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March 23, 2011

Affiliate Marketing And The Free Gift

How do you separate yourself from the rest of the pack in Affiliate Marketing?

How do you entice people to at least look at your website?

How do you spike interest in your product enough for prospects to at least have a modicum of interest at what you are offering and opt in?

The answer is simpler than it may seem. You need to offer them a free gift. Let’s be realistic. Put yourself in your prospects’ position and determine what would motivate you to take the next step and find out more about the product you are offering. How can you possibly earn from doing this? By looking at this from your prospect’s perspective, nobody will want to refuse a free quality gift, since they do not have to pay money to get it. Even so, the quality and value you create in your gift should be the same as you create in your product. Most people will not want to give anyone money without getting some value in return. So if you want to attract more customers, you need to create high value in your products and services. The disappointing aspect of this is that most people just don’t take the time or make the effort to offer a free gift.

Now don’t get excited and think you have to go out and purchase expensive items to give away to all the people who visit your site. That would not work for any of us. What you have to do is learn how to offer some important material that is closely associated with your product or service that makes it more enticing to your potential customer.

Overall, your objective is to let people see and recognize the value of your offer before they opt in to the actual product or service. In doing so, you need to think strategically. One way of doing this is to research and find what it is people want, what their needs are, and the problems you can solve. Then you will know how best you can help them. Offering a gift as a temporary solution will best serve your prospect before you give them a permanent solution in the actual product.

So, how do we go about accomplishing this objective?

There are several ways to effectively accomplish giving a gift to your prospects with little or no money involved. There are PLR’s (product license rights) that are available to you at no cost (you will find some in which you will have to make a small investment). If you purchase a product on the internet that is a guide for your product, you have the right to promote that guide as a gift. You could create a PDF file that explains all the features, advantages, and benefits of your product that your prospect could download to their computer. You could offer a series of auto responder E-Mails that explain what the product is, how it helped you, and why you use it. You could even offer a free audio or visual report that explains all the benefits of your offer. There are several ways to go about offering something of value to your prospects that they would appreciate, and you need to consider each of them strategically.

Just because you are offering a free gift does not mean prospects will visit your opt in page and fill in their name and email to get it. Your gift must be relevant to your actual product or service in terms of features, advantages, and benefits. If people like what information you have to offer, they will certainly come to you regularly for the value they perceive. Unless your gift is relevant and can supplement the main product in use, your potential customers will have no reason to opt in or make a purchase. This makes it a perfect opportunity for you to sell with minimum resistance. Once you apply these strategies, the conversion rates in your products will increase dramatically.

I would be remiss if I did not inform you that if your gift is from a PLR or anything similar, you will need to know how to use an FTP (file transfer protocol) to upload it onto your site or blog. It is not hard to learn, but it’s the only way to get the gift uploaded.

There is no denying just how popular affiliate marketing is as an online business model because of its simplicity and excellent business potential. However that does not mean it is a business that is guaranteed success. On the contrary, the failure rate for our industry is very high, but that has not deterred many online marketers to spend lots of their time and effort to build their business. Your mindset must be that of determination and success.

It is also very important to understand that it takes quite some time to see the results of using a free gift as a marketing strategy. First, it may take some time, effort and even a small investment to create quality gifts that people enjoy. The gift must relate or compliment the affiliate marketing product that you are promoting. It may even take you some time to get this gift prepared, as PDF’s or an E-Mail series will require some effort on your part to create.

So the final question remains, how do I go about learning what to offer and how to offer it to my prospects? The process can become tedious by searching the internet for answers or using trial and error. I would personally recommend you join an organization where you will be introduced to the many facets of gift offerings and how to place them on your website. There are many skills you need to learn in promoting a product using Affiliate Marketing.

Once you learn them, you will repeat it many times over and it will become second nature. You just need to be trained (how much depends on your skill level), ask questions, and become proficient. I encourage and recommend you learn all the fundamentals and develop a solid foundation for your on line business. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Larry Hamilton is an aviator and retired entrepreneur who is passionate about teaching people how to succeed on the internet. To learn more about building a solid foundation in Affiliate Marketing, you are on click away