5 Success Tips to start making money from affiliate marketing

Affiliate Marketing is one of main sources of income for Professional bloggers.  If Affiliate Marketing is a jargon to you, I would recommend the following sources of knowledge to learn more about it – What is Affiliate Marketing? (by Problogger) and Make Money Online eBook by John Chow.  But unfortunately, many Bloggers fail with Affiliate Marketing.  Why?  What can you do to start making money from Affiliate Marketing?

1.  Choose Products in the Niche of your Blog

This is one of the mistakes that many Bloggers make – not choosing the right products that falls in the niche or the topic of your Blog.  Just because an affiliate program gives you a huge percentage in commission, is not a criteria to promote it through your Blog.  Choose products wisely and see if it is really worth the promotion.

Though not possible in some cases – it works well if you first try out the product before promoting.  This helps you examine the quality and also to find out if it falls in your niche.

2.  Be Passionate about the Products

You never sell anything, if you are not passionate about the product.  Though you have not created the product, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be passionate.  Whenever you promote them through your blog, explain in your own words as to why someone should buy it.  Here, put your passion into words.  If possible – give instances on how the product helped you with something.  I have seen this approach work well many times.

3.  Do some Pre-Selling

Once you are passionate about the product, do some amount of Pre-Selling.  Pre-Selling takes many forms – describe the products in your own words, market them across all your sites, highlight the gains of products, etc.  If possible, work together with the product seller (if it is a small product) and find out his/her favorite ways of pre-selling the product.  Help the seller pre-sell the product through the preferred channels and make sales out of it.

4.  Positioning of Advertising Banners and Text

Positioning of Advertising Banners and Text shows a lot about your passion for the product.  Don’t position them in places that are irrelevant or not clearly visible to the visitor.  This way, you can lose a huge percentage of sales.  Some of the possible positions of Ads are:

• Header of the Page
• Top of the Sidebar
• Top of the Content Area
• After Post Content
• RSS Feeds

Position them wisely and wait for readers to buy them!

5.  Promote the Products

This is one of the most efficient ways of marketing your Affiliate products – but it works only if you have tried out the product and are so passionate about it.

Promote the Products by writing reviews or feedback, through one of the following channels:

• Write a Blog Post reviewing the product
• Promote via Twitter (don’t make it look like a spam!)
• A Page on Blog reviewing and promoting the product

Do you use Affiliate Marketing to make money?  If yes, what are your success tips?  How do you use Affiliate Marketing to make money?  I would love to hear them all – share them as comments to this post.  Your discussions encourage me to write more such useful posts!