When you have many self-proclaimed gurus telling you to do this and do that, it’s easy to confused about what you should be doing. However, there are a couple things you can be sure are the wrong methods to follow when it comes to traffic exchanges and similar advertising resources.

5. Cause Eye-Shock
It’s okay to use bold, contrasting colors, but make sure that you have them matched up correctly. Don’t choose a bright green background and then turn the text color white over that background. Pick a color scheme for you page that includes at least one contrasting color and make sure the content of your page stands out from the design.

4. Present an Obese Page
Plastering your page with advertisements is a major turnoff to surfers. So is loading up your page with huge or flashing graphics and bandwidth consuming scripts. Decide what you page’s purpose is and make all content on the page funnel into that purpose. Don’t dilute the purpose with unrelated or load-slowing clutter.

3. Auto-Play Sound
In the right situation, autoplaying video or sound can turn fence-sitters into buyer. However, in the wrong situation, or with the wrong person, it’s a solid way to lose sales. Keep auto-playing content on the squeeze page and prompt users to start media on the splash and capture pages you’re promoting.

2. Use Pop-ups
Ignoring the fact that many people use various pop-up blockers, a poorly planned pop-up can make people run from your site rather than follow through. The best way to implement a pop-up is through a lightbox-style script, which embeds the pop-up content on top of the host page instead of opening a new window or a browser alert box. Unlike other methods, the pop-up is tied to the page and does not require cancellation or closing to progress. Interested surfers can interact with the pop-up and uninterested people can surf on uninterrupted.

1. Break the Surf Frame
On the web, there are instances where framebreaking is good and acceptable, such as at sites where highly personal information is submitted. However, the majority of websites, including most affiliate marketing webpages should not employ the use of frame breaking scripts. Except where the frame breaking is manually initiated by the visitor. As frame breaking interrupts the surf flow (and irritates surfers), most advertising sites prohibit use of frame breakers. Which should be the deciding reason not to promote frame breaking pages, if user response is not enough to convince you.

The name “Oscar Mayer” and the food hotdogs aren’t things that naturally correlate, but I bet you immediately think of hotdogs (or specifically, “wieners”) when you read or hear “Oscar Mayer”. If not wieners, bologna.

Oscar Mayer’s success is based simply on standing out from the crowd. Before the Oscar Mayer company was named, the founding brothers already had a quality product. People were willing to line up for various types of wieners, including bratwurst, from the Mayers.

It wasn’t too long before their products were marked with the Oscar Mayer name, but the name itself wasn’t what made a difference. It was the actions that the Oscar Mayer business was doing. When Oscar Mayer started to use a yellow label with their brand name, nobody had been doing that. Meats were bulk sold with little difference between packing. When Oscar Mayer started pre-slicing bacon, nobody was doing that. You had to get a hunk of meat sliced at the counter. Oscar was even at the front of the line to be inspected and federally approved when the federal inspection program was started. When you purchased meat from the market, Oscar Mayer products were an obvious choice. The introduction of the Wienermobile and the songs that even today people still hear and recognize are the front end of many years of good branding. And Oscar Mayer is still has a strong brand today.

Oscar Mayer’s branding success is something that affiliate marketers can learn from. Meat is not a particularly rare commodity, even though it can be expensive compared to other foods. However, the Mayers took a common product, provided the best, and then through a series of seemingly simple, but highly innovative measures, got to the top of their market.

1. Choose a high quality product.
Good branding didn’t make the Oscar Mayer products good, the good products made the Oscar Mayer branding work.

2. Know your competition.
When the Mayer brothers got started, meat packaging was pretty bland and rather unmarked. They realized this was not beneficial.

3. Find ways to do things better, no matter how small.
Changing a product label is, to be quite honest, as small thing. But in the situation of Oscar Mayer, it made a huge difference.

4. Stick with it.
Throughout all of the marketing, the core of Oscar Mayer hasn’t changed that much. They have continued to provide good products that people do love and to innovate.

There is one thing that Oscar Mayer didn’t do. The Mayers didn’t decide it was enough to simply place their name on a package and call it good. They acted to make the Mayer name mean something.

If all your brand consists of is a portrait of yourself, and no actions towards making it mean something, you will only have as much success as the businesses Oscar Mayer overtook. Consider how hard to you have to think or search to come up with one of Oscar Mayer’s early competitors. Then ask yourself if you really want people to have to look that hard to find you.

There are exclusive downline builders and there are the downline builders included with every other marketing program. Traffic exchanges, list builders, marketer “networks”, etc. They are useful as a slow spring of referrals when you actually fill them with your IDs. But if you’re not prepared, filling downline builders can be an expensive marketing method. Even on a good connection, it’s easy to have a simple fill-in session take up all your “marketing” time.

The solution is having a referral book. I use a cheap 80 sheet notebook marked alphabetically, at least two sheets per letter (three or four sheets for the letter “T” is recommended). When I sign up for something that includes affiliate membership, I write down the domain name on the left and my referral id on the right. When I come across a downline builder, I flip to the appropriate letter for the program’s site domain and look up the referral ID.  The flip through the pages is far faster than having to log into different web sites, skip through one-time-offers and other promos, and navigating to the right pages. It also stops the distraction of realizing that a site your visiting for your referral id also has a downline builder too.

Affiliate marketing, while certainly still young, isn’t very new. However, affiliate marketing is still a very hot way to supplement and even replace income from an outside job.

Affiliate marketing got it’s start in the mid-1990s. At that point, affiliate marketing amounted to a webmaster (aka “publisher”) agreeing directly, through email and phone conversations, to display the advertisers or sponsors promotional media.  Nowadays, many advertiser/publisher relationships are built without any contact. At least no contact until after an individual publisher has made themself stand out from the rest, usually after having made many sales for a particular advertiser. But how does one get to that point?

MarketingTools.ws believes strongly in “opportunity ownership”. That is, learning extensively about the promoted products and even trying them personally. That way, any advertisements, and reviews, can be presented in a way that is both honest and profitable. Opportunity ownership is in some ways harder than what the loudmouth “gurus” suggest, but it also works better for the person who is uncomfortable with being the hard-selling saleperson.

No banner or link farms, no suggestions to paste one more replicated sites into traffic exchanges, and no more being told that some downline builder is the magic pill to make it all happen. MarketingTools.ws is about being an affiliate marketer, not an affiliate clone. Success starts here.