If you’ve never promoted an affiliate product before and aren’t sure where to start, we’ve put together this 5 step guide to help you get started.
Step 1 – Get Your Affiliate Link
Step 2 – Create an Email Signature
Step 3 – Blog About Our Product
Step 4 – Create a Squidoo Lens About Our Product
Step 5 – Write and Publish Articles
Get Your Affiliate Link
In order to participate in our affiliate program, you must register and get your unique referral links for our products. We use a shopping cart service called e-Junkie to manage our online sales and affiliate program. Follow this link to create an affiliate account at e-Junkie and have Go-To Guy! Enterprises automatically added to your list of merchants to promote.
When you have completed your registration, select the ‘Get Affiliate Code’ option on the Affiliate Admin page. This will bring up a dropdown list of all of the merchants you are currently registered to promote – pick Go-To Guy! Enterprises from the list and click the ‘Get Affiliate Code’ button at the bottom of the page.
The next screen will provide a dropdown list of all of our products that have sales commissions for affiliates. Choose the product you want to promote and click the ‘Get Affiliate Code’ button to get the link code for that product.
In addition to giving you your unique promotional code for the product, the Product Sales Price and the Affiliate Share for the product are listed near the bottom of the page. This will let you see exactly what price the product is selling for and how much you stand to make from each sale.
Create an Email Signature
An easy way to spread the word is to create an email signature that includes your affiliate link. Then, with every email you send out, you’ll have a small promotion tagged onto the end of every message.
The important thing to keep in mind when writing an email signature is not to try and ‘sell’ the product. A better approach is to raise a curiosity building question and link the entire thing to your affiliate link.
Altering the text by making is bold or coloring it red can help ensure that the signature link gets noticed – but don’t go overboard.
Blog About Our Product
One very powerful affiliate marketing strategy is to target people who are already in the process of making a buying decision. A great way to connect with those people is to write a product review and post it on your blog.
Creating a review allows you to talk about the product without ‘selling’ it. Explain what it has done for you. Also, make sure to address some of the shortcomings as well so you give a complete impression of the product.
Search for some other reviews and forum discussions about the product to gather a handful of testimonial quotes to include with your review. Then, close by offering links for ‘more information’ that use your affiliate code and lead back to the product sales page.
If you don’t already have a blog of your own, the easiest way to start is to create a free blog at Blogger.com.
Create a Squidoo Lens About Our Product
The review that you created can be re-purposed to create a ‘Lens’ at the Squidoo.com website. A lens is a tightly focused single web page hosted on the Squidoo site. Lenses are easy and fast to create and can include videos, text, polls, lists, and a whole bunch of other types of content.
To give your lens broader appeal, make it about broader topic that the product addresses and use the review as one of the components in the lens and not the whole thing.
Lenses tend to rank well in the search engines and can be used instead of (or in concert with) blogs to help get the word out about the products you are promoting.
Article Marketing
Writing and submitting short articles to directories like ezineArticles.com and GoArticles.com is a tried and true way to attract qualified leads for your site. When you submit an article to one of the directories, they give you what is called an ‘Author’s Resource Box’ where you can include a little promotion about yourself with a link to your website.
If you write an interesting article based on a topic related to the product you are promoting that makes readers curious to know more about your subject, they will be very likely to follow the links to your site because they like what you’ve already shown them.
Don’t link directly to the product in your resource box, but rather link to the review on your blog or the Squidoo Lens you created.