Steps To Affiliate Success

3 Steps To Affiliate Success

Almost every newcomer to internet earning goes for affiliate programs because they seem to be a painless way to online income - an easy 3-step process.


How affiliate programs work

1. All you have to do is to join a program as an affiliate and attract visitors.

2. Send the visitor to the merchant or seller site and your work is over.

3. Seller pays you the commmision for your work as soon the visitor buys the seller's product or service.

Repeat the process as many times as you like with any number of seller sites and just collect the money.

With such a seemingly easy process, you should think that every affiliate should be making money. But that is not what happens. Agreed, some affiliates do make money - and good money at that. But such affiliates are in a minority. A vast majority doesn't see a commission check in years.

This naturally leads to the question...

Why Most Fail As Affiliates?

Affiliate programs are apparently the most straight-forward way to make money on the internet. No hassles for the affiliates at all, because it is the responsibility of the seller/merchant to take care of making a sale, delivering the product or service and receiving payment, attending to the complaints or making a refund. As an affiliate, you just collect commissions when sales are made.

Then where do most affiliates go wrong?

All affiliates know that their success depends upon sales of the products/services they promote. No sales. No commissions.

So they try to get sales and this is where they go wrong.

Here you may say that if affiliate marketing is all about sales, then what is wrong in trying to make sales? Isn't that what I am supposed to do if I want to make money?

Yes, you make money as an affilite when a sale is made. But it won't help you if you yourself try to make sales.

This is because...

* First off, selling is not the responsibility of an affiliate at all. It is what the merchant has to do when when a visitor sent by you arrives at his site.

* Your job is to presell the product or service to your visitor. It is not to come on with a strong sales pitch when someone lands at your site. Do that and you are almost sure to lose your visitor.

The reason for this is that direct selling nearly always fails while preselling gets you sales.

And so what is preselling?

Preselling is getting people warmed up for the product or service you are promoting and then sending them to the merchant site. It is your merchant who will have to make a sale when a presold (interested) visitor arrives at his site. And a presold interested visitor is more likely to buy a product and earn you commission. So to succeed as an affiliate, you have to acquire the preselling skill.

In addition to the preselling skills, you need some webspace of your own where you can presell your visitors. You can't do preselling by placing ads or banners. This is why you need a website of your own or at least a blog which gets targeted website traffic.

What is Targeted Website Traffic and why you need It?

Just getting visitors to your site is not enough. You can do this easily by joining traffic exchange or autosurf programs. Your site will be seen hundreds of times but it will not make a sale. This is because these visitors are not interested in your site. They are looking at it to earn credits so they can show their own site to others.

This traffic is useless for you. You need traffic which is interested in the product you are promoting.

This is the organic traffic - people who came to your site themselves. They are looking for the product you are promoting. and took the trouble of finding it from a search engine or from the particular kind of ads or forums. Naturally such visitors are more likely to convert into buyers and earn you affiliate commission.

How Right Programs Help

Joining right affiliate programs can help you gain affiliate mastery. While most such programs give you a few text ads and banners and be done with you, there are some programs like Sitesell's 5 Pillar which train you for affiliate success.

However, if you have wasted time with such programs, you may not fall in love with 5Pillar at first sight as I also didn't.


Conclusion: Learn to presell and attract targeted website traffic then your affiliate success is assured. Contrary to popular belief, these techniques are not that difficult to master. You can certainly succeed if you want to.