In a way, you can say that affiliate marketing secrets lie in choosing the right program. The top two programs in the market today are Amazon.com associates and eBay partner network. Both the websites are mega portals that get in excess of millions of visitors and customers each month. Both websites have products that sell and hence it is a better option to go with the mega brands vis-à-vis a brand that you or your prospective visitors are not aware of.

The Amazon.com affiliate program offers beginners in affiliate marketing a great opportunity to make good online income. It is easy to get started on Amazon and easier to sell products too. Selling is easy because you will have the brand backing of Amazon and it has global recognition. There are two ways to earn money through Amazon.com affiliate program: one is through referrals and other is through bulk sales. Your referral rate can vary from 4% to 15%.

The second most popular affiliate program according to affiliate marketing secrets is the eBay partner network or EPN. One of the salient points is that they have a tool called “build a niche store” and it will allow you to create a website for specified eBay categories. At eBay, different programs have different commission structure.

In the old days of affiliate marketing, you could send a person directly to a merchant’s sales page. However, because of people complaining about seeing the same page over and over with every ad they clicked, Google made changes saying that only one URL for the same site would be shown at one time. So affiliate marketers who wanted to show their product had to create their own landing page on their own domain. Where the problems popped up was in designing these pages in order to convert well.

Well, there is an easy and quick way to do this so that your pages are effective. It all goes back to the keywords that you choose to promote the product and the actual ad that you’ve written to get people to the landing page. See, people who are looking for specific things have their mind a rather myopic state. If they’re looking for “ways to build a dog house” then that’s what they want to see in your ad and ultimately what they want to see on your landing page somewhere, preferably in the headline. This way, they make the connection all the way through.

Think about it logically. If they’re looking for ways to build a dog house and get to your landing page and don’t see anything that reassures them that they are in the right place, they’re just going to leave. So you have to make it perfectly clear that they are in the right place. This means having a relevant headline, review of the product, maybe even some photos. Think about what YOU would want to see if you were looking for a product. Yes, if more marketers would just think like consumers, we’d have more successful people in this business.

So if you’re going to promote affiliate products using PPC, make sure you have a relevant ad and a solid landing page.

The sales will follow.