Affiliate Marketing – Where to Find the Best Merchants

We all know that affiliate marketing is becoming increasingly popular, and more and more people are jumping into the fray. With all this new competition, the need to seek out the best merchants with the hottest selling products has never been greater. The right mix of products can make your affiliate profits soar, while placing your weight behind a bunch of worthless products will simply be a waste of your valuable time.

From the merchant’s perspective, the most valuable part of affiliate marketing is that no payment is made to the affiliate unless results are seen. Of course from the affiliates point of view this means that finding the right merchant, and the right products to promote, is vital to the survival of their business.

The largest and most successful ecommerce sites, such as Amazon.com, run their own affiliate programs, but other lesser known internet merchants use third party sources. There are a number of these third party resources which allow affiliates and merchants to find each other. Some of the most popular include cj.com, linkshare.com and clixgalore.com.

For the budding affiliate, it is important to understand how affiliated programs work from the merchant’s side of the equation. Merchants who are thinking about implementing an affiliate strategy for their online sales will often first look at the technological innovations which are available to them. Some of these recent technological innovations include special affiliate software, hosted services, third party affiliate networks and shopping cart services with affiliate features built in.

Affiliate programs got somewhat of a black eye during the early days of the internet, when over anxious affiliates used spam email methods to promote their affiliated merchants. These days, however, the most successful affiliates prohibit the use of spam and instead use opt in lists of subscribers to market the products they find.

When looking for a product for which to act as an affiliate, it is best to start with a product you know well. For instance, if you are an avid fisherman, why not start with products you already use. Begin by approaching the online merchants of some of your favorite fishing products.

Taking this approach has several important advantages. First of all, you are an expert in the area where you will be acting as an affiliate. Potential customers react strongly to the availability of expert advice, and your conversion rates are likely to rise if you can provide real world, practical advice to those who are just learning about a subject you already know well.

Secondly, focusing on a product you know well will make learning the affiliate procedure a lot easier. After you have learned how the system works with familiar products, you will better be able to branch off into products you know less about.

Of course, you should not limit your affiliate relationships to products you already know. The best way to seek out products in the all important niche markets is to use an affiliate network like linkshare.com, cj.com or clixgalore.com. These affiliate networks are excellent resources for both the beginning and experienced affiliate marketer.

Article written by Cody Moya.

7) VIRAL MARKETING: word of mouth - or word of mouse - is also a
form of leverage because other people are doing your marketing
for you. Free dating site www.plentyoffish.com, for example, uses
other people to create its content and do much of its marketing.

(In future newsletters I'll describe in more detail some of these
ways of getting leverage.)

8) I've left the most effective form of affiliate leverage to
last...

Create your own affiliate sales force and have hundreds or
thousands of affiliates promoting your product for you.

Anik Singal of Affiliate Classroom says: "There are companies on
the Internet who do over $300 million in revenue a year and over
$100 million of that comes from this ONE marketing technique."

MarketingSherpa estimates that affiliate marketers will make over
$6.5 billion in commissions in 2006.

When you have your own affiliate program, you're the one who is
operating the lever and getting the leverage.

Here's the best place to find out how to do it...

 6) TRAFFIC: You don't have time to create all the traffic you
need, so it makes sense to tap into other people's traffic. Look
for ways to get your site mentioned on other people's sites in
your niche, and in popular newsletters.

Ways to tap into other people's traffic include writing articles
for other sites, submitting tips to sites and newsletters, making
posts on forums, and perhaps buying links.

Some serious affiliates do research carefully and write really
good, exclusive articles, a different one for each target site.
They make sure the topic they choose hasn't been covered already.
This takes time and effort but the benefits can last for years.

Does this sound like too much work? You can outsource this task.

4) KNOWLEDGE: On the fast-changing Internet, it's impossible to
do all the necessary testing and experimenting yourself, so we
harness other other people's knowledge by buying information. A
modestly priced ebook which teaches you how to earn thousands of
dollars is a classic example.

Another way to harness other people's knowledge is to interview
experts and publish the interviews on your site - or sell them.

5) TOOLS: Just as farmers progressed to using tractors and
combine harvesters, super affiliates have progressed to using
sophisticated tools to speed up the creation of websites and
blogs.

As the Internet becomes more clogged with junk, for long-term
success, the "trick" is to use labor-saving tools intelligently,
to create sites which are genuinely useful, add value to the
Internet, and will still be here years from now.

3) LABOUR: You can use other people's labour by outsourcing tasks.
Some affiliates are prepared to spend several days - or even
weeks - struggling to learn how to do a little bit of programming
when they could have gone to Rentacoder or Scriptlance and hired
a programmer to do the job for $20. Outsourcing tasks allows you
to concentrate on doing the things you enjoy and the things you
do best.

Outsourcing also gets things done faster, allowing you to reach
your goals faster.

Buying private label rights (PLR) articles is another form of
applying leverage. It would be impossible to write all the
articles yourself that you can get by joining a few PLR
membership sites. You can also outsource the rewriting of those
articles.

Encouraging user-generated content is another way of applying
leverage. Your website visitors can create content in various
ways, such as forums, tips, recipes, vacation ideas, photos,
videos, reviews and classified ads.

Publishing RSS feeds is another way of harnessing other people's
labor.