How to Succeed with Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are the first choice of most newcomers to net earnings because they have many advantages:1. All you have to do is to join a merchant program as an affiliate and send visitors to the merchant site2. All other work such as making a sale, delivering the product or service, receiving payment, attending to the complaints or making a refund, is handled by the merchant site.3. The merchant site also sees to it that you are paid commission when a sale is made through your efforts.4. You are also rewarded when a sale is made through the efforts of an affiliate referred by you to the merchant site.All easy and simple. But most affiliates soon find that in spite of their best efforts they are not making any money. This is because the affiliate earnings depend not on how many visitors they send to the merchant site, but how many of them buy the product or service of the merchant.So just sending visitors to the merchant site is not enough. You can do this easily by joining traffic exchange or autosurf programs. Your merchant site will be seen hundreds of times but it will not make a sale. This is because these visitors are not interested in your site. They are looking at it to earn credits so they can show their site to others.This is not to say that traffic programs have no use at all.I have used them successfully to build my downline in free-to-join programs, but have never made a sale through them. Most members of such programs are promoting their own programs. They could get interested in joining other opportunities, but would rarely go for a product themselves.So if you want to earn from affiliate programs, the thing to do is to send interested visitors to your merchant site. Who is an interested visitor?This is the visitor who reached your site by himself. He is looking for the product you are promoting. This is why he took the trouble of finding it from a search engine or from the particular kind of ads or forums.This visitor is red hot for a sale. He is already interested in your product. If he finds what he wants on your merchant site, he is very much likely to look at the product's features, mentally compare it with other similar products, ask for more information by giving his email address. All this can lead to a sale and a commission for you. How to target interested visitorsThe best way to reach interested visitors is promoting your products through search engines submissions, placing catchy ads, posting in forums or through your own website.This may sound daunting to newcomers at first but all these are do-able with a little effort. You can get help for mastering all these skills from the resources freely available on the internet. Joining right affiliate programs can also help a good deal to gain affiliate mastery. While great many affiliate programs give you a few text ads and banners and be done with you, there are some programs that give valuable training to succeed. Be positiveMost newcomers to internet earning fail because they expect to be rich in a week, if not overnight. When this doesn't happen as it rarely does in real life, they get discouraged. They are also influenced by others who like them tried but failed to earn with affiliate programs. The result -- they give up, frustrated. The reality is that nobody becomes rich overnight in internet marketing. You have to work at it consistently. Most important of all, banish negative thinking from your life and believe that if others have succeeded, you, too, can and will. That perhaps is the most important ingredient for your success.