Over the past year, I’ve seen an extraordinary amount of web sites who have really mixed affiliate marketing with pure advertising. I’ll see people putting up banners with affiliate links, obnoxious “click here” and “buy this” links all over the place, all in the hopes of making money with affiliate marketing.

Reality check! Sure, you might make a couple of bucks here and there, but you are virtually killing any chance that you’ll see more than that. Affiliate marketing is not just about directing traffic to your merchant, there is so much more to it that will take your affiliate marketing to a whole new level.

Your job as an affiliate is to be a great source of information, and to be someone who is credible. You must earn the trust of your readers, so that you can later recommend products to them. If your readers do not trust you, then the chance they will take your recommendations to heart decreases dramatically.

To build credibility, you should first be prepared to give your readers, whether they be visitors to your web site, or subscribers to your mailing list, as much information as possible. Establish yourself as an expert in your field and as someone they can trust.

By recommending products right away, you will undoubtedly sound like a sales person. People want help, they don’t want to be sold to. Without giving them any information, you aren’t someone they will trust, and nobody wants to just hand over their money to a “stranger”.

Once you have gained the reader’s trust, then and only then should you start introducing product recommendations. The key here is to always be truthful and honest. Always outline the genuine benefits, and how a product will help them directly, and don’t be afraid to outline some of the weaknesses or things you didn’t like about product if needed. This will actually make you sound even more honest and trustworthy.

You should always promote products that you truly believe in and that you have personally tried. By recommending a junk product, you could ruin your credibility very fast. The best thing about recommending products you use is that you can later talk about specific aspects, such as a great chapter of an eBook, or an interesting function of a program, and in turn make more product recommendations which will sound totally natural.

Finally, you can take all these strategies and create a highly profitable product review web site, where you can use these genuine recommendations and create reviews that are honest and truthful. If people are searching specifically for reviews, chances are that they are ready to buy, and your genuine review can easily earn you that juicy commission!

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