How To Promote An Affiliate Product – Part I

A lot of people often ask me, “how do you go about promoting an affiliate product?” We have all these affiliate training courses on the market that claim to teach people how to make millions online. But almost all these courses assume things and take shortcuts. That’s why the success rate of these courses hasn’t been as well as what people hoped they’d be. I am not talking about one or two affiliate courses. Almost all affiliate training packages give you a part of the whole picture. If you are a beginner to affiliate marketing, you want to take the proper time to get yourself familiar with all aspects of the game. You certainly don’t want to focus on only one network, one product, or one method to promote your products. It’s nice to be able to build a list or get a good PPC campaign going, but being well versed in various methods to promote affiliate products pays in the long run.

If you are a beginner affiliate marketer, you want to make sure you spend the proper amount of time finding the right market and product. Once there, you want to focus on a multi-channel promotion strategy to maximize your earnings. Here are a few channels you should concentrate on:

• Search Engine Optimization: I know a lot of top affiliates tell you that you should start with PPC first. PPC is definitely a faster way to promote products. But search engine optimization takes a bit of time and the sooner you lay the foundations, the better off you will be in the long run. You simply can’t replace getting free leads from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (Must read: SEOBook).
• SEA: search engine advertising is the fastest way to drive traffic to a website. But you don’t want to focus only on the search network (on Google). You want to focus on banner advertising, the content network, blog networks and more (Resource: CopyNProfit).
• Social Networking: building a large following on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed can give you an additional channel to push your affiliate products. But do yourself a favor and avoid spamming others. You’ve got to work on building relationships.
• Blog Marketing: building a blog and reviewing affiliate products from time to time helps as well. Just make sure you focus on providing content and value to your readers. A blog full of affiliate reviews is not exactly going to be a hit with your readers (Resource: Wordpress). You can also join hands with other bloggers to join partnerships or promote your products on blog networks.
• Article Marketing: article marketing is another cheap way to promote affiliate products. It also helps with your SEO efforts as well. EzineArticles.com is a great place to start (this one too).
• Ezines: advertising on newsletters is another great way to drive targeted traffic to your website. It won’t be too costly and definitely worth a try.
• Email: creating an email list is another way to have a channel to push your products to through. You’ll need good content to get your e-mail list going. You can also use your e-mail signature to promote your products.
• Partnerships: if you have a product of your own, you can always use it to your advantage to promote other products that may be helpful to your customers.
• Offline Marketing: there are plenty of ways to promote a product offline. You can do it with your business cards, brochures, and … It’s definitely worth testing (here is a good course on this topic).

Affiliate marketing may not be rocket science but innovation certainly pays when it comes to finding ways to promote products. As long as you are testing all aspects of your affiliate business, there is no reason you can’t make a living online with affiliate marketing.

Stay tuned for the second part of this series which contains more advanced methods to promote affiliate products online.