Many look to promote their affiliate programs through ezine articles, but many are unaware of the best way to promote their offers through this means.

If you follow these 5 effective steps, you’ll increase your sales promoting through this avenue.

Step 1.
Choosing the product or service you wish to promote is the obvious first step. It may be your own product or favorite affiliate program. Whatever it may be ensure it’s an offer that you’ll earn profits from, and promote through your free ezine article and move on.

Step 2.
Define your “useful, but incomplete” approach. Provide your readers with information they find value and are able to actually apply but make certain it’s “incomplete” in that they can better use the information by making a purchase.

It works like a charm. The basis behind it is to use your content to build up to your desired response, and then you make an offer that allows the potential customer to fully utilize the content.

For example;
Let’s say you want to promote an e-book on Attraction Marketing.

- You could write an article that covers the “basics” of attraction marketing, and then promote an “advanced” but complete resource on the topic.
- You could write an article on how to profit from promoting yourself, and then promote an affiliate program e-Book as the complete “How to Market yourself” guide.

It’s that simple, that’s how it works.

Step 3.
Change your approach slightly by offering a tips list or tutorial.

For example:

You want to promote a software (let’s say, an autoresponder). You describe various uses of autoresponders and how the reader can actually profit from it. What kind of tips list or tutorial could you create?

“How an Autoresponder Will Increase Your Sales 1000%”
“10 Powerful and Profitable ways to Explode Your Sales and Subscribers using an Autoresponder”

That’s all you need to do. Determine your end result. Decide how to get there with your “useful, but incomplete” approach. And then develop a list, or even a step-by-step tutorial for your article that leads the reader along.

With each new “idea” or “way” or “tip” or “step” or “strategy” that you share, you can further direct the reader towards realizing their need of your upcoming offer, and lay the foundation for them to accept the offer.

Step 4:
Expand on each point to build your content.

Here’s more of the easy part. Just “fill-in-the-blanks” to complete your article.

Write 1-2 short paragraphs for each of your points. Make them good. Provide quality content. The offer you will soon make will see poor results if your information isn’t useful.

Remember, you are trying to pre sell the reader on the idea that they are going to need your offer. If you don’t provide them with quality information that they WANT to begin using immediately, then why will they want to buy what you are promoting?

Light a fire in them. Motivate them. Challenge them. Give them such nuggets of gold that they want to keep mining until they hit the mother load!

Step 5:
Put the finishing touches on your article. This is generally referred to as the 5 Pillars; which are Polish, Promote, Proof, Publish, and Profit. Don’t skip any of them as they’re all critical.

A former college drop out, Donaven James transformed himself from a Factory Line Assember to a successful Internet Marketer. Along with long time friend and business partner Dion Drakes, we are the creators of and a S.Y.S.T.E.M. (Save Yourself Stress Time Energy & Money) that has taken the Internet by storm. See how our Affiliates are earning 100% for every sale! http://www.BusinessBuilder101.com

One of the best ways to earn extra money from home is by promoting affiliate programs. Virtually anyone can get started immediately and begin to sell products that are profitable and highly in demand. The best part is that this can be done from the comfort of your own home with nothing more than a computer, internet connection and your brain. You sell other people’s products to earn extra money from home, so there’s no need to create or have your own products.

With affiliate programs, you choose the product that you want to sell (after much research) and get your own link to promote that product. For anyone that clicks on your link, they’ll be re-directed to the main sales page. If they buy a product from that page, you’ll be credited with that sale and earn yourself a nice commission (anywhere from 25 to 75%).

The big advantage with selling affiliate products is that: you don’t need a website (although it’s better if you do, more on this shortly); you don’t have to stock the product and ship it out to the customer; and you don’t have to take orders or handle payments. All of the “behind the scenes” stuff is taken care of by the owner of the product or the affiliate program. You simply promote your affiliate link to drive people to the sales page and receive your payment checks when the sales are made. What a great way to earn extra money from home.

So where do you find these affiliate products? Two of the most popular places are Clickbank.com and Commission Junction.com, where you will find thousands of popular products to promote.

If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, you will need your own domain name, hosting and a lead capture page. Otherwise, all the traffic that you send to the product owner’s sales page will be lost. You would have no way to follow up with them. But if you have your own page, you can pre-sell the product, capture the lead’s name and email, and then follow up to get the sale at a later time. Just have an enticing ebook or report to give to the lead in exchange for their details. Once you get the sale, you can then follow up and promote “back-end” products to maximize the profits from that customer.

The next important step is to drive quality traffic to the sales page (preferably your own page) to convert into customers. Some of the best ways to do this are free. If you have your own landing page, you can optimize it (SEO or search engine optimization) with your main keyword phrase in your domain, title and body of the page. After awhile you will have free traffic coming from the search engines from your keyword phrase.

Then write articles (once again, target your keyword phrases) and submit these articles to some high quality article directories. Make sure you have a link pointing back to your site in the author’s resource box. With this method you will gain readers, trust, credibility and people clicking on the link back to your site, which will convert into sales. You’ll also increase your back-links which will improve your rankings with the search engines (more traffic).

So, there you have it. Affiliate programs are probably the easiest and quickest way for people to start their own online business and to begin earning extra money from their home. Once you have a step by step system working well for one product, you can then repeat the procedure for multiple products.

Andrew Jones has been a business owner for the
past 10 years, and is now an Internet Marketer and
Plug-In Profit Site owner. Discover the best ways to
earn extra money from home.