One of the realities of affiliate tactics is that it takes a lot of energy and some patience to make it a successful venture; whether your goal is some part time income, or you want to create a fully developed business. It doesn’t matter how you tackle affiliate sales, building your own direct response website, setting up autoresponders, or just advertising someone else’s product; it takes time to build your campaign and maintain it.

Websites are easy enough to set up, design and put on the internet. Any hosting company will sell you the domain (unmasteredaffiliate.com is a domain, for example,) the hosting and design the webpage for you. If you can’t do it yourself, this is a simple and effective way to started. But it is still up to you to provide the content.

If, for instance, you have created a direct response website - a pitch page promoting your product - you need to write the sales letter, you need a way to process payments, and you need a method to collect e-mails. Even after you have created your initial sales pitch, you would be wise to consider alternate landing pages with variations on the content to test which one produces better sales conversions. Testing your content will ultimately allow you to utilize the pitch that is most effective for conversion. But it takes time and careful tracking to implement.

The same is true for autoresponders. You have to put together a campaign (whether it’s informational or sales-oriented) to send through the autoresponder. You have plan out what you’re going to say, how frequently the messages will be sent, and then sit down and write each of those messages. The only thing efficient about the process is that there are companies that will manage the e-mail lists for you.

Collecting the e-mails may be the easy part, but in truth, it depends on how you go about it. You can purchase e-mail addresses from a broker (not advisable.) Or you can collect the e-mail addresses legitimately.

When you sign up for an autoresponder that is managed by a company, they will require that all of your e-mail addresses be opt-in. That means you cannot, under their rules, purchase a block of e-mail addresses from a broker. Opt-in customers voluntarily give you their e-mail address for the purposes of future business contact. You have to have a means for collecting those e-mail addresses (almost certainly a squeeze page or pop-up on your website where people can sign up) and that is where the bulk of the work comes in.

The real message here is to know what it takes in order to be a successful affiliate. Time is the biggest factor. Time to write the content. Time to run your campaign and test variations on your sales pitch. Time to build a robust e-mail list. None of these happens instantaneously, especially if you do it right. But the payoff, as time goes by, is more income.

—
Andrew Marx writes about how to successfully unmaster your affiliate techniques in order to be a successful affiliate. He stays tapped into the industry with affiliate alerts.