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All of us internet foot soldiers in the trenches are aware of the high flying super affiliates sitting in their command tent making the rest of us do all the work for them. You may have received emails from people asking you to buy a product, but only through their link, and they are offering supposedly thousands of dollars worth of bonuses used as an enticement to do so. Then they may have shown you where they are on that product's top sales listing, and when you've seen a few you will notice that a lot of the same names keep appearing. Now you want to know what it is you have to do to join their exalted company and hopefully this affiliate marketing resource will be of some use to you.

Free to join affiliate programs are one of the easiest ways to get started on your internet-marketing career. After all, for most affiliate marketing online programs you just have to sign up as an affiliate for free and you've now got a product to sell, with no inventory to keep or deliver, and no dealing with disgruntled customers, and the money will start to roll in. Of course those of us who have been around a while know that there is a lot of hard work to becoming a successful affiliate, and below you will find some of the essential tools required to become a super affiliate.

Your best asset will be your own website. A lot of affiliate programs will have a dedicated affiliate website, probably with your name on it. There are two things to consider, if you are looking at using this kind of custom web site.

On the plus side, it will be professionally designed, and will look a lot better than your own design. On the other hand, it is the same as every other affiliate for that product, and you have no say in what is on that website. With your own site, while it may not look as good, you have control over the content. People may come to your site because of your product promotion, but while they are there they may see something else which catches their eye and they may buy that instead. It may be something as simple as an opt-in box. In each case you are using the affiliate link to drive traffic to your site rather than someone else's, and you may pick up some collateral sales, as I have described.

Next you will have to provide some sort of incentive. Competition among affiliates is fierce, and no doubt you have been bombarded with emails from different marketers whenever a hot new product comes out. For your success you will have to match the big boys in offering incentives. You could offer your thousand dollar bonus package - just clear out your hard drive of all those products you've bought and never used and allocate an arbitrary value to them, just like everyone else. Offer a newsletter, as long as it is of value, and you will do the work necessary to keep coming up with new content for it. Give them free membership to your exclusive members' area, if you have one, or any other free stuff you can think of. People love freebies, and in the internet world it seems the more the better.

Thirdly, you need to get your link popularity up to a high level in order to increase your page ranking. Visitors are impressed by high page ranking, which is achieved by having lots of relevant one-way links back to your site. I have got mine up to PR3 in a short time by using one-way links. Don't put too much trust in link exchanges - have a look to see where the link to your site is. You will often find that it is buried among a list of other links, at number 549 or something. I don't think Google pays much attention to these links, as it quite rightly pays more attention if the site which is linking back to you is in the same field as your site. For instance if your site is about dog grooming, linking to a site which is about pets may be relevant, but it's no use linking to a real estate site. It will be ignored for page ranking purposes. I use articles to get my one-way links rather than link exchanges.

Finally, every super affiliate has a large customer list, numbering in the thousands. They work on the theory of the numbers game, meaning that if they send out a thousand emails they may get ten sales. If you have the same low success rate, you will obviously have to send out thousands of emails in order to make any money, so you must increase your list numbers. You will have to do this gradually, as you only want interested people on your list, not those who will sign up for anything. This may sound difficult, but every super affiliate started out with a list of zero, just like you.

To summarize, I hope I have given you a few things to consider in your quest for super affiliate stardom, but remember one thing. Super affiliates are making a good income from their affiliate sales, but who is making the really big money?

The answer is of course the product owner, and this is ultimately what you should be seeking to become, having a host of affiliates working for you. If you do not know how to go about getting your own product, there is a link in my resource box which will get you on your way.

'Peter Phillips