Are you ready to hear a painful truth before I share with you the secrets of affiliate marketing behind successful affiliates? Figures show that 90 percent of affiliates make a total of 10 percent of all the affiliate revenue generated. So this means that the super affiliates, the remaining 10 percent of affiliates make the rest of 90 percent of all affiliate income. Which group are you in? I am sure you want to unlock the affiliate marketing secrets responsible for the success of top affiliates. So here's Part One of my two-part article.

Master the following secrets of affiliate marketing and you are well on your way to join the league of super affiliates.

1. Always Cloak Your Affiliate Link.

Whether it is a link you use in email marketing or a website link, be sure to hide the ugly looking link that tells the whole world it is an affiliate link. People get a bit sensitive and are not likely to click when they see that it is an affiliate link. Use affiliate cloaking tools or php redirects.

2. Use Article Marketing

Article marketing is a powerful workhorse in affiliate marketing and is one of the deadliest secret of affiliate marketing used by top affiliates. This is one form of content publishing which can be used to establish yourself as an authority figure. Brand yourself as an expert and you will have loyal customers. Not only so, your articles will drive targeted traffic from the search engines and indirectly from other related websites that post your article.

3. Target Specific Niche For Marketing

Super affiliates use niche marketing. They target specific market niches rather than going for broad markets. It is easier for you to publish content that gets high ranking in the search engines for tight niches than broader markets as it can be overwhelmingly competitive with big established sites taking top spots in the search engines. We all understand that ranking well means more targeted traffic which then translates to sales. Once again, do a search around for tools to help you find profitable niches.

4. Create Presell Pages

Never send your prospect directly to the affiliate sales page. That is a big mistake made by newbie affiliates and even some veterans. Presell your prospect first with a review website or even some testimonials from past customers. The whole idea is to warm your prospect up, and get him or her excited before sending to the affiliate sales page. This would dramatically improve the chances of a conversion to sales. It is important therefore to find good affiliate programs with solid content and sales copy that you can modify for your presell pages.

5. Follow Up With Your Prospect

Did you know that traffic is valuable? While most affiliates would agree that driving traffic is a never-ending task and can be quite challenging even for experienced affiliates, many do not optimize their traffic. Many focus on bringing in fresh traffic but fail to capture them for follow up.

Now, it is more likely that someone would buy your affiliate product after being exposed for several times than just seeing it once. Most people do not buy on the first encounter but given enough time to warm them up to the benefits, the potential for them to convert into customers is much higher! Also, once they have bought from you, you can continue to make repeated sales from these customers. For that, an autoresponder can do a great job in sending a series of email messages.

These are truly powerful secrets of affiliate marketing that top affiliates are using. Find out more of such affiliate marketing secrets in my free report.