The first thing you should do if you want to start
affiliate marketing the right way is buy the product for
yourself. If you have been drawn to affiliate marketing by
reading that it is possible to make money without spending
any cash of your own, it will seem like a backward step to
suggest that you start by spending money, but there is a
good reason why you should seriously consider taking this
advice.
What do you know about the product you will be promoting?
If you haven't tried the product, all you will know is what
other people have told you and the "other people" are
probably the owner of the product and his/her marketing
team. Don't you think they might be just a little bit
biased? The truth is that even if the product was a
complete turkey, they'd still be telling you it's an eagle.
The only way you will really know what a product does, is
to buy it and test it out yourself.
It is only when you have purchased and used the product
that you will be in a position to promote it effectively
because you will then know exactly what it can do as
opposed to what the owner would like you to believe it can
do. You will find there can be a huge difference between
the sales pitch dreamed up by copywriters and the actual
performance of a product. Being an actual user of the
product means you will be in a position to write genuine
reviews on the product instead of regurgitating the
advertising blurb.
The following is what happened to me a few months age when
I found a new product (an e-book) that looked as if it
would be very helpful to many of my website visitors.
After reading the sales letter, I was already mentally
composing my review and anticipating earning loads of
affiliate commissions. By the time I had downloaded my
copy of the book and read a couple of chapters, I had
thrown out my plan to promote the book.
One of the first things to strike me was that the book
contained many typographical errors and obvious spelling
mistakes. Call me picky but, if a person asks me to pay
for a book, I don't think I'm being unreasonable in
expecting it to be free from typos and spelling errors. It
got worse: I didn't have to read far before I noticed some
passages that made no sense; it was obvious that something
had gone wrong during a cutting and pasting operation, and
this had not been detected during final proof-reading. In
fact, I doubted that anyone had bothered to proof-read the
book before publishing.
The content turned out to be just a rehash of old ideas
plus some out of date references. One of the author's
recommendations was to produce articles to be passed off
as your own work by pasting together paragraphs lifted from
articles by other authors. From the overall style of the
book, I could tell that much of the writing had been
created by using that very technique (hence the number of
cut and paste errors). That, despite the so-called
author's protestations to the contrary, is plagiarism and
plagiarism is pure theft.
Hopefully you will never find such a huge gulf between the
sales pitch and the actual content in any affiliate product
you decide to promote but, if you don't buy the product and
test it, you will never know whether you are promoting a
turkey or an eagle. Your customers will. Your reluctance
to invest in a sample of the product could cost you your
credibility and recovery from that is much harder than
recovering the cost of the product out of future sales.
----------------------------------------------------
Elaine Currie helps people to make money online working at
home at her Free Work At Home Directory at
http://www.huntingvenus.com and is the author of Ezine
Article Writing - 10 Steps To Success. Download a copy
now and learn how to write articles for your website:
http://www.huntingvenus.com/free_ezine_articles_writing_eboo
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