The Scientific Approach to Successful Affiliate Marketing

A good way to make some extra money these days is through affiliate marketing. If you’re feeling like you want to get into affiliate marketing but aren’t sure what to do then this article is a good resource for you. Use what knowledge you can from this article and set short and long term goals for yourself accordingly, if you do that then you should have no problem with your results.

As an affiliate marketer with your own online business, you can enjoy many benefits of working from home. Today, many people want to work at home and earn money online and avoid being stuck in a nine-to-five job.

Working at home an affiliate marketer brings many benefits, namely you are your own boss and you can manage your own time. This means that you can set your work hours and adjust them to suit your personal life. You can spend more time with your family or kids. You don’t have to drive to work everyday. You set the targets of what you want to earn from your affiliate business, and you simply go for it!

Although having your own affiliate marketing business and working from home has many benefits, working from home requires a lot of discipline and organizational skills so that you can plan your time properly. There can be many distractions at home, and you must make sure that each day you do what you need to do grow your affiliate marketing business.

Here are five basic tips that you can use as a work-from-home affiliate marketer so that you can manage your time effectively and have enough time to expand your business and earn huge affiliate commissions.

1. Set the hours that you will be working everyday and stick to them. Affiliate marketing involves a lot of work especially when you are still starting to build your business. It is therefore important that you allocate enough time everyday to work on your affiliate marketing business. While working at home, many things can happen that can take you away from your work, but you must exercise a lot of discipline so that you do not neglect your business. 
2. Have your own office where you can work without any interruptions. Although the benefit of working from home is that you can work in your pajamas anyway you want, it is recommended that you have an office where you can organize your work and be able to work in peace and quiet without any disturbances. Having a suitable working environment will increase your productivity.
3. Have the necessary tools. Obviously, to succeed as an online entrepreneur you need the necessary tools. This includes your own computer, printer and fast internet connection. If you handle your affiliate marketing business professionally, you will succeed in making money online.
4. Do not neglect your health. Most affiliate markets are driven to succeed quickly. As a result they can work long hours during the day and night to grow their business and start to earn big commissions. It is important for you to take a break, exercise and get enough rest.
5. Get a mentor and interact with other affiliate markets. Depending on your experience in internet marketing, interacting with other marketers can help you learn some tips that you can use to grow your affiliate marketing business.

5 Important Steps To Success In Affiliate Marketing And Earning Huge Commissions

It is important that you do some research about the program or product you intend to promote as an affiliate. This will ensure that you join an affiliate program that is reputable and that will be easy for you to market and generate some sales.

After you have decided on the affiliate program you want to join, it is important for you to follow the steps outlined below to help you earn huge affiliate commissions.

Step Number 1: Build your own website to promote your product. If you are serious about affiliate marketing, it is recommended that you have your own website where you will be promoting your affiliate products. By having a website, you can therefore select several good affiliate products and promote them on your website. This will increase the affiliate commissions you can earn from these products.

Step Number 2: Start your own newsletter and build an email list. Having an emails list is important because if gives you a huge number of prospects to whom you can promote your affiliate programs on a regular basis.

Step Number 3: Get an Auto Responder for your website. Email marketing makes it easy for you to automatically send emails and capture emails from people visiting your website, and you can do this using an auto responder on your website. The auto responder can send a newsletter, e-course or articles to your prospects on a regular basis. This automated process of promoting your website saves you time and make it easy for you to build your business.

Step Number 4. Write and distribute articles. If you want to be successful with affiliate marketing, you will need to write many articles on your topic and submit them to directories. You must post your article on as many websites as you can.

Step Number 5: Start a reciprocal and one-way linking campaign. In order to increase the ranking of your website on search engines, you must start to exchange links with other websites in your niche. You can also participate in forums, have a blog, write articles and give free e-books that have your website URL. This will create one-way links back to your website. The more websites that link to you, the higher page rank you will have in the search engines, therefore leading to more traffic to your website.

Building Up Your Affiliate Army 

Why Do You Need Reviews

Aside from having a solid inventory, product reviews are by far the most important part of any e-commerce empire as they have the potential to be a real asset for your businesses. By having a solid amount of reviews across the board – similar to how Amazon does – you build trust and credibility with your potential customers.Reviews go far beyond trust, though. Everyone knows that they’re important – but do you know all of the reasons why? Here’s the reasons:

Social Proof

There are many parts to making the user trust your site, and one of the biggest one is having reviews on at least some of your products.If you don’t have reviews, no one knows if your site is actually popular, and that’s bad. People always want to shop where other people are shopping because it gives them a sense of safety with their purchases.

SEO

Assuming bots can read your comment text, comments can do wonders for your organic search rankings.The thing is, product descriptions are limited – even on more complex products, and you’re always going to be limited to a paragraph or two. It’s up in the air as to whether or not longer pages affect SERP ranking… however, logically, it would make sense that reviews are favoured by Google – they improve user experience.

Become “The Guy” For That Item

Five different e-commerce stores have the same product at the same price. Except one of them has 17 reviews on the product, whereas all of the other ones have 0, 1, or 2.

Which site are you going to be looking at the item on?

Likely, you’ll be on the one with 17 reviews. And when the time comes to purchase, because of the reviews, you’ll likely trust that site the most (unless another one is a major name) and purchase from it over the rest.

Answer Personal Question

A lot of the time, users share purposes for products. If a positive review touches on one of these purposes (reviewers will), other users that need the same thing from the same product will relate to the review and be more likely to purchase.There are often user questions that you’re not even aware of… and most won’t go to the trouble of sending you a message to clarify. Reviews can answer questions and concerns in an indirect way – this leads to more sales and more money in your pocket.

How To Attract Reviews From Customer

Getting reviews for your ecommerce store is one of the ways merchants and online retailers can add value and create a point of differentiation to their online store. So, how are you going to get reviews for your E-commerce business? Here’s some ways for your reference:

Set up an incentive

The first hurdle you need to overcome is getting initial reviews and reaching a critical mass of reviews that create value to consumers. It’s human nature that more people will complain when they have a problem or negative experience than a positive one, so you will need to provide an incentive to get a good cross section of reviews, not just negative ones.

For example, if you sell $15 shirts, giving everyone a free shirt when they submit a review is a shortcut to going out of business. However if you sell $500 digital audio equipment, providing people who submit a review with a free t-shirt is probably not going to impact the bottom line.

What do you do if you have a small profit margin on your products? One suggestion is to hold a contest. Enter everyone who submits a review into a contest and give away one or a few of your products every month. Another option is store credit or a gift card. By giving away a store credit, you can build loyalty and encourage repeat customers.

However if your business doesn’t have repeat customers, like say a moving company, offering a gift card is another good option. Choose a generic gift card such as one from American Express, Mastercard, Amazon or iTunes. You could make the offer even more consumer friendly by giving them three or four options and letting them choose their own prize.

Reach Out To Consumers And Customers

Start with your existing customers who have purchased products with the past 6-12 months. Send them a polite and short email asking them to review their product purchase, and telling them about whatever incentive method you have chosen.

If you have repeat customers, it could be annoying for them to receive 6 emails asking them to review the 6 items they purchased in the past year. Contact them about the last purchase, but let them know they can submit reviews for all of their purchases from you. If you sell generic products that are available from other merchants, allow them to review them as well.

As part of your buying cycle, you should ask all new and future customers to submit a review. Hopefully your inventory control system knows when a product ships, and you have an estimate of how long it takes for the product to arrive. Give the customer 7-10 days after the arrival date before sending them an email asking them to review the product, with your incentive offer.

Another option to consider is advertising you are running a contest for reviews. Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter or forums that are about your topic or products are sources to promote your contest to the right audience. Don’t forget to create a press release and promote your incentive using services like PR Web or PR Leap.

Moderating Reviews

Moderating reviews is tricky issue, for consumers to trust you and your reviews they have to believe they are honest. You don’t want to create a store where everything has 5 out of 5 stars, the customers love all the products and the world is filled with sunshine, rainbows and unicorns prancing in meadows, you need to have some negative reviews.

That said, you need to protect yourself from slander, defamation, and questionable fake negative reviews submitted by competitors or ex-employees with a grudge. A suggestion is to develop a review policy or set of review guidelines that allow you a wide editorial latitude to not publish reviews that don’t pass the sniff test.

Additionally unless you have a trusted customer rating system, you would want to be cautious about publishing any reviews without examining them first. What you want to check for is inappropriate language, potential legal issues, fake reviews or reviews with an agenda.

What you don’t want to do is moderate out any negative reviews, you may think it helps sales in the short run, but all it really does is undermine your credibility in the eyes of the consumer. Sometimes fake reviews can have unexpectedly pleasant results.

Use A Reviews Provider

One guaranteed method of getting enough customer reviews to make your product pages more persuasive for shoppers is to use a third party reviews provider, such as Reevooor Bazaarvoice. Many retailers, including Comet, Tesco, and Argos use these companies to add reviews to their sites. This is a useful way to build up a body of reliable reviews for product pages which could otherwise take some time.

These reviews are also authenticated, so customers know that the person leaving the review has actually purchased the product in question. Drawbacks include the fact that such reviews tell other potential customers nothing about buying from your site in particular, as reviews are generally syndicated.

Email Customers Post-Purchase

Sending an email after a customer has purchased an item to ask for a review is a good idea, but the timing is a key issue here.You need to give customers enough time to have received the product and had to chance to start using it and form an opinion, but it still needs to be sent when the purchase is fresh in the customer’s mind.

Make The Process As Simple As Possible

Some users may not have a lot to say about some products, or may have a limited attention span, so make it nice and easy to leave opinions. Offering customers the option of leaving a quick rating out of five or ten is one way, and provides a useful summary score to add to product pages, while another way to get a little more useful detail is to ask users to give different aspects of products a rating, as Reevoo does.

Legal Issues

When you decide to add reviews to your website there is a big temptation to add “fake” or “artificial” reviews, you should avoid this. First, it’s extremely unlikely you will be able to create reviews with a different style and language structure that reads like more than one person wrote them. Nothing says “you are a shady merchant” like fake reviews.

Secondly, in some jurisdictions, writing or publishing fake reviews is illegal and may result in a hefty fine. Another issue to consider is how you incentivize your reviews, again some states or countries have legal issues regarding how you incentivize actions, and contests laws vary considerably, so be sure to do your research.

If you like the idea of Recurring Income, being able to Work From Home, have a business that Fits in with Your Lifestyle and No Prior Experience Required to set it up … this online training course is for you! 

Have you ever thought about creating a full or part-time passive income using the internet?

Are you aware it is possible to achieve this without your own products or website and it can be done in your spare time using Affiliate CPA Marketing?  

CPA Marketing (cost per action) is an easy way to make money online. You are basically getting paid to generate leads to other people’s websites, products or services where those visitors take a specific ‘action’ when they reach the desired destination. Get started today …