If the vendor’s sales letter isn’t converting very high, you can sometimes write your own sales letter. To find out if you can, visit the vendor’s sales page, then click on the buy link. If you aren’t sent directly to Paypal or Stormpay or somewhere similar, you can probably cut and paste that link, and use it in your own sales letter.

I’m not going to go into creating your own sales letter here, though, because it’s quite a bit beyond the scope of this book. I’d recommend that you check out some other tools such as Instant Sales Letters and 22 Secret Hot Buttons. They’ll get you on the right track to writing effective sales letters, and they will help you make sale after sale.

Is there a service you can use to help you get started with affiliate programs?

You bet! I’m a member of a site called Wealthy Affiliate, and I think their service is great. Basically, they give you keyword lists that you can use with PPC ad campaigns (discussed later), but you can use the lists for anything, including AdSense sites, product creation ideas, etc.

They also give you a few choices for affiliate programs to promote, and they research them pretty well to find out if they convert well, offer good commissions, etc. Honestly, if you’re willing to put in some time to dive right into affiliate marketing, this is the place for you. They even offer their own affiliate program exclusively to their members, and I must say that it’s a very good program to promote in and of itself.

I’ve left blogging until the end, because it really applies to all of the topics I’ve covered here. There are quite a few blog companies/sites you can go with, but I recommend using WordPress because it’s free and you can host it on your site (and thus, put your own ads on it). It also has the best functionality among the blog software I have researched.

Niche blog can be one of the most effective IM tools you can have. The search engines love them, because they’re updated frequently, they (usually) contain great content, and most of the time, they’re not trying to sell anything to their readers. (I’ll talk about how to do that in a bit).

Keeping Readers Interested

You really have to treat a blog like an email list. You have to build a relationship with your readers, and you do that through content. If you just slap a bunch of ads and promotions up on your blog, people won’t come. But if you provide good, fresh content, they’ll keep coming back again and again.

You should also stay away from posting blatant promotions. Blogs don’t work in quite the same way as most other things; the people who are reading your blog want information, not product pitches. So, instead of giving them the good ol’ “I use this and love it” from your email list promotions, concentrate on the product comparison and case study routes. This will arm your readers with the information they want, and give you the sales that you want. Win/Win, eh?

Getting Traffic

The first thing you need to do after you make a post is go to Pingoat and “ping” the search engines. This will let them know that you’ve added a post, so they can spider and index it. Now, don’t get over zealous with this, because if you ping them repeatedly, they’re going to think you’re spamming them, and de-list your blog, which is not good at all. Aside from pinging, you’ll want to utilize all of the traffic techniques I’ve mentioned in this book, because all of them can be great ways to get traffic to your blog.