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.

The importance of niche affiliate marketing program options is huge, but you need to identify the niche first, and build a website to cover it right afterwards.

So how can I find a niche?

Keep your eyes open, read the newspapers, get newsletters. If you are always up to date with anything new that hits the market, with every medical or science discovery, you simply cannot miss finding a great niche. If you still are unsure on how to find a good niche, try this: sit in your favorite armchair and jot down 10 – 20 things that you have some interest in and that you think could be a niche. Then do your research – run searches in the search engines and see how those topics are covered. Let’s say you find a weird niche like "rabbit clothing" – is there sufficient interest in it? Also, even if you do get visitors on your site, will there be a niche affiliate marketing program that offers rabbit clothing? If your niche is too specific, try to develop a broader online portal, maybe about "pet clothing", in which an important part would be dedicated to your initial niche.

Examples of niche affiliate marketing programs

Many "niche hunters" charge a lot of money to find and reveal niches to webmasters looking to develop a site on that particular topic. It’s also good to know that what’s considered a niche today, might be an overpopulated field a few months from now. One of the hottest niches today is that for mesothelioma cancer, with lawyers paying huge amounts of money to get leads from websites. Hoodia-gordoni is another niche, and plenty of niche affiliate marketing programs have developed recently so as to supply weight loss products related to this diet. Other niche affiliate marketing program offers may include unexploited topics from the medical world or recent technological innovations. Identifying a niche quickly and building up a good site to cover it is a fool-proof success to earning money online.

How to make the most out of free affiliate programs?
Having a good traffic flow on your website is the first and probably the most important step you have to take. Create and interesting website and optimize it for the search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN (see our Web Development and Search Engine Optimization guides for more info). Once the traffic is there, you have to create positive copy that also stays objective when presenting a certain service or product. If you are a webmaster and you have just joined a free affiliate program, try to present the benefits of the products your affiliates have, but don’t turn your site into a sales pitch.

Your web page text is not meant to sell the advertiser’s products – it has to get the reader’s attention and place them in a "ready to buy" state of mind. The quality of the products or services offered by the company advertising on your website is also vital if you want to make more money online. Offer a high quality informative website with free affiliate program advertisements that promote good services and high quality products, and you are bound to increase your website profits.

Google Adsense tutorial
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By Michael Rad Published: 12/8/2006