Affiliate Marketing In General
I am sitting here, attending the DaVinci Institute “Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp“, listening to Anita Edge (www.BaseCampWebVentures.com), Byron Walker (www.UltimateResultsNow.com) and Dush Ramachandran from ClickBank (www.ClickBank.com) about Affiliate Marketing and wanted to throw out this little nugget of knowledge that is critical for newbie Affiliate Marketer (like me).
What you have to understand is that the whole arena of Affiliate Marketing is (1) directed at the situation where the purchase of the product or service is a one-to-one transaction and (2) there are a large number of combinations of the different mechanisms to implement your marketing approach.
On the first point, the Affiliate Marketing concept does not work well when there are multiple people involved in the purchase. This is why “Corporate Sales” are not typically handled through this mechanism. The whole idea is that the person who is making the search (or finding your blog or whatever) is the person that will be making the purchasing decision. This point is also why the Landing Page is most effective when it is based on personal reviews and/or testimonials because these sorts of purchases are typically going to have a significant emotional component.
In attempting to understand the world of Affiliate Marketing, it is important to understand that there are large number of approaches to Affiliate Marketing. However, it can be distilled down to a four step process (when looked at from 50,000 feet). (1) Find a niche and product that you want to market, (2) generate traffic to your Landing Page (LP), (3) provide some information about the product that will provide more incentive for the potential customer to want to learn more about the product and finally (4) generate a sale. The Affiliate Marketer is the one that does steps 1, 2 and 3 with the 4th step being the responsibility of the Merchant.
One other piece of advice that I learned and came up again during this Boot Camp was that when you are starting, you need to figure out which method of generating traffic (#2 above) you are going to use and stay focused on that approach. If you choose to do SEO, then put all of your energy into getting your organic rankings up and thereby increasing your traffic. Don’t worry about PPC or blogs or articles to start with. Once you get good at whichever approach you want to use (and more importantly are making money) then you can branch out if that is really critical to you and your self-esteem. You will hear lots of “mentors / coaches” telling you that you need to do articles, blogs, email lists and PPC. However, all that this will do is to bury you in possibilities and you won’t be good at any of them. Start simple and straight-forward and then expand in whatever direction you want to go.
Those are two little nuggets that you can keep in mind while considering your next move in Affiliate Marketing. I know that the second point is one that I struggled with for