Make Money Online Affiliate Marketing Blog

So you are thinking about buying the next big thing in affiliate marketing ebooks?  You see your inbox full of “gurus” promoting such and such breakthrough affiliate marketing product - DON’T BUY IT!  At least not yet.  Let’s see if you have tried the basics - and what I mean by the basics is try the things that you will find in most of those ebooks.

While it is true that there are a lot of marketers who make money - and big money I might add, through affiliate marketing, most of them are not doing it through ebooks.  However, as an entrance into affiliate marketing, it may be a good place for you to start.  

For many, the urge to try the Make Money Online “niche” is so strong, it is almost intoxicating to some.  After all, you see all these guys cruising around in their(supposedly theirs) Ferraris on all of these pages promising you that you can do the same if you just buy their $197, $147, For A Limited Time Only $97, but hurry because this offer ends (fake calendar and clock ticking down to indicate urgency).  You decide to hit the back button, or close the page and you get this pop-up that says something like this:

Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?

>>!!!!!!!!!!!!! WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT !!!!!!!!!!!!!<<

Jennifer would like to talk to youabout a special *DISCOUNT*.

Simply click the (Cancel) button to get your special offer!

Click OK to continue, or click Cancel to stay on this page.

Give me a break!  If you made so much money with this secret, you probably wouldn’t be so desperate for me to buy from you.  The ‘big dogs” in affiliate marketing typically do not sell ebooks.  Don’t get me wrong, there are a few out there…and you are going to “use” them in your basic affiliate marketing tactics.  Oh, and Jennifer, Suzy, Paloma, whatever her name is - there is no her waiting to give you a special deal - it is just computer script designed to separate you from your money - all while you think there is some nice woman on the other side helping you to get a deal…

Okay, now that I have slammed the marketing of those types of products, I am going to give you the basics of how you can participate in this segment of make money online “niche.”  Does that sound hypocritical given the apparent attitude that I have towards most ebooks?  No, not really.  I have promoted such items, and continue to do so.  Some of them have great information in them and are worth the money as the authors really wanted to produce valuable and useful information.  I guess the trick is in finding them.  

That being said, I have purchased many ebooks that were light on information, and full of just basics.  So I am going to give you an overview of basic affiliate marketing for free.  Try it before you buy an ebook on how to market a digital product - it should work.  If not, knock yourself out and buy that ebook.

Hey, and who said you had to focus on the Make Money Online niche?  You can utilize the following strategies for dog training, scrap booking, using Facebook, or any other market out there that has digital informational products for sale.

Basic affiliate marketing of digital products:

Open up an e-mail account and get yourself on the mailing list of several of the big gurus.  Use a separate e-mail account as you will be inundated with offers to get the next best big thing.  Think of this as  your affiliate marketing business e-mail account.

You will monitor this account to see what products are getting the buzz.  Some will have pre-sale buzz - you need to jump on that if you think it is a product that you want to promote.  You also should keep a close eye on the ClickBank Marketplace for new and upcoming products.

• A word of caution about promoting someone else’s product.  While it is likely that the “gurus” are       promoting something of decent quality, you really should purchase the product and make sure that it is something you feel confident promoting.  You do not want to lose your credibility in your haste to make money.

Set up a pre-sale site or blog.  Preferably, you set up two.  Make one look similar (without copyright infringement) to the official offer site, and make the second (a blog is probably best for this) as an objective review site.  You want to see if you can get in early enough on the product to secure a domain name as close to the product’s as possible.  For example, if the product being launched was the Martian Affiliate Program and the publisher secured www.martianaffiliateprogram.com - you might want to secure www.martianaffiliate.com or www.martianaffiliateprogramreview.com if they are not taken.  Why names like these?  Because they will have the keywords already in the domain name that potential buyers are going to type into the search engine.  It gives it a sort of credibility in the potential buyers mind and can only help with search engine rankings.

If you are making a site that is similar to the original offer page, it is pretty straight forward.  Make your page and offer up some kind of bonus.  What kind of bonus?  Maybe you have your own product that you were working on, or maybe you have some PLR or MRR product that you bought.  Use them!  Make it so that the prospect feels there is true value added when they purchase from you as opposed to the original publisher site.  Be creative too.  You don’t have to just offer digital products - you can offer your time and whatever expertise you have - these services are usually much more valuable than another free ebook anyway.

If you are making a review blog, you need to be as accurate as possible on your assessment of the product. Give enough information to make the prospect interested, but don’t “spill the beans” so to speak - you want to leave your prospect with enough curiosity that it may inspire them to purchase the product.  Also, within the review, make sure you make both positive and negative points.  But try to make sure that the negative doesn’t come across too negative.  An example would be to write in your review One really bad point was that I actually had to do a lot of work.  A better way to phrase that would be that While the program says you can spend just one hour a week and make money, I needed a little more time.  I spent 3 hours the first week and 2 hours the second before I started to see really good results.  Something like this is more likely to come across to the reader as a positive as they already are skeptic.  When you confirm their skepticism about only 1 hour a week, but then tell them that with a still relatively small amount of effort, the program worked - it lends credibility to the product (that is assuming your site doesn’t come across to amateurish with lot’s of misspellings, etc.)  The most important thing you want to impart on the reader is how the product is going to benefit them, and to leave them with the feeling that the goals of this product are achievable.  You also want to give away a value added bonus just like above.

You should set up reviews on your own blog as well as Squidoo and Hubpages.  I am going to promote another blog - this guy’s blog is a must follow (by the way, it is not self hosted - for those of you on a budget take note - this guy is really successful).  Anyway, check out this great site about how to make money online he has from a guest blogger on Hubpages - very informative.

Okay, you are all set.  The buyers are now going to roll in and you will be making a bunch of money - yeah, right!  You have to find the buyers and they have to find you.  This little primer is way too small to cover finding your buyers - here is a hint though - most will find you on Google.  You need to check back in the future I will try to cover some ppc advertising tips and tricks, but you should do a search on ppc.  I know that is a bit of a cop-out, but that subject is in-depth and you will lose more money than you make if you don’t take the time to learn about it and do it right.

Highly recommended additional step.  If you have the ability (if you don’t, learn how) create a squeeze page.  If you are trying to get customers, you may as well build a list of them with a squeeze page where you will capture their name and e-mail address.  Obviously this can be valuable information for future offers.

Okay - so this was a basic primer on how you can start your affiliate marketing of digital products.  Of course you should find more resources to dig in-depth on the topics above if you are not highly familiar with them.  I will certainly cover things in more detail with future posts, but don’t wait - get marketing.  

I hope you enjoyed this - you literally could have paid $97 for this information - so, I just save you a bunch of money, and it wasn’t on car insurance.

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