Affiliate marketing although not a new idea; has only recently become more widespread as people discover other ways of making money to help prop up their dwindling income. Associate or partner marketing tips have sprung up virtually all over as people seek out ways to make more money and become successful

Tip #1: Work With What You Know and Love
Affiliate marketing although not rocket-science should be approached with some research and planning, especially if you’re only in the preparatory stage. One of the generally asked questions in terms of associate marketing is “What should I sell?”
The answer: Work with what you know and love.

Start a website connected to something you’re passionate on the subject of to ensure that your visitors perceive that you know what you’re talking about. If you appear out of touch on a certain topic, your visitors will recognize it and, may move onto another site.

Tip #2: Use Banners To Advertise Sparingly:
Use banners when you have to but remember that your visitors didn’t arrive at your website to view your beautiful high tech banners. They also didn’t visit your site specifically to purchase your product or service. Partner marketing relies on persuading visitors to buy the products advertised on the merchant’s website. Therefore, it is only common sense to provide them with the necessary information and content they need to decide whether to buy or not.

Tip #3: Know Who Your Visitors Are:
Of course we stressed the fact that it is crucial to maintain particular content on your website. But just remember, the ultimate objective of your website is to ensure that your visitors click through to the merchant’s page and ultimately purchase. That’s how you obtain your commission, which means that you must carefully persuade your visitors to click the order link – something you can accomplish by knowing what type of person it is that lands on your page.

What does it take to become a successful adult affiliate? What are the ingredients of an affiliate marketing success story? Are there any shortcuts to Affiliate Marketing glory? All these questions play around in the minds of affiliate marketers who want to make it big in this business.

Although selling porn is touted as one of the easiest and most effective ways to earn money online, it is not as easy as it sounds. The wise adult marketer plans every action and executes it the best way he can. He should also maximize the potential to earn by utilizing the right tools necessary for a successful porn empire. I have worked with and speak to some of the most successful marketers in the business and below are the top three necessary tools for any successful adult affiliate business.

#1 – The Most Important Tool: Your Own Website.

The most important and indispensable tool in any form of Affiliate Marketing is getting your own website. The first step in any successful adult marketing business is building a good, credible and hopefully professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Therefore, you must first build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your visitors and encourage them to click on the links to the products or service you are promoting and make a purchase. Put simply, you must first concentrate your efforts on building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.

The most important thing you should consider is that almost all adult web surfers go online to look for free porn, not necessarily to go and buy something. Above all else, make your website full of original, relevant and useful content. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is still king and good quality content will not only build your credibility, it can also help you achieve a higher search engine ranking. By posting relevant and useful articles or content, you establish yourself some credibility in the field, making you a more trustworthy endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation is a good step in building up a loyal consumer base.

If you don’t have a domain name – I use 1&1. If you don’t have hosting – I use Hostgator.

#2: Link Popularity.

The importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. The all-important web traffic is at the top of the list of the most important entities in the internet world. Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do everything you can to try and achieve a high search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings. Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you should try to launch an aggressive reciprocal link campaign.

One of the best ways to do this – at no cost at all – is by submitting articles, with your website’s link at the resource box, to e-zines and free article sites. You will not only gain exposure, you will also have the opportunity to advertise for free, just include a link back to your site. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Make your articles original, relevant and useful so that more websites will pick it up and post it.

#3 – Incentivee.

Competition is extremely tight in the adult world. You must always be one-step ahead of your rivals to ensure that you capture a significant share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every possible means to encourage people not only to visit your site but also to click and proceed to the websites of the products and services you are promoting. Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer freebie porn, a newsletter or an e-zine, or something else. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can give them free stuff, cash or gift cards, access to exclusive services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.

These are but three of the many tools that an affiliate marketer can use to maximize earning potential. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination, creativity, resourcefulness and determination. You can always explore other ideas and adapt other strategies, which you think might help you become a high rolling affiliate marketer.

This post is sparked by one of my recent customers, who is new to the adult business so I wish him great success. He and I were chatting after his purchase about what his next steps were (he hadn’t actually read the e-book yet ) and he was unsure of his direction. We got into discussing some things, and as we started to discuss finding a niche he mentioned a point that could have been a painful mistake.

In adult, I always suggest that you target a small niche, or you go after a huge one in a way that nobody else has before. We got into discussing small niches and he said how about “midgets in gimp outfits”. Wow, talk about a niche. If you find people interested in this, you probably have absolutely no competition and more than likely will have a customer for life! Sounds great right?

Well, let’s think about this. He is going to be building his business around “midgets in gimp outfits”. If he does this there is a good possibility to make some money, but what about his mental welfare? This guy is going to be looking at some freaky stuff on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. If he isn’t one of the few people on the planet that dig this, he might get a little sick of looking at that crap. Follow yet? He would be doing the worst thing he could possibly do here… he would be finding a new job to replace his old job, but would be choosing his job for money rather than happiness. MISTAKE!! You absolutely never want to start a new project like this and choose a niche that you are not at least a little bit intersted in. Now, I am not saying that you have to be the #1 fan of the niche, that would be silly. What I am saying is that you have to know what the hell the customer wants, and you have to enjoy what you are selling.

This is basic sales 101. If you can’t relate to your target audience, you are going to have a very difficult time selling. More importantly, you will not be passionate about it and likely will give up if you hit any speed bumps throughout your journey. In his defense, this conversation took all of about 20 seconds, but imagine what a mistake this could have been.

Have you had a similar situation where you got into the wrong project? Please let me know…

I know that this guy will be successful because he has the right attitude, but he has also gotten some valuable info just by asking questions. Please hit me up with any questions, I am really here to try and help people. It isn’t always about going for the money!!

I’m not going to hold your hand and make money for you… I can point you in the right direction though.

There are so many freakin’ ways to get free traffic out there that it should be illegal. The best part is you can send it to your website or directly to affiliate offers. These ideas are relatively old, but many people still don’t know the basics. People have made millions of dollars using classified sites like Craigs List and Gumtree, but there are plenty of other locations for it. Start thinking about where people go on the internet for free…

Facebook, MySpace, YouTube… yeah no brainers right?

Have you thought about utilizing forums? There are like hundreds of thousands of niche forums and blogs out there nowadays. All you have to do is dig into the ones that have potential. The key is not to look like a newbie and spam the hell out of them. If these blogs or forums are in your niche, then you should probably visit and learn from them often. Post like 30 times before you start mentioning your product or service. And no, I don’t mean posting 30 times per night. Get involved, become a regular. All of the sudden your credibility is there and when you drop a hint or link to a product, it doesn;t look like spam. Again, I am not suggesting you should visit Asian MILF Forums or Teen Blog’s if you have no interest in those niches… Stick with what you know and what you like. You can be an expert that way.

The same with social sites like Facebook. Become a member of a number of groups, add alot of friends and don’t spam at first… then when the time is right… kapow!!! Hammer those links and make some money.

Hope this helps. If all else fails, talk to your affiliate managers about idea starters. They are there to help you!

The key to affiliate marketing success is to get people to buy…whether you are selling ipods, free credit reports, e-books or asian porn. Chances are, it isn’t your product you are selling so you need to be able to provide some form of value that gets the prospect to become a buyer. Similar so far right?

Well the truth is, mainstream affiliate marketers will actually have it pretty easy when making the transition. Why you ask? Because they have had more success selling a product that doesn’t necessarily sell itself. Lets be honest, when you are selling adult affiliate programs the buyer has one hand on their wallet and their other hand on their… well you know. If you have the right pictures, videos or whatever then they are quick to pay because you are dealing with a complete impulse buyer. Last I checked, going to a website to fill in my information, then complete a few surveys, and then completing even more offers is not exactly easy… yet this is how many of the mainstream programs work. If you have been able to convince someone that this is the right place to spend their time in mainstream, then you my friend are good at what you do. I have played around in the mainstream world and have had very little success.

Adult marketing pays nicely though… Yeah, the water is full of sharks… but most of the sharks don’t know what the hell they are doing. People often get into adult because they want to be in the “industry”, but don’t put in the work that is required. Let’s be honest, my ebook is based on learning how to be profitable in the industry quickly, but at the end of the day you have to actually work to make money… I don’t do it for you. So how do you make money in adult? Well let’s discuss that.

I am not going to break down the different niches, or the different types of adult sites because that is literally way too much information. Lets just assume that you are going to create a “landing page” or in the adult world a thumbnail gallery. You can create this with either a few movies, or even more pictures, and typically you will promote a specific website. The nice thing here is that once the person decides they like what they see, it is going to be very easy to convert. Why, well because they don’t have to go through 35 different surveys or fill out a number of different offers like netflix, or stamps.com, or sign up for a credit card. Chances are, you told them that it will cost them $19.99 a month, or they can have a 3 day trial at $4.99 or whatever the price is… So the buyer knows what they are getting to begin with. Now, hopefully like any other marketing partnership, you have talked with the company you are promoting and are familiar with their product. This way you know what the buyer is actually going to be getting. This helps you with the final big decision.

Do you want to take the one time lump sum payment, or go for recurring billing? Me, I always go for recurring billing because I know that I am promoting the good site out there. There are huge payouts for the lump sum guys, sometimes up to $100 to $200 for every person you get. But the benefit of the recurring billing is when you get the person that sticks, forgets they signed up and just keeps getting billed, or the holy grail – the whale! The whale is the guy that basically throws away every free dollar he makes on girls from cam sites… yeah, you can get lucky and be the guy that referred that whale and watch out!!! The money will just FLOW!

Anyway, I hope this gives you a good idea of how similar the whole process can be… and if not, start researching the adult industry. Those of you that give it a shot will be very happy.

Yes, you can make money with adult pay per click affiliate programs. I know because I get checks every month from them. These types of affiliate programs have a bad reputation for not paying webmasters and accusing them of cheating the system. So I do recommend that you stick with trusted sponsors and follow the affiliate guidelines and terms of the sponsor and you can make money quickly.

Remember a sponsor has to make money from the traffic that you are sending in order to pay you, so remember to follow the following guidelines.

Adult Pay Per Click Guidelines That Will Make Sure You Get A Check!

(1) Don’t send fake traffic generated from hitbots, redirects, friends clicking on links and software generating automatic hits, it won’t work. Same as with any other PPC system.

(2) Don’t spam via email. This will result in instant cancellation of your account. Same as with any other PPC system.

(3) Don’t send traffic from non-english speaking websites unless your sponsor allows it. Most non-english speaking traffic is of little or no value to your sponsor. Chances are if you are reading this you speak english and should stick with what you know. Same as with any other PPC system.

(4) Don’t send your junk traffic, example: multiple exit consoles, traffic that was generated from a pop up that was generated from another pop up. These are multiple pop up windows that the surfer will be annoyed with and close them as fast as possible resulting in no profits generated for you or your affiliate sponsor. I send my sponsors decent traffic and I make money. You can do this simply with Text Links, Banner Ads, or even in Thumbnails! This is where you can really profit. Think about putting one of these links in every TGP you create!!

Most affiliate programs value productive webmasters. Keep in touch with your sponsor. If he or she doesn’t answer or respond to your questions, find another program fast! This is not a good sign, trust me. A good sponsor will take the time to keep a good relationship with it’s webmasters. I always email them for a phone contact so I get get to know them and if there is a problem work it out with them.

One of my most trusted adult sponsors I have had a productive relationship with them for over a year and have been paid on time every month.

Follow the rules and start making money today!