As an affiliate marketer, how you promote your niche affiliate marketing business on the Internet is entirely up to you. You could either direct your prospects to your niche affiliate sales page, or you could direct them to a pre-sell page or a squeeze page before sending them to your main sales page.

While the first option is undoubtedly easier it is certainly not what affiliate marketing experts would recommend! Of course, if you get enough targeted traffic to your sales page you are probably going to get some sales. However, do not expect your affiliate marketing business to pull in a profit because by directing your visitors to your sales page without pre-selling them on your product you are missing the best chance you have of converting them into customers.

A more effective way to turn prospects into customers is to write reviews of your products and post them on your website. Each page will review one product.

That allows you to set out the benefits of the product more clearly and will help you to establish your credibility with your prospects. You should not try to sell the product because this is the "pre sell" warm up stage. Your aim is to get your visitor to move on to the sales page already warmed up to the product.

Obviously you will need to know what you are talking about, so ideally you will have bought and tested the product before writing the product review. Knowing the product inside out will provide you with an opportunity to talk to your target audience about the product from their own perspective as potential customers; by identifying with your target market you will create a feeling of empathy and trust between yourself and your visitors.

Once you are comfortable with this two-step approach you can take it a step further by using an auto responder to boost your sales. An auto responder will provide you with an automatic way of sending email follow-ups and are an excellent resource to add to your affiliate marketing arsenal.

So how do you get people onto your list so that the auto responder can send them your follow up mailings? The most common way of doing that is to set up a squeeze page complete with a sign up form. A squeeze page aims to do one thing only, which is to arouse the interest of your visitors enough to cause them to want them to give you their contact information.

To arouse interest you will have to provide some kind of incentive like a free information product that can be downloaded from a link that will be provided after the prospect has signed up to your mailing list.

After a visitor signs up his or her name and email address will be added to the auto responder, which will then begin mailing out the follow-up mailings that you will have written and loaded into the system. Keep your newsletters newsy and informative. Again, go easy on the sales pitch even when you include your affiliate link.

The links you place in your newsletter will probably get a better response if they direct the prospect to your product review page rather than to the sales page.

According to this model the process will be:

1. squeeze page,

2. mailing list sign up,

3. newsletter,

4. product review page,

5. sales page,

6. sale!

Each step along this path is an opportunity to strengthen trust and deepen the relationship between yourself and your subscribers. You can do this by constantly providing useful information and good advice. Do not expect everyone to complete all the steps, but treat those who do with special consideration and you will be able to build a new "high priority" list of regular customers.

So to conclude, creating your own webpage reviews and using an auto responder with a squeeze page is a much better way to run a niche affiliate marketing business on the Internet.