1. How you reach your visitor, and
2. What you say to your visitor, and
3. How you refer her to your merchant.

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In addition, it takes, on average, 7 or 8 exposures to your ad before people will click on it.

The falsity of this statement lies in its generality. A "content" page will indeed attract visitors interested in content, that is free information. They are not on your page to buy something, and only multiple exposures to an ad will convince them to even click through. However, a selling oriented page will attract visitors interested in buying an item. Rare is the affiliate marketeer who manages to make content sell.

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This is, as you can see, nothing but a numbers game. Pure and simple.

True and False. True that you need numbers to convert to sales. False that numbers alone will do the trick. You must find a target market, and find what keywords that target market uses to search for what they purchase.

Then you must build a page that pre-sells the product and get your visitor to click through and purchase.

Simple? Yes. And no.

Quote:
The most effective form of advertising is in ezines.

True for some, false for others. Many affiliates have found pay per click advertising to be an effective form of advertising. One advantage it has over ezines is that traffic can almost immediately be purchased. No wait, no fuss, no building a mailing list. Building your own ezine mailing list takes time. It will almost always pay off, but why ignore an immediate source of traffic as well?

Also I'd like to point out that Elaine's calculations show that for advertising in her ezine, you pay around 14 cents/click. I seldom pay more than 5 cents per click at a pay per click search engine, more often 1 or 2 cents.

Another remarkably effective form of advertising is search engine optimization. Finding yourself in the top 5 listing for a keyword phrase in Google.com or AOL.com search engines is very likely to bring you the traffic you desire. Again, an ezine will get you clicks in the long run, but your audience is limited to the ezine subscribers. You never know who is going to search for your term on the net.

Quote:
Setting out to make money with affiliate programs before you have your own site in place is putting the cart before the horse.

False. Try choosing a reliable merchant and building a page around marketing one of their products. Do it again for another couple of like-themed merchants and you have now built a site on which every page is targeted to pre-sell.

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It will take you weeks to create a worthwhile site and then MONTHS to generate the kind of traffic you need.

False. And True. False for a sales site, since you can build a simple site with minimal graphics and no bells or whistles but lots of good ad copy. True for a good content site. A good content site will go much further in the world of human edited directories, and is thus an important part of the total picture of an affiliate marketeer's planning. However, in the MONTHS your content site is building momentum through link exchanges and newsletter sign ups, you can pay for traffic to your sales pages and optimize them for niche keyword phrases for free search engine traffic within 1-2 MONTHS.

Affiliate marketing is about pre-selling. You need traffic, but keep your pages presell oriented, and you will attract buyers, not researchers. There's more than one way to get the buying traffic, so don't ignore any of them in favor of only one.