Let Me Give You Some Advice…
Here are three essential bits of advice I have given to friends and family that were trying to get into affiliate marketing. If you’d like to share some of your own tips please leave a comment below.
Tip #1. Have Patience And Persistence
The most important trick to affiliate marketing is to have the patience and persistence to stick with it. Unless you plan on paying for visitors (for example via PPC advertising), then it’ll take months before you make your first sale. If you act too hasty and add too much content or get too many links to your site immediately Google will probably apply a spam penalty to your site. If that happens you can kiss the number one source of free traffic goodbye. Instead, set a target of creating a few new pages a day. Remember content is key on the web.
Tip #2. Try Something New And Learn From It
The beauty of affiliate marketing is that the start-up cost is basically nil. So if you want to, you could setup a few web pages promoting merchants in every possible niche and targeting every sort of keyword you can think of. Sure the vast majority of the pages won’t make you any money, but the ones that do will show you where you should concentrate your efforts. This is where log file monitoring comes in. It’s absolutly essential to monitor your logs regularly. Doing so will allow you to see where your visitors are coming from and what they are looking for. There have been many instances where I’ve changed the focus of a page after noticing a lot of traffic came for something I didn’t offer.
Tip #3. Keep Up To Date With The Latest Goings On
Like everything that involves Internet time, affiliate marketing is a constantly changing discipline. If you don’t follow affiliate marketing news and discussions sites (like those listed on the sidebar to the right) then chances are that you’re going to miss out on a lot. For example, merchants often post special bonus offers and exclusive coupon codes in their discussion forums. As well, general discussion forums are an incredible source of information. From how to avoid the duplicate content penalty when using datafeeds to how to prevent Norton from removing affiliate links, the tips and tricks some people share are worth their weight in gold. And of course the success stories that people often post provide great motivation for continuing to work on a affiliate site late into the night.