Going from squeeze page to sale can be a difficult part of affiliate marketing. There's a massive difference between free information and information that costs even $1, and making your prospective customers convert from passively reading to pulling out their credit cards can be a difficult jump. There are really three things to check off your list before you should try to sell to your customers. First, you need to build the trust and immersion in your ideas that cause people to buy. Secondly, you need to introduce a deal so valuable and worthwhile that your prospective customers become interested. Finally, using a combination of psychological selling and informative copy, you should hook your customers into a purchase. These three steps are explained in greater detail below.

Building Trust:

This is the fundamental and primary goal of any marketing campaign. With so many competitors out there, truly innovative and powerful marketers need to build trust to ensure that their prospective customers keep coming back to them, and not falling to the competition. Building trust starts with creating value for your customers, which can take the form of free information or sample products, an informative guide, or merely brief video or text content explaining how you can help them. Without being able to offer anything for them, you can't expect your prospective customers to convert immediately.

This is where so many wannabe affiliate marketers make mistakes. Instead of building trust and creating the environment that results in sales, they sell their products short and introduce a sale from the get-go. While this may result in one-off sales and some low conversion rates, it immediately puts the buyer on the defensive, and destroys any potential trust that could have lead to greater sales. It's ultimately your decision, but the smart money (and massive payoffs) rest with building trust and introducing sales later on in the process.

This means that the most lucrative and profitable campaigns are almost never those that focus exclusively on direct ad -» sale advertising. While Google AdWords might bring in a sale now and then, it's never building relationships with your customers, never creating a permission asset, and ultimately never creating the trust that's so essential for a profitable business. Focus on trust first and foremost, and then worry about monetizing and sales targets once you've built the trusting customer.

From here, it's a matter of introducing offers that interest and entrance your prospective customers. Simply mentioning your product isn't enough -- it's about building the benefits that the product can create for your customers, and highlighting why they're so important. This part of closing a sale is introduced in greater detail in part two of this quick guide to affiliate marketing, along with the best methods to make your customers pull out their credit cards and convert from passive readers into active buyers.

To learn more about affiliate marketing, check out the free Affiliate Marketing 101 report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.