Affiliate Marketing: The Secret

What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is probably the most popular form of doing online business, and can be highly lucrative. And yet, most people who do it are unable to make a real living out of it.
Affiliate marketing is very popular because it is, in theory, very easy to do. You choose a product, start promoting it, and when somebody buys it you earn a commission. What could be easier than that?
To put it in military terms: it takes brave soldiers to fight a war, but it takes a skilled general to win a war!
The secret to success
You don't need to be a genius or a marketing guru to become successful in affiliate marketing. But the most important aspect behind the secret to success, is the ability and the will to learn.
Learning takes time, and by knowing yourself and your background knowledge, you should be able to make a realistic estimation about the time needed to learn the necessary skills. Your next step will than be to determine whether you want to make that time investment in order to build a successful online business.
The secret behind successful affiliate marketing, is not only to find the right marketing strategies, but also the right product sweep.
Many people who start with affiliate marketing just run around on the internet, spreading their affiliate links on forums and paying for ads on Google or Bing.
They spend loads of time, and often loads of money, with virtually no regard for effectiveness. This often results in them becoming disillusioned and giving up after a few months.
Before you start spreading your affiliate links throughout the internet, you should check out the available marketing strategies, pick out 1 or 2 to start with, and start learning about them.
Once you've mastered them, you can add 1 or 2, but don't try to master all strategies because that will result in you spreading yourself to thin over your activities. After all, it not only takes time to learn them, but also to apply them!
The secret behind a good product choice
When starting out, most people just pick a few products which they think will be easy to sell, and their only thought is to start selling as quickly as possible.
But one of the main secrets to success, is making the right product choice. The time and effort you put into your marketing strategies will be the same, whether you promote a cheap or expensive product. The main difference will be the commission you get from selling it.
It is therefore unwise to only select cheap products, since your commission will be so low, you would need to sell five hundred products or more every month in order to make a living!
Furthermore, you should select products which are related to each other, but with an increasing price tag. The reason for this is quite simple. People who buy any product, are likely to later buy a related and more expensive product if it can offer them a chance on achieving better and faster results.
If you have done your list building wisely, you now have sold 2 products to a single customer, and your second commission should be significantly higher than your first one!

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