What advertiser will be crazy now to pay for his ads to be shown on any of those two search engines, when people are paid to search and will probably just click the ads by mistake, without any potential interest on the product ?

Microsoft has been desperate for a while to grab a piece of the market and has proved it when they tried to buy Yahoo!, but that was a good move, at least in comparison with this one. It looks like they have to think about changing their marketing team, because their decisions are only going to harm the company and make them lose money.

I hope at least Google won’t take the wrong road and keep fighting with the others by relevancy. Anyway they will probably see an increase in ad sales and advertisers moving from Ask and Microsoft.

The first thing when you want to start doing affiliate marketing is choosing one or more products to promote. Put yourself in your visitors shoes and think if you’d buy a doubtable product. Well, I’m sure you won’t so make sure the products you sell are trusted so you will definitely get a higher conversion than a low quality product.

Do not try to sell products that over exaggerate on features that don’t meet, but choose products that are good and useful and point the features.

2. Don’t lie

Don’t lie about your product. If you’ve read the first point and you will follow my words, then you will chose a good product, but you have to only point it’s features, not lie or exaggerate because the visitor will then go to the product page, see you lie and leave, without converting into a sale.

3. Point the advantages

Your visitor is a potential customer that has to be convinced about the product you want him to buy. So point the product’s features and advantages clearly, tell him why he has to buy it, but as i’ve stated before, be honest. A happy visitor is more possibly a potential buyer, so make him happy, tell him what he wants to hear with honesty.

4. Present your product

Affiliate marketing isn’t about putting a link on a page that says “Buy MacBook Air Here”, you have to tell him what you are about to sell him, tell him advantages, disadvantages in a clear way and also show him pictures. You know, one photo can mean more than one thousand words so he has to see what is it about.

5. Build a landing page that converts

Affiliate marketing can be done through many ways, but almost all of them need a landing page. The landing page is an important factor in convincing the potential buyer to become a buyer, so you have to make sure you offer an easy navigation, simple, good looking design that your visitor will trust.

6. Focus on quality traffic, not quantity
Not everyone searching for a product is really interested in buying and to be more clear, only a few from those searching for a product are going to buy and the others are only curious. So you don’t have to focus on the amount of traffic, but on it’s quality. And in affiliate marketing quality is equal to targeting, so you don’t need social networks visitors here, you mostly have to focus on people looking to buy.

The best traffic for affiliate marketing comes from the search engines and you have to focus on some keywords, the most common is “Buy <<and here comes your product>>”. It will probably be hard to rank well for this keyword, so you’ll have to try long tail keywords.

7. Track your results

Affiliate marketing is about tracking and tweaking, so you have to track every visitor and it’s every move and click. You have to see what converts better, what ad sells most, then try to modify your placement, design and texts. Then track and see what happens, until you get to a satisfying conversion rate. But you never have to stop tweaking, because your landing can’t be perfect and there is always an improvement to make, you just have to find it.

Look and design

Take care what design or theme do you use, because it may scare the readers or it may be a hard job for them to find out what are they interested in. Don’t place too many animated gifs, weird images and unpleasant font.

Also, don’t fulfill your website with ads, but try to blend them and place fewer, not to disturb the visitors.

Content

I will not talk about the quality of the content, because that definitely has to be high, but the formatting.

Don’t post blocks of text, 3 pages long, because the readers will get bored. Don’t post when you remember, meaning you post 3 posts today and 2 after three weeks, but try to post them regularly. Also, don’t post too many posts, because the readers will get bored. You should find out how many is too many in your niche.

Put yourself in your readers shoes

This is the most useful tip, because there may be other issues that can scare the visitor i might have missed and you have to check your website to find them. In essence, try not to use malicious scripts, pop-ups, expandable flash ads, floaters or anything that might disturb your visitor from it’s try to read the content.

The company that runs the campaign is probably paying a lot of money to another insurance company’s employee that, when a client goes to him to make an insurance he exaggerates the price, making it sound like 2 times higher than the other company’s and then recommends him the other company. This is neither legal or ethic, because they were practically ruining that company, by driving all their clients to them.

Probably both that employee and the company that runs the marketing campaign will get a lawsuit. If they don’t get caught, that’s an extremely profitable campaign.