Beating the Recession With Affiliate Marketing

A recession is now inevitable. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently predicted that the current recession in the United States will last for at least the whole of 2009. It is of global proportions and it will not discriminate and thus will affect each and every single market. Moody's stated that China is in for its most serious economic downturn in two decades and trade figures have been described as just awfully dreadful. All is far from well in the Euro region, already said to be plunging headlong into recession, with the UK economy being the fastest to contract. Developing countries will also feel the crunch with growth predicted to slow to an abysmal 4.5% for the pre-developed. Shades of the Great Depression seem to be colouring the present global economic crisis so the big question of how to safeguard our financial well-being is springing into everyone's mind.

For this I offer a simple straight-forward answer. Start one or many low investment, high return businesses! Cynical readers will be tossing around expletives at this statement as it is common knowledge to everybody that doing this will ensure profitability, even in the worst of downturns. It is the method of what businesses we should be starting that is this article's concern. My advice is, start an affiliate business! It possesses low initial investment and at the same time maintains high yield characteristics that I believe we should all take note of.

The cost inherent in setting up an affiliate program is fairly paltry. Simple things like hosting, domain name registration, and pay-per-click advertising, are all fairly inexpensive. Compared to traditional physical commerce, affiliate marketing offers a host of benefits with the most useful characteristic being never having to ever stock up on the wares that you are marketing! It also does not require having any physical office, storage or operations space. This translates into never having to pay rent or a mortgage installment! Estimates put US spending on affiliate marketing channels at $2.1 billion dollars for 2008. In terms of your audience however, you are not just marketing to the US. You are marketing to the entire world!

If you have diligently marketed your affiliate products, you stand to make ludicrous sums of money. Since low operating costs are coupled with opportunities to generate extremely high returns, affiliate marketing is the ideal way to generate more income during economic slumps!

5 Steps to Create Income Online

Do you want to create income online with an autopilot system? You don't need to be a professional in website design and you don't need to be an expert in your market. With the help of affiliate marketing, you are able to generate a 4 figure online income by just spending a few hours into it everyday.

Many people thought that create income online is something difficult and complicated. In fact, it is not. Many people are generating money from the internet these days, especially with the existence of affiliate marketing, more and more people are making money from the comfort of their home.

Now, here are the 5 steps how you can create income online using affiliate marketing...

1. Start by targeting a hungry crowd. This is the same as looking for a profitable market. Remember, it is the people in the market that are going to buy from you, therefore, do your market research correctly.

2. Find the problems in your market; solve the problems by providing an affiliate product. For example, if you are in golf market, there are a lot of people who want to learn how to play better golf and so you can promote affiliate products to fulfill their needs.

3. Build a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a simple one-page website that you use to capture visitors' emails and names so that you can contact with them anytime. Use an auto-responder to do this. Outsource this if you don't have any idea about it. It is not complicated and it can be done within 5 minutes. Building your own list of subscribers is a very important task to create income online.

4. Build trust and relationship with the people in your market by providing what they are looking for. Nobody is going to buy from you if they don't know you and if they don't trust you. Thus, you must build relationship with them and promote them at the same time. Use your auto-responder to send automated emails to them.

5. Drive targeted traffic to your squeeze page. Traffic generation is all about taking action. As long as you take the necessary action, traffic will come. Use article marketing, forum marketing, social networking and more to generate traffic to your squeeze page.

This is how you can create income online by using affiliate marketing. Once the system has been set up, it will be in autopilot mode. All you need to do is to drive traffic and improve the conversion of your business.

Top 2 Keys For Affiliate Marketing Success

While the concept behind affiliate marketing is simple to learn, the process itself can be a bit more difficult to master, especially if you have little to no experience working in the Internet environment. Learning affiliate marketing is not impossible, however it does require focus, energy and determination if you are to not only succeed but also thrive as an affiliate marketer. Here are the keys to success when it comes to succeeding in this game:

The First Key - Be Careful Which Doors You Open

It is a common mistake when learning affiliate marketing to align yourself with too many product providers. If you would not do business with them as a customer a good rule of thumb is to not do business with them as an affiliate marketer. If you're careful which doors you open from the beginning it is much easier to establish your credibility right off the bat.

The Second Key - Be True to Your Word

Always deliver as promised. If you can live by those four words consistently, then you have accomplished one of the most difficult tasks in learning affiliate marketing. If you promise customer service response times of 24 hours or less, then your customers should expect exactly that - respond on time every time and your customers will get the message. By the same token, it is important not to overstate your abilities or misrepresent yourself, your company or your products.

These two keys will help you to unlock the doors that stand between you and gaining the necessary marketing skills that can earn you a respectable and impressive income from your Internet based business.

Find Top Clickbank Products

Finding quality Clickbank products that convert is one part of the riddle to being a successful Clickbank affiliate. The other part is successful marketing.

But for this article I will provide some basic tips to finding Clickbank products that sell.

First, how well is a product selling? If the product is brand new it's impossible to gauge, but if the product has been around a while you can tell by the product's gravity and gravity history. Gravity is not an exact number representing total sales. Clickbank does not give the information away. But it's a general idea of how well a product is selling. I typically look for products with a gravity of between 10 and 100. Any product with a gravity over 100 is obviously a great product, but its more than likely that product is hyper-competitive and getting any marketing traction is going to be somewhere between tough to impossible.

Look for products on the rise. Find a couple dozen new products and track them over the course of two to three weeks. If you see a consistent climb that is evidence the product is selling well, finding a market, and since it's new you know that competition from other Clickbank affiliates will be small. Jump on and ride the wave as long as you can.

What is the return rate? Clickbank doesn't offer this data, but there are few places online you can find it. I personally wouldn't touch a product with more than a 20% return rate. The ideal would be no more than 10%. In rare cases if the conversion rate is high and the commission generous, then a higher return rate might be tolerable. That's up to you to do the math and make sure the numbers gel.

Finally, do research. You may find a product in the Clickbank marketplace that has simply been overlooked or undiscovered. It could have a gravity of zero, but that's doesn't mean the product isn't a winner. Do your research. How much search traffic does that product's niche get? If it's decent, put the product out there in front of prospective buyers and see how it does. You might find a diamond in the rough and have it all to yourself. It happens. When it does, focus on that product and squeeze as much money out of it as possible.

Another way to gauge the worth of an untested product is to look at the pitch page. Is the merchant website professional? Is the text readable? Does the product's pitch make you want to buy? Really, really, really buy? If so, that's a product with potential.

These are just some of the tips I use, they are other ways to evaluate top Clickbank products I will cover in future articles.