Conversely, however, if a high percentage of people who see your message become paying customers, you only need expose your message to a small group of people to see same increase in business. Both approaches are useful for certain products and certain marketing messages. The nearly unlimited audience of Internet makes volume advertising approach relatively easy to pursue. This article examines second, comparatively subtle art of increasing your customer conversion rates.

The average computer user has become an old hand at deleting commercial emails with barely a passing glance and ignoring flashing banners as they surf web. So you have a product that will increase their productivity, impress their friends, inspire their children, and improve their life beyond imagination; if only they knew about it. How do you tell them? Answer: don't.

You'll be much better off if they find out from an objective third party, or (better still) learn how great you are on their own. Sounds great, right? Only no objective third party knows (or cares) who you are and only chance someone will find you on their own is if they type your URL into their browser to see if your domain name has already been taken. Every entrepreneur is in this position when starting out, and ones who have gotten past it spent their marketing dollars developing a relationship of trust with their customers.

To maximize effectiveness, affiliate sites need to keep in mind some common sense suggestions:

1) Resist temptation to add too many affiliate links. Affiliate link overkill confuses visitors and hurts credibility. You want your visitors to view your site as a value-adding destination and not just a cheesy sales site. Recommend links to products you have tried, or that come from good, solid companies. Don't recommend something you don't know just because you're getting paid. Give your visitors best advice and they will reward you.

2) If you write articles for your website, try not to include affiliate links in body of your articles: it will give impression that you have a vested interest in recommending them. You want your visitors to trust your advice, so don't turn your article into an excuse to promote products and make a commission. It's OK to include affiliate links, but do it on a side bar or on a resource table. Whenever possible, link to your affiliate partners with text links (since banner ad click-through is at its lower rate ever, and people tend to ignore banners).