How to Promote Your Chosen Affiliate Product

Obviously once you have a product, either as the product owner, or as an affiliate, your aim is to get people to purchase it. Therefore you have to promote the product to get the attention of potential purchasers.
There are several ways to promote your product and this article looks briefly at some of the ways.

BUILDING LISTS AND GETTING TARGETED TRAFFIC
First of all, you need to have a website and/or blog as a landing page. Vendors will usually provide affiliates with promotional material such as banners to put on them. You then need to set up an auto responder on the blog or website and offer some incentive for people to sign up, such as a newsletter or free content-rich report. This way you will build a list of customers. It is important to keep your website and/or blog populated and up-to-date.
Your target market should comprise of people with specific needs and money they are willing to spend. The bigger their needs, the hungrier they are, and the more they will spend.
There are many ways to locate your market. Be open to ideas, trends, challenges, and problems, from television, newspapers, and other media and other people.
The lifeblood of any business is being able to generate consistent targeted traffic to your websites/blogs. Without this you will find building a customer base, an income and a reputation online a real struggle. THE MONEY IS IN THE LIST!
Another couple of advantages of having your own list of subscribers are: You can do joint ventures, and you will get more sales long term.
However, growing a list can be counterproductive when:
There may not be enough Clickbank products in your niche to maintain regular mailings to a list (in fact you should check that there are products at all with some niches).
Some buyers may have a need which is fulfilled with only one product and may not want repeated mailings. Finally, it’s not a good idea to focus on just one market, in case something happens to it, like people losing interest, or a product being banned. A more diversified approach is definitely recommended.
It is very important to communicate regularly with people on your list, to give them good value information, and to build a relationship with them.
However, you obviously need to get people to visit your website and/or blog in the first place to sign up to your list.
WRITING ARTICLES
By writing articles for article directories you can promote your affiliate product and place links back to your blog and/or website, and for your affiliate product, in the author resource box.
Use keywords in your articles relating to your product, and repeat them throughout the articles, for instance ‘affiliate marketing’ to get search engine attention.
A good way to decide what type of articles to write is to identify from online articles those receiving thousands of hits in days of being published. Go to EzineArticles and other article directories for articles that have had lots of hits early on. Use these articles to create your own on a similar theme.
FORUMS
Forum marketing is a powerful way to promote, especially if you concentrate on forums which are dedicated to the product/subject you are promoting. Forums with members that have urgent, shared problems which your product would resolve are ideal.
Join forums and take part in discussions, offer useful information and tips. Post something that shows you as an expert in the subject, offer free report with links to your promotion inside report.
OFFLINE ADS
Offline ads consist of classified and display ads. classified ads are cheaper and smaller, and good for generating enquires. They are restricted usually to 20-30 words of text only, and are for low price items straight off the page.
Some affiliates use 2-stage classified ads, where customer has to visit their site to find out more, to grow mailing lists. Classified ads can be used to test the sale of your product or to test success of the advertising media.
Display ads are large ads, best for selling high price products straight from page. People are more likely to trust display ads because of their cost.
Finally, there are plenty of social networking sites and video sharing sites to promote your product.
Remember, to use an incentive to get customers on to your list, and, importantly, that you must build yourself a good reputation online.