Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online and we have people making thousands of dollars (and even millions) from their affiliate marketing efforts. We all love to get great results from little efforts and that is exactly what affiliate marketing brings about – No need to answer support queries, no need to brainstorm product ideas etc.

Successful affiliate marketers have a recipe, and this is what most newbie don’t know. You don’t just setup an affiliate website and expect the income to be flowing; there are steps you have to take to get the best from your affiliate marketing efforts. This post will be explaining a 4-step-recipe used by many successful affiliate marketers to make money online.

1. Market Research

One thing I have learned from many successful affiliate marketers is that they don’t just jump into a niche and begin to try to make money online promoting affiliate products but they always research effectively before committing their resources into a niche.

It is a very dangerous mistake to get started in a niche you know nothing about, you have to research effectively and have enough details about the niche you are about to enter. When trying to start affiliate marketing in a particular niche, you have to have basic knowledge of the niche, such as the type of audience, the buyer intent, the competition and which type of product works best in that niche. You wouldn’t want to be promoting ebooks in a niche where they love to buy books in hardcover.

2. The Right Product

After you know the type of market and what works best, you wouldn’t just want to start promoting any product you see, this isn’t going to work! Another crucial step to making money online from affiliate marketing is promoting the right product. I have discovered that promoting products from big brands tend to convert better because the big companies will have done a lot of the marketing work, and your prospect would have come across the product on several occasions, he/she will be more likely to buy it than other products he/she is coming across for the first time.

Another thing you should note is that if a product has been over-promoted, you might not get the best from your promotion efforts because most of the buyers would have gone after the recommendations of a guru in the niche, thereby leaving you with less opportunity to make sales.

3. Focus on Trust

Another core factor that determines how you make it with affiliate marketing is trust. It is very important to focus on building trust with your prospects first. It is very important to know that it is easier to destroy your trust than it is to build it. If you worked hard on building trust with your readers, you can destroy that trust by promoting the wrong product.

There are several ways to build trust with your readers (or to-be customers) and one of the best ways to build trust is by making sure you give value. If you are promoting your affiliate products via your blog, it is very important to focus on writing high-quality, valuable content first because this will help you win the trust of your readers, thereby making them buyers.

4. Get Traffic

One thing I have noticed from most people who believe affiliate marketing is difficult is that most of them have little to no traffic. Affiliate marketing success doesn’t stop in you researching the market or having the right product, you also have to focus on getting traffic to your affiliate links. When it comes to getting traffic, there are different types of traffic but getting high-quality traffic from the right place works best. One major source of traffic you should focus on as an affiliate marketer is search engine traffic because you only need to work once, and once you could secure your spot in the search engines you will begin to get traffic on autopilot.

Another great advantage of search engine traffic is that it converts better than any other traffic source because search engine visitors are more targeted – they came in a search for something.

While search engine traffic is not the only way to get traffic, there are several other ways to get high-quality traffic to your blog and I will be listing 5 of them below:

i. Guest Blogging
ii. Forum Posting
iii. Blog Commenting
iv. Video Marketing
v. Article Marketing

Conclusion

The above are 4 great steps (I call it the affiliate marketing recipe) to affiliate marketing success, implement the above tips and you will begin to get more results from your affiliate marketing efforts.

This guest post was written by Onibalusi Bamidele, a young entrepreneur living the internet lifestyle, subscribe to his blog for more great posts. Also, get his free traffic report called the ultimate traffic formula.

I’ve been trying to clean up the blog here and there, and decided to go with the Intense Debate plugin for my blog comments. The previous comments were a mess. The layout was great, but it wasn’t threading comments and what’s the point of commenting if you can’t reply directly to other comments in a mannerly order. The overall setup with Intense Debate looks great and it’s really easy for anyone to log into their favorite platform to leave a comment, whether that be wordpress, twitter, facebook or even as a guest. You can see the comment form below and all of the different login options.

Outside of the great looking form and login capabilities, there actually a lot more you can do once you setup a free account with IntenseDebate to manage your comments. In the past I would have to look around for plugins or widgets to post the top blog commenters, top blog posts, as well as social network sharing. IntenseDebate has added all of these features and plugins to their backend. You simply just click which plugins you want, then they are enabled.

I’m still playing around with the admin options and moderation settings. You can moderate all comments, or have them automatically approved once a user has posted a specific amount of times and earned your trust. In the end, I think the move to Intense Debate was a good choice and I look forward to getting a better handle on how to better customize the comments on this site.

Leave a comment using Intense Debate and let me know what you think.

It doesn’t matter if you are promoting your own product, an affiliate offer or event a contest… the bottom line is, you need a killer landing page! You can send the best and most targeted traffic in the world to your site, but if it’s not designed properly, how much business are you losing? That is why you MUST split test your landing pages.

I’m currently using a service called Conversion Doubler for split testing tracking on my Six Figure Affiliate Blogging opt in pages. I’m going to start setting up a few ad campaigns on the major search engines and through social networking, so it’s important to have a good idea what’s working and what’s not. Here are the three landing pages I will be split testing with.

(Landing Page 1)                                     (Landing Page 2)                                    (Landing Page 3)

I haven’t done any split testing yet on these landing pages, so I’m anxious to see how they compare. I have a good idea which will convert best, but I will also let you decide. Leave a comment on which landing page you think will convert best and I will follow up with actual split test results.

How to Setup Your Own Split Testing

In this series of split testing, I’m going to be using Conversion Doubler, which is an amazing took for split testing A/B Multivariate solutions. Since my Six Figure Affiliate Blogging landing pages are more image based than text, I’m truly not putting the full power of Conversion Doubler to use, so I will show you want I mean.

Instead of dealing with the hassle of running an ad campaign, sending traffic to your landing page, then repeating the process after changing an area to see if it helps your conversions, Conversion Doubler let’s you start your campaigns while testing different text and changes in the beginning. In short, let’s pretend I want to split test ZacJohnson.com’s blog and how I can increase conversions to the newsletter subscribe on the right side of the page. When I log in to Conversion Double, I would setup a new experiment and after listing my site, it will show the actual landing page and you can hover and click on any area you would like to split test. You can see in the preview below how the ad copy in the newsletter section is highlighted with a blue dotted line, you can hover and select any area of your site to split test within the Conversion Doubler admin.

This probably sounds complicating to some of you, and that’s understandable… it’s much easier to learn from a visual standpoint. Fortunately Conversion Doubler took the time to create a short video on the step by step process for split testing your landing pages.

This is a really amazing split testing service Conversion Doubler has to offer, and definitely one of the best I’ve seen. They actually make it so easy to split test, that I will write up a few landing page split testing case studies over the next couple of weeks. I will also be following up next week with the results of the Six Figure Affiliate Blogging landing page split test. Be sure to leave your guess at which landing page will convert best.

Setup a free account at Conversion Doubler and see how you can double your conversions.

How many times have you asked a search engine like Yahoo or Google a question, then you find yourself at a site like Answers.Yahoo.com where someone is asking that same exact question? It happens quite often, and it’s actually been extremely profitable for companies like Yahoo to run these types of sites. Not only are they actual content generating sites from their users, but they also provide a huge value to anyone searching for a topic, then ends up on their site.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a type of Yahoo Answers site of your own? Now you can with a new wordpress plugin called WP Answers. I first received an email from Oliver, the creator of WP Answers last month. Oliver wanted to show me his new wordpress plugin, how it worked and the amount of traffic and revenue this plugin can actually generate. I loved the idea of the plugin and how powerful it could be in tiny niche markets, or even used to build out a large questions and answers type of site.

You can see a live working version of the theme at the WP Answers Demo. While at first the theme may look very clean and basic, the plugin does allow for a lot of customization and features, includes 6 premium themes, which are loaded with widgets that allow you to play around with logo, header and ad spot customization.

The real meat and power of running a questions/answers site with WP Answers, is it’s ability to grow over time, increase user activity and index very well in the search engines. Build up your own database of users and site loyalty by having visitors register and ask questions. The person who created the question can then award points to the person with the best answer.

GROWING YOUR SITE ON AUTO-PILOT

If you don’t have the time to build up your own site and rely on site visitors for Q&A submissions, you can also pull questions straight from Yahoo Answers using their API. All questions and answers are posted on your site, so it can look like you have a full content and busy site. There is no limit to the amount of search terms you can target, and when posting through Yahoo Answers, your content can be updated hourly, daily or whenever you like.

MONETIZATION AND TRAFFIC

Whether you are going to focus on generating your own traffic and Q&A submissions, you are eventually going to want to make a profit with your site. Outside of selling your 125×125 ad spots on the site, you can also place Google Adsense strategically through out the site. Since your site content is all about detailed questions and topic, all of your ads should be relevant to your visiting traffic.

Building a site around questions and answers is also great for search engine traffic. Every day millions of people are flocking to search engines to answer their every day questions about pretty much anything. How many of these questions could be syncing up with your own Q&A site? The bottom line is, WP Answers will drastically help send traffic to your site. You can see a stats chart from one of Dale’s site’s which is doing extremely well using WP Answers, and his growth from search engine traffic.

Another method for generating revenue, is through the WP Answers affiliate program, where you earn 35% of all sales, which can be up to $87 per sale.

20% DISCOUNT COUPON CODE

WP Answers is a quality product and I look forward to playing around with it more on a few sites of mine. Oliver was also kind enough to offer ZacJohnson.com readers an exclusive coupon to save 20% off your purchase. The current price for WP Answers ranges from $80 to $249 depending on your license purchase, so a 20% discount will definitely help. Use coupon code “ZACJOHNSON567” at the time of check out.

WP Answers

The last time you were at a conference, how much did you pay to attend and how many people did you end up “really” doing business with? When I say “really”, I don’t mean passing them in the hallway and saying hi or quickly grabbing a business card off a booth. I’m talking about really getting to talk to someone and establish a meaningful conversion, then actually following up with them and doing business after the conference. In most cases, this doesn’t happen too often. Usually you will meet a lot of people, but most of those relationships won’t last longer than that individual conversation or even after the conference.

Not to put a value on different attendees at these events, but it’s true that it’s much harder to get time to speak with well respected keynote speakers and well known marketers. At the same time, these individuals come at a higher value (time or cost), simply because they can change your business with their promotion, or have the contacts to do so. With all of that said, it’s often the after parties at conferences where all of the networking happens. So and so will introduce you to whomever, and it goes from there.

So what’s the best solution? My good friend DK came up with the solution. Bring together some of the biggest names in the industry, while providing a fun and social experience. A very small conference event (only 50 attendees, a fraction the size of a conference!), where top names in the industry come together and simply network and have fun over the course of three days. I was at the first ThinkTank in Del Mar, California two years ago, and will be there in a few weeks for this year’s event. DK sets up these crazy surprises like MMA training, surfing, trips to Facebook, huge BBQs on the beach, and much more… you really never know what DK has in store until you get there.

Other names who will be attending ThinkTank this year include…

No lie… It’s a cool event and no where else will you truly be able to mingle and have a good time with some of the top names in the industry at the same time. It’s a laid back event, and everyone is there to make new friends, increase business and just have a good time.

* WARNING * – There are only a handful of seats available. It costs $3,000 to attend, and this is not just a price issue. You must also pre-qualify with DK before attending. Only quality and pre-screened attendees are allowed. (more info here)

DK talks about the importance of networking and why traditional conferences are a bad investment in his new video series. Check them out and hopefully I’ll see you at ThinkTank later in the month.

- ThinkTank in Del Mar, California