This affiliate marketing guide will help you understand exactly what your affiliate company should be giving you in order to grow your business. I have been online for 3 years and I have made so many mistakes when it comes to affiliate marketing.

Like so many people I thought it was great that this company would give me free websites, banners, sales letters and all the tools I thought I would need to make money. I thought they had given me all the affiliate training I would need to be successful.

Boy was I wrong!

By the end of this affiliate marketing guide you will have an understanding of what you need in order to succeed with affiliate marketing. I also want to make sure that you avoid the many affiliate marketing scams that are ever present online today.

The tips in the list below should be used in order, and if one is missing then your chances of success are greatly reduced.

• This is the most important thing and that is to build your list. The company must allow you to build your own list and not theirs. Your financial security is in that list so you better make sure you are the owner.
• They must offer you all the tools you need in order for you to succeed. Might sound a bit obvious but many offer lots of bells and whistles that don’t actually do anything. The tools you need will be the affiliate marketing tutorial videos they will provide you with.
• You need to work with somebody on a proven daily strategy that will get you the results you need. A daily plan is essential to your online success and any reputable company will have one in place.
• They must offer a proven marketing funnel that will have all of the capture pages, different videos, articles and images that you can use in you marketing. This is very useful when you are starting out as you will be able to start adding content and value to your blog while you are still learning.
• And finally they must offer you a support network that answers your questions in seconds and not days. You are working on the internet so you need to move as fast as the internet moves; you don’t want to be waiting a couple of days to get a problem solved.

Let’s just go into a bit more detail about these import points in this affiliate marketing guide. If you do not build your own list and the company goes bust, they you will have to start again. Your list is vitally important and you must own it.

All the tools and training should been provided, and it must include how to set up a blog, how to market on social media, how to do keyword research and advance SEO tactics as well as syndicating all your work.

Once you learn how to generate traffic your affiliate company must put in place a marketing funnel that gives your prospects valuable information they can use with a product at the end so you can earn your commission.

If you follow the steps in this affiliate marketing guide you will have all the success you desire. But please remember that if one is missing they walk away and find an affiliate program that offers you everything in the list above.

You may have heard about Myspace, the News Corp.-owned social networking powerhouse. Or Facebook, the rapidly growing network which is presently independent but might one day be owned by Google, Yahoo!, NBC, Tribune Co., or any other media company which recognizes the site’s massive potential for consumer leverage.

In a sense, marketing on the internet uses high technology to advance a very low-tech agenda. Like any offline marketing campaign from years ago, generating business demand online still boils down to an objective understanding of your product or service’s utility. You still need an informed and unbiased view of your target market. Effective and efficient use of the marketing mix (price, product, placement, promotion) is as important today as it was decades ago. None of this has changed.

But the dawn of the internet introduced a new variable: a breadth of consumer touch points previously unfathomable to most marketers. Social media are among the most promising channels; according to Nielsen/NetRatings, the top ten social networking sites grew 47% in 2006.

Now a company has a variety of ways to appear in front of its audience. Take Jalima Coffee as an example. This manufacturer of organic Mexican coffee differentiates itself from competitors with a strong prosocial mission, and hired Clicksharp Marketing to inject this brand image into new channels. One of the co-owners used LinkedIn to introduce the business community to her background in non-profit and international development. The company posted a video on YouTube documenting the manufacturing process and sharing a unique slice of culture with its viewers. Jalima’s Myspace profile is linked to over 500 friends: mainly coffee lovers and advocates of sustainable agriculture. Whenever the company’s marketing department chooses, they have an immediate channel with which to communicate news and events, product introductions, or just to say hello.

Moral of the story – forget what you may have heard about the typical user of any of these sites. Their convergence is taking place rapidly and ubiquitously. The sooner you join the network, the sooner you can forge meaningful connections with the stakeholders that are key to your business!

For more, I highly recommend reading Michelle MacPhearson’s Social Media Marketing Guide.