I have been doing some Affiliate Internet Marketing lately. This is an activity which i have read a lot about and even played around with but never became real serious about it. I purchased a book a few weeks back and everything just clicked in the affiliate marketing arena.
One thing that always has driven me crazy about Affiliate marketing is the fact that when you join an affiliate program and log on to the back office, there is training material. You will find banners, text ads, email ads, offline classified ads and many other promotional tools.
They will tell you to join the surf for traffic sites, submit some articles to directories and Ezines, post replies in forums leaving your link in the signature file. (Some forums dont even allow affiliate links) and answer some questions in Yahoo answers leaving links to your site here and there as references.
The one thing that 9 out of 10 of these affiliate back offices with all of there training offer you zero assistance in building your own mailing list. Yes I have found that 90% of affiliate programs out there just want you to send traffic to your special affiliate link and then the actual site owner collects the name and email. Can you see how you will be paying to promote your page and build a list for them making a few sales here and there.
I will not send any traffic that I have to work or pay for to any page unless my opt in form is on that page. If I am spending money or time, I want the subscriber for future contact and sales. There are a few good programs out there that steer you right and sometimes even provide a lead capture (splash, landing, magnetizer) page that you can edit and place your own autoresponder code enabling you to build your own list.
I set one of these little systems up a couple weeks back, and I am making sales on a regular basis. This is cool because the commission pays $45 and all I did was set it up once. It is now on auto pilot. My advice to you is to never promote any program until you can get a double opt in with name and email before redirecting traffic to your affiliate page.
Now that was a mouth full about Affiliate Internet Marketing.
To Your Success,
Ted