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One of the most important things to learn when getting started in Affiliate Marketing concerns traffic- particularly what it is and how to get it.

Why?

Because if you want to be successful then the truth is “the money is in the list”; not the list of the people whose product you are selling, but YOUR list!

Here’s why. As an affiliate, your job is to find people who want to buy the products you’re promoting, right? So to do that, you need to write an ad (or hire a copywriter to write it for you), and send people to a Website where they can buy the product.

BUT – there’s a serious problem with using this method. Do you see what it is?

Anywhere from 60 to 95% of the people you send to the sales page probably aren’t going to buy the first time.

1. Most people want to be certain that they’re making the right decision, so they usually need to see or hear from you between 5 to 12 times before making a buying decision.

2. If you’re paying for the ad and sending people to the seller’s Website, the ones who don’t buy disappear forever. (And neither you nor the seller will benefit.)

3. Of those who do buy, if you’re only sending them to the sales page, YOU still lose them forever because you have no way of knowing who they are.

Here’s the solution:

1. Write your ad and send prospects to a well-written squeeze page – YOUR squeeze page. (A squeeze page is a single page Website that has one purpose – to convince prospects to give you their contact information. Squeeze pages should be simple – no flash, no links, and if you use a graphic or photo, keep it simple and make sure it relates to the purpose of the page. How do you convince prospects to give you their contact information? By giving them information that is what they’re expecting to find and that’s useful to them.)

2. Offer them an incentive to give you their contact information. (This could be a free report, a free newsletter, an audio or video product – just make sure it’s related to the niche or affiliate product.)

3. After they’ve opted in to your autoresponder, send them to your affiliate sales page.

4. Follow up with them on a regular basis – mixing good information, free bonuses from time to time and additional affiliate products.

Lather, rinse, repeat. (Once you’re making money from your first affiliate product, move on to the next and then the next and the next.)

The best thing about this is that you can set most of it up on your autoresponder, so you turn it into a “system” and it runs “almost” on autopilot. (There is NO SUCH THING as a business that runs 100% on autopilot – and don’t believe anyone who tells you differently.) Any business – real business – takes work and effort. But by setting this system up this way, your autoresponder does the majority of the work, and you will only need to do simple updates and make sure you keep fresh information flowing.

With most affiliate programs you will receive textual ads and banners for online advertising placements. There are several free ways you can use these ads and banners.

One of the most popular ways are Traffic Exchanges. You register with various traffic exchange programs, upload your text ad or banner, and your banner will appear on various registered web pages throughout the world. The number of times you banner or text ad will show will depend on how many points or clicks you accumulate through “surfing” the traffic exchange. The more points or clicks you have the more your ad will be shown to others. This is a very effective method of advertising. It can be time consuming but doesn’t have to be…you just need to organize yourself to do 5-10 different exchanges each day.

Once you sign up for a traffic exchange bookmark the signup page in a folder with all exchanges. Then using Firefox as your browser, right click the folder, where it says “open all in tabs” click on that and all your exchanges will open. Sign in and start to surf.

Traffic exchanges are relatively easy to use and FREE!

The other two types of advertisement placements are online classifieds and paid placements.

Online classifieds is one of the easiest ways to get your product in front of customers on high traffic websites; and it can be done for FREE. Type in your search “online classified” or a similar phrase and look to see what the rules are for placing your advertisement or banner. Several major website will allow you to place classified ads for free. While others, like Yahoo, will charge a fee for placement. These can be very effective depending on the volume of ads being submitted at any given time. If it is a high traffic site, your ad will only appear for a matter of hours before it is pushed down by new advertising submissions. Daily attention and resubmission is necessary to an effective ad campaign on free sites.

Paid placement of advertisements is a very broad category and covers many different scenarios. You can do a PPC campaign (pay per click); where you only pay the site for clicks to your sales page. This can range anywhere from 0.05 to 5.00 a click, depending on what you are willing and can afford to pay. It is best before you start to read as much as you can about PPC campaigns because if you aren’t careful you can spend a lot of money very fast with little or no results. You must keep very close track of expenditure and income for this to work.

There are also the paid advertisement placement sites that will charge you a set fee to place your ad on their site for a designated period of time.

You can also use affiliate-networking sites to sell your products, but each site has different criteria so you would have to contact them directly to see what they offer in terms of tracking and costs. These too can become expensive unless you are an experienced marketer with a unique product to sell.

Ezine or E-magazines are another great source of free and paid advertising. Ezines can range from sites that will accept articles with your bio and link to your site for free. The advertising part comes in the form of that bio. Some sites will not allow you to put an affiliate link in the bio, that is another reason why in a previous article I suggested a “doorway page”.

There are also Ezines that have an opt-in option for you to receive emails from other clients. In exchange for you putting your article or advertisement on their site you will agree to receive emails from various members. This is not considered “spam” as you have to agree to receive this email before you can place your ad (word of advice, use a separate email account). This is all free advertising.

This is just a brief overview of the methods with which you can place your advertisements online. In all of these examples it is best to build your own content rich website. This will be the most effective for advertising.

Finding locations to place free ads is a continuing process.  The Internet does not stand still.  Sites that may work for you one day will be ineffective the next.  New sites crop up continuously.  The more practice you have looking for these sites, the more efficient you will become with the process.

The mistake a lot of newcomers make when starting free advertising is that they get a list from their upline and only use that list.   Here is an analogy that I use quite often.  I am a avid fisherman, I fish winter, summer, spring, fall.  When I go on the lake in the early morning and see a bunch of boats in one location all with their rods over the side, should I go to that same spot or find a new spot that is not being over fished?  If I go to the popular spot the fish look at my bait and swim on by; but if I pick a new spot away from the crowd the chance of that same fish taking my bait increases.  Can you see the point of this analogy and free advertising?

It is all right to check the spots out that your upline gives you, but you need to find your own.

So how do you do this?  It is really a matter of going to the search engines and typing in phrases like “free advertising sites, free classifieds, free ad sites” or any relevant words.  Once you pull up a list write down (or copy and paste to notepad) all the sites on the first three pages.  This is the list of where NOT to place your free ads on at first!  Eventually you will place ads here but not at first.

Why do you do this?  Two reasons.  First, it will save you time in your search process.  If you see you have found one of these recommended sites on your list, move on.  You are not there to search for the small fish, but the big fish!  Second, writing down these sites will save you countless hours of putting your ads on sites that are crowded with other ads for the same service and it might even save you from giving up on affiliate marketing.  I have known too many would be marketers who come into this business place their ads all over the Internet on just such sites only to sit back and see no results and become so discouraged they give up.  It doesn’t have to happen to you!  I want you to put your first ads on effective sites, so you will know that affiliate marketing does work.   It will take you some time to find these “hidden treasures”, but once found you will spend less time putting ads on the Internet and more time making money.

The task of coming up with search terms to use to find these “hidden treasures” is simply this:  Put yourself in their shoes (the customer).  What terms did you use when you were looking for a work at home opportunity.  Write them down.  Then go to every search engine you can think of and search for free ad sites using those terms.  For instance, “work at home opportunities” place that phrase into Yahoo, Google, 7Search, Miva, and you will come up with some new advertising sites that are not listed on all search engines.  Use terms that describe your particular skills.  Maybe you have worked in an office before use the terms that best described your duties.

Now look at that free advertising list that your first made, you know the list of free ad sites everyone else uses, and see what ones are not on there.  Those are your personal “hidden treasures”.

Remember the Internet is in constant flux; it changes hourly.  New sites pop up every single day.  So repeat the process  to build your own list of free ad sites.

Nancy Kraska Owner of Home Work For You, Better Business Resources. Avid reader. A food-alcoholic. Sometimes Crafter.

Free Advertising and Web Site Submission

No matter if you are using free advertising or paid advertising all online advertising is composed of four basic elements.

1. You need an ad
2. You need a website address (URL) to point the ad to or an email address
3. You will need to prepare for the posting process
4. You will need a location to place the ad

Most affiliate programs have pre-written ads for you to place at various ad sites. You will need to read the guidelines for each program to make sure you follow them. Use the URL given to point the buyer to the appropriate website. If you have a website of your own, some affiliates will point their ads to that URL.

For most people writing these ads is the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Even though most programs have their ads set up, there are still some that don’t. Take a moment to thoroughly check out the website you want to promote, then take a few key points and you will have your ad. Write them down in notepad, and play around with the wording until you like the ad. Then try it out. Just remember it is not rocket science, if you have ever written an email to a friend you can write an ad. It really is that simple!

Whether you ad is designed to point to a URL or an email address, all free or paid ad locations require that you submit an email address to the ad site in order to post an ad. That is why it is highly recommended that you have a secondary email address for just this purpose. When you post a FREE ad on any of these sites your email address will get harvested for all sorts of emails, including spam. At no time use your primary email address when submitting to any free ad site, always use your secondary.

In addition many sites require that you submit an address and a phone number to post an ad, most times you will get away with just putting N/A in the required fields. There are some issues involved with this type of service that you will have to resolve for yourself, but remember that what ever information is given to this advertising site, is in reality giving the hosting company of that site a lead for their business offers. Some people do not give real phone numbers or addresses to avoid just this type of junk mail, but it is not recommended.

Once you have started to place your ads on these free sites you will need some type of tracking system. This is a very important step. You need to know which ads are producing and which are not. This is a very simple piece of code that you can put at the end of each url and it should tell you where the ads are coming from. For example: http://NKraska.MyWorldMoms.com/?SOURCE=blog; if you were to click on this ad it would take you to my sales page, but it will tell me in my account stats that I had a click from this post. It is that tiny bit of code at the end: (/?SOURCE=blog) that tells me where the customer clicked on my ad. Different affiliate programs have different code to track, so always check with the program. This particular code will not always work with individual affiliate programs.

All of your affiliate programs will have a stats page to show you where your clicks are coming from. It is a good idea to make a spreadsheet of some sort on your desktop with all the ad sites, and login information as you sign up. Then as you get further into free advertising you can set up your own system to keep track of your click throughs.

Nancy Kraska Owner of Home Work For You, . Avid reader. A food-alcoholic. Sometimes Crafter.

Stay tuned to Part #3—The Quest for FREE Ad Sites!