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Affiliate Marketing –  How Competitive Is It?

When you watch a football game on television, you can easily realize how games are won or lost in the fight that takes place on the scrimmage line. Offensive plays are planned to protect the quarterback and/or to open up holes in the defense so that yardage can be gained.

Defensive tactics are designed to sack the quarterback or close holes that would allow yardage to be gained. Quarterbacks and coaches get the credit for wins and blame for losses but the battle is won or lost in the trenches.

Affiliate marketing is a lot like a football game just without the bruises and sore muscles. As an affiliate marketer you must design offensive plays and defensive plays that will put you in a position to win the affiliate wars.

When you are one of many marketers who are trying to sell the very same product to the very same consumers, you had better have a plan to get at least your fair share of the market or more.

Every niche market on the Internet is highly competitive. If it isn’t competitive then there can’t possibly be much of a customer base to sell to. That is just the nature of all Internet marketing and in every niche.

Maybe you do have a long and impressive list of paid customers. That’s great! It means you have already won several of the affiliate marketing contests and come out on top. The problem is there are always those up and coming marketers who want your customers on their lists.

Your list and your competitor’s lists may well contain many of the same names and email addresses. Just having a list will not be enough to assure you of a victory when selling an affiliate product. You have to design some offensive plays that will assure that your customers buy from you and not from your competitors.
 
So, you ask, what is it that I can do that will assure that my customers will buy from me? The answer is just one word… unique!

You have to be unique. You have to offer something that sets you completely apart from your competitors. You have to make your offer for a product or service for which you are an affiliate more attractive to buy from you than it is to buy from you competitors.

If you simply send out a marketing email advertising a product or service that you are an affiliate marketer for, you need to remember that there are dozens or maybe even hundreds of other marketers who are sending out marketing email advertising the exact same product or service and many of them are sending them to the same people that you are. You have to do something to make sure that your customers buy from you…you have to be unique.

There are several ways to achieve uniqueness. One way is to have established yourself as an expert in the field for which the product or service is being sold. You have to have become not only visible but credible, as well. This visibility and credibility is not easily achieved. It takes a lot of hard work, time and effort.

Visibility and credibility are established by taking such measures as writing and marketing articles and E-Books, posting to blogs and forums, appearing as an expert on teleseminars and webinars, etc. The fact is that when people know you and trust you, they buy from you. They will buy from you even is your competitors are offering a better deal or more incentives.

People do not like to buy from strangers. The Internet is a big impersonal and even frightening place to many consumers. They want to feel like they know and trust the people that they buy products and services from. The time, effort and energy that you put into becoming visible and credible is the best time, effort and energy investment that you will ever make. Reputation is everything in the world of Internet marketing. Credibility makes you unique.
 
Another very important thing that you can do to insure that your customers buy a product or service for which you are an affiliate marketer from you and not from one of your competitors is to give them a very good and compelling reason to make the purchase from you. Offer something extra or a lot of different extras that will enhance the value of the product that you are marketing.

No matter what the niche or what the product is that is being marketed, there are free gifts that you can find that will make the product a better value if it is purchased from you.

For example: if you are marketing an E-Book about Internet marketing, you could add several additional free E-Books concerning different aspects of the broad subject of Internet marketing.

E-Books can be downloaded from PLR sites or even from E-Book banks and repositories. Another free gift that people can’t ever seem to get enough of is free utilities. There are many on the Internet and you can bet that there are some that will fit right in with whatever product or service that you are promoting.

While other marketers who are selling the very same product that you are, simply send out marketing emails that recommend the product to their lists, you will be adding value to the product and doing it for free to boot.

Add extras! Add free gifts! Even better than extras and free gifts is additional help to use the product or service that is being sold. You can offer a free teleseminar for those who buy the product or service from you that will make the product or service better or easier to use.

You can most likely even get the producer or the product or service to speak at your event if you plan far enough ahead. People just love teleseminars… and they love free…when you add teleseminar and free together, you will have a winning play that might just score the proverbial touchdown for you.

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Niche Blueprint is one of the most revolutionary and unique products to hit the internet in years. The developer, Tim Godfrey and Steve Clayton, claim that with Niche Blueprint you will be able to build a $1 Million E-Commerce business online.

Without any other tools. Without buying or paying for any other software. Without having your own product or list of customers.

And you will be able to start making thousands of dollars each month right away without any technical knowledge.

This sounds almost too good. Other gurus have said the same things about their programs that did not work as advertised. But it was enough to hook me in a little so that I wanted to take a deeper look at Niche Blueprint.

What I found was that Niche Blueprint is a sound system designed to be duplicated by anyone willing to follow simple instructions. This is not a mystical black hat program but a solid down to earth system.

But you do have to take action. If you are searching for an automated push-button system to let you just set back and count your income, you need to keep looking. This is not it and in fact it doesn’t exist. If you are willing to put in just a little effort, Niche Blueprint can be you golden key to a $1 Million E-Commerce Business.

As with any business if there is a way for someone to steal they will find it. It is up to you to protect yourself from fraud. If another affiliate were to get hold of your vendor I.D., it would be a simple matter to remove your affiliate I.D. and insert his or her own.

Affiliates are very important to vendors and those vendors need to take steps to assure that their links are not visible to customers browsing their website. A couple of viable precautions are using a redirect link, or a cloaking code. There are also programs which the vendors can purchase that will allow him or her to offer the affiliates security such as Hop Guard. Your business relies heavily upon affiliates channeling buyers to your site and Hop Guard encrypts the affiliate’s link so that they can be assured that no one will make off with their commissions. There are cloaking programs available, one such is Affiliate Cloner another is Affiliate Shield. These programs provide you with a way to cloak your link so that your affiliate I.D. does not show. If it can’t be seen it can’t be changed. Click Mate is a program that focuses on linking all your affiliates to all of your products along with giving you the ability to notify all of your affiliates when you have a new product. Click Mate also helps with tracking and security.

Using products like these will show your affiliates that you are a real professional who is concerned about providing the security they need to be able to do their jobs. Easy to use, the affiliate merely has to enter his link and an encrypted link will be immediately assigned to them. Nothing is 100% foolproof but these are some of the best on the market.

In another scenario, which although unethical isn’t technically fraud, a customer of yours, once on the publishers site could simply click an available link and sign up as an affiliate themselves and purchase under his or her own I.D. instead of yours. Some of the things a publisher can do to protect their affiliate’s commissions from this kind of dealing would be to find ways to make it less probable that someone will see the links.

They can put the links on a page that is separate from the ordering pages. Make certain that these are pages that a search engine will not try to index. As an example, you could put the links on the FAQ’s page. You can also set up pages separate from the ordering areas where the affiliate program is explained and visitors to your site are told that the program is available and they only need to contact you for further information. Another solution would be a separate page that the affiliates link to, which would still have all of your information and the order link, leaving your vendor page intact where you could safely have things like the sign up link for new affiliates since the buyers sent by your affiliates would not end up on that page.

By: Pawel Reszka

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

My good friend Adeel Chowdry has come out with a really good tool for Cloaking banner links, and the best part is that it really works, and costs less that a trip to Starbucks  Check it out here