Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

Stop being so lazy with affi­liate marketing!

An affi­liate pro­gram is where you can link to someone else’s offer with your spe­cial ID and get paid com­mis­sion every sale you make. This pro­cess “seems” really hands-​​off and easy because there’s no pro­duct crea­tion or cus­to­mer sup­port invol­ved… just send traf­fic to a pro­ven offer!

Here’s the problem.

Most mar­ke­ters are lazy and don’t rea­lize that affi­liate mar­ke­ting has its own disad­van­ta­ges. It’s tougher to build a list using affi­liate mar­ke­ting, tough to con­vert and split test, and you have to devote most of your effort to pre-​​selling and mar­ke­ting that affi­liate product.

What the heck do you need to know about affi­liate mar­ke­ting in order to pull in decent results?

If you’re serious about affi­liate mar­ke­ting, setup a squeeze page that gets peo­ple on a mai­ling list first and redi­rects to the affi­liate offer. Send traf­fic to that page using forum posts and articles.

Even if they don’t buy right away, you can keep broad­cas­ting to that list every day with remin­ders about bene­fits for that offer… things they might have mis­sed or even things you thought about the ven­dor didn’t.

For exam­ple, once I pro­mo­ted an affi­liate offer about how to create iPhone apps and I wrote a quick follow-​​up asking peo­ple… what if you thought of eBay or AdWords before anyone else? What if you regis­te­red even one or two English-​​word domain names like Busi​ness​.com or About​.com before anyone else? What would those be worth today?

What’s great about this is the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor prac­ti­cally wrote your e-​​mails for you. You can copy huge chunks of the sales let­ters and add them as e-​​mail follow-​​ups… then add a call-​​to-​​action at the end of the e-​​mail so peo­ple can click your affi­liate link to get back to the page.

Even if they don’t buy that offer, you can even­tually hit them with a dif­fe­rent but rela­ted affi­liate offer as well.