When it comes to traffic, there are two proven ways to get targeted and interested buyers to flood to your websites or affiliate offers. That is organic (search engines, writing articles etc) and paid traffic (Pay per click being the most effective).

Whilst both methods are capable of bringing in huge amounts of targeted traffic that are ready to buy from you, the paid option has certain benefits over organic search engine listings.

First of all, paid traffic is able to bring in traffic in lightening fast time as opposed to organic traffic. Whilst organic traffic from the search engines might save you money over time, it’s also important to realize that time is also money!

So why do a lot of struggling marketers still shy away from paid advertising such as Google Adwords? Is it because it doesn’t work? Well, maybe it didn’t work for them personally but it sure does work for millions of other marketers. So the real question is how to make it work for YOU.

If you are promoting affiliate offers then the first thing to consider is whether you will be able to link directly to the merchant’s website using your affiliate link in the PPC ad, or if you would be better off sending your traffic to a landing page hosted on your own domain (or on a free domain elsewhere if you don’t own a domain yet).

This is a common hurdle for affiliates and there are pros and cons to each method. Let’s look at why you’d want to link directly to the merchant’s website instead of using a landing page on your own site:

1. You can quickly throw up an entire campaign and test the water with a product
2. You don’t need to worry about writing sales copy or actually creating web pages
3. You eliminate one less hurdle for the visitor to go through before making a purchase

Whilst all of these benefits seem pretty conclusive, the truth is that there is actually a greater effectiveness of using your own landing pages to pre-sell the visitor on the affiliate product that you are promoting, such as:

1. You can warm the visitor up and prepare them for the sales pitch
2. You can tell your story and make the visitor connect with you emotionally, which rockets conversions!
3. You can get the opportunity to capture an email address so that you can send out multiple offers to the same person (all for the same product if they don’t buy straight away).

Another problem with directly linking to affiliate offers is that Google Adwords will often penalize you for doing so, if other advertisers are also doing this on the same keywords that you’re bidding on. Google doesn’t want a ton of duplicate ads for a keyword, so you need to be unique.

Ultimately, tests have proven that sending people to a pre-sell landing page that either contains a personal recommendation, a review or a chance to capture people’s email addresses is likely to rocket your conversion ratios beyond belief.

And in the lucrative but competitive world of PPC advertising, where every click cuts into your profits, then a higher conversion ratio is your ultimate goal.

Google rotates ads that point to the same display URL. If you and 99 other folks are advertising a specific affiliate product, and are all using direct link, you dilute the number of times your ad will be seen. Google will only return one ad per display URL when a search is performed.

The number of referrals you can generate for your affiliate marketing program can range from a few dozen to several hundreds. Great if there are only a few names on your list so far since they would be easy to familiarize with but what if you’ve collected enough names equivalent to a mid-sized city’s worth of phone numbers?

Without an organized system, you could easily lose potential income from referrals you can’t monitor.

Learn how to keep track of your affiliate referrals offline and online so you’ll never have to waste your efforts.

Offline tracking techniques

Just because you’re in affiliate marketing doesn’t mean all your affiliate referral prospecting methods are limited online. Offline activities can be incredibly useful for generating leads.

If you’re the type of affiliate who has an active social networking life, you probably make use of conferences, trade shows and meetings to mine affiliate referrals. If you do, then make sure you are organized enough to take advantage of all the prospects you get in touch with during these occasions.

An excellent way to do this is to obtain a prospect’s business card. That piece of paper should hold enough information for you to use later to get in touch with that person.

If you attend multiple events or are constantly generating leads online, make a few notes on the back of the business cards so you never forget important information about the person, such as the event they attended, what they said and other business-related stuff you might have discussed.

Keep all business cards collected specifically for your affiliate marketing program separate from your other business cards. This will prevent confusion later when you begin communicating with these people.

Don’t be afraid to use labels and to make notes, this will help ensure that you keep track of all your affiliate referrals and never forget critical information and data.

Online tracking techniques

One of the fastest and most convenient ways to track affiliate referrals is to use online resources. Some of these include:

An affiliate referral tracking application

Once your referral activities begin in earnest, you’ll find it difficult to manually track the number of referrals you bring to your affiliate company’s website.

You’ll need a reliable application to perform this efficiently. Some of these referral tracking applications may be downloaded for free, although you might prefer premium editions if your affiliate business is big enough.

These applications are quite easy to use so you can conveniently keep track of the activities of your affiliate referrals. Many of these applications even offer extras, such as features that allow you to monitor your banner exchanges, start pages and affiliate links, essentially the kind of activities you’ll been doing in order to promote your website.

Your affiliate marketing program’s tracking system

Majority of established affiliate marketing programs have their own tracking system for their affiliate’s referrals. Check your program for this. You’ll usually only need your own affiliate ID in order to gain access to your stats.

Your affiliate program is able to do this because the affiliate links you post on your web pages are coded. This usually comes in the form of a tracking cookie. Each time your visitors click on that link and arrives on the affiliate company’s website, their tracking system will register the unique code coming from your site.

Activities related to this code will be kept in the company’s system which you can view at any time.

Establishing yourself in the affiliate marketing world is no easy task. However, once you have, the rewards are much greater than one could usually expect. Your products and affiliate marketing sites will get you that success you want. But how do you get them to do that?

You are probably just starting out with affiliate marketing by trying your luck with just one product, or like many affiliate marketers, marketing multiple products to maximize profits. Either way, you should acknowledge the fact that the method in which you utilize your affiliate marketing sites is a major determinant of your success.

Creating unique affiliate marketing sites for your affiliate products pave the best way for maximized profits. Unique affiliate marketing sites allow for your prospects to focus highly on the certain product they need or want, or the niche in which that product belongs to.

Further reasons why you should create unique affiliate marketing sites (and how these sites should look like) for your affiliate marketing ventures are stated below.

WHY CREATE UNIQUE AFFILIATE MARKETING SITES?

1. TO GET YOUR PROSPECTS FOCUS ON ONE PRODUCT. Your prospects probably landed on your page because they were specifically looking for your product. They would want to know more about the product, and considering just how patient (which isn’t much) customers can get these days, they wouldn’t want to know anything more. Imagine how they would get if you placed the descriptions of totally unrelated products beside the one they were looking for (for example, sneakers beside a computer)? You wouldn’t want to know just how much that would hurt your profits, except that since you care about your profits, you have to.

By focusing on one product at a time, you give your prospects the chance to get to know your product more. Plus, unique affiliate marketing sites are quite easy to maintain and establish: at most, a day or two to get everything (links, layout, entries, photos, etc..) right. You’d be extremely surprised just how these unique affiliate marketing sites focused on promoting a single product could bring in profits disproportionately high compared to the effort that went into making them.

2. TO GET THEM TO FOCUS ON A CERTAIN GROUP OF PRODUCT. Sometimes, customers who aren’t satisfied with the features and benefits of a product want to find other alternatives. It would be such a sad thing if you cant provide them with that. By grouping similar products together in one unique affiliate marketing site, you can pretty much capture the market, despite all its preferences and specific needs.

The only problem with establishing unique affiliate marketing sites focused on a certain group of product is that they are much harder to do than single-product sites. The work is tedious, and you might end up having to hire someone else to do the job for you, which calls for money, money you would rather earn than spend. The trouble also is that these sites may not work right away, it may take awhile before profits come pouring in, and this could get quite a bit discouraging. If you have the patience for everything (creating the site, waiting for profits), then you could try your luck at this.

THREE QUALITIES YOR UNIQUE AFFILIATE MARKETING SITES SHOULD HAVE

It isn’t enough to know what kind of affiliate marketing site to establish. Even if your site caters to a single product or multiple ones, they have to have a certain qualities to ensure success. To encourage profits, your unique affiliate marketing site should be:

1. USER-FRIENDLY. Create affiliate marketing sites that users could find easy to navigate. Keep links and buttons within acceptable reach, and at enough frequency.

2. WELL-FORMATTED. Do with a format or a layout that does well for the product you are trying to sell. Do not ever do the mistake of creating an affiliate marketing site meant for Big Bikes (ie, Harley Davidsons) with a layout composed of butterflies and pretty flowers (this is a thing for the insane to do).

3. ORGANIZED. Keep your unique affiliate marketing sites organized by placing appropriate links where they are most likely to be seen without interfering with everything else. Categorize your links and products as well (don’t just place hundreds of your links under one category). Keeping your site organized will entice your prospects to discover more, and click away.

Promotion can never be a walk in the park. That’s what most of us say. Promoting somebody elses site for instance makes it much harder for you to attest for the said website.

That’s how affiliate marketing works by the way. You are tasked to promote a certain website through your own website. It may sound like a hard task but in reality, that is not true.

Promoting your affiliate sites can simply start by enticing your website visitors to try out this particular product you are endorsing. If you are running a blog, you can simply shift your entries t the products advantage. Here’s an example.

You are currently promoting an Xbox website which caters to online gamers. The products range from Xbox accessories to online downloadable games. Your blog is about your everyday living experience, sort of a journal like website.

So how would you shift your blog so it could help your affiliate to boost up its products sales? It is pretty simple. You could make your entry for one day something like as you are bored and tried to look for something to do. Luckily your cousins arrived and look what they have brought an Xbox! So you hurriedly setup the console and played to your hearts content! You must emphasize how you have enjoyed the experience, hence, now you are longing to buy yourself that same console. Thats when you will introduce the affiliate website that you have. You will then mention there how they will save if they go to these certain website and order. You know the drill, just make sure that you always say good things regarding your affiliate.

Here’s another example. Same thing, you have a blog and your affiliate site is for a Nintendo Wii. You could make your entry for one day something like this.

You are bored and tried to look for something to do. Luckily your cousins arrived and look what they have brought a Nintendo Wii! So you hurriedly setup the console and played to your heart’s content!

You must emphasize how you have enjoyed the experience, hence, now you are longing to buy yourself that same console. That’s when you will introduce the affiliate website that you have. You will then mention there how they will save if they go to these certain website and order. You know the drill, you have to detail the good testimonies you have regarding the website you want them to visit.

If you are running a blog, you can simply shift your entries to the products advantage. That’s when you will introduce the affiliate website that you have.

Promoting your affiliate sites can simply start by enticing your website visitors to try out this particular product you are endorsing. That’s when you will introduce the affiliate website that you have.

You will then mention there how they will save if they go to these certain website and order. If you are running a blog, you can simply shift your entries t the products advantage.

In this manner, promotion of the affiliate sites will be much easier. No pressure on your part and the effect will be colossal.

You can simply make the most out of your advertisement by simply using your blog to your advantage. It is like telling a story and at the same time, enticing to your target audience. Now that’s what I call effective blogging marketing.

Have you been living the rat race life for quite a while and now you’ve grown tired of the boss breathing down your neck and the exhausting office politics? Or maybe you simply need an extra source of income?

Whatever your reason may be, if you want some good decent income going your bank account’s way, doing affiliate marketing can be a very viable path to follow.

What exactly is affiliate marketing? It is a technique posing as a business opportunity that lets those with entrepreneurial spirit explore the world of passive income through marketing products for other businesses. You can earn through commissions.

So if you think you’d like to give affiliate marketing a try, how do you ensure your success in this field?

Here are some very important tips you should follow:

- Choose your niche well

One of the most important factors to consider in doing affiliate marketing is choosing the best affiliate company or products to market. It can make or break your earnings. If you have a certain field that you’re most interested in, the easier you can go through the process of deciding what affiliate program to join. So start making a list of your interests and see what affiliate programs come up from that list.

- Create a website that gets followed

One of the best ways to make the most bucks in affiliate marketing is through the creation of well-designed websites.

Make sure that your site is easy to navigate and compels targeted visitors to convert - either to sign up under you as referrals or to purchase the products you are marketing.

A quality landing page that has a call to action for your targeted visitors to do what you need them to do has excellent content that can either be texts that reviews the product, a video tutorial that lets visitors learns how to benefit and use the product well and a very conspicuous opt-in form.

- Use the power of freebies

Useful content is what you can use in making the word free mean money to you. When you offer free content, like say, free reports, when the right people get hold of this report, it can translate to more referrals or purchases.

- Learn how to get targeted traffic to your site

You can’t benefit from your well-designed website, no matter how good your content and freebies are if you don’t have the right visitors.

So how do you drive targeted visitors to your site? You can do off-page search engine optimization or also known as link building. Whether use blogging, social networking and word of the mouth just to get the attention of the right people.

There are different ways on how you can successfully make people go to your site through this means - article marketing or the use of written content and submitting it to directories for publishers to pick it up and drive people to your site, you can set up and maintain social network accounts and let people know about your affiliate sites, or you can tap on your contacts - especially the new media savvy ones like popular bloggers and or community managers to spread the word about your sites.

If you follow all of the above mentioned bits of advice, it will be hard for you to fail as an affiliate marketer.