Tips for the Newcomer in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is an appealing field for many Internet marketers.  It seems simple enough; you put up a link on your website and you get passive income.  You make money without even thinking about it.  This kind of thinking will never get you anywhere.

Some simple rules to observe when becoming an affiliate:

• Know the product you’re promoting.  This cannot be stressed enough.  For one thing, if you promote a junk product, that reflects on your reputation.  For another, you can bet that people following your link will have questions for you.  While you COULD leave it to the product’s support department, being able to give answers yourself will help your reputation.  It may even generate some word of mouth promotion by your customer.
• Don’t put too many affiliate links on one page.  Avoid creating a page or a Web 2.0 account that is just a collection of affiliate links.  No one will want to sort through them just to find out what a product is.  Especially if you’re affiliating with several different niches.
• Give adequate descriptions and above all SELL the product you’re linking to.  Many successful affiliates will have one page dedicated to one link, and generate a sales page around it.  This is a good plan, especially if you can find a cheap domain server.
• Do not affiliate with businesses that aren’t relevant to the page you have your link on.  This can make the normal visitors uneasy and decrease the traffic to that page.  This would be shooting yourself in the foot.
• Something else that’s shooting yourself in the foot:  Putting up an affiliate link for your competition!  You might think this is a no-brainer, but you have to be careful to investigate who you’re setting up a link for.  It’s not always obvious who it is.

These five tips will keep you out of most of the trouble you could get into with affiliate marketing.