There are a lot of blogger good at marketing that only tell their readers what they want to read and make profit of their naivety. Unfortunately, this is far away from quality blogging, because almost all blogs of this kind that i’ve seen offer almost no useful informations and only general facts that can be found everywhere.

Readers are subscribing when seeing that blogger earns a lot of money in the hope they will find out how to do it. But rarely this will happen because nobody is that fool to tell their secret and worse than that, a lot are lying just to get a strong readership and profit.

Those blogs mean time loss and a good blogger has to manage his time very good to increase productivity, so only subscribe and read the blogs that can really help you, don’t just get fooled by everyone.

Of course nobody will tell big secrets, but by reading a lot of useful informations you can make an idea of what you have to do and test, until you get somewhere good.

What do you think of those bloggers ?

For the last few days, StumbleUpon has continuously banned accounts and a lot are complaining that the traffic has went down. I have a lot of friends that were power users and got their accounts banned for different reasons or for no reason at all.

I have also noticed a decrease in traffic from StumbleUpon, but i can’t tell for sure if it’s because of the algorithm or because my websites have been down and flagged as unavailable, due to my servers issues. I will be able to tell more exactly in the future, when I’ll be sure I’ve got rid of that flag.

Lately, Stumble became the best social network, from my point of view, being easier to market than Digg and sometimes brining more traffic. Unfortunately, Stumble isn’t such a good link bait as Digg, but can still bring some quality, related links.

As you might already now, Digg has screwed it’s algorithm really badly from it’s last updates and has hired moderators that won’t let anything pass to the front page, if they don’t like it. That’s why a lot of users left and some of them joined and started using Stumble. Now, Stumble seems to have taken Diggs example, by screwing it’s algorithm.

There truly are a lot of accounts that ruin the system and have to be banned, but in my opinion, they have to focus on aggressively spamming profiles, haters, flamers and others that do a lot of bad and less on those that do promote their websites, along with many others.

With this I have to say Social Networking has reached a crisis point especially for Social Media Marketers, but for regular users too. Some new idea has to come out and I’m curious when this will happen. Considering this, it seems nothing can’t stay clean, but also this was already known. When something gets big, it has more and more issues, because everyone tries to profit.

I would like to read your opinion about this.

1. Choose a good product

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.