As an affiliate marketer you need to set yourself apart from all the other affiliates who may be vying for the same prospects.

This is particularly true in some of the most hotly contested markets such as internet marketing, poker sites, dating and the like.

So how does an affiliate set themselves apart, or better yet, above the competition so as to create more sales?

They do it by using an autoresponder to collect the names and email addresses of their prospects.

Simply sending people to your affiliate page is not enough to create sales. Depending on your market there may be several hundred, if not thousands, of other affiliates using the same pages.

What makes you believe that someone seeing the same page for the hundredth time is going to make them want that product any more than the tenth time?

The key is to offer a special report that focuses on how the particular product can solve a problem or fill a need that the prospect may have.

A simple title like “The 5 Proven Ways Product XYZ Will Make Your Skin Look Younger” on a special report that leads to an opt-in page to an autoresponder will greatly increase your prospect list.

Then take each of those five different aspects that you touched on in the report and break them down even further using each one as a separate follow up email to those that downloaded the special report.

Have each email going out every other day for the first two weeks and you have an automatic sales person working for you hands free.

By staying in constant contact with your prospects you build a sense of familiarity and trust with your list members. People like to buy from someone they know rather than a complete stranger.

These autoresponders can be set up for any niche imaginable.

An easy way to find material for your special report and autoresponder series is right on the sales page for the product you are promoting. Read through it and find the best sales points then combine them into a short report.

Another great way to find info is to just do a search through your favorite search engine, gather some facts from several different sites and rewrite them into your report.

Always remember though not to just copy someone else’s work. That is plagiarism and is illegal. But with a little so called leg work you can quickly compile enough info to keep your prospects coming back, build rapport and eventually grab the sale!

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Are you running short of ideas for your articles? Is generating fresh ideas for writing becoming difficult? By following the techniques discussed in this article, you will be an article generating power house.

Subscribe to a dozen RSS feeds on various subjects you are most interested in. Scan through the feeds every morning or at night and select a few articles for thorough reading. After reading the articles, tag them using your own classification system.

Classifying articles in different categories helps locate them quickly. Use Google’s RSS reader for reading and tagging the RSS feeds. You will have access to your categorized articles from any computers connected to the Internet.

Subscribe to a few print magazines and read them regularly. After you finish reading an article, record the main points of the article in a Google note. You will have access to these notes anywhere in the World.

Use a PDA and carry it with you wherever you go. Better yet, get a PDA with a camera and cell phone. You will only carry one gadget for all your communication, organization, and content generation needs.

Take pictures of interesting places, events, and moments you come across in your daily life. Use the voice recorder of the PDA to record whenever an idea hits you. Every night, transfer the ideas from your PDA to Google notes and upload your pictures to flickr.

Scan through the comments posted by others on the online articles you read regularly. Record interesting ideas, pros and cons of an issue, and strong opinions posted by others in your Google notes. Leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

Have lunch with friends at least once a week. Bounce ideas off them on any topic. Mix ideas from divergent topics to create new ideas in you own subjects.

Use the time like driving, watching TV while exercising in a treadmill, etc. to think about your favorite topics and try to relate to things you observe on the road and on the TV. When you get an idea, record it in your PDA.

Go through all the ideas and articles you have recorded in Google notes and your RSS reader to create new ideas by giving new twists to the old ideas. Combine two or more ideas and change or improve an existing idea to come up with your own idea.

Use a variety of online tools like Technorati, Digg, Delicious, etc. for writing inspiration. Every hour, hundreds of new articles and news stories are posted in these sites. Quickly scan them to hit a few gold nuggets that can serve as springboards for new ideas.

Using on-line tools discussed earlier, select an issue and jot down all the pros and cons. Search Google to enhance the idea by adding more pros and cons. Once you have collected a dozen diverse opinions, you will be able to write an article based on those facts in a pro-con format.

If you are good at using data for analysis and comfortable in the use of a spreadsheet, draw charts in the spreadsheet and look for patterns in the data. Provide you own interpretation to the data. Illustrate your articles with charts and graphs.

To generate topics for your article, use overture keyword selector. Select a single keyword and run it through the overture. You will see a dozen or more keywords based on the search popularity. Copy a few selected keywords to a notepad. Now, take each keyword and do a search in online sites like Digg, Technorati, etc. You will see a number of articles. Read them to generate ideas.

Ask yourself what if, what else, and why not questions on an issue and search the Internet to find answers from different sources. Create new ideas generated from existing materials, provide step-by-step guide for somebody to practice an obvious idea, or offer benefits of practicing an old idea.

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

1. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

2. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

3. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

4. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

5. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it’’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

6. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

7. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

8. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

9. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

10. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

Have you ever wished you could make some extra money for the things you have always wanted, without having to check the balance in your checkbook first?
Do you have enough money saved to take care of those emergencies should they arise.
Do you have to save money all year, to take a family vacation or a second honeymoon? How about buying a new car or some of those toys like your friends have?

Are you worried that you might have to work a part-time job, to make ends meet, but you do not want to lose time with your friends and family? Have you ever thought about starting your own online business from home to make extra money or maybe to replace your current JOB some day? Of course the biggest question everyone asks is, “Can I really make a good living, with an online business from home?” The answer is, YES you can!

There are many online businesses from home which will produce the necessary income to set you financially free. You must protect yourself and do not get caught up in any online scams. Make sure you do a thorough research of all the online businesses you are considering! Research them in all the major Search Engines to see what other people are saying about these opportunities you are considering. There are thousands of Forums related to online business. Participate in a few forums and ask questions concerning the programs that interest you. You will likely find people who have already tried some of the programs and based on their observations, you can save yourself a lot of time and money. Keep in mind, even legitimate companies will get some negative responses, but the positive will far outweigh the negative.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many honest and legitimate ways to start a business from home, however, be aware of all those scams waiting to clean out your wallet. The intention is not to try and scare you from pursuing your dream. You just need to do the research, and you will find the honest and legitimate businesses from home. It is not difficult to see the difference between the legitimate online businesses and the scams. Remember, If it sounds too good to be true, Then it is!

You should be able to communicate with a legitimate company, either by email or telephone. If you are consistently running into brick walls trying to get answers to your questions, be a little leery. You should be able to get a real person to answer your email with answers to your questions. It may take a day or two, but if they are honest and legitimate, you will get a real person to reply. If a company requires a large some of money to start your business from home; turn and run the other way, because it is a pretty good indicator, It is a scam.

Now, instead of asking yourself, “Can I make money with an online business from home?; why not ask yourself, “When am I going to get started to financial freedom?” Remember, there are many honest and legitimate online businesses from home, and you can definitely find one to fulfill your dreams.

Remember to thoroughly research all the online businesses from home that interest you. Protect yourself from scams and you will find that honest and legitimate online business you can build successfully.

Let’s look at how you may approach Affiliate Sales. Here are two ways:

1. PPC, known as Pay-Per-Click, is a method that pays you for every click others make on ads running with your special code attached. You’ll need an AdSense account through Google but it’s free to create your account. Then you simply need to drive traffic to your AdSense website where the ads appear. When a customer clicks on one of the links, you get paid.

2. Blogging. This method is one of the most dynamic business models for affiliate marketing in today’s IM environment! Blogging gives you a personal forum, a place where you can express your feelings and opinions about anything you’d like. Be open and straightforward with your analysis. If you have a great experience with the product, tell about it with glowing endorsement. If you were disappointed, say so and why. If you deal straight with your readers you will create a loyal readership who will hang on your blog posts and follow your advice. Make sure that you find products to reference with a ClickBank ID or your affiliate ID that will help your readers accomplish their goals.

Finally, remember, you are the point man. You must decide if the products you promote are worthy of the time and money you invest to promote for that owner. Thoroughly read all sales pages. Ask yourself if you would buy the product based on the pitch. If not, contact the owner and ask if you could improve the sales page or squeeze page. Your efforts will only make the owner more money so he/she should be open to your suggestions.

You must FOCUS on the product totally. You need to find all the keywords, the most effective ad wording, and the best techniques to drive the most traffic to your opt-in page. This is a key to becoming a successful affiliate marketer. If you send your traffic directly to your sales page, chances are good you’ll never see that customer again. So create an effective squeeze page with which to capture your customer information for your opt-in list. This list will become your most valuable asset. You will be able to market to your list repeatedly in the future.

In closing, your efforts will determine your results. Take action, test, re-test, rinse and repeat. If you get little results after testing, simply find another product and rinse and repeat.