Affiliate Programs Worthless for 80% of Affiliate Market

No doubt you've heard of the 80/20 rule - which states that20 percent of affiliates generate 80% of affiliate income, andconversely, remaining 80 percent of affiliates generate only20 percent of all income for most affiliate programs.

There are ten basics that will put your affiliate marketingin the top 20 percent of affiliate earnings. Ten suggestionscreek that barely covers your hosting fees, to a roaring river

TOP AFFILIATE MARKETERS DO MOST OF THESE TEN ITEMS

1.Top affiliate marketers cloak web site links

Cloaking affiliate links should not be necessary, but is. Oddlymany site visitors refuse to visit your links if they see an affiliate code appended to the URL when they hover their mouseover a link on your web page. Sometimes they will type theaffiliate domain directly to the browser address bar whileremoving your affiliate ID from the URL. To short circuit thisodd behavior, simply cloak the URL. How? Visit this Link Tool:
http://WebpositionAdvisor.com/tools/link_cloaker.php

2.Top affiliate marketers write & distribute articles

Writing articles about your market niche is essential to gainreputation as an expert in your field. But the biggest benefitcomes not just from writing those articles, but from havingthose articles published by other web site owners and ezinepublishers. Your article gains you both reputation and linksfrom other web sites from the resource box appended to theend of each article. Here are major article distribution sites.
http://yahoogroups.com/group/free-content/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aabusiness/
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com

3.Top affiliate marketers focus on a market niche

Filling a web site with content reflecting a narrowly focusedproduct or service niche is a well known method of gaining webtraffic in your area of specialty. An excellent resource thatan help you determine relevant and focused areas to fill yoursite with is called NicheBot. They offer innovative tools toresearch and pinpoint market niches for your web site based onthe WordTracker Database and Google. http://www.nichebot.com

4.Top affiliate marketers use autoresponder series

Autoresponders are incredibly valuable tools that allow you to send a timed series of email messages to those that sign up for them. Most often those autoresponders are sent through a thirdparty provider. Some of the top providers are Sendfree.com and aweber.com, for a tutorial covering autoresponder basics, visit:
http://website101.com/email_e-mail/email_autoresponder_basics.html

5.Top affiliate marketers create web pages to pre-sell

Creating either testimonial pages or review pages that discussand pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with isthe best method of getting increased orders for your chosenaffiliate programs. Many programs actually provide either anarticle or recommended text to sell their products for you and allow reproduction of those articles with your links embedded.

6.Top affiliate marketers gather email addresses

The best affiliates collect email addresses on their web site by offering free reports via the above mentioned autoresponders or by giving away ebooks or through newsletter signup forms.The best use all of these methods or more to build their listof email addresses. This also allows you to contact potential customers that would otherwise never see your site again after clicking away to the affiliate program web site.

7.Top affiliate marketers advertise SOMEWHERE

Depending on your market niche you should advertise using PPCand/or ezine advertising. Some categories of Pay-per-click can be prohibitively expensive, but advertising somewhere is all abut mandatory to gain substantial additional traffic to yoursite. There are some great bargains in ezine advertising and some less popular PPC engines other than Yahoo's Overture and Google's Adwords. Try 7search, Kanoodle and FindWhat for lowerBids than the big boys of PPC.

8.Top affiliate marketers optimize for search engines

Search engine optimization is becoming more complex as more and more webmasters participate, but the basics applied to your site can increase visibility dramatically over time. The most critical of the many SEO techniques is to use title tags that reflect individual PAGE content. Many webmasters write a master title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worst thing you could do for search engine ranking. Learn more SEO:
http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/

9.Top affiliate marketers give away ebooks or freebies

Everyone knows by now that giving something away is a greattraffic generator and allows you to gather email addresses to allow contact of potential customers at a later date. This strategy is employed by EVERY successful web-based company at one time or another. Think of all the free things YOU have
collected online over time. Screensavers, software, ebooks, discount codes, toolbars, white papers. They work!

10. Top Affiliate marketers have their own mailing lists

The best of affiliate marketers have their own newsletter or ezine and gather email addresses on their site to build their list of subscribers. Having this list allows regular contact with potential customers interested in your site, your product and your market niche. If you don't write your own material or think you can't produce weekly content, there are hundreds of authors out there that will gladly product articles for you. The article distribution lists provide free content and ghost Writers provide high quality content for a fee.

If you implement ALL the above techniques, you are guaranteed to become one of the top affiliate marketers on the web. Then you can create your own product telling everyone how YOU did it, create your own affiliate program and have hundreds of usselling for you.