Affiliate Marketing is continuing to evolve at a rapid rate and is now frequently seen as a way to market mainstream products online.

My aim with this article is to give you Five steps that should enable you to create some additional income streams using Affiliate Marketing.

Author:Paul Ingersole
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Affiliate Marketing is continuing to evolve at a rapid rate and is now frequently seen as a way to market mainstream products online.

Step One:

Always pick a product to market online that has substance and integrity,by this I mean that the creator has put their own real name behind the product or the organisation that is running the affiliate driven campaign is a reputable one.

Make sure that if you start any kind of marketing campaign that you track the success or failure immediately, by this I mean your conversion rates.
If a product has a well written sales page it will convert to sales form you fairly quickly,don't wait until you have spent thousands on a pay per click campaign to pull the plug on a product that does't sell.

Step Two:

 If you feel that you are promoting a good online product do a proper campaign and invest some time and energy into your marketing and research,have a look at what other affiliates that promote the product are doing and if you find some professional looking affiliate websites that are promoting the same things you are reverse engineer them.

Please allow me to explain the statement above and what I mean by the term "reverse engineer'.

When you find something that works well and has a high page ranking for the term or the product that you wish to be successful promoting take a good look at the site and pull it apart a little.

If the successful affiliate is doing certain things you might wish to recreate a similar marketing effort with your own original touches, although there is more then one way to skin a cat there are things that work and things that don't and by taking note of the things that an oposition affiliate is doing it will quickly provide you with a checklist that you can use.

Ask youself what appears on the page One affiliates website and what word tract have they used in their pay per click campaign?.

You might note things such as the heading style they have used on their landing page and the font size,have they used a name capture form offering a free report or are they offering a bonus for buying the affiliate product from their website?

Analyzing all the above and more is what I call reverse engineering a website,and it will pay dividends for you.

Step Three:

Many affiliates that I have observed spend their first year or so trying to sell products online by simply writing catchy or simply bad pay per click advertisements but they miss one key point and that is if their expensive visitor either leaves the affiliate master site oe opts in to get information from the site they will never ever see that prospect again.

It is true that some affiliate promoters have websites with lifetime cookies to attract affiliates to promote their products and websites but in most cases unless you have you own website and your own lead capture form on your website you will never see or hear of your expensive vistor again.

My advise in this step is to invest in your own website buiding software and also get a company that provides lead capture forms there are a number of inexpensive website software building tools that you can buy and these will give you additional control for the affiliate sales campaigns that you run.

Step Four:

The advice above in step Three about building your own websites and putting name squeeze forms on your websites is good advice I promise but just to expand on it a little more I would also suggest that when you choose to promote a particular product online it is wise to register a domain name that does not necessarily have the name of the product in it.

Let me give you an example,you start to promote xyz company and you use their company name in your url address and as you learn and begin to sell the companies products very successfully as do a number of other affiliates. The company then starts to get greedy and changes the commission structure to a price point that you feel is completely unfair ,what can you do?

Here is your problem,you have built a website using the companies name in your url address and you have written articles to send traffic to that address as well as social networking about the product and your website so you basically are tied in to promoting this company regardless of what they want to do to you.

I will give you another scenario that may serve you better,if you really want to build a website using the companies name in your websites address ie.www.xyzsecrets or something similar go ahead and do that but also build a similar site with a generic name about the type of product you are promoting and this will give you some fantastic flexibility in that you could simply switch to a competitors brand and change your website to adapt.

Summation

In closing I would sum up this article by saying to you that affiliate marketing is evolving at a rapid pace and much like business in the offline world people running online business are needing to analyze and acess what their competitors are doing in a much more detailed way.

Before you start any afilliate sales campaign you should map out your plan in great detail and also have a page that lists exactly what your competitors are doing in their promotional efforts.