Affiliate Marketing 101: How To Promote Just Any Product

Here is the post you´ve all been waiting for. I actually felt bad that I put it off so long that you guys started to remind me. I do apologize, and here goes.

Most of the time people get introduced to affiliate marketing by a product that they are told will make them a lot of money if they make just one sale a day! That goes to any affiliate product, and is particularly true in case of network marketing (where you are stuck with the product/company and you can only promote this thing that they have).

You are still going to do the market research because you need to find people who are interested in your product, where they hang out, and what do they search for. When you know this you´ll be able to target those people and increase your chances of making sales/sign ups (i.e.: conversion)

Here is how to do promote any product

1. If you don´t have the product it´s time to have it. Sometimes you can get a free copy/sample as an affiliate. Ask for it, if not … then buy it. A flexible refund policy is a good sign. It means they are confident about their product.

2. Ask yourself: Who might need this product? I´ll explain with an example, which is GDI (because most of the questions I get are ¨how to promote GDI¨). GDI provides domain registration and hosting (as a product) and a residual source of income (as a benefit).

Who might be interested in GDI´s domain registration and hosting?

First off, GDI hosting is one of the poorest in the industry. So you are not going to promote GDI to webmasters because GDI is out of the competition. Your target should be beginners who don´t know what is FTP, who in the world is HTML, or Fantas..who? As long as they only need an easy to build personal website, then they are a target.

Your target will be the group of people who are interested in building a website on their own domain, have their private email address on their own domain, and will definitely need a website builder in the hosting package.

Is this even a market? Let´s have a look.

Google keyword tool will tell us how many people are searching for terms that indicate they are beginners when it comes to virtual real estate (websites and alike).

That´s 74,000 searches every month for ¨how to build a website¨. Do you think you have a market? You bet you do.

So … here is your target audience. They search Google for ¨how to build a website¨. If you can explain to them how to build a website using GDI´s website builder (tutorials, pictures, and videos) you have a chance to get sign ups. Even better, you can pitch them to buy a one year of hosting because it´s cheaper than paying on a month-by-month basis.

You can also pitch them on the income opportunity, like this: ¨refer 10 people and your hosting is free¨.

The other direction is to approach people who are interested in the income opportunity. Definitely you need to stay away from affiliate marketers because GDI is a very weak offer for us. But for beginners it is the perfect income opportunity because it is very cheap compared to other network marketing ¨opportunities¨.

So .. your target is people who are looking for a cheap online business opportunity. Do you have a market? Let´s ask Google one more time.

2400 people world wide search for cheap online business each month. Do you have a market? I don´t think so. Not a big one at best.

So how to promote the income side of GDI?

Here are two suggestions:

1. Focus on the hosting side and pitch your subscribers into reffering others to reduce their hosting cost (or even get it for free). You´ll need to show them how from scratch because this audience have no idea how to promote anything.

2. Attract other network marketers who are still doing it offline. Introduce the power of Internet marketing and the importance of having a website for capturing fresh leads for their business. Then pitch them on GDI as a hosting company with a network marketing opportunity in place.

Even better, give them a solution, like a lead capture system (including the files to load to their hosting, the autoresponder, some email follow ups) and give it for free if they join your GDI business.

These are just suggestions to get your own marketing mindset started.

So to wrap up: find out who might need your product/service, and make it appeal to them.