Affiliate Marketing That Works

Many affiliate marketers are facing headwinds in 2011. Strategies that once worked in prior years, especially the hard sale, are not working as well anymore. However, I’m here to say that affiliate marketing works, perhaps better than ever. Case in point: I earned nearly five grand on EPN in 3 months in my limited spare time above and beyond the income from my demanding full time job. Since I wrote that post, my overall EPN and affiliate marketing earnings in general continue to thrive and grow.

I’m not the only one. There’s a new class of affiliates and today I want to share an affiliate marketing strategy that works in 2011, via case study. In particular, I’m going to highlight a personal experience I had with my friend Eric’s blog, My 4 Hour Workweek. After reading this post, I encourage you to sign up for a leading affiliate network such as EWA Private Network (they’re accepting 10 new affiliates right now) and then get out there and employ this strategy!

So What’s This Affiliate Strategy?

The strategy is quite simple in theory, but difficult in execution. It’s all about establishing an honest voice with your readers, making it very clear that you earn an affiliate commission when they purchase via one of your links, but offing such an overwhelming amount of value that users make a conscious effort to buy via your link. How do you do this? Very, very hard work and an amazing level of transparency with your readers. You can’t leave an ounce of doubt in anyone’s mind. You need to exclusively recommend products you personally use and prove over and over why the product is working for you. You need to go well above and beyond to provide tremendous free value. You need to avoid mistakes (such as the hard sale) at all costs. Once you’ve done that, your readers will feel an emotional tie to purchase via your link. They’ll owe it to you!

Let’s take an example. My friend Eric from My 4 Hour Workweek promotes this awesome peer to peer lending network called Lending Club. Each month, Eric publishes an income report that highlights his sources of online income and passive income, including Lending Club (check out his August report for an example). I’m honestly addicted to Eric’s blog because of his level of transparency, honesty, and value. My favorite posts are his income updates. As a reader, Eric has established a personal connection with me.

So, I had been meaning to sign up for Lending Club for quite some time. Not only because of Eric’s blog, but also because my former boss is the CMO there and I’ve read an amazing amount of good stuff about the network as a source of diversification and passive income. I’m a busy guy (it’s hard to find even a half hour to sign up for something like this) and I’m all about efficiency. As such, when I finally had some free time to sign up for Lending Club, I could have just gone directly to their site. Or, I could have searched the Internet for special offers and coupon codes in an attempt to get some kind of freebie. However, none of this even crossed my mind. I quickly remembered how much value Eric’s blog provides and my decision was simple: Sign up via Eric’s affiliate link! I even went as far as commentating on Eric’s blog to let him know I used his affiliate link. Now, that’s an affiliate marketing strategy that works. If you’re trying to make money online in 2011, I highly recommend a similar approach. It truly works and it’s also how I make money online.

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