Isn’t it amazing?

With affiliate marketing you can sell a great product without even owning one – that means without the hassle of designing a good product, paying upfront for creating it and without taking care of customers later. But it gets better: with the use of today’s fantastic advertising tools, like Google Adwords, you can sell it to the whole world! Well, the whole internet world at least.

When I got that – that it is that easy today – it really blew my mind. All you have to do is get the right product and the right advertising method and you are good to go on making a living online …

Is it really that easy? Well, almost …

You have to understand how to laser-target your audience

When I first got in contact with affiliate marketing I thought it is nonsense. I’ll tell you why:

At that time I was growing my first internet company. It was a german gaming Network called ingame, which had a lot of visitors who play hardcore computer games. It were about 40 million monthly page impressions in Germany which was a lot back in 2002. To earn money we sold banner advertising (and still do) and I also tried affiliate networks.

You could also call affiliate marketing performance based advertising: you only earn money if you make a sale. If you do so, it’s a win/win situation for the advertiser as well for the publisher. But the affiliate products of the german affiliate networks did not work; I made no sale of those products and went back to selling the adspace on CPM basis. I concluded affiliate marketing doesn’t work and it’s a waste of time.

Why was that?

Answer: Targeting.

In affiliate marketing you have to laser target the product to the person you are offering the product. That is the basic key. Otherwise you won’t make any sale.

Now you may say that is obvious and the basic of any marketing activity – and you are right, but it isn’t always done right, is it?

You see we had a lot of people who played computer games excessively in their spare time. Wouldn’t it be logical to sell them Dell computers and iPhones? No, because it is targeted yes, but it is not laser-targeted!

There is a difference and the difference is 1 out of 1000 buying your offer versus 100 out of 1000, if you get the right product to the right audience. If you laser-target.

Google calls it relevance today and it is one of their main goals: to give the user the most relevant results – in other words: to target the search query of the user to the best result.

Now in the above result offering a Dell computer to a 19 year male who plays World of Warcraft wasn’t wrong targeting, but it was not very good targeting. Selling them the AddOn to World of Warcraft or a so-called Game-Time-Card to expand your playing time, that was laser-sharp targeting and that brought home the money …

Laser-targeting is easy, if you know how …

With this gaming network I had a very, very specific audience, and a big one. Nevertheless you can only sell to them what they need and if you have a website in a certain niche, you are basically stuck in that niche.

Not so anymore. The big shift is pay per click advertising on search engines.

When I started with the first network, AzoogleAds, on 6. April 2009 I immidiately made over $100 sales a day and went to over $500 in 4 days. Next month I was over $1,000 in sales daily. You can see the numbers on the statistic screenshot to the right with the combined sum for April and May of $53,761.49 in total sales revenue.

Now those are not terrible huge numbers and of course you have to subtract the pay per click costs, which were 45-55% on Google Adwords. But to start with them is a goal attainable in Affiliate Marketing, if you have the right knowledge.

With todays advertising you can laser-target any audience you want, using Google or Yahoo as your laser and reaching nearly anyone worldwide to sell your product. No, not your product, one of the best products as an affiliate! You are not stuck to a certain audience as in the example above, you are totally flexible and can switch your laser in a heartbeat.

And that is the magic between Affiliate Marketing and Pay per Click Advertising.

… but you have to master the 2 basic skills of an Affiliate Marketer

In order to really succeed in Affiliate Marketing you have to be ahead of the crowd. It is so competitive in the most money-making niches that you have to be among the 10% of the best on the top. You have to master the two core skills that determine your success as an Affiliate Marketer. And those skills are: Generating laser-targeted Traffic and Converting that traffic into sales.

Related posts:

1. Master the 2 Core Skills for Success with Affiliate Marketing