If you do not already have a statistics program up on your website then now is the time. Most free sites and revenue share sites will offer statistics so you just need to figure out how to access them if that is what you are using.

The most important thing about a statistics account is knowing the keywords that people are coming in to your website from. Google analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ is a free statistics program that offers this. StatCounter http://statcounter.com/ is another good one.

Learning how to use whatever statistics program you choose is important.   There are many metrics that you can use to improve the way your website interacts with its visitors, but right now we will just talk about the keywords that people used to come in to each individual page.

If you have a sales page this is a good one the focus on. Going to the statistics information for this page and see where people are coming from. Are there any keywords that you had not considered? Are there any keywords that are on a different but related topic? Are there any topics – indicated by the keywords –  that you should be covering but aren’t?

Make some new pages for these different but related topics and any topics that you should be covering but aren’t. Use your statistics as a tool to know what people are really searching for.  You don’t have to pay $56 a month for a keyword tool in the beginning. You can do is dig into your own statistics and see what you should be writing about next.

Are people searching for products and winding up at your website even though you don’t sell or promote them? This is actually a really good indication that this particular product is underrepresented on the Internet. If you are getting traffic for a product you don’t even sell then maybe you should consider creating a page about this product and selling it. If there were already a bunch of good pages on this product they would be getting that traffic not you.

Also, looking at your statistics you can easily see what Google and the other search engines think your pages are about. If that does not match what they’re actually about, then maybe they need some rewriting or tweaking.

Regardless of exactly how you use the statistical information about how people are coming into your website the information is very valuable. You will want to print out and keep copies of this information as your site grows so you can keep track of how your website is evolving.

If you lose traffic on a certain keyword this is something to be aware of and possibly something to take action on – especially if it is a buying keyword.

So just realize that your website statistics are gold and treat them as such. Basically, you can use this information to find out what your visitors are truly wanting and really searching for and then give it to them.

You want a list of people who are interested in the market that you are in. You want to send them great information periodically, like once a week so they don’t forget who you are and so they like and appreciate you.

Then, when you have something amazing to recommend to them many of them will buy it – and you did very little work. An e-mail list is an asset that can grow and evolve and make you a lot of money. I heard someone say recently that it only takes a list of 500 people to send you $8.36 a month and you will make $50,000 a year.

Obviously that is a simplified version of how an e-mail list really works, but it should open your eyes to the potential of e-mail marketing. A list of 500 people is very simple to get. $8.36 is nothing to most people. If you have a list of people who really want to know the information that you have and you create or recommend stellar products to them you have to make money – and no one can ever take your e-mail list away from you. Even Google.

So how do you start an e-mail marketing list? One way to do it is to create a product to give away in exchange for people signing up for your list. The product should be relevant to what your list will be about. For example, if you are promoting cameras, you might want to give away a short report that you have created or have had created for you that gives digital photography tips.

Anyone who signed up for this list will be interested in digital photography and perhaps will be interested in buying any other reports you create or will possibly be in the market to buy a new digital camera when you recommend one in one of your e-mail messages.

If you want to get started with an e-mail list a great way to do this is to sign up for some e-mail lists that already exist on the Internet. Find a website or a blogger that you want to follow and sign up for their e-mail marketing list.

Pay attention to their messages. How often do they send messages? What do their messages say? Do any of them make you want to buy anything? Do you think you want to do things the same way that they do them or do their methods turn you off and you want to do things completely different? No matter what you will learn something about what you want your list to be like.

Aweber https://www.aweber.com/ is a trusted e-mail marketing service provider. They charge one dollar for your first month and then you will have to pay based on the number of subscribers that you have after that.

There are some free e-mail marketing service providers but normally they send out their own ads with your e-mail messages and sometimes they only free up to a certain amount of subscribers.

However you decide to do it, getting started with e-mail marketing earlier rather than later is a good idea. If you can learn how to make money with e-mail marketing then you are set on the Internet.  There is a good reason why people say “the money is in the list”.

When you are creating a website or a group of webpages that all have one main purpose you will be focusing on certain keywords. You want to know exactly what people are searching for before you start creating pages. This is what I mean by a keyword. A keyword or a keyword phrase is what people type into the search engine when they are looking for something.

You, as an affiliate, want to attract people who are at the end of their buying cycle. You will get the most sales and commissions if the keywords that you are focusing on in your site are keywords that people who already have their wallet out are searching for.

Let’s take a very specific example. Let’s talk about digital cameras.  Someone who types in Google “digital camera review” may seem like they are ready to buy, but in fact they probably are nowhere near buying a camera today. That is a very broad keyword and the person has not even picked out which two or three digital cameras they may be considering.  They are just toying with the idea of buying a camera at this point. Digital camera review is a browsing keyword.

Someone who types in “cheapest digital camera” is probably closer to buying a camera than the person in the previous example. This person knows what is important to them. Price. And that’s it. Cheapest digital camera is a buying keyword, but we can do better.

Someone who types in “cheapest Canon powershot” literally has their credit card in hand and is ready to buy if they can find a price that they think is cheaper than anything else they can find on or off-line.

The difference between a buying and a browsing keyword is extremely important when you want to sell things. Browsing keywords can still serve a purpose and can still be very valuable. If you are trying to attract people to sign up for an e-mail list that you are maintaining or if you are wanting to prove yourself to be an expert in your field or if you are looking for an opportunity to create some linkbait then browsing keywords are wonderful for these things.

If however, you are creating a page that has the purpose of showing someone where to go to make their purchase so that you can get a commission then buying keywords are imperative.

You can occasionally and accidentally make sales on pages with browsing keywords. You can consistently and frequently make sales from pages with buying keywords. I like to consistently and frequently make sales.

Knowing the difference between a browsing keyword and a buying keyword can be the difference between $100 a month site and $1000 a month site.

Pre-selling, if done correctly can increase conversions astronomically.

Consider these three scenarios:

1) If you were on my list and I were to send you an e-mail saying “check this out” and giving you a link. How likely do you think you would be to check it out? Not very likely probably. I know that I’m busy and if I had no reason to click on a link in my e-mail I am just going to delete the e-mail instead.

2) if I were to send you an e-mail about a product that you had no interest in or desire to buy and I were to give you a hard sell on it.  I told you all the great things about this product and why you should buy it NOW NOW NOW!  Like an infomercial.  Ha.  Again, I would probably just delete the e-mail if it were me. How about you?

3) if I were to send you an e-mail and you already knew me and trusted me and thought that I had your best interests at heart – and if I said in this e-mail “wow, I have been using this new product and it has been so great. This is what it has done for me and these are the reasons that I love it and I think maybe it can help you to. Check it out here. And then I put a link in there.

Would you click on that link? Yeah, you might.

Scenario number one is not anything. It’s spam. Scenario number two is selling – that’s not your job. Scenario number three is pre-selling and when it’s done right it works wonderfully. Not everyone is going to buy because not everybody is going to be interested – but the people who are interested will be more likely to click on your links if you use scenario number three and getting them to click on the link with a positive opinion of the product already in their head is 95% of the battle.

Pre-selling always involves getting the person who is reading the information to think about how this product will benefit them. Pre-selling also involves a friendly and conversational tone, like you were talking to a friend.

Even if you are creating a page to promote a physical product like gardening gloves or a swimsuit, you want to pre-sell – not sell. You want to talk about how wonderful this swimsuit is and how beautiful it looks on women. You want to be open and engaging and have a bit of a conversation in your page content.

Let’s look at this page
http://www.squidoo.com/bubble-chair-circle-and-ball-chairs-buy-stylish-round-furniture-online

That is a squidoo page where the sole purpose is to recommend bubble chairs in the hopes that someone will buy one.  See how light and friendly the words are?  This is pre-selling.

So always remember, it is your job as an affiliate to pre-sell – not to sell.  Give information – give lots of pictures – be friendly – and include lots of links so that your visitors can get over to the site and start buying whenever they want to.

Basically when somebody in affiliate marketing wants to scale something up that means they want to take something that is working and do it on a wider and broader scale so that more people see it and it works in more ways. Usually what they mean by working is something that is making sales. A good way to scale sales in internet marketing is to find affiliates.

Say you have a sales page about an e-book that sells well. You’ve done split testing and you know what works and what doesn’t and what your conversion rate is. Now, you find affiliates that send traffic to this sales page, and depending on what kind of a reach they have, they can double or triple or quadruple your current traffic, hopefully increasing your sales by just as much.  That is scaling up your sales with affiliates.

But what if you are the affiliate?  What are some ways that you can scale up your efforts?  The absolute biggest one for anyone who is creating content online is to repurpose that content.

You take your content that you have created for one reason, and you use it for several other reasons and in several other ways.

Here are some examples.  Let’s talk about an informational article that you created for your website.

Use 1) put it on your website.

Use 2) make an autoresponder message out of it and put it in your email list

Use 3) release it for syndicated content (with a research box linking back to your website) at ezinearticles and other article marketing websites and with private website owners

Use 4) Put it together with a few other very good articles you have written on the same topic and create a short report for sale or to give away.  If you give it away you could use it to entice people to sign up to your list.  You could also give other people rights to give it away as long as they keep the links back to your site intact.  Say something in the report like “If you are reading this report you have full rights to give it away as long as you do not sell it and as long as you leave it exactly as it is.”

Use 5) make the article into a video and put it up on youtube and the other video sites.  Use a slightly different title and description that still applies to the article each time.

Use 6) Make the article into a pdf document and put it up on pdf sharing sites like scribd.com

Use 7) take ideas from each paragraph of the article and rewrite and expand on it and create a page with this expanded topic at squidoo and or any other revenue sharing website.  Link these pages back to your original page for traffic and backlinks.

Use 8) Make the article into a podcast – make a recording out of it and put it up on podcast websites.  Talk about and link back to your website.

Can you see how repurposing your content will increase your reach across the internet exponentially, but not take near as much time as creating brand new content?  This is truly working smarter, not harder and should pay off in increased traffic and sales.