It is possible to make a great income from blogs and affiliate marketing separately, but also to combine them to do even better. There is no reason why affiliate products cannot be promoted on your blogs to provide you with a good income. First, let's consider affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is where you make money by promoting other people's products. The reason that most newcomers to affiliate marketing fail - 98 percent fail in their first six months - is that they don't know how to promote a product. The whole ethos of affiliate marketing is about promotion, and not about selling. There is a world of difference between the two, and there are some great salespersons that couldn't promote a product if their life depended on it.
So, what is needed to make a success of affiliate marketing? It shouldn't be difficult: you have a ready-made product with a professional sales page written for you. You don't have to deal with the order taking or the collection of payment and subsequent delivery. You don't even have to worry about dealing with questions or complaints. So what's the problem?
The problem is three-fold. Those that fail do not know:
1. That they need a website to be truly successful
2. That they have to choose the right keywords to get visitors to their website, and
3. That they are not selling the product: they are pre-selling it.
Let's discuss these three failings in detail, and make sure that you don't make the same mistakes.
1. The Website
It is claimed by many that you don't need a website in affiliate marketing. However, if you advertise using Google Adwords, the only program liable to get you sufficient clicks to make a living, you can't send visitors to the merchant's sales page since only one advert per keyword is allowed by Adsense to send visitors to the same web address. You need a website!
However, and this is where the blog comes in, you could use your blog to advertise your affiliate product. The drawback is that your blog would have to be very focused on the product in order to get a good conversion rate. Let's say you are selling a $47 for which you get 50 percent affiliate commission. To make $1000 weekly - you need to think in these sums to make a living from this - you need 42.6 sales. A good CR from a blog is 0.5 percent, which means you make a sale from every 200 visitors. You therefore need 8,520 visitors weekly to your blog.
Nevertheless, blogs are good income generators for affiliate products if you have enough of them (products and blogs).
2. The Keywords
You must choose keywords to advertise your website or your blog that relate to the product. Unless your website or blog is expertly optimized, these will have to be long-tail less popular keywords, and for that you need either good software, or know how to do it free. There is free software that can find keywords for you, such as the Digital Point Keyword Tool, or Google's Keyword Tool External.
3. Pre-selling
You don't try to sell affiliate products, but pre-sell them. You can write about how the product solved a problem for you, you can write a review of the product ... One way is to present a problem and discuss several ways of resolving it, all costing money and not very good solutions. Then you can suggest a final way and reach the conclusion that the final way is the best way, all things considered.
You then offer the affiliate product as one that uses that way to solve the problem, and offer it at a good price (the right price, but a good one for solving the problem). You then offer a few free gifts that also relate to the problem, and when the visitor clicks on your link, they are taken to the vendor's sales page where they get the real sales message.
That, together with your pre-sales technique and free products if they buy, should be enough to secure the sale. That's how to carry out affiliate marketing.
You can get loads of free gifts to offer by registering with a Private Label site. For a few dollars a month you can get some great products to give away as free bonuses. However, the secret in affiliate marketing lies not in the freebies but in the pre-sales technique you use. Whether you advertise using a website or a blog, their function is simply to send the visitor to your presales or review page, where the real business is done
So, you can make a great income with blogs and affiliate marketing, but not necessarily together, although a good blog with a good readership can help you to secure a good number of sales.
Carol Oon is the "nice" mentor who writes articles on Home Business and Affiliate Marketing strategies. To get a free 7-day e-course on how she earns a living online, visit [nice-biz.com parked domain].
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