When people start affiliate marketing, they likely have just one goal in mind: to become the next affiliate superstar and to start selling products in the thousands of millions so that they can give up the day job and start travelling the world.

We hear these success stories all the time and we’re constantly told it’s possible. The problem is, that when most people try and emulate that success, they end up with a few paltry sales and a lot of time wasted and hopes dashed.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is defined as a revenue sharing relationship between advertisers or merchants and online publishers or affiliates. It is a low cost way for merchants to sell their products and services.

In this type of online business, you don’ have to take any risk because you only have to pay the affiliate once the result is achieved. Once a customer is gained, a portion of the profit from that customer will be given to the affiliate as commission. 

Usually, an affiliate gets a commission for referring clicks, leads or sales to the merchant’ website. The said affiliate income can be a fixed dollar amount or a fixed percentage.

From this simple commission-based referral system, some affiliates become experts on this field. In fact, some of them are gaining more than five figures every month.

However, among the thousands of marketers, only 1 to 5% of them reached this level. And if you’e among the lucky ones who achieve this so-called elite level, you can now be aptly called a super affiliate.

This means you are capable of achieving noteworthy percentage of sales or traffic on your merchant’ website.

Affiliate Superstars  are not only experts on search engine optimization; they are also great in newsletter marketing, email marketing, reciprocal linkages, keyword optimization, link exchanges, advertising in forums and o ther methods to advertise and promote their products and services.

But how does a person become Affiliate Superstar?

Making your way to super affiliate stardom is not that easy; and it surely won’ happen overnight. Bear in mind that you need to embrace some tactics, carry out effective online business strategies and of course give hefty time commitment.

You can’ be an affiliate superstar without blood and sweat and without the following traits – patience, persistence and thirst for knowledge. Matched with efficient strategy, these three traits provide you the formula towards super affiliate stardom.

Affiliate marketing strategies are a bit difficult but they are achievable; you just have to work hard on it. First, look for a unique and exceptional niche and focus in it. The reason why most people in the affiliate marketing business don’t turn out to be very successful is that they try to offer almost everything under the sun instead of giving all their attention in a particular niche market.

If you want to become an affiliate superstar, try not to scatter all your efforts; concentrate on your niche and make it grow by means of promoting, advertising and selling it well.

The next step you must do after you have established your affiliate storehouse is to promote it. Most affiliates resort to pay-per-click engines. But what’ more advisable is to discover how to accomplish organic search results or better yet, hire a search engine marketing company. Through this, you can be saved from losing all your profits on pay-per-click engines.

It doesn’t have to be this way though. If you’re smart about it, then there’s no reason you can leapfrog the rest of the marketers and go straight to the top as a superstar affiliate!

How to Become the Next Affiliate Superstar

The Tried and Tested Formula

The first tip for doing this is to emulate the people you want to be as successful as. Find someone who you genuinely believe is making a killing from affiliate marketing and do your background checks by asking about them on Warrior Forum or just following them around the web for a bit. Are they hanging out with other big names? Are they showing signs of being ‘in the money’?

Once you’re sure, you should then sign up to their mailing list, go on their site and generally become one of their prospective customers. Instead of buying from them though, you’re just going to learn from them. What product are they selling? How are they convincing their audience to buy?

You can then lift that exact same product and exact same formula and do the same thing yourself. That’s the beautiful thing about affiliate marketing – you can use the very same formula!

Stand Out

When you start doing this though, you’ll of course be competing with all the other affiliate marketers who had the same idea (not to mention that initial superstar). The trick to succeeding is to do what they probably aren’t – by adding value. Could you give away a free e-book with your sales for instance?

Affiliate Superstar – Go Big or Scale Up

The other thing to do is scale up. Want to guarantee success? Then sell 100 affiliate products – one of them is bound to become a hit! Likewise, make sure you’re going big in terms of the amount of work you’re doing, the amount of money you’re putting in and the amount of social media you’re doing. The simple rule is that if you want to make a full-time living from an online job, you need to treat it like your full time living. One hour a month is not enough!

Why Finding the Route to Market is the Key to Affiliate Success

It is potentially possible to make big money from affiliate marketing and really it’s the closest thing there is to a ‘fool proof’ technique for making money online.

All you need to do is find a product that’s selling really well already, to emulate the techniques that others were using to sell it, and then to start selling it yourself. If it worked for them, then there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t work for you too!

So if you’re trying to sell a product and you’re not getting any takers this can be very frustrating. What are you doing wrong? How can you fix the flaw in your plan?

One common way to increase your sales immediately overnight is to find a route to market. Here we will look at what that is and why it’s often the magic ingredient in the affiliate marketing formula.

What is a Route to Market?

A route to market is essentially a method of accessing a specific demographic or audience that you are trying to sell to.

So if you have an e-book about knitting patterns, then that demographic is quite likely to be old ladies and more specifically, old ladies who enjoy knitting. If you can find a route to that market – a way to communicate with them directly – then you can make a lot of money from affiliate marketing.

Examples of Routes to Market

So in this example of the old ladies, how do you go about finding a route to market that will work?

The simple question to ask yourself is where these people hang out and spend their time – both online and in the real world.

Online you might have a few destinations. Perhaps there’s a forum somewhere where people discuss knitting?

Maybe there’s a website aimed directly at ‘knitting fans’?

In the real world, examples might be the bingo club (not to reinforce stereotypes) or perhaps a knitting magazine. If you can get your affiliate link into a knitting magazine of a circulation of 3,000 – then imagine how much money that could make for you almost overnight.

This is the power of finding a route to market and it should be an integral aspect of your plan. In fact, you should identify several routes to market before you even select which product it is you want to sell! 

Have you ever thought about creating a full or part-time source of income through the internet? Did you know you can do this without even creating your own products or owning an expensive website. You can even get paid without consumers actually having bought anything!

Affiliate Marketing is an easy way for you to make money online. You get paid to generate leads to other people’s websites, products and services.

If a visitor does a specific action on these websites, you get paid. These actions could be a customer clicking on a specific link, completing a signup form or registering for a free sample or product information.

Is Affiliate Marketing Right for Your Business?

One final word about becoming a super affiliate – always strive to provide the best for your website visitors. The best content, the best quality products and the best information.

When they trust you, like you and value your information, they’ll click on your links and make purchases.

Conclusion 

These are just few suggestions and ideas if you want to boost your affiliate income. Let me reiterate, you have to be patience, persistence and knowledgeable. Then, follow the above mentioned strategies and you’l surely find yourself on the road to super affiliate wealth.