Today I want to talk to you about 15 proven ways to promote affiliate products. Even if you have your own product or 10 products of your own, you still want to promote other people’s products.

It’s incredibly profitable.

Think about this for a minute. When you’re an affiliate, which means a commissioned salesman, the person who owns the product does the market research .

• They determine if there is a market there.

• They create the product.

• They write the sales letter.

• They do the customer service.

• They do all of the heavy lifting.

When done right, you promote and cash the checks. It can be a beautiful thing.

It can also be a nightmare for some people. That’s why I’ve created this series. I want to share the proven ways I use to promote affiliate products. I’ve done this over the last 10 years. You might find some of the advice I give you to be simple.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

I think we make internet marketing so complicated now with 900 videos and this or that method, it can make you want to pull your hair out. I want to keep it simple. I think you’ll like what you see.

Before I begin I want to tell you a few things…

First, 15 ways are too many to put into one article, so the techniques will be broken up in this three article series.

Second, I will recommend specific resources. I want you to check them out. They are not my affiliate links. They are just the tools that I use.

Third, I want to keep it really simple. I will give you one or two of my best pieces of advice about each technique.

Let’s begin…

It won’t surprise you that ezine advertising is one of my favorite methods of advertising and marketing online.

If you’re going to do ezine advertising you need to know that solo ads do work the best.

What is a solo ad?

A solo ad is an email that is sent to the entire subscriber base of an ezine publisher. It is all 50,000 or 500,000 of them, whatever their circulation is. It contains your ad. It goes alone, hence the word “solo.”

The secret when doing ezine advertising is to match the topic of the ezine to the product you offer.

Ezines are electronic magazines that are about a specific topic like fishing, golfing, making cakes, making money online or advertising.

They are very specific in nature.

When your product or the product you’re promoting matches the topic of the ezine, great things can happen. You want to promote golf equipment to people who play golf, not to people who are trying to make money online.

You want to target this market as focused and tightly as you can. If you’re promoting an auto responder service you want to promote to ezines in the categories of internet marketing, affiliate marketing or advertising.

Finding the right ezines can be hard and time consuming or it can be easy. It is obvious what I’m going to say next.

I’m going to say it anyway. The Directory of Ezines exists to make it easy for members to find the right ezines. There you go.

There is pay-per-click advertising.

I talk to members all the time who have given up on pay-per-click advertising. I think that’s a mistake. They say, “I’ve tried it. It’s too expensive. It’s too hard. It’s too complicated.”

I talked to a member this week. He said, “Yes, I tried pay-per-click. I had 150 keywords picked out and 9 ads.” Einstein couldn’t keep up with that.

Make it easier. Choose fewer keywords.

That’s my first piece of advice. That was my advice to him.

My own campaign for Directory of Ezines has five keywords. They’re great keywords. They’re very profitable. We make about $4 for every dollar we spend.

You want to make sure the site converts before spending your hard-earned money. How can you do that? You can run other forms of advertising. At The Directory we give members 20 text ads that look like Google AdWords ads.

They can place them on the Directory of Ezines sites. They are high traffic sites. It’s free to them. It’s part of their membership. They can test that way.

If you send 200 or 300 visitors to a site and don’t make a sale, that’s a warning sign. You want to investigate that. Try to find out if the site does convert before spending money on pay-per-click.

I think banner advertising is an overlooked resource.

Too few people are doing banners. I do banner advertising all the time. I don’t send people who click on the banners straight to my sales letter.

I send them to a list-building squeeze page. Banners are great for list builders. They’re inexpensive. They’re easy to use. They run and run. You don’t have to maintain them, monitor them or do very much.

They work. There are a billion places where you can place banners. You can place banners inside ezines. Did you know that? It’s a form of ezine advertising.

You can place them on websites. There are a million things you can do with banners that are effective and cheap.

Viral marketing is a very powerful method of marketing especially if you want to build your own mailing list.

It’s a powerful way to promote affiliate products. It’s kind of free. I will recommend two resources that aren’t free.

You won’t pay much. If you use them you’re going to love them. EasyPLR.com is Nicole Dean’s wonderful site. It offers 20 to 30-page reports that are very well written. I use them all the time.

They are about very specific topics. They are not just make money online topics. There are things like holiday planning and home-schooling. There is a wonderful group of topics. Plus, you can customize them to make them your own.

Then you can get a program called Viral PDF.

It’s the best money you can spend and best product you can buy. In about 30 seconds you can turn this into a brand-able report that you can give to other people. Why would you want to do that?

This is one of the greatest list-building methods known to man.

If you create a viral report that someone can download, they can brand and give away, they will give you their name and email address in order to get that goodie. When they do, they’re on your mailing list.

What better way to promote affiliate products than by having a mailing list of your own? Use viral marketing.

Check out these two resources.

If you want to know more about follow up email marketing, which is one of the greatest ways to market online, check out FollowUpSellingSystems.com. This is one of my favorite sites. I’m very excited about it. I teach everything I know about how to sell with email in that course.

I appreciate your time and hope you enjoyed this article. Stay tuned for parts two and three.