Beginners wonder if it’s possible, and skeptics declare the expense and efficient prices of affiliate marketing potentially lowers the bar for online marketing. Yet, the question remains: Are Affiliate Marketers in High Demand? However, there is an excellent reason affiliate marketing has actually experienced consistent growth throughout the ups and downs of online marketing — it works. Affiliate marketing has now become a reliable source of sales for a large range of marketers.Affiliate marketing developed from the early years when some touted it as the future of online advertising, and others claimed it was the downfall of the medium. It’s now a sophisticated avenue which creates anywhere from 5 to 25% of online sales for a number of the world’s biggest brand names.The idea of a wide-open affiliate program with a unchecked and unlimited number of affiliates is a thing of the past. Nearly all online marketers concur that affiliates add value to an online marketing effort, however the program needs to be tailored to fulfill the online marketer’s goals. Affiliates are the real step-children of internet marketing. They rely on tried and tested techniques for developing sales and marketing websites or items online. Lots of e-commerce sites owe a lot to affiliate marketing methods– namely Amazon.com and CDNOW’s WebBuy system. This is an extremely effective way to produce brand awareness and generate leads and company.In the early days of the internet (around late 1994) the majority of online merchants made usage of a Cost-Per-Click system (known as CPC or CPM). The affiliate made money from every click to the merchant’s site generated from the affiliate’s website. 80% of affiliate marketing is now on a cost-per-sale basis, where the affiliate receives a commission for every real sale produced on the merchant’s website. At least 19% of online marketing is on a cost-per-action basis, where the affiliate receives a revenue-share if the individual referred from their website in fact registers or subscribes with the merchant’s website.Affiliates did not bring an end to other, higher priced forms of online media marketing. The success of their endeavours in providing sales cost effectively by method of a pay-for-performance design led the way for other types of performance-based advertising, such as CPA-based search and portal marketing, to produce approval among direct online marketers. Affiliate marketing has actually developed, with marketers and affiliates ending up being more sophisticated and programs more integrated with other kinds of online marketing.In Conclusion:The idea of a wide-open affiliate program with an endless number of affiliates is a thing of the past. The success of the affiliate marketing in delivering sales successfully by method of a pay-for-performance design paved the method for other types of performance-based advertising, such as CPA-based search and portal advertising, to create acceptance among direct online marketers. Affiliate Marketers are now more sophisticated and marketing programs are more incorporated with other forms of online marketing.

Your main marketing tool and the “shop window” online is your website. But do you know how well it’s performing? How many visitors do you get every week? How many of those sign up for your email newsletter (opt-in to your email list)? Where do they come from, what keywords they searched before they reached your site?All this information is available for free in one of the most comprehensive marketing analytics tools online – Google Analytics. And best of all – it’s completely free to use! In this post I’m going to show you how to setup a Google Analytics account and your website conversion goals.The main reason we need to set up and track websites goals is to track website conversions.Every business website has a purpose: to sell products or services, to cross-promote another site, to engage users. The purpose is achieved when a user accomplishes some specific action, like watching a video, filling in an enquiry form, viewing a minimum number of pages, buying a product. It’s important to identify these milestones and give them values so you can track and measure the extent to which your users succeed.That success data is available in the Goals reports in metrics like Goal Completions, Goal Value and Goal Conversion Rate.Types of Google Analytics goals you can track:

Destination: the user reaches a specified web page or app screen.

Duration: the user spends a specified minimum amount of time on your site or app.

Pages/Screens per visit: the user views a specified minimum number of pages or screens.

Event: the user conducts a specified action, like viewing a video.
For newsletter subscription you can set up the Destination type of goal – webpage view. You need to set up for your email subscription form to redirect subscribers to a special page on the website “thanks for subscription”. Views of this page we are going to track.First you need to create a Google Analytics account if you haven’t got one yet. Then you need to set up a marketing “account” there for your business and accept their Terms & Conditions. In each account you can have multiple properties – I would usually set up a properly for each separate website a business has.Once your property has been set up, Google Analytics will give you a tracking code or a tracking ID that you can add to your website. If your website is powered by WordPress, you can install one of several excellent plugins – we love Google Analytics plugin by Yoast. Most of the plugins are free to use as well.After your plugin has been configured and code successfully added, Google Analytics should say that Tracking has been installed and it’s waiting for data. You can come back to check on your results in a few days to uncover answers to all the questions I showed you at the beginning of this article.What can you do with this data after you have setup your Google Analytics account?You can test improvements to your site to see what really works.

Name of your freebie or optin offer – reason to sign up for your list,

Position on the page – above, below, after header, within the page etc,

Having a pop up vs not having a pop up form, as well as having a text pop up offer vs a video opt-in offer,

Having a sidebar signup vs not having one, and positioning it differently within the sidebar.
The key to testing is you change only one variable at a time, leave it for a while, check your results. If you start changing several aspects at the same time, like adding a pop up, changing offer title, and adding a form just below the header – you won’t know for sure which of those improvements made the biggest difference, and which of the changes could actually be hindering the impact of others.The important part you will also need to set up is to configure goals for your website property – this is done through Google Analytics admin interface. You will need to set up a Goal for each conversion type you want to track – contact form enquiries, product purchases, newsletter subscriptions and so on. The simplest one to set up is your newsletter (email list) opt in conversion.You will need to choose a Goal of type page tracking and enter the URL of the page that subscribers see after they’ve signed up for your newsletter. If you haven’t got a page like that yet – you can add one to your site. In your newsletter provider you then need to add a setting that once someone signed up they should get redirected to this special page. How to do this varies from one provider to another, so you will need to check their specific help files.I’ve also created a video tutorial on how to use Google Analytics, which you can watch here: Google Analytics tutorial. So basically once someone completes a form on your site to sign up for the newsletter, they get automatically redirected to the confirmation page. And Google Analytics tracks views of this special page as conversions for your neswsletter opt in form. Within your goal analytics you can see what kind of traffic converts better – by filtering it by sources, keywords, demographics. Use this data to inform your other marketing strategies: guest blogging, social media, podcasting, keywords you optimise against, SEO.

In my Fast Track Marketing System I divide marketing into seven very specific modules:1. The Game of Marketing2. The Mindset of Marketing3. Marketing Messages (Your Value Proposition)4. Marketing and Selling Conversations5. Written Marketing Materials6. Marketing Strategies7. Marketing Action PlansAll of these have their particular challenges. But in my experience in working with thousands of Independent Professionals, it’s #7 that seems to be the hardest for most people.After all, most of the other 6 modules are all about preparation to market yourself.You learn the basics of the game of marketing, you work on your marketing mindset, you develop marketing messages, conversations, and written marketing materials, and ultimately choose the marketing strategies to get the word out.And then the rubber hits the road. You have to actually get out there and connect with potential clients through networking, speaking, an eZine, social media, emails, etc.For most, the bottom falls out of their marketing at this point. It simply goes nowhere, or more specifically it goes into the infamous “Random Zone” where things are done haphazardly and inconsistently.If people have worked to develop the whole foundation of their marketing first, know who their target market is, have put together a web site and have practiced their marketing and selling conversations, they are going to have more success.But even the well-prepared struggle with implementation.Why is putting action plans into action so hard? Here are three of the most common ones. Are they familiar to you?1. As soon as you start reaching out, you face possible rejection. What if your message, your talk, your emails fall on deaf ears? What if your potential clients could care less? What if they outright rejected your promotional efforts?We conjure painful mental images in our mind that stop us cold.For this one we need to work again on our mindset, on our thinking, realizing that if we reach out and people aren’t interested, that it’s not personal. They don’t hate us; either they are simply not good prospects right now or our message doesn’t have the impact it could.So reach out to new prospects and keep improving your messages.2. It takes way more time and effort than you ever thought it would. We think of marketing as a few promotional things we do here and there. This should be easy, we think. But it’s not.Time to do a reality check. Any marketing activity takes time, effort and commitment to make it work. Marketing is a bit of an art and nothing works perfectly on the first draft.You need to make detailed and realistic plans based on strategies that others have used successfully in the past. If you just make it up as you go along, your chances of success are very slim.3. It’s never good enough and although you might even know what you’re doing, you put off your marketing launches until everything is perfect… but it never is.What underlies this are beliefs about perfection, not being good enough and being judged by others. It’s not so much rejection you fear, but disapproval. What will others think of you?Well, if your marketing campaign isn’t relevant to those you are targeting, it’s not a big deal. They’ll just ignore it. They won’t think much about it at all. But for the ones that are looking for what you offer, they’ll not only be interested, they’ll respond.Your prospects are not looking for perfection from you; they’re looking for assistance and value. If you’ve got that, perfection is virtually irrelevant.I’ve done a whole lot of marketing action plans that were rejected by most people, took me a long time to implement, and were far from perfect. And most of them have made me hundreds of thousands of dollars!Marketing success is about know-how, value, commitment, and persistence. Everything else is just a distraction.The Fearless Marketer Bottom Line: There could be a lot of other things stopping you from following through with your marketing plan as well. The question is, where are you going to focus – on your fears and worries about rejection, time, and perfection – or are you going to focus on the value and difference you make and give your marketing plans a real chance?