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Articles on Marketing Matters:

3 Baby Steps to Affiliate Marketing Success

Are you thinking about getting involved with affiliate marketing

This article will give you three simple strategies to start your affiliate marketing career off on the right foot

The key to success in this business is focus and dedication

1)Stop signing up for every new affiliate program that comes your way - stay focused on one to start with.

If you really want to succeed as an affiliate marketer , then sign up with one reputable affiliate program to start and focus on that one program until it is running smoothly. Refrain from joining every program that comes your way...It's just too overwhelming.

Most do it because they think they will make more money but soon discover that they are in fact loosing money.

That's the wrong way to play the affiliate marketing game, so just start with one program and stay focused.

2)Select and register a domain name

Owning your own domain name is the first step towards building trust with your potential customers, refrain from using free Website & hosting services as they tend to be associated with scams, schemes or amateurs, in the eyes of the average consumer.

Try to choose a domain name that is closely related to the product or service that you are promoting, for example if you are promoting cellular phones you might want to register a domain name such that has the key words CELLUAR PHONES in it.

Although it is not a proven fact,it is believed that the search engines will give more weight to a website that has the major keywords in the domain name, plus it looks much more impressive and legitimate to a potential customer

The Internet has tons of places where you can register domains for about $7 or $8 per year, simply do a search for "cheap Domain names" and go from there.

3)Time to build a Web Site

If you don't know html, you can use free site building software that helps you build a website even if you no nothing about Website creation . You can build a WebSite using any of the sitebuilders you will find online, but remember to transfer your domain name so that you are not using there free domain name & hosting. They will usually charge about $5 a month for hosting.

Owning your own web site is a crucial part to building trust with your visitors and it will also enable you to add unique content which the search engines love.

The more often you update your content the more often the search engines will come back to spider your site which will let them know that your website is fresh and not stagnant, this will help to move your site up the pages of results.

Remember, these three steps are the first steps you will need to follow when starting out in affiliate marketing, all too often an individual will join multiple programs and start submitting the affiliate pages to the search engines(those are the page that have their affiliate ID# on them). The problem with doing that, is that the search engines DO NOT rank affiliate pages well in their search results, so therefore your page will NEVER be seen by anyone.

Search engines are able to tell the difference between affiliate pages and originals simply because the URL will have a ? in it or some other tell tale sign.

So, when starting out in affiliate marketing be sure to take your baby steps first.

Pat Johnson
14 Dec 2006

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Internet Marketing Strategy - 8 Steps Formula

Before you decide what to sell on the internet. You have to develop an Internet Marketing Strategy that is the essential part of your online success on the Internet.
You have to take into consideration the following:

1. Find a large and easy to reach niche market
2. Find a Product or Service the niche market demands for!
3. Setup your website
4. Have a great sales copy (your 24/7 sales man)
5. Create an opt-in page to collect email address
6. Have a great sales process
7. Make your website scalable and search engine friendly
8. Backend, backend and backend

Each step plays an important to your success in your Internet Marketing Strategy Planning. If even one step is miss out you will not be able to see the results you would like to see as each step is equally important to each other.

1. Find a large and easy to reach niche market
Your first step in your Internet Marketing Strategy planning requires you to do your research and find a large and easy to reach niche market to market your product. What you can do from here is that you go to Free Keywords tools and search for niche keywords that have high click through and low competitions.
Example the keyword “Dog Food For Sale”, when you search that on Google there are actually 5,650,000 which is seriously not a lot of competition but you also have to check is there a demand for it by using tools from www.seobook.com to look at the KEI rate. The higher the KEI rate the better the keyword.

2. Find a Product or Service the niche market demands for!
After you have found 2 or 3 keywords that you would like to target on, you would want to find products that will serve the market that demands for it.
Example like the keyword “Dog Food For Sale”, you would not want to promote Cat Food as it is totally not related to the topic you want to promote about. So find related products like an eBook “where to find great sale for dog food” or dog products that dogs like to eat.

3. Setup your website
After you have decided what product or service you want to sell online, you would want to setup a website to promote your product. The best way to do it is by creating a Blog talking nothing but Dog Food that are for Sale. Because Google and Yahoo search engine loves Blogs so much that you virtually get listed just 24 hours upon updating compared to a normal website, which will take at least a few weeks to be cached into the search engine.

4. Have a great sales copy (your 24/7 sales man)
Do not be mistaken, sales copy is not the sale. A sales copy is a page with descriptions and details to promote your product on your website. When I first heard of this term sales copy I was totally stunted how important it was to have a sales copy.
Depending how good your copy writing skills are, you can get people to write your sales copy or simply teach yourself to write one. If you can try to write it yourself as copy writing is a very good skill to learn especially when you are an Internet Marketer who plans Internet Marketing Strategy.

5. Create an opt-in page to collect email address
This is another important step that many do not have and its the most important. Why? It is because they fail to collect email address from their website. With the email address you can design out your sales process in the next step which I will explain further.

6. Have a great sales process
With your opt-in page in place, you can used the captured email address and name to follow up with people who are interested to know more about what you are promoting in your opt-in page. This way build you list of email list and keep sent them information or promotion products to sell those products again in the future.

7. Make your website scalable and search engine friendly
With all that done, you would now need to read up on Search Engine Optimization. Practicing this will allow search engines like Yahoo and Google to spider your website easily. The good thing about Blogs is that you can ping the search engines to spider your site easily and you can listed very quickly within 24 hours.

8. Backend, backend and backend
Upon completion of all 7 steps, you just need to keep on sent backend information to your list from your opt-in emails that you receive and keep on driving traffic your opt-in page to get more email address to sent out promotion to your customers.
If you constantly follow these 8 steps formula for your Internet Marketing Strategy Plan, you will see great massive results after 3 months upon you have setup. So do the math and start planning your Internet Marketing Strategy today!

Alvin Phang
Singapore
03 Jan 2007
www.gathersuccess.com