If you’re like most affiliate marketers, you are itching to get some sales and start seeing money coming in. Some marketers spend hundreds of dollars on their ezine advertising, hoping to make a large profit. For some it works, for others they loose big. If you want to win with your ezine advertising efforts, you need to take into account the following strategies:

1. Who is your target market?

The product that you decide to market in any ezine must be related to the ezine’s readers. That might seem like an obvious statement, but many affiliates forget this. Not everyone is interested in what you have to offer. So make sure you keep it related.

For example, maybe you want to promote a product about obedience training for dogs. You want to make sure that the ezine you target has readers intersted in that topic. So if the ezine is related to training hunting dogs, it will probably not be a good match. That doesn’t mean you can’t try it, but you probably want to wait until you are making good money already before you test it.

2. What are you going to advertise?

What kind of products are you going to advertise to the readers of the ezines you want to target? Are you going to promote your own product, an affiliate product, an ebook, some sort of course?

When you are thinking about what to promote to an ezine, you need to think about the following:

Is the product geared toward my target audience?
Does the product have any value to the audience?
Does the sales page look professional or like a 3rd grader made it?
Does the sales page make you want to buy?
Is there a money back guarantee?

These are all elements that you need to evaluate in order to make certain you have an offer that will produce results.

3. Where do you find an ezine for your niche?

I have some directories listed below where you can search for an ezine related to your niche. When you do your search you want to keep in mind that the more tightly focused the ezine is to your niche, the more sales you are likely to receive.

www.ezine-dir.com

www.ezinelisting.com

subs.zinester.com

4. Determine your advertising budget.

Don’t spend all the money from your advertising budget on one ezine. You will have to decide what price is comfortable for you to pay for one ezine, but you need to be careful.

The price will depend on several factors. How many people are on the ezine, how effective is the ezine, etc. You also want your ad to be the only one shown. This is called a solo ad. If there is more than one ad in the ezine, the effectiveness goes way down. You might ask the owner for references from previous advertisers also.

Now I mentioned the number of subscribers will effect the advertising rate. You should not get hung up on numbers only. The number of subscribers is not as important as the quality of the ezine content. If the ezine publisher send too many ads to the list, they are more likely to ignore your ad. If the ezine has a lot of content with only one ad, you will have more luck with making sales.

5. Write great ad copy.

Great ad copy is the secret to getting people to buy your product, but how do you write great copy? I’m going to give you a sneaky way to write effective ad copy.

First you need to understand what makes people buy. People buy because of benefits, not because of features. When you look at good ad copy it will be fill of bullet points. The bullet points focus on the benefits of a product.

So to write great ad copy we want to do three main things. Capture attention with a great headline. Rewrite the headline of the products copy, don’t simply copy it this is illegal. Just rewrite it in your own words. Grab a couple of benefits and do the same thing. Finally you need a call to action. Tell them to do whatever it is you want them to do. Most likely that is “click here for more information” or something like that.

These are some of the worst affiliate marketing mistakes that people make. They are made by both new affiliates and seasoned pros who just have not had the benefit of coming across an article like this. Some of these i have learned as a result of my own experience, and other have been shared with me by other affiliate program marketers.

1: Too much Flash

Using a lot of flash can be a huge mistake. People typically come to websites to get information, not watch your flash presentations. While high speed internet is becoming more common, there are still a lot of people that use dial-up.

Think about your actions at sites with a flash animation on the home page. Do you sit and wait for it to load, or do you click the skip flash button, most people skip it. Keep your website simple. Look at Google. They have the money to do whatever they want, but they don’t use flash. Why? They know people want information, and do not want to wait for the flash to load. Keep your website simple so it will load quickly for everyone. You will loose people who have to wait.

2: Difficult Navigation

If your visitor has to try and figure out how to navigate your site, they will leave. It’s easier to click the back button then it is to try and figure out how to get around your site. Don’t use animated buttons, or cute pictures to get people to navigate around your site. You are ultimately asking people to purchase a product. You want people to know you are a professional business, not some kid trying to scam someone out of their money.

3: Not writing your own text

There are companies out there that allow their webmasters to write the text for their website. Most webmasters are programmers and not marketers. They know how to try and make your website relevant to the search engines, and that is their main focus. Your main focus is making sales. Simply finding your website is not enough, the visitor needs to take action when they are there by clicking through to the sales page.

If you lack the confidence to write a copy that will make visitor click to your sales page, you have a couple of options. First you can hire a person who is a copywriter. They get paid to make people want to buy, that is their job. They make people want to buy. The second option is to learn copy writing yourself.

No one is more interested in seeing you succeed than you. You can get e-books and e-courses over the internet that teach you copy writing. Writing copy is not easy. That’s why those who do it well get paid so much for it. If you want to learn you do it yourself, become a student of copy writing and take this aspect of your business into your own hands.

4: Playing it cheap

Nothing says cheap and un-professional like a free website. Look at the sites that people put up at places like Yahoo’s geocities.com. They scream free and cheap when you look at them. There’s nothing wrong with free and cheap when you are building a personal page about yourself. But when you are trying to run a business and makes sales, it just doesn’t work because you don’t build any confindence in the visitor.