This is a continuation of the Affiliate Marketing Tutorial Part 1 that we discussed yesterday.  The first half of the Affiliate marketing tutorial was geared at creating a strong foundation for your affiliate marketing business. Today we will be talking more about the strategies you need to actually drive traffic and start converting that traffic. Details right? Details!

Affiliate Marketing Tutorial 14 Tips of The Trade

Continuing at Number 8

8. Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

A crucial component of driving traffic to your site. I have discussed SEO countless times on this blog. Just because you are doing affiliate marketing does not mean you should not be optimizing your site for Google. In fact, if anything when you are using a blog to start promoting affiliate links you need to up the ante. Check out the following posts that I have written on the subject of SEO: Effective Search Engine Optimization,  SEO Keyword Research, and 8 Ways To Increase Quality Backlinks to Your Website.

9. List Building

This is bigger than you possibly imagined. It is amazing how many people when they sign up for your list for a while and hear what you have to say are interested in your products and services at some point and time. The fact is that the web is not the new frontier that it used to be. People do not go online and get all up in a frenzy because they are connected to the WWW. Instead, you have to build a relationship. The easiest way to do this is through email.

Having the right email auto-responder is crucial for automating the system. I have been using Aweber for the past 2 years now and it is a dynamic system where I am always finding new and cooler applications for all the time. Update 8/31/19: I now use Active Campaign. While Aweber is still a quality product, I found that Active Campaign had more features I could use to grow my business.

10. The right content for the right crowd

Make sure your content is appropriate for who you are writing to in your articles, web content, and emails. You would not use “LOL” or “ROTFLMAO” to a business audience, just as you would not obsess about using words, such as “ROI” and Split A/B Test among teens.  Learn who you are talking to and adjust your style to match theirs.

11. Cloak Your Links

The Aweber link above is cloaked. What that means is that you can not pull out the affiliate tracking code that directs people to Aweber. The reason this is important is that some people will do this to spite your efforts to make money. Therefore, cloaking your link protects you from losing affiliate commissions.

I have been using Pretty Link Lite, however, Go Codes was not bad from the brief tests that I did with that software. Please note that these are WordPress plugins. They might be available off WordPress, but my experience with them is completely through WordPress. Do not ask me what they are like off WordPress.

12. Paid Advertising

Some times it pays to advertise for either product or just to build your list for future offers. I am not a huge paid advertising person, but I have had some success with limited advertising. One of my favorite sites for paid advertising is 7Search.com.

I once did some Peerfly sales off of 7Search for Google Android that returned a 25% profit margin. They slowed down eventually and it was not scalable but good for making some quick bucks on the right products. I have found that technology and money-making opportunities do best here. Other products have dive-bombed so far on the site that they ended up on the other side of the planet.

13. Article Marketing

This ties in with a lot of the other approaches above, but it needs its own category for the breadth of different types of article marketing that you can do. Everything from blogging to writing ezines to re-purposing content for your emails marketing is a great way to build your business.

Now, for those who are deathly afraid of article marketing, you are talking to the right person. My recent 28 Cent Articles video course shows you how to outsource articles for only 28 cents per article and a little lifting from yourself.

14. Different Affiliate Programs

That brings us to the close of this Affiliate Marketing Tutorial. Where do you actually go to become an affiliate? Well, I am going to give you a few options to get started. Some of the first sites you might want to take a look at are ShareASale, Peerfly, and Linkshare. These sites have a wide variety of merchants who are

However, for the first five people who take me up on this post before November 1st, 2011 I will be offering a special to help you get started with affiliate marketing.

I have a number of affiliate products that I am launching in the next few weeks. Right now, I have all my affiliate products over at E-junkie but am in the process of applying for Clickbank, which is another affiliate network.

Final Thoughts

If you have additional questions about how to improve your affiliate marketing, then set up a free 30-minute consultation with me at SmartattheStart.Com today!