As marketers we all want to profit on the Internet. Affiliate marketing is possible the simplest method around to start making money on the Internet. But this doesn’t mean signing up for all the potential affiliate programs you see and sit back and wait for the fat affiliate checks to roll in!

To profit online requires time and money is the basic news . You cannot earn a lot of money on the Internet by doing nothing – success depend on action.

But what is affiliate marketing? As an affiliate you drive traffic to the vendors website. For each sale you get a percentage of the price, norally 50% but up to 75% has been given. According to most affiliate programs they give you a unique link and tell you to promote this link in as many places as possible. 1-2% conversion rate mean that max 2 out of 100 buys, while 98 will click away from the vendors site.

Collecting name and email address for all visitors is a better strategy for affiliate marketers. On the squeeze page there is only two options – accept the offer or click away. If we give the visitors a software, a report or something else of value we can get their name and email adress. To get their name and email adress a report, survey or an other valuable item must be offered. A double opt in prospect can be emailed as often as we want since he/she have accepted to receive information until they “buy or die” By puechasing the initial offer or they unsubsxribe from the list.

When the visitors to the squeeze page has given their firstname and email address they are members of your list of subscribers. Since they all have to confirm their email to receive the “list bait” you provide, this will be double opt in subscribers. Now you can start emailing offers for the vendor’s products as well as offers for other vendors products. Most successful affiliate marketers use this strategy today. This is the two-step marketing model, and it is much more effective than directly promoting the vendors link. We don’r look like agressive marketers when we give a report or something else of value – we did them a favour. The report provided offer free advice, something that is of value for the visitor. Offers promoted to these people, will often be accepted as they from your report feel they know you!

A two-step marketing model bring in more money on a consistent manner. Automation is core and an autoresponder will be used for this automation. This will be discussed in the next article in the series.