Monday, June 30, 2008

Affiliate Marketing Critical Success Factors – Part Four

What are the tools that an affiliate marketer require? There are

many, but for your benefit I will only mention two of the most

essential ones for now.


A - The first one, is "Track your Statistics".

You need to track your statistics and especially the amount of

clicks you send to the sales page of the product you are

promoting. If this statistic is not tracked you could for

example make ten sales over the period of a week and think you

are doing a marvelous job.


In reality however, it could be that you have sent more than

10,000 visitors to that sales page over the period , and the

conversion rate of actual buyers to clicks will then be 10 to

10,000 . This works out to a dismal 0,1% conversion, which is

not a very good percentage at all, meaning that you could be

wasting your time and efforts. Either the sales page is not

converting that well, or your source of traffic is not targeted

enough and therefore very poor.


B - The second thing to do is “Cloak your Affiliate Links”.

If this concept perhaps sound foreign to you, then you only need

to look at the following example of an affiliate link:


http://www.mysalessite.com/affiliates/refer.cgi?ID=726252


There are a good few problems associated with it, with the very

first is being able to blatantly see that it is an affiliate

link. For some strange reason, many people do not like clicking

on affiliate links and some will just simply cut off most of the

URL go straight to the actual sales page. The tragedy with this

is that it will lose you a sale.


Ensure therefore that you shorten your affiliate link by using

any of the multitudes of free software programs and other

services available on the Internet. Some programs even allow

you to rename the link with a domain named that reflects the

product niche.


Another scam that you must be made aware of is affiliate link

stealing, where cyber or Internet thieves can recognize an

affiliate program URL and substitute the identity or reference

number with their own unique details and deprive you even

further of hard worked for commissions.


Affiliate marketing is sometimes not for the faint-hearted, but

with enough of the correct tools at your disposal and coupled

with diligent application thereof, almost anyone can make a

success.


Please look out for Part Five of this series which will appear

shortly in the article marketing forums including EzineArticles

and GoArticles.


Beware of the affiliate scams and do your background work before

jumping into any program. For a comparison of the best affiliate

programs, please visit my site at

http://www.onlinesuccess.thebestbizreview.com

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