3 Essential Tools Every Successful Affiliate Marketer Uses

3 Essential Tools Every Successful Affiliate Marketer Uses
Free Copy Of Big Affiliate Marketing Pay Days and Affiliate Marketer's Handbook

Affiliate marketing is recognised as one of the easiest and straight forward ways to start an internet marketing business. Anyone who is marketing affiliate products and services will have the same set of questions. The "what to do" and "how to do" boils down to fact that everyone wants to be successful at it. Though the merchant may provide you with all the tools and keywords etc etc, what do you really need to be really successful?

1. Your Own Website

Your website is the most important, if not most indispensable tool for affiliate marketing. Why? This is because your website is the first point of reference to your customers. Your website is where you do your marketing to your customers. Therefore, building a credible and professional looking website is as important as renovating a retail shop.

A retail shop should have easy passage for customer to walk in and browse the products on sale easily. This is the same with your website. The interface should be easy for customers to navigate. The design of the website should encourage the customers to click on links to the products or service you are promoting. It's like a discreet sale person prompting customers to look at an item more closely or to buy it.

It is a fact that most people surf the internet primarily to look for information on something which they are interested in, or are looking for answers. So they are not surfing the internet to buy something. To draw people to visit your website, it has to be filled with information that people are looking for. Information which are original and relevant are the ones that stand out and these are what people are searching for.

People love reading articles that help them learn something that they are searching. By providing lots of useful and original content on your website, you build yourself up as a credible expert in your area. Reputation is important in building a loyal customer base. Your reputation enables your customers to trust your word, hence, your endorsements on the products or services you are promoting. This makes selling your affiliate product easier. So build up your reputation by being a provider of original and quality information on your website for your customers.

2. Incentives and Bonuses

Since affiliate marketing is an easy way to start a home business, many people will be involved in it. So, competition is going to be intense. How do you differentiate yourself from other affiliate marketers? How do you encourage people to visit your webpage? You need to attract customers by giving away presents. Give them incentives or bonuses when they come to you. Give them more incentive to stay with you eg, giving away free ebooks, reports or softwares or free subscriptions to your newsletters that are useful to them. The perceive value of these bonuses is up to you to decide. However, if it is useful and relevant to the customer, then the value of the free gift is high, even though you may have bought it as a private label right item.

The thing is, to stay ahead of your competitors, you must become a generous provider of information. Everybody loves gifts and presents, more so when the gifts or presents are relevant. So give away information that is useful and original, build your reputation as a generous person who only have the benefit of the customers in mind. This will build your reputation and trust very fast.

3. Link Popularity

Finally we come to traffic to your website. When you set up a retail shop, you need visibility. Without visibility, nobody knows you exist. To help your affiliate marketing, your website need to be visible as well. Ranking well on search engine is one of the ways to draw traffic to your website.

Building your link popularity is one way of improving your search engine rankings. More people linking to you is an indication to search engine that your website is popular and possibly possess many relevant content.

One of the tried and proven free method of building your links is to write articles and submitting the articles to various article directories and e-zines. Each article has an author resource box that you can write about yourself and your website. It is through the author's resource box that links are pointed back to your website. So, the more articles you submit, the more links are build back to your website. If your articles are original, unique and relevant, more people will copy it and put it up in their own site, thus increasing your exposure to other readers and drawing more potential customers to your site.

The above 3 tools are what you need to have to succeed in affiliate marketing. Ask any successful affiliate marketers and you can see that they have their own website, they have very good rapport with their customers and their websites are high traffic sites. There are many ways to build up your 3 affiliate marketing tools, so explore with different ideas and strategies that works for you.

Hai Liang strive to help beginners who would like to start home based business and succeed in it. Go to Proven Home Based Business Ideas And Opportunities For Novice for more information.

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