Online profit is all marketers main focus. Affiliate marketing is possible the simplest method around to start making money on the Internet. But this doesn’t mean signing up for all the potential affiliate programs you see and sit back and wait for the fat affiliate checks to roll in!

The message - online success require money and time. You cannot prosper on the Internet without spending time and money.

What is affiliate marketing? When you become an affiliate you have an agreement with a vendor to bring as many visitors as possible to his salespage. For this he give you a percentage of the sales price of the product sold. Most affiliate program give you a unique link they recommend you promote as heavy as you can. But since we know that the conversion rate for such traffic seldom is more than 1-2% it means that for every 100 visitors there is maximum 2 who buys, the rest is gone forever.

Collecting name and email address for all visitors is a better strategy for affiliate marketers. This we can do by sending them to a squeeze page (or landing page) where the visitor has only two options - provide their name and email adress or click away from the page. By offering a report or something else considered of value some will give their name and email. In exchange for their name and email adress they get an ebook, report or similar - the “listbait”. A double opt in prospect can be emailed as often as we want since he/she have accepted to receive information until they “buy or die” they purchase the initial offer or something else, or they unsubscribe from the list.

When the visitors to the squeeze page has given their firstname and email address they are members of your list of subscribers. Since they all have to confirm their email to receive the “list bait” you provide, this will be double opt in subscribers. Now you can start emailing offers for the vendor’s products as well as offers for other vendors products. This strategy is used by most successful affiliate merketers today. This is the two-step marketing model, and it is much more effective than directly promoting the vendors link. We don’r look like agressive marketers when we give a report or something else of value - we did them a favour. We are rather giving free advice to the visitor through the report offered. Offers made to new opt-ins will often lead to slaes!

As can be seen from the outline above, affiliate marketing can bring in more money in a consistent manner if a two step model is used. Automation is core and an autoresponder will be used for this automation. This will be discussed in the next article in the series.