how to do affiliate marketing
7 Affiliate Marketing Companies To Be Aware Of And Use
7 Affiliate Marketing Companies To Be Aware Of And Use
As an affiliate marketer, there are many companies that offer commissions for promoting products. But there are 7 specific affiliate marketing companies you should know that have a great reputation and many products to choose from and should be an integral part of anyone’s affiliate marketing strategies.
Commission Junction
Commission junction is an affiliate marketing company that represents many different products. This company has been in business for years and is one of the top affiliate marketing companies. It offers you a network of large companies to work with once you’re accepted.
However, because of its size and reputation, it can be difficult to get accepted initially. Once you’re accepted, though, it can be very profitable.
Amazon
Amazon is one of the most popular and profitable affiliate programs. You can earn commissions for promoting the wide variety of products available on their site, and the sign up process is quick and easy. Amazon provides you with all you need so that you can add banners and share links on your own blog.
Share A Sale
Share a Sale offers an affiliate program that allows you to have a large network of over 2,500 merchants whose products you can promote. It’s known for being ethical, easy to use, and provides many resources for promoting on your own blog or other type of website.
Linkshare
Linkshare is one of the first affiliate networking companies established. It has a simple process for signing up and once you’re accepted, you have access to a large number of companies for product promotion. Like Commission Junction, very large companies are included.
Jvzoo
JVZoo is an affiliate program that many people love because it pays commissions immediately to your PayPal account. While most affiliate programs have a waiting period of up to 60 days for payments, with JVZoo you get immediate access to commissions. The sign up process is simple and gives you access to many products to promote.
Warrior Plus
Warrior Plus is the affiliate program that promotes items being sold in the popular Internet marketing Warrior Forum. This allows you to promote Warrior Special Offers, also known as WSOs. It uses PayPal to deliver funds and has a simple registration process.
Clickbank
ClickBank is a very popular site that offers an affiliate program for digital products. Through ClickBank, you can promote eBooks and guides as well as video courses and membership sites – and earn as much as a 50% commission or more – some of the highest in the industry. It’s easy to sign up as an affiliate and begin promoting products right away.
By signing up with these top affiliate marketing companies, you can leverage the network they already have in place to promote products. You’ll get access to tools such as banner ads and affiliate links to make product promotion easy.
4 Areas Of Expertise That Will Help Build Your Affiliate Marketing Business
When you’re learning how to do affiliate marketing, you can’t just rely on typical “affiliate marketing courses” to get you to the advanced levels you need to go for the big bucks.
You want to begin studying some more specialized topics that help you soar above the competition, garner more traffic and ultimately convert into more sales and higher commission tiers.
There are four areas of expertise that you need to focus your efforts on – blogging, list building, social marketing, and trends. Once you’ve mastered all four of these elements, you’ll be amazed at how much growth you have.
Blogging is important to learn as an affiliate because most people simply learn the basics of setting up a blog and then never go further with their knowledge. It’s not enough to simply know the technical details of blog set up and then slap some articles onto a blog.
You want to know advanced strategies. This includes things like plugins which help your blog operate better in the world of SEO, elements that achieve the best navigation and communication for your audience, and more.
By the way, if you are serious about using blogging in your affiliate marketing strategy, check out the Rapid Blogging Blueprint. This is a premium level training that takes you through each and every step of setting up your own highly profitable blog and profiting from it. You can check it out here.
List building is something far too many affiliate ignore. They’re simply after that initial click through and they miss out on years of potential sales making this mistake. Take the baby niche, for example.
There are endless opportunities to cater to that parent’s needs in the niche – because you can promote baby care items initially, then toddler toys, home décor for the room, furniture from crib to bed, and more.
You want to know the technical details of list building, but also gain insight into how to grow your list, how to make the subscribers more responsive, and more. There’s a lot to learn and implement.
The third thing you want to study up on is social marketing. There are dozens of books on this topic – and they teach you how to utilize free traffic opportunities like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter, to increase your affiliate sales.
And if you plan to branch out or expand your niche, then you’ll want to buy books about spotting trends. Eve if you stay in just one niche, it’s important to understand how you can keep an ear to the ground and get an edge over your competition using trend data to dominate.
Branding Yourself As A Go To Authority Figure When You’re An Affiliate
Just because you’re an affiliate doesn’t mean you’re off the hook for branding. Well, you could take that approach – but it won’t help you build a flourishing business. Sure, you might make some sales and commissions – but you want profits to explode.
To achieve the top tier levels of affiliate income, you still have to brand yourself as a leader in your niche – and it doesn’t mean you have to put out your own products. Leaders are guides, not necessarily product creators.
Figure out a unique slant for your business that reflects the message you want to share. Don’t just be the “home improvement advice” person. Think of a way to build a buzz around your brand. Have you ever heard of the Fly Lady?
She’s all about cleaning and organizing your home – on the fly. Nothing comprehensive and detailed – just enough to help you sustain neatness and not go insane. She’s wildly popular. You can have a brand like that.
Start curating information for your niche. Curation is when you go out and gather information in your niche and share bits and pieces on your site, providing your own commentary about it.
Have professional graphics on your site. You really want to have a design that reflects the message you want to project. If you’re good at graphics, then create your own – but if you’re new, it’s always best to hire a professional. An entire minisite theme costs under $200 for a great design that’s unique for you.
Share on all of the major social networks. The top leaders in the world, like Tony Robbins for example, all have a presence on multiple social networks. Make sure you are on whatever is trendy at the time – Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, Pinterest and more.
Ask to interview other experts in your niche. You can create weekly or monthly interviews with other experts and leaders in your niche, making your website home the place where tons of great advice is shared.
Whenever you can, start working on your own product for the niche. Having your own book will further your position as an authority figure. You can even outsource the process to a ghostwriter and put your name on it.
BTW, if you want to know more about affiliate marketing as a business model, then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it read it and take action 😊

7 Reasons Why You Need An Affiliate Program
If you’ve created and launched a product or you have an online store, you probably need traffic.
Even if you do all the heavy lifting yourself by using a combination of SEO, email marketing and paid ads, you’ll still be scratching the surface when it comes to marketing your products/services.
You NEED An Affiliate Program!
This Alone Should Be Enough!
Imagine having your very own team of salespeople raving about your products all over the internet… Sounds great, doesn’t it?
This obvious benefit alone should be enough to convince you to set up an affiliate program for your products/store. You’d be leaving money on the table if you didn’t… and setting up an affiliate program is really not as difficult as you think.
These days, it’s easy to set up an affiliate program with software such as iDevAffiliate. Just install the plugin or use their cloud hosting and you’ll be good to go within a few minutes.
How It Works
The process is mostly automated. An interested affiliate will sign up to your affiliate program either by invitation or they may find you online. You can then decide if you wish to manually approve them (recommended) or if they’re automatically approved by the system.
They’ll get an affiliate link which they can use in their promotions, and this link will cookie their potential customers.
With the software mentioned above, affiliate management and tracking are a breeze. Thanks to their intuitive interfaces which keep things simple.
Here are 6 More Benefits Of Having An Affiliate Program
More Targeted Traffic
Besides boosting your sales, an affiliate program will also get you more targeted traffic. Your affiliates may have niche sites and their own audience who will be looking for just the type of products/services you’re offering.
They’ll gladly buy your products if your sales copy is good – and if your site looks reputable.
Using affiliates is definitely an effective way to get sales quickly. That said, many marketing articles will tell you that using affiliates is the cheapest way to get sales, since you won’t be spending on advertising, etc.
However, we believe that it’s the most expensive way to get sales, depending on the commission rates you’re offering.
Digital products on ClickBank offer as high as 50%-75% commission rates per sale. Stores like Walmart offer anywhere from 10%-15% commission, and Amazon offers even lower rates.
However, affiliates can bring in a deluge of sales that you’d not have gotten on your own. So, it’s worth paying more just to get more sales, even if it means settling for less profit per sale.
Overall, you WILL make more, if you get your numbers right. Just know that it’s NOT the cheapest way to get sales.
Increased Brand Awareness
Having affiliates praising your products from the digital rooftops of their web properties is the online version of marketing via ‘word-of-mouth’
Getting others to sing praises about your brand will be far more effective than blowing your own horn with hyped up sales copy.
SEO Benefits
Have you ever noticed that Amazon products rank for many search terms?
One of the reasons for this is the thousands of affiliates who are linking back to the Amazon website/products. This massive number of backlinks pointing to Amazon helps them rank quickly and easily in the search engine results.
So, affiliates may be able to indirectly help you with your search engine optimization efforts.
Form Mutually Beneficial Partnerships
Some of your affiliates may have their own products and online stores. You could work out reciprocal mailings with them. By promoting each other, both parties will benefit.
Just be sure to pair up with those marketers with whom you have shared values, so you know that what you share of theirs to your subscribers will be high quality and valuable to them.
Low Risk
With affiliates, you only pay when they make a sale. This is a performance-based reward system that has very little risk for you. Marketers with on a tight budget will do better with affiliates.
Many beginner marketers will not be able to stomach this risk… and will be better off using affiliate traffic instead.
Full Flexibility
As the vendor, you’ll get to decide the commission rates, whom to accept as affiliates, which products they can promote and so on. There’s a lot of flexibility here and you call the shots.
Never try to short-change your affiliates. It’s not good form and word will get around.
In Conclusion…
By now, you’ll realize that setting up an affiliate program is a necessity if you wish to take your online business to the next level. There’s so much to gain with very few downsides.
Use reliable affiliate software such as iDevAffiliate and you’ll be up and running in no time at all.
Then go out there and proactively recruit affiliates and treat them well. Reward the better performing ones with extra perks and always be transparent with them.
From here on, you can scale up and expand your online business exponentially. It doesn’t get better than that.
BTW, if you want to know more about affiliate marketing as a business model, then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it read it and take action 🙂

5 Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategies
There are a plethora of affiliate marketing strategies and tactics employed by many successful affiliate marketers to ramp up their sales and commissions.
While some strategies may seem advanced, they are all usually based on the fundamentals of affiliate marketing.
As an affiliate marketer your job is to be a ‘conduit’ that takes an interested visitor to the sales page which will go on to sell the product.
That’s really all there is to it. All other intricacies can be boiled down to this goal. Let’s look at a few highly effective strategies employed by thousands of affiliate marketers all over the world.
Niche Sites
This is without a doubt the most popular strategy. To promote a variety of products you need a niche site. The content that’s interspersed with your affiliate links will make you sales if you do it right.
As long as you grow your site, your earnings will increase exponentially. Some of the large authority sites make 5 to 6 figures a month in affiliate commissions. That’s how powerful this method is.
Facebook Groups/Pinterest Boards
Everyone is on social media these days. Having Facebook groups and Pinterest boards dedicated to your niche, will allow you to tap into existing hotbeds of traffic while targeting and audience that is interested in your niche.
That’s fine too. What matters is that you hang out where your audience hangs out.
YouTube Channels
If you’re shy to be on camera, you can still do unboxing videos or PowerPoint presentations with a voiceover. YouTube is an excellent source of free traffic.
Links in your video descriptions can either go to a landing page or your website. While some affiliates prefer to directly link to the product, it’s wiser to try and capture the lead.
BTW, for an excellent course on video marketing, I highly recommend Video Marketing Insider
Email Lists
As mentioned earlier, always strive to build your list. Have a pop up on your site with a freebie that encourages the visitor to opt in.
Once you have a list and you build a relationship with them, you can promote products that will be well-received. A list will be your greatest asset.
Paid Ads
Many marketers stay away from paid advertising because it’s almost inevitable that you lose money during the testing phase. However, you should give it a try when your budget allows for it. You’re not losing money – you’re buying data.
Give these 5 strategies a try and watch your affiliate commissions soar. They will take you some time to do, but if you’re consistent and stick to the plan, your future self will thank you for it. These strategies will work wonders for your affiliate marketing.
Of course, a major part of affiliate marketing is knowing which products to promote, so how do you decide which to promote and which to leave aside?
What Should You Look For When Choosing Products To Promote?
As an affiliate marketer, when you choose a niche to market in, ideally it should have a wide variety of products to promote. There should be a mix of tangible and digital products to cater to a wide variety of customers within the same niche.
So, it’s important to put right product in front of the right person at the right time to get maximum sales. Below you will find a few tips to guide you.
Does It Fit Your Niche?
This is a very important point. You need to know what your audience is looking for. If you’re in the golf niche, promoting bodybuilding supplements such as mass gainers might be a flop. However, an eBook about improving one’s shoulder strength may be a hit for people hoping to improve their golf swing.
However, that same guide will not be as eagerly bought by women looking to lose weight with an easier program like yoga.
As you can see, even though the problem is the same, the products that’ll interest your audience will be different. So, you must really understand your niche and expect a period of testing.
Vendor
Another factor that you should look at is the vendor. If you’re promoting products on Amazon, you don’t have to worry too much.
Everybody trusts Amazon and they do a great job at selling.
Always check the vendor’s credibility.
Sales Page
Is the sales copy for the product convincing?
Is the description accurate and convincing? Read the sales copy and ask yourself if you’d buy the item. If you would, your site visitor or subscriber might probably buy it too.
Does It Solve A Problem?
Products that solve problems will always sell better than those that are just for satisfying wants.
You need to supply people with what they want, not necessarily what they need. This is just the way of business and marketing; hopefully they will eventually find what they need through you.
Reviews
Look at the testimonials and customer reviews on the site. Amazon makes this easy by providing ratings and reviews from verified customers. Promote products with a high rating and many positive reviews.
The same applies to digital products. You may even wish to ask the vendor to email you a review copy.
Many vendors will gladly accede to your request. If they don’t, just move on and find another product.
Trends
Last but not least, check on Google Trends to see if the product is in demand. Sometimes, products are very popular because of a craze, but then it all suddenly dies down.
These are the pointers to look out for when choosing products to promote. Exercise due diligence in your research and only recommend proven and profitable products to your audience. This will ensure that they trust you and your reputation remains intact.
If you want to know more about affiliate marketing then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it read it and take action 🙂

Affiliate Marketing 101: Know Your Audience
One of the secrets to successful affiliate marketing is knowing your audience so well that you can instinctively predict what products they’ll like and what they’ll avoid. To get to this stage, will require some effort and research on your part.
Follow the pointers below and you will be better prepared.
Do You Have A Customer Avatar?
When targeting a niche, whom will you be speaking to? If you’re targeting the women’s weight loss niche, how old will your reader be? Is she a mother or single? How much time do you think she’ll have a day to exercise? Is she a career woman or a stay-at-home mom?
Generally, she’ll be trying to lose weight with gentler exercise programs like Pilates or Yoga. So, you can leave out hardcore interval training programs and focus more on promoting yoga DVDs, yoga mats, etc.
While some questions will overlap and you don’t need to get too specific, you must have a general idea of whom you’re speaking to. This will enable you to tailor your message accordingly.
Where Do They Hang Out?
Finding your target audience will be your next task.
You can then target these areas with your marketing.
Over and above that, knowing where your audience hangs out will be helpful when it comes to traffic generation later on.
What Are Their Problems?
The forums, Facebook groups and other places where your audience congregates will often have questions and problems being mentioned by those in need of help. This is a goldmine of information.
Very often, during your research you’ll see similar products being mentioned that have helped people with their issues, and some other products will not be looked upon favorably.
Take notes here and promote the popular products and avoid the stinkers.
Are There Any Other Issues That They May Have?
Some niches can be related without you even realizing it. For example, the man who wishes to lose weight and get ripped, may also be doing it to attract more women. He’ll probably also be interested in guides that show him how to pick up women, etc.
This is actually a very popular industry online with tons of sales. You may wish to experiment and try promoting a pickup artist guide and see how that works for you. If it’s well-received, you know that you can start planning to market it more frequently. If it falls flat, you can ditch it and move on.
But it doesn’t end there! In affiliate marketing there are many skills you need to master to be effective and once you have found and know your audience, you will need to try to sell them on your affiliate offers but you need to be careful and not turn them away and this is where subtlety comes in…
How to Be Subtle In Affiliate Marketing
There’s a marketing saying that goes, “People hate being sold to, but they love to buy.”
This maxim pretty much hits the nail on the head. Many marketers fail to realize that you say more when you say less. When a blog post hypes up a product or you send an email that praises a product in a way that’s over the top, you actually repel potential buyers.
Your motives become suspect and you lose credibility and trust. Once those go, getting the sale can be very difficult. That’s exactly why you must be subtle in your marketing.
One of the best ways to do that will be to show how the product helped you and how you benefitted from it. While it may not be possible to do this for all the products you’re promoting, you can still be subtle in other ways.
For example, if you have a site showing how to build chicken coops, casually mentioning that ‘circular saws are much better than miter saws because they’re easy to use’ will get you more sales. You just need to hyperlink the words circular saws to the product you’re promoting.
Curious visitors will click on the link. After all, everyone wants to make things faster and easier for themselves.
However, if you say, ‘you need to buy a circular saw model XXX to do this job effectively. It is the best saw that we found for the job and only costs $YYY’, you’ve probably set off the reader’s Spidey senses. They can sense that you’re pushing the saw on to them because you were too obvious.
As an affiliate, your job is to get the click. The sales page should do the selling. While your content can gently pre-sell the reader, it should mostly be ‘benefits oriented’. You want to sell the solution to the problem and not the product. The best way to do this is by showing how the product solves the most common problems that your audience faces.
You’ll not even need to mention where the product is sold or the positive reviews it has. If your content convinces the reader that the product is the solution that they’ve been looking for – without blatantly telling them, the reader WILL click on the links to see how they can solve their problems.
Everybody is looking for solutions. You’re just the middleman who gently guides them down the right path. That’s all there is to it. Be subtle.
If you want to know more about affiliate marketing then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it read it and take action 🙂

2 Questions You Need To Answer As An Affiliate Marketer
As you are reading this post, you must already realise that affiliate marketing is a great way to start an online business quickly.
But it isn’t always as straightforward as it seems and you may have some questions such as “Do I need to build an email list as an affiliate marketer?” or Do I need my own website to do affiliate marketing?”
In this article we are going to take a look at these two important questions.
Firstly, we’ll take a look at whether you do need to build your own email list when affiliate marketing and then we’ll look at whether you really do need your own website to really succeed as an affiliate marketer.
Ready? Let’s get started…
Do Affiliate Marketers Need To Build A List?
When embarking on an affiliate marketing career, you’ll need to determine if you want to build a list of emails from customers. Whether or not to build a list depends on the type of affiliate marketing you plan to pursue.
Building a list works well for products in specific niches. For example, the weight loss, health, and parenting niches offer opportunities for you to promote multiple products over a period of time. You’ll find a wide variety of products that fit different needs of your customer base.
When you have a list, you can capture the names and email addresses of potential customers so that when a new product is available, you can share it quickly and easily. You’ll need a program specifically designed for email marketing – such as Active Campaign or Aweber.
Using Active Campaign or Aweber, you can create sign up forms that you can add to your blog and squeeze page where people can enter their name and email address. You can also add special categories to help you get to know your customer better, such as the top weight loss problem or parenting concern they have.
Once you’ve captured emails, you can use the program to send different types of messages. Broadcast messages are often used to announce specials or just generally communicate with your list. They’re sent one time to the current subscribers.
Building a list doesn’t happen instantly – it’s another area in affiliate marketing where you will grow over time. You’ll start with no one on your list and gradually begin to see it increase. The larger your list, the more people you can reach to promote products.
It’s important to treat your list with care and respect so that people will want to hear what you have to share with them. You’ll want to make sure not to share any of the information you gather or submit your list to constant spam type messages.
Another question you may have is about having your own website as an affiliate marketer; is it required?
Well, let’s take a look at that now 😊
Do You Need A Website To Be An Affiliate Marketer?
As an affiliate marketer, you may wonder if you need to have your own website in order to succeed in the business. While it’s certainly a good idea to have your own website, there are many options that don’t require you to do that.
For example, you can use third party platforms that allow you to promote products. Examples include HubPages and InfoBarrel. These sites are relatively easy to use and can help you make a profit in affiliate marketing. You can write articles with affiliate links in them and you can generate income from the links and from the articles themselves as these sites operate a revenue share scheme. You can also do a similar thing with Medium too.
You can also get hosting for a free blog. For example, BlogSpot allows you to create a free blog where you can promote products. The one thing you need to be aware of, though, before you use third party platforms – is that you’re subject to their rules.
At any time, the rules may change and your blog might disappear or your pages may become obsolete. You just don’t have much control over your business when you choose these options. In fact, you can have the business you’ve worked hard to build that gets deleted in an instant.
If you are looking to buy a domain name Namecheap is a great place to look and if you are looking for hosting you won’t go wrong with either A2 or Siteground.
It’s very simple to set up a blog on your own site and you don’t have to worry about conforming to anyone else’s rules about what can and can’t be done on it. Then you can use third party platforms as a support mechanism and even to drive traffic to your blog.
You’ll find that it doesn’t cost as much as you might think to have your own site in your chosen niche and truly be the master of your own affiliate marketing business. This small investment (of about $10 a year for a domain and less than $10 a month in hosting) can bring big payoffs and is worth your efforts.
As an affiliate marketer, you don’t have to have your own website. But depending on third party platforms alone can be a risky decision. The best option is to have your own website and take advantage of third party platforms to supplement what you’re doing on your own site.
This way you get the best of both worlds and have multiple streams of income to support your affiliate marketing career.
If you want to know more about affiliate marketing then check out the featured resource below for a free report; download it read it and take action 🙂
