For the highly motivated individual, there exists a virtually limitless number of ways to make money on the Internet with a minimum of technical savvy. You don't have to be an IT Professional or have a degree in Computer Science to get started either, as the most lucrative paths to online wealth require more business acumen and initiative than computer smarts. Affiliate Marketing has emerged in the last few years as one popular and highly attractive way to bring in serious revenue. So-called “Super Affiliates” can make literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
What exactly is a Super Affiliate? Simply speaking, Super Affiliates are virtual sales people who are capable of directing substantial amounts of Internet traffic to the product or service sales pages of online vendors. Some of this traffic results in sales or conversions for the vendor in question. In return for the traffic referred, the vendor splits a portion of the profits with the affiliate responsible based on how many sales they generate. In most affiliate programs, the bulk of conversions often result from the referral work of a small, highly productive group of agents, hence the “Super Affiliate” label.
The truly successful Super Affiliate employs a variety of techniques to claim such a large share of the affiliate referrals. Such techniques include Article Marketing, Pay Per Click Search Engine based advertising as well as Social Networking, to name a few strategies. Often times, a Super Affiliate will set up a number of “feeder” sites that provide helpful information related to the specific niche or industry they're targeting, such as consumer electronics or real estate. On their websites, they'll include Affiliate Links along with their main content, that direct interested readers to products or services that help them solve their unique problem or fill a need, and give credit to themselves in the event of a sale.
Let's take a “virtual”, online software product and look at how you'd go about promoting it and collecting affiliate commissions on sales you secure. One popular tool used in Affiliate Marketing itself is called KeywordSpy. KeywordSpy is a web-based program that allows affiliates to look into the popularity of certain keywords used in Search Engine queries to see how often they're used in searches for a variety of purposes. Most affiliates then look for unexploited “keyword niches” with little competition from other marketers which nonetheless are used by many ordinary users to look for products. Super Affiliates can then tailor promotional websites around these keywords to rank at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages for those queries, grabbing the lion's share of the traffic for them and hopefully producing affiliate sales from that traffic.
As with practically any other industry or realm of commerce, the most important factor in becoming a successful Super Affiliate is effort and momentum. It all comes down to hard work, perseverance and research. Most Super Affiliates spend the bulk of their time looking for promising niches, then tracking down the most viable keywords to focus on for getting quality, “organic” traffic from Search Engines for the least amount of money spent promoting sites centered on such keywords. It's a fairly complicated area of E-commerce which is difficult to fully cover in such a short synopsis, but that's more or less the gist of Affiliate Marketing. The most attractive aspect of Affiliate Marketing is that anyone can master it if they put in the time to learn the ins and outs of the process without a lot of money spent upfront.
Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO of KeywordSpy. You can find more information about him at PeterZmijewski.
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