Affiliate Marketing – It’s A Battlefield – How do You Win?

Affiliate Marketing is much like a war in so much that you are competing with rival affiliates on a battlefield to win battles. The battlefield relates to your chosen niche and the battles are sales won or lost. To enter onto a battlefield with no knowledge of the battlefield itself or your enemy will see you being slaughtered. The same is true for affiliate marketing, competition will be high and those winning sales are affiliate marketers who have knowledge of their chosen niche and have in place strategies to win sales 24/7, those that don’t win see their business lose out and can effectively fail.

So as an Affiliate you should be knowledgeable about your niche, what’s in demand, who demands it and why? Who is your competition and what are they doing to make a sale, how are they conducting their business and what marketing tools do they employ to make a sale.

In short you need to put you and your business in a position of authority, you need to be better than the rest..

Every niche market on the Internet is highly competitive. If it isn’t competitive then there can’t possibly be much of a customer base to sell to. That is just the nature of all Internet marketing and in every niche.

Maybe you do have a long and impressive list of paid customers. That’s great! It means you have already won several of the affiliate marketing battles and come out on top. The problem is there are always those up and coming marketers who want your customers on their lists.

Your list and your competitor’s lists may well contain many of the same names and email addresses. Just having a list will not be enough to assure you of a victory when selling an affiliate product. You have to design some strategies that will assure that your customers buy from you and not from your competitors.

So, you ask, what is it that I can do that will assure that my customers will buy from me? The answer is just one word… unique!

You have to be unique. You have to offer something that sets you completely apart from your competitors. You have to make your offer for a product or service for which you are an affiliate more attractive to buy from you than it is to buy from your competitors.

If you simply send out a marketing email advertising a product or service that you are an affiliate marketer for, you need to remember that there are dozens or maybe even hundreds of other marketers who are sending out marketing email advertising the exact same product or service and many of them are sending them to the same people that you are. You have to do something to make sure that your customers buy from you…you have to be unique.

There are several ways to achieve uniqueness. One way is to have established yourself as an expert in the field for which the product or service is being sold. You have to have become not only visible but credible, as well. This visibility and credibility is not easily achieved. It takes a lot of hard work, time and effort.

Visibility and credibility are established by taking such measures as writing and marketing articles and E-Books, posting to blogs and forums, appearing as an expert on teleseminars and webinars, etc. The fact is that when people know you and trust you, they buy from you. They will buy from you even is your competitors are offering a better deal or more incentives.

People do not like to buy from strangers. The Internet is a big impersonal and even frightening place to many consumers. They want to feel like they know and trust the people that they buy products and services from. The time, effort and energy that you put into becoming visible and credible is the best time, effort and energy investment that you will ever make. Reputation is everything in the world of Internet marketing. Credibility makes you unique.

Another very important thing that you can do to insure that your customers buy a product or service for which you are an affiliate marketer from you and not from one of your competitors is to give them a very good and compelling reason to make the purchase from you. Offer something extra or a lot of different extras that will enhance the value of the product that you are marketing.

No matter what the niche or what the product is that is being marketed, there are free gifts that you can find that will make the product a better value if it is purchased from you.

For example: if you are marketing an E-Book about Internet marketing, you could add several additional free E-Books concerning different aspects of the broad subject of Internet marketing.

E-Books can be downloaded from PLR sites or even from E-Book banks and repositories. Another free gift that people can’t ever seem to get enough of is free utilities. There are many on the Internet and you can bet that there are some that will fit right in with whatever product or service that you are promoting.

While other marketers who are selling the very same product that you are, simply send out marketing emails that recommend the product to their lists, you will be adding value to the product and doing it for free to boot.

Add extras! Add free gifts! Even better than extras and free gifts is additional help to use the product or service that is being sold. You can offer a free teleseminar for those who buy the product or service from you that will make the product or service better or easier to use.

You can most likely even get the producer or the product or service to speak at your event if you plan far enough ahead. People just love teleseminars… and they love free…when you add teleseminar and free together, you will have a winning battle that might just win the proverbial war for you.

Recommended Resources

Your list can be a money making machine if you have time and great content for it, so if you are struggling for time or have writers block don’t get stuck in the doldrums, don’t sit on your hands, your time is way to valuable. Have a search on google for PLR or better still visit my favourite – Nicole Deans Easy PLR where you will find an amazing array of good quality content at very affordable prices.

To build a list you will need an Auto Responder that offers fantastic resources, tools, support and a reliable service - To compete with the best you need the best and for me that has to be Aweber

If you are new to Affiliate Marketing then you need the Chris Farrell Membershiphis teachings are second to none, very easy to listen to and understand, Chris really gets it and so will you by the time he’s done teaching you via his excellent video tutorials, they are the best teaching videos I have yet come across. More than that his down to earth methods will keep you ahead in the affiliate wars. If anyone knows any better please do post them.

Search engine optimization and keywords seem to be on everyones minds these days so I took the time to investigate a new program called Mass Money Makers – very good, I did have problems listening to the videos as the guy narrating really pissed me off, he was just so slow and I was so excited I found my self screaming at him to get on with it, so frustrating….. I’m sure he’s a nice enough guy though – maybe it was all part of the marketing plan who knows, it didn’t put me off. Anyway they are offering a superb keyword tool called Super Affiliate Technology (SAT) that shows you where the money is by highlighting excellent keywords to rocket your business up the search engine rankings, it’s very cool and extremely easy to use, a must have tool in your affiliate armoury. Find out More

Another good tool I recently discovered was Automatic Backlink Creator- I happened across it at the Warrior Forums and thought I’ll have a go at that, doesn’t cost to much either which is always a bonus. It’s a WordPress Plugin that you can use to create backlinks to your site and allows you to write articles to farm out to lots of other sites which have your link in …. kind of viral. The down side is you also need to accept articles, well I say downside but in actual fact it’s working quite well for me as the content coming in is okay. I just setup a Guest Blogger category and the articles get posted there. Find Out More

If you are looking to promote products via an online store then I can’t recommend Mark Fail’s ShopperPressWordPress theme enough. The ShopperPress theme is fantastic and comes with quite a few different designs and plugins to help you create a store in less than a day and be earning an income in no time at all. The support in the forums is fantastic too so you’ll have no problems if you get a little stuck. The ShopperPress themes are heavily discounted at the moment so don’t miss out. Find Out More

Well that’s enough from me today, I do hope you enjoyed and please do leave a comment and of course visit often.
Here’s to your success!
Kind Regards
Cash Seeker