NOTE:  The following is a guest post from one of my favorite internet marketing mentors.

Why I Love Affiliate Marketing – Part 1
By Jimmy D. Brown of “Affiliatenaire”

Do you find yourself “starting” to create your own product to sell online, but never “finishing” it? 

One of the things I love about affiliate marketing is –

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One of the excuses we hear most often from struggling online marketers is that they don’t make more sales because they don’t have a list. We even hear that excuse from marketers who have been online three, or even five years.

My question to them is always, “What are you waiting for?” “Why not start a massive list-building effort today?”

When I look at how I built my database, I used only a few primary methods. Here are the most effective ones that I used:

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If you are seeking online success with your business, then SEO search engine optimization is essential. Without adequately optimizing your website for search engine spiders or algorithms, you have little chance of your site receiving visible listings on the search engine results pages. That spells death to most online businesses.

Free traffic is by far the best, and if you are unsure how to use pay per click advertising such as Google Adwords properly, it could cost you a lot of money to correct inadequacies in your SEO. Only 1% of those that start in internet marketing actually make any money: largely because they do not know how to promote their website. There are other reasons of course, and a website is not always necessary, but if you have one then you must learn how to optimize it to attain as high a listing position as possible.

SEO search engine optimization is about telling search engines exactly what each page of your website is saying, and that it is highly relevant to the keyword, or search term, for which you have optimized it. Having a great looking website with a lot of well writen content on each page is not sufficient to earn you a listing on Google, let alone a high one that will bring you free traffic. It is essential that manipulate the search engine algorithms to calculate a high degree of relevance of your page to the requirements of those using Google and other search engines to find information.

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There is nothing more frustrating than checking your website’s analytics and realizing that, although a visitor has just spent over 10 minutes reading through a single webpage, they have not made a purchase. Sometimes it can be almost heartbreaking, because no matter how hard you try to increase sales, turning a prospect into a customer can appear to be a near impossible task.

Sometimes the key to turning a prospect into a customer is not a change in your website content, but rather a change to your purchase page:

• Is it easy to find?
• Is it easy to use?
• Can your visitors trust you with their credit card information?

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Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers. While a great looking website  can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-ngine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

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If you’ve reached the point of exhaustion trying to keep up with answering the mountain of e-mails that threatens to bury you alive every single day, you’re ready to learn about autoresponders.

The bad news is that people expect prompt replies to their e-mail inquiries. However, unless you can figure out how to work continual 24-hour shifts, or hire enough people to constantly monitor incoming e-mails (while they’re eating up your revenue), you have a problem. The good news is an autoresponder is an inexpensive—or even free—method of quickly responding to e-mails. What these programs do is automatically respond to incoming e-mails as soon as they are received.

E-mails are essential to your business for many different reasons. Most importantly, these invisible e-mail voices give you their feedback about your website—for free! However, if you spend all your working hours answering these e-mails, how are you supposed to run your business?

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There is a common misconception that a website automatically catapults a business to global stardom. This could be true – with a lot of time and money spent on it – but in isolation, a website is next to useless. No doubt all you SEO experts out there will think I’m teaching grandma to suck eggs but there are literally thousands of people starting out who just don’t realise what it takes.

The truth is, a website on its own is akin to opening a new shop at the bottom of a dark, gated alleyway – with no signage or advertising. Passers-by will do exactly that, pass by, never knowing what wonderful products you are selling. Without the brightly lit signs, local press, opening launches, special offer flyers and other advertising, nobody will ever know your shop is there!

It’s the same with a website, unless people know it’s there, they will never visit it.

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