The internet has made it easier and cheaper than ever before to keep in touch with people using email, it can even all be automated using autoresponders so you can set up emails and they are sent out automatically to everyone who joins up.

But still people avoid it, I understand, it is scary to stop going straight for the sale, but it can be so much more profitable in the long run. Research suggests that it can take someone being exposed to something 7 times before they will consider buying it. If you just direct them to you website once you only get one chance.

Once you have them on an email list you can email them useful information to build a relationship with them, you can send them special offers, you can send them alternative products, digital catalogs, videos – you name it! That means that instead of maybe selling them one product, you are maybe selling them a load of products instead!

But here is the only secret that really matters when it comes to building a list using Adwords – you have to ’sell’ the sign up! Sure it is 10 times easier to get someone to sign up to a free newsletter etc than it is actually commit to buy something, but you still need to sell that free newsletter just as hard as a product you want money for….

Why?

Because people are getting jaded online, they don’t want spam so they hold their email address close to their chest, they won’t let just ANYONE have it. That is until they see something they want, then they hand it over with a huge smile on their face and their thanks for all the cool stuff you are sending them.

So what can you offer visitors to get them on your list? You need to decide that first or you are sunk before you start.

Videos are a great medium that has really taken off online – can you offer videos? If you sell kitchen utensils can you offer a series of cooking videos for them?

If you sell a digital book on how to train dogs can you give them cute dog videos or some sample clips on how to cure one problem they may have.

Make it desirable! Make it seem to be worth a lot, hell it should be worth a lot! This is getting your digital foot in the door to get permission to sell them more stuff. Make it good or you’ll crash and burn.

Once you have that done you need to decide how to reach these people. Advertising to get people on your list is different to advertising products. Take our toaster example before – can you really get those people onto a list, I know I said it would be more profitable, but they are just not that targeted, they want a toaster and that’s it.

You see if you are building a list using Adwords you need to concentrate on just getting that person to sign up your list. You can’t have a page with both your product on and the sign up area for your list, give people multiple options and they’ll often take none.

So we have to choose one or the other, for toasters I’d go for the sale, THEN on the page they go to that thanks them for their purchase I’d put the signup for your list and offer something cool. They have just made a purchase, they are no longer worried about where to get a toaster from, they are happier, they now have time to look at the videos you are offering etc. Plus you know you are getting someone who is willing to spend money!

For the dog training videos you can go straight for the signup – advertise on dog training keywords and offer 1 set of videos teaching their dog how to stop barking. People click through, like what they see (hopefully) and sign up to your list, you then get to sell them the rest of the videos, dog toys, dog training aids, etc.

I have heard of people getting up to 70% of the visitors to their site to opt-in to a list, so that sure beats the 1% conversion rate you might get for purchases, but again the key is to test, test how much money you make going for straight sales and getting them onto your list afterward, test how much money you make getting them on your list first and going for the sales afterwards, and then keep the winner!

Option 1) More keywords:
If you did your keyword research to start with then you probably had a reasonably big list of keywords that you had to trim down to just some good ones to start a small campaign – can you use any of the others now? What about finding more?

Try to think ‘outside the box’, if someone is looking for a grass seed maybe you could sell them your ‘Green grass miracle food’, if someone is looking for a toaster maybe you could sell them the full kitchen appliance set you have?

Go back to the keyword tools and type in related keywords and see if it sparks an idea off for you to explore. Experiment, you’ll soon get feedback from people by them either ignoring your ad or clicking through and buying and you can adjust things as necessary then.

Option 2) More products:
If you are selling your current products well then maybe you should add some new ones into the mix? Expand your current range or go into a different market?

Find what people are searching for online, check out the competition and then decide if you think you can compete based on your current conversion rates etc.

If you are an affiliate this is much easier as you can just go out and grab a load of different affiliate products and try to sell them, if they sell well you keep promoting them, if they don’t you ditch them. If you actually have to buy the stock that makes it riskier.

As a merchant what you could do is find an affiliate product you can promote instead, see if it sells, then if it does get your own stock and start to sell it using the same ads which you now know work!

Option 3) More PPC networks:
That’s right, there are a load of other PPC networks out there similar to Adwords, none quite as sophisticated which can be a bonus or a boon depending on how you look at it, but it is a quick way to double your traffic!

Current estimates put Google at owning anything from 50 – 70% of all the searches on the internet, that leaves MSN, Yahoo and various others to pick up the rest. So are they worth it? Of course! If you have a campaign that works on one network then there is a good chance it will work on others – instantly giving you access to more traffic and more profits!

Here are the main networks you should consider once you want to expand:
* MSN adcenter
* Looksmart
* SearchFeed
* Yahoo Publisher’s Network
* Miva Network

Here are 7 quick tips to boost your quality score and avoid getting slapped.

1. Get your CTR up by split testing your ads
A high CTR is critical to show Google you deserve to be there. If people are clicking your ad then they must like what you have to say right?

2. Start off at a high initial price to put yourself in position 1
For some reason people click the ad in position 1 a lot more, but they tend to be timewasters just clicking the first thing that pops up so they are not good for sales, get a good CTR from being in position 1 then lower your bid after Google sees you have a good CTR

3. Make sure your ad is ‘relevant’
Google wants to see ‘relevance’ so your ad should have your keywords in it, try to put them all in twice if you can, once minimum. Don’t sacrifice a good message to stuff a keyword in, but make sure they are in there. You can also name the page they are going through to as your keywords, that way you can put that in the ‘display URL’ and get more relevance there.

4. Split ad groups down further
Again Google wants to see ‘relevance’ make sure they all have common words between them and there are no stragglers you just stuffed in there as you couldn’t put them elsewhere. Can you split them down further, do 50% of them also have another word in common? Then split them out into another ad group.

5. Try different matching options
If a keyword is getting a poor quality score with broad match try it with phrase or exact match.

6. Make sure your landing page is relevant
If you have an advert for blue widgets but your landing page does not mention blue widgets then it is not ‘relevant’ to your ad. Even worse, if your landing page only mentions red widgets then get ready to be slapped by Google! Put the exact keywords from your ad group in your landing page a few times including in the page title, this may mean making a custom landing page per ad group…

7. Make sure your landing page looks like an authority page
Human reviewers will come and look at your site after you put your ads live, they want to see professional advertisers. If you don’t have a privacy policy and legal disclaimer you can’t be that professional, if you don’t have a ‘contact us’ page then how reliable can you be? Also if you have crude graphics all over the place then you do not look professional. Fix it all and look like a pro to score well.

So how do you write a good ad? Well I don’t like hard work, I prefer to work smart not hard, so I’d say as the first point of call you should look at the ads that are currently running. They have probably been tested for a while now and that ad you are seeing is the result of all that testing.

Don’t copy an ad word for word, but just take the basic idea and build yours around that.

Let’s break writing an ad down into four section and look at each one in turn:

* Ad ideas
* Title
* Body
* Call to action

Ad ideas
First you need to start off with an idea to base your ad around, the best way is to think of the one benefit that the customer wants. Notice I said benefit as most people sell features.

So if you were selling a toaster then most people would write boring ads about how theirs has a triple heating element system, or theirs is chrome. People don’t want that, they want what those features can GIVE them. It’s all about the potential customer.

Having that triple heating element is great, but the benefit to the customer is they get their delicious hot buttered toast a lot quicker in the morning. Chrome looks good, but don’t leave it up to them to decide why it is good – tell them how good it is going to look in their kitchen!

Price could be a benefit, although it is not in most markets, but the key here is to test, so choose one idea that you think the customers will appreciate, and get the ad up and test it against another idea (testing covered in a minute!) to find out what the customer really wants.

The title
This is where you grab the visitor by the eyeballs and compel them to look at your ad, so it needs to be attention grabbing but not offensive. Some of the best titles are:

Questions:
Questions seem to be a consistent winner in Adwords, we respond to questions and they engage us and force us to look underneath to see if the answer is there. You can also use something called cognitive dissonance which is a human trait where we hate to leave things unfinished or hate to not know the answer to things.

So if you pose a question to someone then tell them the answer is on the page they will get to if they click, that is powerful! (don’t ask them to click.. Google doesn’t like that!)

But for now let’s just concentrate on the title, so say someone was looking for a toaster, then you have 25 characters to pose a question to them that will grab their attention. How about…

Looking For a Toaster? (22 characters)

Or if you think they have broken their old one then you could do…

Toaster Trouble? (16 characters)

That helps you to separate people, if you run a toaster repair company then using the second title ensures you just get people with broken toasters contacting you, the first title also captures people looking to buy their first toaster as well as people looking to get a replacement.

Just the keyword they are looking for in the title

If you look at the ads that appear when you search then you will see that the keywords you typed into the search are in bold in the ads, this is a great way to get attention!

You can combine that power with the power to give them exactly what they are searching for by just putting the common keywords for your ad group as the title of the ad. So you remember earlier I had an ad group where every keyword phrase had the words ‘cheapest blue widgets’ in them somewhere?

So you would put that as the title, then you are guaranteed to have the whole title to your ad in bold, plus you are giving them what they want, if they are looking for something to do with ‘cheapest blue widgets’ and that is exactly the title of your ad then will they think your ad is relevant to them? Of course they will!

Announcements
Another great way to grab attention is to announce something, we are always on the look out for good announcements as they tell us new or cool stuff, so use that to your advantage with titles like:

New: Super Fast Toaster (23 characters)
Revealed: Insomnia Relief (25 characters)
Announced: New Widgets (22 characters)
Breakthrough New Toaster (24 characters)

Titles with figures in them
This revelation shocked me when I first found out about it, but apparently having figures of any sort in your ad attracts more clicks…? So try to use percentages or prices, anything that uses figures to grab attention like this:

New Toaster 71% Faster (22 characters)
30 x Stronger Vitamins (22 characters)
$10 Less Than Brand X (21 characters)

That should get you started towards writing a great title – let’s look at the body of the ad now:

Body & Call to Action
The body of the ad is where you need to condense the benefit for the viewer, but it is also where you need to put a ‘call to action’ if you can. A call to action is simply something that tells the person what to do and people respond unconsciously to them so they are very powerful if use them.

Try to get another set of keywords into the ad as well so they are bolded and also it will help your quality score which we’ll talk about later. Other than that the secret is just to keep revising it to get it right in such a small space, you don’t have to use all the space if you don’t want to, but also you can’t use artificially shortened words to free up space.

So for the keyword ‘Faster toaster’ we could try:

New Toaster 71% Faster (22 characters)
You get your hot buttered toast (31 characters)
71% Faster – learn how here (27 characters)

—

Need A Faster Toaster? (22 characters)
You get your hot buttered toast 71% (35 characters)
Faster with us – learn how here (31 characters)

—

Or for the keyword ‘Toaster repair’ we could try:

Toaster Trouble? (16 characters)
Save 75% on a new toaster with our (34 characters)
Repair service – find out more here (35 characters)

—

Need Toaster Repair? (20 characters)
Save 75% on a new toaster with our (34 characters)
Repair service – find out more here (35 characters)

It is up to you to experiment until you find the perfect ad, just generate a load of ideas and one will stand out as the ideal ad.

There are 3 different ways to enter keywords into your Adwords account:
1) Broad matching
2) Phrase matching, and
3) Exact matching

Broad Match means you enter in the term blue widgets without anything round it. Google will then show your ad for anything containing those two words, in any order. So your ad will show up when a person searching google types in any of these phrases:

* Blue widgets
* Where can I buy some widgets that are blue
* I hate blue widgets
* How can I find some free blue widgets
* Blue magic music club widgets

Phrase Match goes one step further, you put some quotation marks around your phrase so it becomes – “blue widgets”, this then shows up only when someone types something in that has the whole phrase in it, in that order.

So you ad would show up for the following:
* Blue widgets
* I hate blue widgets
* How can I find some free blue widgets

But not for these:
* Blue magic music club widgets
* Where can I buy some widgets that are blue

And finally, there’s Exact Match, for this put square brackets around the phrase like this – [Blue widgets] and your ad will only show up for that exact term, in that exact order, with nothing else attached to it.

So it would only show up for:
* Blue widgets

But not for any of these:
* Where can I buy some widgets that are blue
* I hate blue widgets
* How can I find some free blue widgets
* Blue magic music club widgets

Most people just try to triple the size of their keyword list by wrapping everything up with every type of combination, if you want to do that then head over to:

http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/adwords-wrapper.html

That is a great free tool that does it for you, but you need to be smarter than that. Looking at the ad groups I created before then you can see there will be issues if you use the wrong kind of matching.

If you use broad match on the term ‘blue widgets’ then that means all your other ad groups are affected as that ad will show up for any keyword with ‘blue’ and ‘widgets’ in, that covers every other keyword you have! Therefore ruining all your other ad groups.

Be smart, I’d recommend using just phrase match and exact match on the terms, then probably sticking in a broad match just on the term that is common in every keyword for that ad group, like ‘cheapest blue widgets’ for the ‘cheapest blue widgets’ ad group. I know that sounds a bit confusing, so based on the keywords I put in that ad group earlier I would use the following keywords once I had added in the broad/phrase/exact match:

Ad group:
Cheapest blue widgets

Keywords:
[Buy cheapest blue widgets] – exact match
[What are the cheapest blue widgets] – exact match
“Buy cheapest blue widgets” – phrase match
“What are the cheapest blue widgets” – phrase match
Cheapest blue widgets – broad match

It gets easier after your first campaign trust me! So now to make sure you are not wasting money let’s look at negative keywords.

Negative keywords
When you use broad and phrase match you open yourself up to get more traffic, but you also open yourself up to get impressions (views) off keywords you may not want to be viewed for.

Google thinks that keywords that get clicked more in relation to their views are much more targeted and rewards them, so you need to avoid wasting views by showing your ad to people who are clearly not interested.

If you use the term ‘Cheap blue widgets’ and you use phrase and broad match on that keyword then your ad will show up for the following phrases:

* Cheap blue widgets – good
* Where can I buy cheap blue widgets – good
* I hate using cheap blue widgets – bad
* Where can I sell some cheap blue widgets – bad

People searching for the last two terms are not interested in your site selling cheap blue widgets, they don’t care about your site and won’t click your ad.

So you need to setup some negative keywords which are words that prevent your ad from showing, so if you enter ‘hate’ and ’sell’ as negative keywords your ad would stop being shown for the last two keyword phrases above.

You can pick up some powerful negative keywords when you are doing your keyword research, just make a note of all the specific words in the keywords you definitely don’t want to show up for and you have a great list!

You can enter negative keywords at the campaign level or during normal ad group creation, I will show you exactly how later on. So your task now is to go out and find enough keywords for about 4 tightly focused ad groups and some negative keywords too, remember everything above and try to get some really good ones!

So what is a keyword or keyword phrase?
A keyword is just a word that you think someone would type into a search engine either to find a product like you are selling, or just to find information on a topic related to what you are selling. I like to call it a keyword phrase as it will usually consist of multiple words like, ‘How to fish for Salmon’, but you’ll typically see them just referred to as keywords (some people call them ‘long tail keywords’).

To pick successful keywords you need to do one of two things:

1) Get inside the head of your prospect,
or
2) Copy what someone else is doing.

If you want to get into the head of your prospect then you have to think like they would if they were searching for information, what would they search for? What terms would they use? What are their problems or their desires?

Or you can find keywords where people are already advertising products like yours and spy on them to see if they are still advertising 30 days later. If they are then the chances are that they are making money so it will be a good choice.

Of course the problem with this kind of competitive intelligence is that it does not take into account other factors. For instance the competitors campaign could be making them money, but they are making money off some other keywords not the one you are looking at, so you copy the losing keyword and lose money! But either way you are going to want to brainstorm possible keywords and find out their monthly search volume so you know roughly how many people will see your ad.

Free keyword tools:
You can use these free tools to help you generate a list:
* http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
* http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ (Good when it works, but often has trouble)
* https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Just type in a keyword you think someone would search with and those tools will spit out a whole host of related search terms and the amount of times per month they are searched for. There is no right and wrong answer about how many searches a day makes a good keyword, a good keyword is one that turns into sales, there is no point having lots of searches if they don’t convert to sales!

Try to think of ‘buying’ keywords, for instance, ‘blue widget’ is a lot less valuable to you than ‘buy blue widget’ as you know the second phrase is a person looking to buy, the first person could just be looking for information.

Grouping keywords
Google used to be very easy to use, but due to widespread abuse and also to sort the professional people out from the amateurs who can’t be bothered to put in the effort, then Google has introduced a lot of different measures to make sure they deliver quality ads to the right audience.

What this means is that your whole account and specifically your campaigns and keywords will have a ‘quality score’ assigned to them (more on that later) and in order to have a good quality score you must first group your keywords so they are relevant to each other.

You used to be able to put 1000 keywords in an ad group and just let that run, but not anymore. Now it is more like 10 – 20 keywords maximum. Plus you need to make sure that they all contain the same phrase in them to help you get the best score possible, so let’s look at an example set of fake keywords:

Best blue widgets
Which blue widgets are the best
Blue widgets from Spain
Buy cheapest blue widgets
Spain Cheap blue widgets
What are the cheapest blue widgets
Excellent blue widgets
Blue electric widgets

So I would split these as follows:

Ad group 1: Best Blue Widgets
• Best blue widgets
• Which blue widgets are the best

Ad group 2: Blue widgets Spain
• Blue widgets from Spain
• Spain Cheap blue widgets

Ad group 3: Cheapest blue widgets
• Buy cheapest blue widgets
• What are the cheapest blue widgets

Ad group 4: Blue widgets
• Excellent blue widgets
• Blue electric widgets

You can see above how any keywords with the same kind of phrases in are grouped together.

Thousands upon thousands of people are trying to use Adwords to make money using this method with varying levels of success, I know of one affiliate making $1000’s a day from just one keyword and one ad!

With a well oiled sales funnel that gets the visitors to convert well to customers then in markets where there is a lot of search volume you can get thousands of people every day to go through your ads to your site.

Product creation:
The other side of the coin is where you have your own product or service to sell which you can advertise using Adwords. This means you get more control over everything as you control the product pages and you get to keep all the profits from any sales.

Surveying and testing:
PPC can have your advert up and running in just minutes and your first visitors soon after, so it makes a great medium to survey your market and also to test out ideas and processes.

Although not something you typically directly profit from then surveying and testing can have a huge impact on your profits later on, if you can survey your market and find out exactly what they want then you can create or sell products that they really want.

Testing means you can either make your sales process more efficient and test out ideas. Or it could even save you a load of money by stopping you from making a big error. You can quickly and easily test out new ideas by putting up a salespage and seeing if people click the buy button to see if they are interested. Just make sure you tell them after they click to buy that you are still developing the product and it will be available soon, as it is illegal to sell something you don’t have ready to give them!

You’ll also find them along the right-hand side and on top of the results when you use Google to search for something. Or on websites that choose to show them. Those are Adwords ads. Someone has paid to have that ad there to try and capture your attention and get you to click through to their website.

With approximately 200 million searches done every day and countless page views of websites that will have these ads on then I am sure you can see how powerful this can be in the right hands! (or a disaster in the wrong hands!).

So Google Adwords is just an PPC (pay per click) advertising platform that allows you to display a small advert to try and get people to click through to your site where you try to monetize them in some way (get them to perform some action that leads to an immediate or future purchase).

There are two main ways to use the system, you either choose the “search” function which will show your ads to the side of the search results Google gives when people are searching. You enter a “keyword” or “keyword phrase” into the system and then when people search for that keyword then your ad will appear.

Or you use placement targeting which means you get your ad to appear on someone’s website either by just telling Google to display your ad anywhere and it goes out and evaluates the writing on a page and sees if that page is a good fit to your advert. Or you can simply choose the websites you want your ad to appear on.

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.