Affiliate Marketing Tips: Creative Strategies For Affiliate Marketing Success

Affiliate Marketing is a growing industry and for good reason. Affiliates can earn a substantial income by directing website traffic to a merchant's website and if a sale occurs, the affiliate gets a commission.

While Affiliate Marketing can produce attractive pay days, it does take some work and creativity to find success.

Here are some creative Affiliate Marketing Tips:

1. Harness the huge amount of website traffic that naturally comes to eBay every single day. Many affiliate marketers have yet to take advantage of eBay and because of this, opportunities abound.

One newer feature being offered by eBay is the eBay Classifieds section. You place a classified ad here just like any other online classified is placed.

You have the ability to use your own custom HTML so the classified ad can look any way you'd like.

There are several differences to placing a classified ad with eBay, as opposed to an auction...

You have the ability to direct website traffic to any site you'd like (say your affiliate link). You can add a web-form to build your list and since this page is only an advertisement, you don't have to pay eBay any "final value" fees either.

2. Use the ever-growing Web 2.0 community of sites.

Some sites, liked Scribd.com discourage users from "commercial" type content but others, like Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com do not.

These social networking sites are getting lots of traffic and many are being favored by the search engines as well. Many affiliates have not figured out how to take full advantage of sites like these so there still is lots of room for those who take a little time to educate themselves.

If you've created a landing page for your campaign, try to create some "lenses" which are narrowly focused around your top 5-10 keywords and point all of these new "lens" pages back to your landing page.

In short order, you'll find each one of your new "lens" pages getting search engine traffic and some of the traffic will naturally flow to your landing page as well.

In addition to this, you'll find your landing page crawling it's way up in the search engine results pages as you have pointed 5-10 more quality backlinks to it as well.

3. Use V-books in conjunction with video sites like YouTube.com

The term "V-book" was coined recently by marketer Mike Long but it's really nothing new. Basically, he's just added some screen-shot images of an actual YouTube video into a PDF ebook and then hyperlinked the image to the URL of the video on YouTube.com

The really creative part of this plan is its "circular" nature. Here's what I mean...

First, you create an informative (and hopefully interesting/funny) video on your topic and you upload it to YouTube.com In the video itself, you tell the viewer about the ability to get more information from your free report and direct them to your offer page.

In the PDF report, you link the screen-shot images to one (or more) videos that you've uploaded to YouTube so that each reader of the report is likely to click the link and watch the video.

Then, you go out and do everything in your power to get your report in as many hands as is humanly possible. You might blog, send PPC traffic, interact on forums, build Web 2.0 pages, or anything else that might get people to go to your landing page and signup for the free report.

These readers then watch the videos on YouTube and because of this the video gains popularity and with it, more viewers. The viewers then get exposed to the free report offer and the cycle continues.

While there are literally hundreds of different ways to make money as an affiliate, these Affiliate Marketing Tips can be followed with very little (or no) money at risk.

Better still, since these techniques are not over-saturated, you have a chance to stand out from the rest of the Affiliate Marketing regime and make sales.