After a month away from the IM scene, I figured I’d slowly work my way back in with a blog post aimed at those of you who are using my Dominating Amazon system.

The run up to Christmas is already on. It seems to get earlier every year, but without a doubt there’s a lot of early birds out there starting to buy presents which means online powerhouses like Amazon are starting to take more orders. And that’s great news for us affiliate marketers.

At the moment I’m looking at what new games and gadgets will be released around early December. There’s often a flurry of new products to hit the market just in time for Christmas, and many, many people get in on the act early to ensure that if stock runs out they’ll still get their high-demand product delivered to them in time for the big day.

Now, most affiliate marketers get to the scene too late and find that the cost-per-click is too high to make much of a profit. But if you get in on it now then your costs will be lower due to less competition (the keywords are extremely important) and you can get out of the market in early December if needs be and leave the rest to struggle to turn a profit.

So start looking around now. Browse online stores and look at their soon-to-be-released products. Read magazines and see what’s just around the corner. And when you have a great list of products, get your Amazon affiliate links and start promoting… before the rest of the market jump on it in about 6 weeks time and make it a real chore to turn a profit.

Very few people realise you can save yourself a bundle of money on your Adwords costs by simply changing your ad. The idea here being you pre-qualify the people who see your ad to ensure only those who are looking for your product or service actually click on it.

The process is simple: you add some copy to your Adwords ad which pre-qualifies the prospect. For example, if you’re selling fishing tackle you could add ‘for carp fishing only’. If you’re selling beginners golf clubs, you could add ‘for beginners only’ or ‘for high handicappers only’. I’m sure you get the idea.

Here’s some more examples of how to pre-qualify your Adwords traffic:

For professionals only
For women only
Over 25s only
Left handers only
For download only

… and so on.

Another great pre-qualifier is to add the price to your ad. Someone looking for something for free is less likely to click on your ad when it’s got a price of $1,997 in the copy. You WILL get freebie seekers clicking it out of curiosity, but over all you will get more targeted traffic to your site.

Another example: the debt management niche. Ads will say, for example, ‘Debts of £15,000 or more?’ That’s a pre-qualifier. They might also say ‘England and Wales only’. Yet another pre-qualifier. Put them both together and the people who click on that ad are generally going to be living in England or Wales with debts of £15,000 or more.

Hopefully these examples have shown you how to use pre-qualifiers effectively. What you need to do is brainstorm ideas about WHO your ideal customer is and use their characteristcs and demographics to create pre-qualifiers for your ads. You’ll get more targeted Adwords traffic with less clicks.