Affiliate Marketers: Are You Using This Powerful Affiliate Marketing Tactic?

By: J Andrew Morrison
How can you differentiate yourself from all the other schmoes out there offering the exact same thing you are? There are many difficult tasks you face as an affiliate marketer but I am sure you will agree setting yourself apart from other affiliates sits near the top of your list.

Most of you rely on marketing skill and ad copy to stand out. Adjusting your PPC bids to bump your competition into oblivion is a daily occurrence. Slight of word redirection tricks are standard tools you use to guide that extra customer from your competition's camp. You sweat and toil to make your competitors ads disappear completely. What if it didn't have to be this hard and brutal?

Imagine being able to move in next to a successful campaign of your competitor and start funneling customers right out of their pot? Imagine sliding into a niche and immediately catapulting yourself to a top selling position? Well you can, and the secret is...

You need to know something before I share this with you. You need to have your own web space for this to work. I'm not talking about a web site, with lots of pages and navigation and consistent graphics and all the other things involved. You just need a place to put single pages and to put images for use in other "free" advertising venues.

And, if you think your own web space optional for your affiliate marketing endeavors you're wrong. You'll make some money without it but never excel. If 10 bucks per month is too much for you to invest in your business you should just stop. Go shmooz your boss or a head hunter and make more money at your day job. There is affordable web hosting. It's the web host choice of many marketers, including myself a 10 year web developer veteran. Without hosting won't be able to take advantage of many opportunities, including the one I'm sharing today.

So here it is, the tactic that will propel you past your competition.

Take advantage of offers from affiliate networks allowing you to offer incentives. Before you groan and moan thinking about the sites offering free iPods for trudging through a pages and pages and pages of offers with an endless parade of other offers and pestering your friends to do the same, that's not it. I feel your pain, and that's not what this technique is about.

In fact you will find this method to be more effective and easier than the head to head fight your accustomed to. You simply find an inexpensive service or product highly targeted at the audience of your affiliate campaign offer. As an example, if you are promoting an eBay success product paying $30 in bounty offer your customers a book about eBay from Amazon that you can get for $10. Test different bonuses to see which ones increase customer pull and conversions rates. With a little effort your "exclusive" offers will be drawing enough business from your competition to increase your bottom line despite the extra cost of incentives.

So there it is. Your creativity and niche knowledge will allow to go forth and dominate niche after niche. Be sure to keep up on the affiliate programs available allowing you to incentivize some or all of your offers. Go out and slam the market. Live your dreams.