How you can Generate More Search Motor Targeted traffic

Finding The Best Affiliate Products To Promote part 1

The Internet has become a virtual world. There is nothing that you can do in the real world that you cannot do in the virtual world including buying and selling products. This has been a known fact for some time, and when you promote products on the net it is called Internet marketing. There are a number of websites that sell products and a few large organizations that dominate the market. Companies like Amazon and eBay are some of the most commonly known names although there are a few others as well. While Amazon and eBay sell products, they do not actively advertise for them. Considering their sales volume and growth – Amazon grew 16% last year when compared to 2.4% for retail sales, it is possible that they feel that they do not need to advertise. Yet everyone knows the value of advertising. This gave birth to what is called the affiliate websites. When you are selling a product, and someone comes to you and tells you that they are willing to promote your product, they are vendors. When they do this online, they are called affiliates. Affiliate marketing works because it is a win-win situation for both parties. The affiliate takes it upon themselves to promote his website. He toils hard and puts in a lot of effort to increase his ranking on Google. The result is that any product that he is promoting for you will also get the increased exposure, and you have not spent one dime, or one minute of your time to do this. The affiliate is paid a commission that can range anywhere from 4% to 30% on profits depending on the product that they are marketing. He is paid only if any person who he directs to your site makes a purchase. You may miss your profitability per product here, but your overall profits will increase because of the increase in sales volume. 3 You keep track of who comes to you through whom by giving each of your affiliates a different cookie. This cookie has a definite expiration date and is installed in the system of any person who visits the affiliate site. When said person comes to you, the cookie in his system will tell you who has sent him allowing you to keep track of both the number of people he directs to your site and the number of sales made. Most of this is automated and it is a system that works for everyone. If instead of being the person who sells the product you are the affiliate, the process is the same, but in reverse. You contact the seller, get his cookie, and you are set. All you need to do is to put in the legwork to increase your web traffic because it is the basis of all conversions and ultimately the amount of money you make. Because you go to such lengths, investing your hard-earned money and time into promoting a product, you need to make sure that the product that you choose is the right one. There are millions of products being sold online, but not all of them will give you what you are looking for. Then there are the scam artists who are out to cheat you. This being the case you need to be careful how you choose the product that you want to market. There are a few ways to do this and we will discuss them in detail below. Where do you stand? This is the first thing that you have to think of. Either you will be creating a completely new website or blog to market a said product, or you will be integrating it into your already existing site. There are pros and cons to both of these. Promoting products on an already existing site If you already have a site or a blog up and running, you are lucky in that you would already have a certain ranking with Google. You can focus your attention on your one site and over time you can get quite a high ranking with all search engines. The advantage of this model is that you already have a 4 certain amount of traffic that you are getting on a daily or weekly basis, which means that the chance of you getting a sale quickly is higher. In addition, if you have more than one product in your site, even if you put in activity promoting one product, all the other products will reap the benefit. You just have to concentrate on improving the ranking of your one site so that you increase traffic. Once you do this, if you have made a good choice on the products and if you have designed your web page well, the sales will come. The other side to this is that you will have to pick and choose the kind of products that you can promote. For example, if you have a website that reviews dishwashers, you cannot start selling air conditioners there. You can take your pick of any dishwasher to promote, but you are pretty much limited to only one product category. Of course, you can try to work around this by creating a generalized website where you can promote anything you like. The problem with that is that such sites have no focus at all. If you want to sell home appliances, beauty products, herbal medicines and books all in the same place, you will have to choose a name that is very general, like “Amazon.com” for example. Unfortunately, it also takes that much more work to bring it to the notice of search engines first and then to the notice of the public. When a person is looking to purchase anything online, he or she is apt to click on the link that carries the name of the product that they wish to buy. For example, if you name your site www.xyzreview.com people will realize that your site is providing reviews about the product xyz. If on the other hand you name your site www.purchaseproductsonline.com nobody knows if you are connected in any way to the product xyz and will not click on it. Furthermore, even the search engines will lower your ranking because they tend to give the highest ranking to those sites that carry the search string in the site name itself. Building separate sites for different products This is the second option open to affiliates. They can choose to create different niche websites and then actively push their product online so that over time they get a good ranking with search engines, consequently resulting in increased sales. 5 This tactic is a good option in that everything about it is a positive. You can choose a site name that carries the keyword in the name of the site itself. As mentioned previously, sites that carry the keyword in their address not only have a good chance of getting high up in the rankings, but are also the ones that are clicked on more frequently. You will be targeting a certain product and can focus your attention on that single product, helping you build a good site, one of the prerequisites to getting traffic. Consumers online will only remain and read what you have written if the site looks nice and if the content is worth reading. By focusing on a single product, you are able to provide targeted content, what people are looking for. This increases your conversion ratio. On the other hand, you will have to create a different site for every product that you promote. This will increase your work a hundred fold because instead of having one site where you can sell five different products, you will have one site selling one product. This means that if you want to sell a total of five products, you will have to create five different websites, and work on all of them so that they all start becoming income streams for you. It is a little difficult to decide what to do, and many people prefer to go the latter way, creating different sites for different products, because even if it is more work, it gives you more returns. This is the most common advice that you get with regards to affiliate marketing. Focus is everything and if you do not target one thing, a niche or a product, you cannot hit anything. Yet, this is not always the case because if you create a generalized site but are willing to work on it for some time, you are creating a brand, and over time people will start to recognize the brand. Once this happens, the sky is the limit on what you can promote. Amazon.com is a simple case in point. The company was started in 1995, but did not show any profit until the fourth quarter of 2001. At that time profits were a modest $5 million on a turnover of nearly $1 billion. Now, just nine years later, it is growing at a rapid 14% while retail sales are struggling to post 2.5% growth. Their profits have grown to more than $2.4 billion, and are still growing. Yet, it is important to note that it took six years for them to become profitable. 6 Where do you look for products to start promoting? Once you have the first question out of the way, the next one is to start looking around for products to promote. This is really not as easy as many people say it is and requires a lot of effort. There are not too many places where you can look for products and most of them are known. Below we will take each of these and individually discuss their pros and cons. Google AdSense This is one of the easiest ways to spot products to sell. Whenever you type out any search string, you will get sponsored ads on the right hand side of the page. Usually these ads would have been put up by affiliates wanting to increase traffic to their websites. For example, if you type in “Herbal beauty creams” in the search bar, you will get five ads on the right hand side of the results page. Barring one, all the others are affiliate sites that sell different kinds of herbal beauty products, and just looking at the different products they sell will start you off on your search for products to market. Generally, if you follow the link to the home page, you will find details of how to become an affiliate member. It is not necessary to sign up to the affiliate network immediately as there is many analyses that needs to be done before you pick a product, but it makes finding them easier. The negative of this method is that you will be entering a crowded market. If there are four ads by affiliates themselves, think of the total number of affiliates who will be marketing these products. Standing out from this crowd to make your site unique is not going to be easy. Yet, if many affiliates are promoting a particular product usually means that it is a good selling one, so the chances of you making a sale are also better. Check out your competition This is one of the easiest ways to find products. If you are in a niche, you will be aware of whom your competitors are, and all you have to do is to follow their lead. This way is easy because you let someone else do all the legwork for you, while all you have to do is copy them. There is a lot of 7 analysis required before you decide on whether you want to go with a product or not, and allowing another person to do this frees you up to do other work. The drawback to this model is that you are always following the leader. Depending on how long it takes you to set up your site, get content posted with everything else you have to do to get its ranking up, you may very well miss the boat. However, some people follow this policy because their costs are low. All they have to worry about is marketing a product, not finding it. Use affiliate programs There are a number of affiliate programs like Google's affiliate network and ClickBank that allows you to browse through sites that have registered with them and who are open to using affiliates. It is similar to what you do with the Google results page ads, but the difference is that you get a much bigger number of sites from which to choose. You can search according to product or niche and identify the product you want to go with. Not only this, you will be able to compare the commission given to affiliates. Different sites will offer different percentages of commission, and while going with the one that offers the highest commission may seem like a good idea, it may also mean that the high commission is because of the difficulty in selling the product. A more easily salable one may have a lower commission per sale, but total sales volume may be greater, giving you more total income. The biggest advantage is not even this. Most of these affiliate programs will give you a track record of the company that you want to start marketing for. This is very important because if you are pulled in by a scam artist, sell his products and he doesn't pay you, there is very little you can do about it. Checking the track record of various sites gives you the knowledge that you require to weed out the strong candidates from the not so strong. You can check their payment history to see if they make their payments properly, and even check how long they have been online. Generally speaking, going with someone who has had a web presence for at least 6 months to a year is good because if not you have no idea if they are real or not. 8 By going with sites that already have an affiliate program running you may be entering an already tight market, but you at least know you will not be cheated. Look up online stores This is becoming very popular nowadays. Amazon actively encourages affiliates and with their sales volume increasing by leaps and bounds, it is relatively easy to make a sale on Amazon. Not only that, their whole affiliate marketing system is mostly automated and there are no payment issues at all concerning commission. There are a few negatives here, with Amazon offering the lowest commissions anywhere on the net. They start off at a low 4% and many times you will have to work really hard to start seeing any money from your site at all. Many affiliates just drop out because they will be putting in more than they are getting out of it. Yet, if you are willing to be patient it is also one of the best methods. Not only does Amazon give you all the details of what the most searched for products are on their site, they give you the option of tracking a number of other details. There are a number of people who earn just out of promoting products on Amazon. Their per product earning may not be much, averaging around $1000 per month for a really good affiliate program, but if you have 10 such sites you're earning quite a tidy sum of money. Amazon has been taken simply as an example, and the same is true of any online store that you want to start marketing for. All of them know the value of affiliates. Many of them take a day to check into the antecedents of those who want to start on their affiliate program to find out of you are serious or not before accepting you into their program. Although there is no minimum qualification that you need to become an affiliate, it is better if you have an existing website with a bare minimum amount of traffic monthly. It shows that you are in it with your eyes open and for the long term. 9 Approach potential partners This is something that you can do only after you are really set up with a really good site and are doing business. You can approach both online partners and offline ones to check with them if they would be interested in having you market their products. This will work only if you are able to offer an already existing marketing network, with both a large amount of traffic as well as sales going on in your site. Most companies are interested in increasing sales and are open to commissions if you can give actual increase in sales. A few of the top bloggers and review sites have done this with success, even approaching companies that have never done any online marketing before and partnering them. Although this means that you already have an existing set up, if you can do this you are effectively putting yourself in a place where there is absolutely no competition. Because these companies themselves have never worked with affiliates in the past there is no competition that you have to worry about. You would still have to do a basic analysis to find out if you have a good chance of making a sale or not. For example, if you are able to convince Ferrari or Lamborghini that you are a good person to start an affiliate program with, it still does not mean that you will be able to sell even one car. You need to research into the market to find such products that have a reasonably good chance of being sold online. Google search This is the simplest way for you to find anything that you are looking for. If you want to enter the health and fitness niche, just Googling “health and fitness” will give you a number of products. This is very time consuming, but there is nothing better to give you an impression of how the market is. In fact, if you rely only on affiliate programs and other directories, you will be mission out on a number of products whose manufacturers are not a part of these directories. They may not necessarily be against affiliates as such, just against being part of a third party program. 10 Even with all the amount of online activity that is going on, not every niche is crowded, and sometimes there may be a new product that has been launched in the market, and you will not find more than one or two sites promoting it. This is the opportunity for you to jump into that particular niche and take advantage of this lesser competition. A simple example would be when it comes to record labels that come out. When a particular artist brings out an album, it does not take you more than 24 hrs to find out how much of a hit it has become in the market. Checking online the next day will tell you what the competition is like and very often it will be nil. If you work fast, you can have your site up in just a couple of days at the most, to take advantage of the interest in the public for that album. Getting affiliated and starting your marketing is going to be very easy simply because there is little competition. Getting to be the number 1 ranked site is very easy as long as you take some basic precautions like including it in your site's URL and putting in at least a couple of good quality content that is optimized towards that artist's name and other related keywords. Interest may taper off within just a matter of weeks, but you would have taken advantage of the wave of public interest, and have ridden high on it because you got an early start.