Well, I am here to tell you that there are 3 steps that you should follow if you are going to promote affiliate programs. They are:
Step 1: Search for affiliate programs with your favorite search engine. Look for only those affiliate programs which have products which interests you and not affilate programs which offer a high commission.
Since you already know a little about a certain product or have an interest in a certain field, it wiil be much easier for you to promote various aspects of the product.
So when selecting the affiliate program keep in mind the following:
a) Product which you know about or are interested in.
b) The quality of the product. To know the quality of the product I suggest that you buy the product yourself first.
c) The organization associated with the product. By this, I mean that you should look for the promotional material they are giving to affiliates. This shows the confidence of the manufacturer in their own product.
d) Commission structure. Some webmasters provide 2 tier commission structure. Some have a threshhold amout before the affiliates get paid. Commission matters, but sub steps a, b, and c are more important if you are going to succeed.
Step 2: Design a simple landing page to "presell" the product before sending the visitors to actual sales page. Now this step is extremely imporant. Why do you to presell the product? You want people that are interested in the product and you do not want to use the same website as all the other affilates promoting the product. Thus, spend the money for a domain name and a website (usually less than $100).
Normally when someone buys from the internet that person will look at 4-5 products that are similar before they make the final decision. Here if that person comes to your affiliate landing and it is not like every other affilate page it becomes much easier for the person to compare the product you want to promote with other similar 4-5 products in the category.
The landing page you have designed can have testimonials, which you can borrow from the sales page. It can also contain your own experience about the product. You can use before/after situations for describing the benefits of the product. By doing this, you will add instant credibility to the product you want to promote.
Step 3: When the visitors reach your landing page you must have a system to capture their names and email addresses. Because as I said earlier there are many people who look for similar 4-5 products before buying. By capturing email addresse you can "follow up" your subscribers later on using newsletters or product features using email autoresponders.
The best way to capture email addresses is to provide a free gift related to the product such as an e-book. So again this is a very important point, join only those programs where you will find decent promotional material already prepared for the affiliates.
Well,I hope this article was helpful. I wish you good luck in your affiliate promotional journey.
