The percentage behind affiliate marketing is that:

20 percent of affiliates produce 80 percent of all income; while.

80 percent of affiliates generate 20 percent of all income.


Ironic but true.

You would almost certainly want to be one of those 20 percent that is earning the 80 percent of the total earnings. Who wouldn't?


Follow these basic steps, and you will find yourself sharing the profits that the most fortunate ones are getting.


1. The best affiliate marketer covers their web site links. Cloaking affiliate links may not seem necessary, but it actually is. Apparently, visitors will not tend to click on your link when they see that it is leading to an affiliate program on your site once they point their mouse over them.


The usual tendency is for them to go directly to the affiliate domain. Thus ignoring your affiliate ID from the URL displayed. The best way to avoid this problem is by covering your URL. There are cloaking tools available over the Internet that you can take advantage of.


2. Successful affiliate marketers create and distribute their articles. Writing articles regarding your market niche is necessary to expand your reputation as a specialist in your field.


You can get the greatest benefits not just from writing these articles but also from getting those articles published and reprinted by other site owners and ezine publishers. Your articles will then give you both reputation and links from other web sites because of the resource box attached at the each of each article.


3. Affiliate marketers focus on a market niche. Loading your site with content that is focused on a certain product or service niche is one way of getting more web traffic in your target market.

There are tools over the Internet that can help you point out market niches that is important for your website.


4. Top affiliate marketers uses autoresponders. Autoresponders are important tools that makes you capable of sending a timed series of email messages to those persons that signed up for them.

Most of the time, these autoresponders are sent through by a third party provider. Look for the best provider that will cater to your autoresponder needs.


5. Smart affiliate marketers build web pages in order to pre-sell. Create either testimonial pages or review pages that talk about and pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with. This is the best method of getting increased orders for your chosen affiliate programs.


Many programs truly offer an article or recommended text to sell their products for you and permits duplication of those articles with your links implanted.


6. An outstanding affiliate marketer collects email addresses. The best affiliates gather email addresses on their web site by presenting free reports thru autoresponders, giving out ebooks and newsletter signup forms.


This method is best used in building your own list of email addresses to contact. This also lets you contact potential customers that clicked away once they got into the reaffiliate program website.


7. Top affiliate marketers markets everywhere. You can advertise using PPC or ezine advertising depending on your market niche. Some categories of Pay-per-click can be expensive, but advertising somewhere is needed to get additional traffic to your site.


There are some good bargains in ezine advertising and some less popular PPC engines other than Yahoo’s Overture and Google’s AdWords you can check out.


8. Affiliate marketers optimize for the search engines. Search engine optimization is now getting more complex as new and more webmasters participate. But the basics put into your site can add to your visibility over time.


The most critical of the many SEO techniques is the use title tags that shows individual page content. Many webmasters write a master title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worst thing you could do for search engine ranking.


9. Affiliate marketers have their own mailing lists. The best of affiliate marketers has their own newsletter or ezine and gathers email addresses on their site to build their list of subscribers.


Having this list allows regular contact with potential customers interested in your site, your product and your market niche.


If you understand and make use of the above-mentioned techniques, you can be one of the top people that are making it big in affiliate marketing. What are you waiting for?