There are ten basics that will put your affiliate marketing



in the top 20 percent of affiliate earnings. Ten suggestions

that will transform your affiliate income from a trickling

creek that barely covers your hosting fees, to a roaring river

of extra disposable income.

TOP AFFILIATE MARKETERS DO MOST OF THESE TEN ITEMS

1.Top affiliate marketers cloak web site links

Cloaking affiliate links should not be necessary, but is. Oddly

many site visitors refuse to visit your links if they see an

affiliate code appended to the URL when they hover their mouse

over a link on your web page. Sometimes they will type the

affiliate domain directly to the browser address bar while

removing your affiliate ID from the URL. To short circuit this

odd behavior, simply cloak the URL. How

2. Top affiliate marketers write & distribute articles

writing articles about your market niche is essential to gain

reputation as an expert in your field. But the biggest benefit

comes not just from writing those articles, but from having

those articles published by other web site owners and ezine

publishers. Your article gains you both reputation and links

from other web sites from the resource box appended to the

end of each article. Here are major article distribution sites.

http://yahoogroups.com/group/free-content/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/

http://www.goarticles.com

http://www.ideamarketers.com

3.Top affiliate marketers focus on a market niche

filling a web site with content reflecting a narrowly focused

product or service niche is a well known method of gaining web

traffic in your area of specialty. An excellent resource that

can help you determine relevant and focused areas to fill your

site with is called NicheBot. They offer innovative tools to

research and pinpoint market niches for your web site based on

the WordTracker Database and Google.

http://www.nichebot.com

4.Top affiliate marketers use autoresponder series

Autoresponders are incredibly valuable tools that allow you to

send a timed series of email messages to those that sign up for

them. Most often those autoresponders are sent through a third

party provider. Some of the top providers are Sendfree.com and

aweber.com, for a tutorial covering autoresponder basics, visit:

http://website101.com/email_e-mail/email_autoresponder_basics.html

5.Top affiliate marketers create web pages to pre-sell

Creating either testimonial pages or review pages that discuss

and pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with is

the best method of getting increased orders for your chosen

affiliate programs. Many programs actually provide either an

article or recommended text to sell their products for you and

allow reproduction of those articles with your links embedded.

6.Top affiliate marketers gather email addresses

The best affiliates collect email addresses on their web site

by offering free reports via the above mentioned autoresponders

or by giving away eBooks or through newsletter signup forms.

The best use all of these methods or more to build their list

of email addresses. This also allows you to contact potential

customers that would otherwise never see your site again after

clicking away to the affiliate program web site.

7. Top affiliate marketers advertise SOMEWHERE

Depending on your market niches you should advertise using PPC

and/or ezine advertising. Some categories of Pay-per-click can

be prohibitively expensive, but advertising somewhere is all

but mandatory to gain substantial additional traffic to your

site. There are some great bargains in ezine advertising and

some less popular PPC engines other than Yahoo's Overture and

Google's Adwords. Try 7search, Kanoodle and FindWhat for lower

Bids than the big boys of PPC.

8. Top affiliate marketers optimize for search engines

Search engine optimization is becoming more complex as more

and more webmasters participate, but the basics applied to

your site can increase visibility dramatically over time. The

most critical of the many SEO techniques is to use title tags

that reflect individual PAGE content. Many webmasters write a

master title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worst

thing you could do for search engine ranking.

9. Top affiliate marketers give away eBooks or freebies

Everyone knows by now that giving something away is a great

traffic generator and allows you to gather email addresses

to allow contact of potential customers at a later date. This

strategy is employed by EVERY successful web-based company at

one time or another. Think of all the free things YOU have

collected online over time. Screensavers, software, eBooks,

discount codes, toolbars, white papers. They work!

10. Top Affiliate marketers have their own mailing lists

The best of affiliate marketers have their own newsletter or

ezine and gather email addresses on their site to build their

list of subscribers. Having this list allows regular contact

with potential customers interested in your site, your product

and your market niche. If you don't write your own material or

think you can't produce weekly content, there are hundreds of

authors out there that will gladly product articles for you.

The article distribution lists provide free content and ghost

Writers provide high quality content for a fee.

If you implement ALL the above techniques, you are guaranteed

to become one of the top affiliate marketers on the web. Then

you can create your own product telling everyone how YOU did

it, create your own affiliate program and have hundreds of us

selling for you.