive affiliate credit on the sale.

7. Don’t use your password as a Tracking ID. If you choose to include a Tracking ID on your HopLink, it is visible to anyone who clicks your HopLink, as is your account nickname. Having both of these pieces of information visible to others may invite unauthorized access to your account.

8. Don’t be overly concerned with picking a “perfect” ClickBank nickname. Your advertising efforts are what really count, not the nickname you use.

If you seriously want to make money online

If you seriously want to make money online, you must have the knowledge and skills to make sure you succeed in it. The knowledge of Google Adsense and affiliate marketing is the basic skill you need to master in order to make money online. If you are planning to sell products online, then the skills to advertise online is a must too.

No doubt, the easiest way to make money online is from blog. To make money from blog, you first need to decide how and where you want your blog to operate from.
There are 2 ways you can manage your blog. One is through free hosting, where you blog is hosted with big companies like Blogger, Wordpress or other free blog platforms.

With free hosting, you do not have to pay for domain names nor the monthly hosting fee. The downside of this is you don't always get the domain name you wish for, as the domain name will consist the name of the blog company, for example, mydomainname.blogpost.com, or mydomainname.wordpress.com. On top of that, you don't own the blog, the blog is of full ownership of the blog company and they have the full control over your blog. They can literally shut you down whenever they wish without having to explain to you.

It is always recommended to self-hosting your blog if you are serious in making money online. However, there are few guidelines to follow before choosing a web hosting company. First of all, you want to make sure that the hosting company offers MySQL database, this is vital to run the Wordpress blog. Next is the availability of Wordpress blog software. Wordpress is preferred over other software as it is the easiest and most flexible blogging software that allows you to customize, plus there are tons of free plugins available for Wordpress blog for you to optimize you blog.

Now, lets come back to the ways of making money from blog. To make Adsense money, you need to first register a free account with Google Adsense. Go to http://adsense.google.com and sign up a new account. Follow the instructions given and complete the registration within minutes.

Once you are done, you will be able to generate the Ads code. Paste the code on the strategic locations of your blog and start making money whenever people clicks on the ads. You get paid per click; your visitors do not have to purchase anything. Just a click, you'll get paid.

The strategic locations to place your Google ads are the sidebar, and bottom of each blog post. Some have greater success with ads placed below the post title, before you begin the content of the particular post. Try to customize the layout of the ads to match the look and feel of your blog. You don't have worry about what kinds of ads get displayed on your blog; Google will determine the set of ads to show based on the content and keywords used in your blog.

Besides making money from Google Adsense, you can also offer affiliate products on your blog. You help to promote other people's products by directing the potential customers to the vendor's website. When the sale is done, you get a commission. This is called pay per sale. Commission is always higher with digital products. The rate can go as high as 75% for promoting digital products as compared to physical products.
Clickbank offers various digital products for affiliate marketing. Simply log on to http://clickbank.com and register as an affiliate. Go to Clickbank market place to search for products to sell from your blog.

Most vendors offer promotional tools like banner ads, email marketing, text links that help you to promote the products. You can either place the banner ads or links on your blog, or write a review about the product and post it on your blog.

However you need to remember one thing, you need to have total control over your blog in order to make money online. You must be able to edit the html files of various components of your blog like stylesheet, header, footer, etc. So, if you are serious about making money online, get a self-hosted blog. Buy a domain name of your choice and get hosted with reliable web hosting company like hostgator.com

The above are just 2 simple ways to make money from blog. There are other ways to maximize the online income from blog. Once you have master the basic and skills to money blogging and traffic generation techniques, you will find your blog doing wonder$ that just a plain website.

Rob Benwell was just like you back in year 2005, struggling to make money online. He dropped out from college and suffered bad debt. He wasted months trying and testing systems from the so-called Gurus. He's so frustrated with the results that he finally decided to throw away all the craps and went about his own way. It was not easy, though not impossible. After spending months, he was able to develop a simple way to make money blogging. Check out his Homepage to find out how he makes money online.

Malaysian Are Now Accepted By ClickBank!

ClickBank - Internet's largest digital marketplace has accepted Malaysian sellers and affiliates.

Prior to this, Malaysians are not allowed to join ClickBank marketplace as Malaysia is not in the list of approved countries. I still remembered how myself and other Malaysian internet marketers dealt with this disadvantage -

We registered a Virtual Office in Singapore and opened a Singapore Bank account. With a Singapore address (virtual office address), we were able to register with ClickBank as a Singapore seller. Though this counteract the disadvantage that ClickBank has put up towards Malaysian, it was indeed wearisome. You have to make a trip to Singapore to open a bank account with DBS with minimum amount of S$300. On top of that, you need to arrange to have the Virtual Office operator forwards all the correspondences to your Malaysia local address in order for you to respond timely should there be any action required.

But now, we can forget about all these nuisance. ClickBank has now accepted and added Malaysian into their list of approved sellers and affiliates. I am sure this good news will definitely make many Malaysia bloggers and internet marketers happy and excited.

For those who are new to selling digital product on the internet, be it ebook, membership sites or subscriptions, ClickBank is one of the many options available for you to market your products online with payment gateway ready. The other option available for Malaysian internet marketers is 2CheckOut. But ClickBank has one plus point over 2CheckOut - ClickBank is equipped with affiliate setup. If you sell your product on ClickBank, you can utilize their affiliate system to get many resellers / marketers to promote for your product.

To start selling product on ClickBank, you need to send a request to ClickBank to review your website and your product. When your product / website is approved and accepted by ClickBank, you are required to pay a one-time setup fee of US$49.95. After which, your product will be listed in their website and get noticed by over 100,000 affiliates in the ClickBank network. You are limited to sell 5 products with one ClickBank account, however you can setup as many accounts with ClickBank as you wish, but each account costs you US$49.95

When your product / website is approved and accepted by ClickBank, you can incorporate their credit card payment processor into your website to make payment via credit cards easier for your customers.

To learn more about how you can start Selling on ClickBank, find out the information on ClickBank - Sell Products page.