Affiliate Marketing 101 – Finding the Right Products to Promote on Your Affiliate Marketing Blogs
When you start affiliate marketing, one of your first tasks is picking which niche or sub-niche you’re going to be marketing in. Part of the research involved in that decision was making sure there were plenty of available affiliate programs within that niche, so you already have an idea of what affiliate programs are currently available in your chosen niche before you even install your affiliate marketing blogs.
Now it’s time to choose exactly which affiliate programs you’ll include on your niche marketing blog at first, since right from the first post the affiliate ads in your sidebar must be relevant and hopefully profitable. Your first decision has to be whether you’ll mostly be promoting digital products or physical products based on the niche you’re going into.
If your target market is truly global, you have to ensure that shipping charges to the largest demographic group you’re targeting won’t make the products prohibitively expensive – if your target market can purchase similar goods locally at a lower total cost, you’d be fighting an uphill battle to say the least. If you can find an affiliate program for a product unique in the marketplace though, the shipping costs are immaterial if the prospects want the product badly enough.
In the Internet marketing and affiliate marketing niches, on the other hand, most affiliate programs are for digital products and online services, with physical products being a smaller portion of your target market. In niches like these product fulfillment is instant, so there’s usually no shipping charges or import duties to contend with.
Most other niches fall somewhere between these two examples for affiliate promotion purposes. You may be promoting musical instruments as physical products, while offering training videos and printable sheet music as digital downloads. Or you might be selling travel information products as downloads, while promoting specific resorts in the offline world. Digital Photography Tips and Tricks would be a perfect e-book to be promoting alongside your digital camera affiliate promotions.
Use a blended approach to both products and prices – low-priced items often sell the fastest but you usually make considerably less than you would promoting high-ticket items that take longer and require more effort to market. Similarly, digital products almost always offer a higher commission percentage to affiliates, but can’t match the overall selling price of the highest-priced physical products like real estate, automobiles, planes, etc. You want to try and achieve a workable variety of high and low prices, both for digital and physical products you’re promoting.
Before you begin posting to your affiliate marketing blogs, choose the right mix for you to start affiliate marketing from your blog. Fortunately for you it’s much easier to switch products when you’re affiliate marketing than it would be as a merchant promoting their own products and services, but try and get it right the first time anyway, if only to save time and bring in that affiliate marketing pay a little sooner. Research affiliate programs for digital products through sites like ClickBank and check affiliate directories like LinkShare for physical products with affiliate programs.
No matter which initial products and programs you choose for your affiliate marketing blogs, be sure to test and track the results you’re getting with each item. Switch out those affiliate programs that aren’t producing until you find replacements that will drive commissions and then do all you can to keep the earning power of your affiliate marketing web sites optimized – and your affiliate marketing pay rolling in!
Doug Champigny – Doug Champigny, a world-famous Internet marketer, Super-Affiliate, mentor, speaker and creator of the PowerStart Marketing coaching classes, is often called a super-promoter because he
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