5 Steps To Becoming A Leader In Your Niche

If you are thinking of starting an online business, I'm sure you will have come across the terms "finding a niche" and "becoming an expert in your niche" - particularly when it comes to affiliate marketing.  

This article on Linked In discusses the Five Steps To Becoming A Leader In Your Niche.

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.”John Quincy Adams

If you look at people who are leaders in Affiliate Marketing, you will notice that they are all experts at building a community around themselves and their products.  This should be the goal for anyone in performance marketing, to develop an almost cult-like following.  With a little swag and an ability to locate and attract followers, you can enjoy the life of a successful Affiliate Marketer.  Transforming that status into profits is the ultimate goal.  Here are several tips to help you become a leader in your niche.

Be Confident

Confidence attracts people.  While being intelligent, hardworking and attractive doesn’t hurt your chances at all, oozing confidence that comes from knowledge and a core set of beliefs which you adhere to like the law is the only way to become a real leader in your niche.  When you can confidently voice your truths, you are on your way to becoming the leader you need to be.

Be Different

Why speak the same words and take the same approach as other marketers in your niche?  The best marketers find a way to separate themselves from the others by being different.  Evaluate the elements that make your competition unique.  Make your perspective unique and one that others will want to share.  By modifying your approach and adapting new ideas you can create an appeal that is worthy of attention.

Find Followers

People often look for simple solutions to whatever problems they have.  They look for people that have the knowledge, experience, and answers to these problems.  Your ultimate goal is to find followers, as many as possible.  If you have something unique and compelling to say, it shouldn’t be hard to find followers.  Building your list of followers is of extreme importance to building a successful affiliate campaign.

Be Persuasive.

Quality Content + Loyalty =$$.  This is a simple equation.  Once you understand why a person engages your content, why they opt in and ultimately buy into you, you will be able to develop an approach that will be effective for your niche.  Influencing one-time actions shouldn’t be your goal, it should be repeatable ones.  The fewer holes you have in your content, the more your content will be shared.

Be Legit.

Longevity +Growth = Legitimacy.  Publishing content often while building your list of followers will help build credibility.  As an Affiliate Marketer, one of your goals should be to earn respect.  To do this, you need to be creative, different, smart, and have a little swagger.  Being a cookie-cutter marketer and producing the same thing, as everyone else is something you need to steer clear of.

http://www.terrellcotton.com/5-steps-to-becoming-a-leader-in-your-niche/

What Is Affiliate Marketing ?

The Basics

Affiliate marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry.  You would probably be amazed at how widely spread it is. But what is this thing ? Actually it is simply selling other people’s stuff - that’s all ! And it is also one of the most lucrative ways to make money online. It has made hundreds of thousands of people millionaires and many more make a living this way. But it is a business like any other and if you want to be profitable, you need to take it seriously. However, the purpose of this article is not to deeply explore affiliate marketing, but to give you a basic idea of what it is and how you can make money with it.

What Exactly Affiliate Marketing Is…

What Is Affiliate Marketing, pic sxc.hu

To be clearer, let’s take a look at an example … Imagine that John is an expert in making websites. He has something valuable – knowledge, that could help other people to make their own sites themselves. So John decides to create an e-book entitled “Build a Site in 5 Steps!”. That’s great, he writes it in a couple of weeks and puts a price tag of $50 for it. As a main marketing strategy, he chooses to use affiliate marketing. So he creates a site for his product and offers anyone the opportunity to sell his book for a commission of 50% of the price or $25. Michael comes across this offer, and he thinks that he can offer this book to the visitors of his site about web design. He writes an article about the book and includes a link (containing his affiliate id) to John's site.  Some of his visitors come across the article and after reading it, they click on the link and go straight to the e-book’s offer page. If someone decides to buy, she pays $50 for the book to John, and then John pays $25 commission to Michael for leading the customer. And this way everyone is happy! The buyer gets the book they want, the promoter gets paid, and the author receives the other half.

This is a pretty cool marketing strategy for John, because if his product is really good, it will sell well and he can attract a whole army of sellers marketing his product for him.

This is a good business for Michael (the affiliate marketer), who has no product of his own, but who gets half of the price as commission, simply for selling John’s stuff.

How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

So now you know how it works, you can try it yourself. The best thing is that you have nothing to lose! If you sell – you get a pay, if you don’t sell – you lose nothing! But where to start?

CLICKBANK.COM is the oldest, most trusted and reliable place to start.  It is the biggest affiliate site nowadays - to promote other people’s products (on your blog, webite or via email) for free or create your own product and list it there to be promoted. Creating a product is not that hard, if you are good at something you can make an e-book and then a decent income, Just register with CLICKBANK.COM and you can start right away ....

http://businessideaslab.com/affiliate-marketing/

How To Make Money From Your Blog

While most bloggers start out writing their blogs simply because they are passionate about their subject matter and want to share their enthusiasm with others, once they discover how easy it is to start making money from blogging at the same time, they quickly adapt to monetizing their blog.

Blog monetization is actually quite easy, especially once you have attracted a large number of followers or have produced a lot of high-value content. It can be a double-edged sword, however, because if your readers start to suspect that you are only blogging for commercial purposes, they may be less likely to follow your blog.

Unless you are creating a blog for your business or organization, a better idea for personal blogs is to follow the 4:1 rule: For every blog that promotes products or services, provide your readers with four blog posts that are non-commercial and simply provide helpful information they can use in their everyday lives. This will make them much more receptive when you do ask them to buy something.

How to Promote Affiliate Products

Affiliate products are those that are promoted by you but are actually sold by somebody else. Whenever one of your readers follows a link and buys the actual product, you receive a percentage of the sale as a commission.

WordPress does not allow you to promote affiliate products if you are using the free service to host your blog, but if you have a self-hosted blog you can do anything you like, even if you use WordPress to create and maintain your blog.

Creating your own blog and monetizing it is not as hard as it may seem. There are many options for creating a blog and many ways to make money from it. A great way to build a free blog is on Blogger by Google. The blogging platform is simple to setup and easy to post in.

Another great free option is Blog.com. Get a free account and start blogging right away. The only problem with many of these free blogging options is that the money you could be making on your own blog is being siphoned by the actual blog owners.

Probably the biggest player in affiliate marketing is Amazon. The world's largest online retailer has a program called Amazon Associates in which you can sign up for free, select products from among the tens of thousands they offer for sale, and promote those products on your blog posts.

http://EzineArticles.com/7723576