4 Fundamental Steps to Becoming a Super Affiliate

Feb 11, 2011
Anish Dasgupta

Affiliate Marketing - renjith krishnan

An affiliate marketeer can earn commissions by selling other people's products. This is a detailed guide to get you started becoming a super affiliate

One of the most popular and effective ways to earn money online is to join an affiliate network and try and sell other people's products by converting your online traffic into potential customers.

Why Should You Become an Affiliate Marketeer?

Becoming an affiliate marketeer has several advantages over trying to sell your own products, including:

You do not need to invest time and money into designing and developing the commodity.
You do not need to bear the cost of paying recurrent fees for merchant accounts, registration charges, encryption (SSL) services etc.
You do not need to concern yourself with the technicalities of the transaction such as how to deliver the product once it is purchased, how to offer free trials, how to manage your affiliate network etc.
You need not concern yourself with the legalities involved in selling the product such copyright issues, end user agreements, etc.

All these are the responsibilities and liabilities of the actual owner and seller of the product. As an affiliate marketeer your sole duty is to promote the product of your choice as best you can to generate as much profit as possible.

With the presence of a number of free publishing portals which allow affiliate links (like Squidoo) and the presence of services like Amazon Associates, Google Affiliate Network and ClickBank, it has become very easy to be an affiliate marketeer. As a direct fall out, all new affiliate marketeers may expect to face stiff competition and not have much of a chance to make a substantial profit. So, being just an affiliate marketeer is not good enough, to make it big you need to become a super affiliate.

Four Fundamental Steps to Becoming a Super Affiliate

Select a Good Niche

The most important factor for becoming a super affiliate is to choose a good niche. A good niche should not only include lots of interesting products which people would want to buy, but should also pertain to a niche with which you are well acquainted and have a decent ability to predict future development as well as have some knowledge about past invents. The best way to find out if you are an 'expert' in a niche is to try and jot down 15-20 ideas for informative and mutually independent or very loosely related articles.

Select the Perfect Product

After you have decided upon a niche try searching the internet for the perfect product for you to market. While demand is by far the most important factor, another factor you would do well to consider is competition. You can get a good idea of the competition by Googling your product or even from the AdWords Keyword Tool. Don't go for a product where the competition is too high as you will have difficulty getting noticed amongst the crowd.

Another important factor you should consider while choosing the perfect product is pricing and commission rates. Ideally you should be looking for a commission rate of at least 40% on a product which will earn you around $25 per sale.

Set Up an Affiliate Marketing Platform

The next step is to set up a platform (i.e. an online presence) to market your affiliate product. The best and most professional way to do it is by launching a self hosted website with a TLD. However, this requires a small initial investment (around $50-$75 a year). So an effective and free alternative is to create a blog with Blogger or a number of interrelated Squidoo lenses.

If you have a sufficient number of friends/followers, you can also use contextual forums, Twitter and Facebook as your affiliate marketing platform.

Market Your Affiliate Product to Potential Buyers

This is the final and most important step to become a super affiliate. However, it is also the most difficult step and more often than not proves to be the differentiator between an ordinary affiliate marketeer and a super affiliate. The best (and probably the only) way to succeed as an affiliate marketeer is by getting as much search engine traffic and visibility as possible so as to attract a large number of potential buyers to your pitch page.

The best way to do this is by optimizing your pitch page so that search engines can find it easily. This includes two major steps:

Write a lot of fresh and unique for your site every day for a considerable period of time so that Google realizes that you are serious about whatever your niche is and "trust" you more and more.
Get as many dofollow backlinks as possible pointing to your pitch page. The best way to get more contextual backlinks to your page is to write articles for article directories such as E-zine Articles and submit your URLs to social bookmarking sites such as Digg. Another way to get backlinks is by commenting on other people's blogs, provided they offer dofollow links (which is slightly rare for high PR blogs).

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a high inertia game and it may take you a few months before the results start to show, but once it does it won't fluctuate for quite a while.

Another less tedious and more expensive way to market your affiliate product is to run ad campaigns and e-mail campaigns. This method obviously provides more quick and temporary results than SEO.