Are you ready to hear a painful truth before I share with you the secrets of affiliate marketing behind successful affiliates? Figures show that 90 percent of affiliates make a total of 10 percent of all the affiliate revenue generated. So this means that the super affiliates, the remaining 10 percent of affiliates make the rest of 90 percent of all affiliate income. Which group are you in? I am sure you want to unlock the affiliate marketing secrets responsible for the success of top affiliates.

Master the following secrets of affiliate marketing and you are well on your way to join the league of super affiliates.

1. Always Cloak Your Affiliate Link.

Whether it is a link you use in email marketing or a website link, be sure to hide the ugly looking link that tells the whole world it is an affiliate link. People get a bit sensitive and are not likely to click when they see that it is an affiliate link. Use affiliate cloaking tools or php redirects.

2. Use Article Marketing

Article marketing is a powerful workhorse in affiliate marketing and is one of the deadliest secret of affiliate marketing used by top affiliates. This is one form of content publishing which can be used to establish yourself as an authority figure. Brand yourself as an expert and you will have loyal customers. Not only so, your articles will drive targeted traffic from the search engines and indirectly from other related websites that post your article. To improve your reach and save time in the process automated article submission tools are becoming ever more popular.

3. Target Specific Niche For Marketing

Super affiliates use niche marketing. They target specific market niches rather than going for broad markets. It is easier for you to publish content that gets high ranking in the search engines for tight niches than broader markets as it can be overwhelmingly competitive with big established sites taking top spots in the search engines. We all understand that ranking well means more targeted traffic which then translates to sales. Once again, do a search around for tools to help you find profitable niches.

4. Create Presell Pages

Never send your prospect directly to the affiliate sales page. That is a big mistake made by newbie affiliates and even some veterans. Presell your prospect first with a review website or even some testimonials from past customers. The whole idea is to warm your prospect up, and get him or her excited before sending to the affiliate sales page. This would dramatically improve the chances of a conversion to sales. It is important therefore to find good affiliate programs with solid content and sales copy that you can modify for your presell pages.

5. Follow Up With Your Prospect

Did you know that traffic is valuable? While most affiliates would agree that driving traffic is a never-ending task and can be quite challenging even for experienced affiliates, many do not optimize their traffic. Many focus on bringing in fresh traffic but fail to capture them for follow up.

Now, it is more likely that someone would buy your affiliate product after being exposed for several times than just seeing it once. Most people do not buy on the first encounter but given enough time to warm them up to the benefits, the potential for them to convert into customers is much higher! Also, once they have bought from you, you can continue to make repeated sales from these customers. For that, an autoresponder can do a great job in sending a series of email messages.

These are truly powerful secrets of affiliate marketing that top affiliates are using.

Many elements come into play when implementing a successful affiliate marketing strategy. Yes, being an online affiliate marketer can be very lucrative. Let’s explore some important characteristics of a well established affiliate marketing campaign.

1. Affiliate Marketing Success Requires an Opt-in List

In order to be successful at affiliate marketing it is important to have your own opt-in list. This means that you need to have your own website with an opt-in page where people can subscribe to your newsletter. Once people have given you their email address you will not only be able to increase the exposure of people who have not bought a product from you and so encourage them to return and buy something, but you can also sell new products to existing customers and so make more sales. Few people will buy something the first time they visit your website but once they have bought something it is a lot easier to sell more products to them as they have built up trust in your company. Email marketing through an opt-in list is therefore vital for affiliate marketing success.

2. Optimize your Affiliate Marketing Website for the Search Engines

Search engine optimization is vital to affiliate marketing success. When creating your affiliate marketing website consider the keywords you are targeting and the optimization of your web pages. By paying attention to search engine optimization you will be able to get many more visitors to your website since most people use search engines to find what they are looking for and will make more affiliate sales.

3. Use Pay per Click Marketing such as Adwords to Ensure your Affiliate Marketing Success

Pay per click marketing is another way to boost your affiliate marketing sales and ensure your affiliate marketing success quickly. Pay per click advertising allows you to only pay for the people who are being sent to your website and you can start receiving visitors immediately after you start your campaign. By using features, benefits and negative qualifiers in a well worded pay per click ad you can ensure that you are getting the people you want to your website and then optimize your landing page to improve your sales.

4. Use Other Targeted Methods of Affiliate Marketing to Ensure your Success

Targeted marketing methods allow you to market to people who will really be interested in your product and include article marketing, forum marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click advertising as well as a number of other techniques. By using these targeted methods of advertising you can approach your target market and increase your affiliate sales.

5. Test and Track your Results

Testing and tracking of your affiliate marketing results is vital to your affiliate marketing success. Take time to split test your web pages, pay per click ads and other marketing methods. Test the results you get from different marketing means and find out what works best for you and where you should be focusing your efforts.

6. Stick with One Niche and Make It Work

The biggest mistake many affiliate marketers make is of jumping from one affiliate program to the next according to what seems to be hot at that particular time. The successful affiliate marketer will carefully choose their niche, a few affiliate products or streams of income within that niche and then make it work by treating it as a business and really getting to know the products that they are marketing.

In conclusion, affiliate marketing success means creating an opt-in list via your own website, optimizing your website for the search engines, using pay per click advertising and other targeted advertising methods.

In order to ensure your success at affiliate marketing you should also carefully choose your niche and stick with it, treating it as a business and gradually growing within it. You also need to test and track the results you are getting so that you can make improvements where needed.