Your Affiliate Marketing Success Depends on These 3 Steps

Picture this: You are a new affiliate marketer. You send affiliate links to everyone in your email address book - friends, family, business contacts, even casual acquaintances you met recently. You get a few sales, you see a few hundred dollars in your affiliate commissions account. Impressed? Suddenly, the sales come to a complete grinding halt. Zero sales. You feel completely dejected. Now what? Here are three things to look at to ensure your affiliate marketing longevity.

• Profile Your Prospects

The main reason most new affiliate marketers fail is because they have no idea who they are selling their products to.

If you intend to be in affiliate marketing for the long haul, you need to exercise long-term planning to ensure your success. It cannot be an arbitrary mass email (or spam mailing) exercise.

This means you need to invest time and effort to understand your market and your website visitor demographics. Information such as their age, sex location, hobbies occupation income level, will give you an idea of their likes and dislikes, giving you invaluable insight for the next step of the process.

• Profile Your Products and Services

People go onto the Internet to look for information to solve problems they are facing.

An example: a man in his 40s who is facing the prospect of premature baldness will be looking for information on how to reduce hair loss and possibly reverse this potentially embarrassing problem he is facing.

Premature balding is a major issue faced by many men, if you are able to provide the appropriate product or service to solve their problems, you will be virtually guaranteed a sale.As a side-effect, you will benefit financially as well.

Timing is also a key factor in affiliate marketing. The more urgent the need,the more is price insensitive people tend to be.

Here is an example:

On a rainy day, people were being willing to pay more for an umbrella to shield them from getting wet, compared to a dry day.

When natural disasters, such as a hurricane or tornado is about to hit an area, people will be willing to pay more for water, food and emergency supplies, compared to normal circumstances.

Research is key then to be able to profile the most appropriate products and services to meet your visitors needs.If you are able to do this successfully and continuously than your successes are affiliate marketer will be virtually guaranteed

• The Follow Up

Research shows that it generally takes about seven follow ups (which can include postcards, phone calls, faxes and emails) before a buying decision is made.

That means the prospect has to be exposed to the product or service about an average of seven times before they make the decision to buy.

It is important not just to promote the product or service once and leave the prospect to their own devices, crossing your fingers that they might choose to buy your product.

Instead, successful affiliate marketers will continue to follow up with their prospects.

In your series of follow ups, you can highlight issues that they may not be aware. This can include ways in which they can benefit from using the product and service. You can also highlight the savings in terms of time and money they stand to gain by using the product.

If your prospects see the logic behind your marketing, most rational people will make the decision to buy a relevant product or service for their needs.

If you fail to complete the sale, it could be an indication that you have not done enough to convince them of their benefits of your product. You will need to take appropriate actions to get the results you desire.