The key to affiliate marketing success is learning this simple statement:

“People do NOT buy from an affiliate site, they buy directly from YOU!

If you create good will in your visitors, they will trust you and from that trust is where sales are really made. Are you beginning to see the true importance of your website? Your trust is on the line!

Not everyone follows this rule, but my suggestion is that when you are thinking about what programs to join and what products to endorse is… only tell people about products you trust and use. That way, you can really tell them about the product on a first-hand experience.

If you don’t do it this way, you could be advertising a really cheesy product that doesn’t work. Do this and your image will go down the tubes and the trust that you have built will be lost. I’m pretty sure you know that trust is something that you can only earn once.

A good advertorial site “focuses” on building trust, giving out good information and talking about great products. And it does it in a me-to-you, no-hype, straight-forward manner. If you grasp and understand this concept, you’ve won half of the affiliate battle! Here it goes again (just in case you skimmed over it the first time): People don’t buy from an affiliate site, the buy from you!

Advertorials don’t look like they were coming from an outside source – like a banner ad (which is why banner advertising doesn’t work as much as it used to). Banners and outside sources *sell* and people don’t like being sold… at least not from a site like yours. If they feel like they are being sold, they will click the back button and you’ll have lost them forever.

Now, I’m not saying that banners are bad. They do work when used tastefully and in a site that gives honest-to-goodness valuable content to its readers. Heck, there are a few banners on this blog!

An advertorial is not a salesletter, don’t fall into this trap either. A good advertorial provides good information that encourages your visitors on something that you feel a real passion for. You want to fit the affiliate program (the ad) into the context of what you’re doing. If you don’t, you’re going to sound just like every other affiliate site out there… the ones that don’t make any money! And you don’t want your site in this category do you?

There is a good rule of thumb for balancing your advertorial website: The 80-20 rule. This means that the content of your website should be at least 80% of valuable information and just 20% (or less) of sales content. This is not an exact rule, but if you follow it, your site will never be out of balance and fall into the ugly-online-mall category.

The #1 mistake that most affiliate sites make is to think that they are selling products. It simply doesn’t work that way… you don’t want to sell products, you want to entertain and educate your visitors and you want to build a website that tells people about your passions, your interests and the things you like.

You want to give them valuable information about the topic your site evolves around and then weave into that content an endorsement for a product or service that you like and use.

You want your visitors to know that you are just trying to give them good information about the topic that interests them (else they wouldn’t be at your site in the first place). And if you feel a real passion for that topic, this will reflect in your writing… and if it does, people will percieve that passion and will be excited about it, and it will traduce into sales for you. BIG sales.

Writing about a product or service in the editorial content of your website is called writing an advertorial (this comes from the combination of the words “ad” and “editorial”. And just to be clear, this works exactly the same way if you’re blogging as an affiliate.

Mass media channels like TV, radio, magazines and newspapers endorse products and services in their editorial content all the time. Creating a good advertorial is easy, all you really need to do is talk about a topic you like giving people all the information you know about that specific topic and weaving in a few words about a product or service that has helped you achieve in your area of interest.

Imagine that you know a lot about how to grow bonsai trees. You can easily set up a *great* website or blog with all the information you have collected on this topic, giving specifics about how or why you grow your bonsai trees in a certain manner.

You can also include information about the kind of clippers you use to trim your bonsai trees and why you use them. You can also tell your visitors about the top three books that have given you the most valuable information about bonsais.You can start a newsletter that gives out free tips and tricks about bonsai growing (we’ll talk about in a later chapter of this guide).

Iif you’re into bonsai-growing, that sounds like a great site to visit doesn’t it?

When people find a site like this, they find this site useful and entertaining, they bookmark it and come back… and they even spread the word around to their friends, family and using social media sites.

Now let’s imagine a second site. A site that’s chock-full of banner ads and graphics that are trying to sell some bonsai trimming clippers. Which of the two sites above do you think will get the most sales (even if they are both affiliate sites)?

You are absolutely right. The site with all the bonsai information will make the most sales.This takes us to the #2 mistake that most affiliate websites make: Building a mall.

Malls are an excellent idea in the brick and mortar world. They give you a practical way to shop by placing a lot of stores together in a single building… this way, you don’t have to drive all around your town to look for a certain product. But it works a lot different on the internet! Here you don’t have to drive all around to get to a certain place – everything is just a few mouse clicks away!

If you find yourself at a website that doesn’t have anything of value to you, and it’s just packed with banners trying to sell you everything under the sun: from shoes to computers to practical jokes.. you just click the “Back” of your browser and you are gone from there. You wouldn’t buy a thing in there would you? But for some strange reason, people think you will and they keep building sites like this.

That is the pitfall you’ll want to avoid! The right way to do it is to sign up to only a few affiliate programs that are related to your topic of interest that are selling products that you actually believe in… and then build a website that endorses those products.

Why? Simply because having your visitor’s names and e-mail addresses gives you the ability communicate with them constantly and build a relationship with them. And by doing this, you also build trust – which is a key factor to generating sales (online and off).

Some people try to do this by offering a free report that is will be sent to the visitor with an autoresponder. This works sometimes, but you don’t want the permission to contact visitors only once… you want a full permission to speak with them and become their friend. So be sure to mention something about that in your opt-in forms.

Giving them good and valuable information they can actually use will make them see you as an expert on the subject and this will earn you their trust. Once they trust you as an expert, a good percentage of those opt-ins will feel comfortable enough to buy the products you recommend (You are the expert after all… right?).

And if you keep giving them good information and treating them good as your customers, they will repeat-buy the products and services you endorse. And that’s where the real value of your business is.

When a user first visits your website she will scan through it for 8-15 seconds. And if your site caught her attention she will stay an average of only 3 to 5 minutes in total… that’s not a lot of time you know? Certainly not enough time to earn someone’s trust and sell her something.

For this reason, it is critical that you get their permission and their email address so you can follow up with them and build credibility. A good way to encourage them to do this is by giving them a freebie (like an e-book or a special report). You should tell them that if they want the free stuff they will get both – the e-book and a free subscription to your newsletter.

Once you have them in the list, contact them periodically to stay fresh in their minds.

Can you see the value of a good list? Your opt-in list is worth gold! If I were to be shut down today and could keep just one asset of my entire business, I wouldn’t keep my site or my product, I’d keep my list! Having it with me can help me start a new business tomorrow and make money with it almost instantly. You can not replace the trust of people with *anything*!

The best service I’ve found so far to develop and manage an opt-in list is called aweber. Their system lets you easily create opt-in subscription forms on your website and manages all the user handling automatically; it also allows you to send email to your lists in text and html formats and all this is done via a very friendly web-interface. I use aweber to handle all my affiliate lists (a single account can handle as many mailing lists and autoresponders as you want).

Once you start developing your own opt-in list, you should always remember something: Give users good value and useful information. Many list owners fall into the mistake of sending only sales messages to their subscribers.

Sales! Sales! SALES! That’s all they can think of. Remember that it’s their trust you want, not their money. When (and only then) you’ve earned their trust it is that they’ll feel comfortable enough to buy from you… not before.

By now, you know exactly what you should do to build a killer affiliate site or blog. This is the only kind of site that will bring you more sales from *any* affiliate program you decide to join. If you follow my advice you will make killer sales even in programs that have thousands of other affiliates… why? Because now you understand what really works…

If you are just starting out as an affiliate marketer, the best advice I can give you when choosing a niche is to select one that closely relates to whatever you enjoy doing. You will always produce better online content if you are writing about a topic you love – plus when you follow this strategy, writing is fun and doesn’t really feel like work.

The first step in finding a successful niche to work on as an affiliate is to take a paper pad and write down all the things that you love doing. Think of the things or activities that you don’t mind talking about with your friends all day long; the ones that you’d love to be doing all day if you didn’t have to make money to live and pay the bills.

Is it a good niche?
Once you have a short list of areas of interest that youd like to explore, consider each of the topics separately and answer the following questions:

* Would you be happy if working on this was your daily job?

* Do you have any particular skills or knowledge in that field?

* How many people do you know that share this interest with you?

* Would you like to talk to these people (or similar ones) every day?

* How passionate are they about this particular topic?

* Do these people (and yourself) spend money on this particular interest?

* How much and how frequently do they spend their money on this?

* How many products related to this topic are there to buy?

* How many of those products would you buy if you had no money restrictions?

* Would having all those products make your life easier somehow?

* How popular is this topic on the internet? Can you easily find forums/sites related to it?

Answering the above questions honestly should give you a pretty good idea if the niche or industry you’ve chosen will be a good match for your affiliate promotions.

Once you get some experience in affiliate marketing, you’ll be able to branch out and venture into different niches and industries. But for now, keep it safe and get started with something you know that you’ll actually enjoy.

It is important to keep in mind that your niche selection is not cast in stone, you can always reconsider it if you can’t find good products to promote as an affiliate.

Affiliate programs can be divided in two main areas: PPC and CPA.

PPC stands for “Pay-Per-Click”.
This type of program pays you each time that one of your visitors clicks an ad and visits the merchant’s website. The goal of this type of program is to generate web traffic for the merchant – and it will be entirely up to him what he, in turn, does with the traffic. The largest PPC campaign broker is Google, and their program is called “AdSense” (I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of them around the web).

The main advantage in PPC for you, as an affiliate, is that as long as you can generate clicks for the merchant, you will get paid… no matter if the traffic you’re sending converts into sales or not.

The biggest disadvantage of this type of affiliate marketing program is the payout. Each click that you generate for the merchant will usually pay you anywhere between a few cents and a couple of dollars (depending on the niche or industry that you are targeting).

CPA stands for “Cost-Per-Action” (also known as PPP or Pay-Per-Performance).
In this type of affiliate program, the merchant pays you when the visitor takes a particular pre-defined action. This action can be a sale or it can be a signup or lead. In the PPP model of affiliate programs, the merchant can pay you a percentage of the sale you generate or a fixed fee (that decision is up to the merchant, so keep your eyes open for the terms of each program you join).

The main advantage of PPP affiliate programs is that the payouts for affiliates are usually a lot larger than those programs that pay you per click generated.

On the downside, the visitors that you generate for the merchant *must* take the action required. If they don’t buy (or subscribe), then you don’t get paid. For this reason, the PPP model requires you to learn how to drive targetted traffic that is relevant to the merchant’s website.

But wait! There’s more…

Affiliate programs can also be organized in tiers or levels. The most common type of affiliate program will have a single tier. In which you are paid for the sales (or actions) the visitors you refer generate.

However, there are other affiliate programs that have more than just 1 tier. These programs can pay you not only for the traffic, subscribers or sales that you generate directly for the merchant, but also for the traffic, subscribers and sales resulting from affiliates that have signed up to promote the program using one of your affiliate links.

This is essentially a kind of multi level marketing, where there are various level of tiers below the first tier affiliate. The first tier affiliate, will not only get paid, for sales referred directly, but also from those generated by those in the tiers below him. It is always wise to keep your eyes open for affiliate programs with more than one level, the end results may vary a LOT.

In residual income affiliate programs, you get paid whenever one of your referrals makes a purchase… but you also keep getting paid for as long the customer you referred keeps buying from the merchants website. These types of program are normally reserved for merchants who offer services that require a maintainance fee (like web hosting) or for those where the customer would want to continue paying for additional results (like with diet pills or vitamin supplements).

Residual income affiliate programs hold the potential of earning you a HUGE amount of money, because your promotion efforts are not lost after a single sale is made – and the commissions you earn with them can really add up in a hurry!

This type of marketing has an advantage for all of the three sides involved. It creates more opportunities for merchants to generate web sales, for affiliate sites to generate a lot of revenue and for consumers a way to find information about the products they want and need without being sold “in their face”.

With Affiliate Marketing, a merchant recruits content sites to partner with them as affiliates in exchange for commissions. The merchant provides their advertising banners and links to their affiliates and assigns a commission for each click-through to their site, subscription to their service (a lead), or purchase of their products that is generated from the affiliate links.

Affiliates, in turn, place the tracking code for these ads into their web pages and a announce them around the web using different promotional methods.

Whenever a visitor to the affiliate’s site uses these links to generate a click-through, lead, or sale for the merchant, that transaction is tracked online. If a product or service is purchased, the customer pays the merchant directly, and the affiliate is paid a commission for that sale.

In other words… affiliate marketing is the quickest and easiest way to make money online.

Thousands of people all around the world would love nothing else but to have an e-commerce enabled website. But most of them don’t have the time, patience or will to go through the hassle of creating new products from scratch, learning every single detail there is to know about online advertising and e-commerce and then setting up websites to sell it.

Busy people like you and I have a very good alternative and opportunity in the affiliate business. Because you still can have a great website with as much content as you want and make tons of sales from it without having to go trough the hassle of building your own products. Plus most of the products you can sell from affiliate programs already have a proven sales record, they are high-quality products that people are already looking for.