affiliate marketing business Learn Affiliate Marketing

Getting Started In Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is probably one of the easiest, straightforward and cheapest businesses to start online. You won't have to develop a product, carry inventory or deal with customers. You simply find a niche that interests you and promote products related to that niche. You do this by partnering with an online merchant by promoting their goods or services. If you make a sale -- you receive a commission.

Is affiliate marketing a real "honest to goodness business" and can you really make money at it?

Here's some additional information that will help you get started:

ABSOLUTELY, I do it every day!

10 Steps to getting started in affiliate marketing

Why Choose Affiliate Marketing as Your Business?

When someone starts out in a business of their own there's a LOT of work and risk involved. You're responsible for investing time and money in developing a product, there's research, marketing materials, getting established, branding and the list goes on. However with affiliate marketing there's less risk because all that work has already been done by the affiliate merchant.

All you need to do is promote the product and collect the commissions.

What's more, a good affiliate program will provide you with all the marketing tools and materials you need to promote it, things like banners, ads, email salescopy and free ecourses or materials branded with your affiliate link (my favorite). These are all things that make you a much more effective affiliate marketer, helping you make MORE sales.

The benefits I appreciate about Affiliate marketing the most are:

No Production costs - No costs to make or purchase products.
No product inventory - There's no inventory to stock or maintain.
No merchant accounts to set up - No payment processing.
No order processing or shipping - Your merchant takes the orders and processes them.

...and what's best of all, you can do it without:

Any programming or website design knowledge or experience
Being a Search Engine "guru"
A having single product of your own.

The types of products you can promote as an affiliate are endless. But beware, don't get caught up in promoting everything and anything. I suggest starting small. Start out creating one website around a specific topic. Promote a few GOOD products with GOOD affiliate programs that complement your site's topic. Once you’ve established a system and understand how to make it work, then you can duplicate that system over and over again. The more sites you build, the easier it gets and your income each time.

Don't worry either about web design knowledge or being a search engine guru. There's plenty of help and tools available.

So what does it take to be successful at affiliate marketing?

It takes a few things all working together.

1. You need a product or service that sells well on the internet

This is where you need to do your homework. Do your keyword research, make sure what you are selling is something that people will buy. For example, people consume millions of Hostess twinkies a year, but they don't buy many off the internet.

2. You need a website that is appealing and where people can find what they want.

How your website looks and feels is important. I wish I still had copies of my first websites, they were pretty funny. Lots of bright colors, flashing and dancing graphics. I wanted to stand out and I thought being flashy would do it -- well it didn't.

It's not the flash that gets attention, it's your words. A good test is take all the graphics off your page and simply look at the text. Would a person be able to get to the meat of your website. Could they navigate easily finding what it is they're looking for? Would they be able to find products that solve their problem? Can you convince them that what you have to offer will really help them? In other words, whatever you do with your site, stay focused on your visitor, what's in it for THEM. Don't be too anxious to get them to buy, that's focusing on YOU.

3. You need lots and lots and lots of traffic

In order to make one sale on the internet you have to scurry up about 100 visitors. Now if you're selling a product that has a commission of $15 and you're only getting about a 100 visitors a day, that's $15 a day -- not much! But if you're getting a thousand visitors a day with your $15 product, that's $150 a day and that's much better.

...The moral of the story is get as much traffic as you can each and every day.

How is it done? There are lots of free ways to bring in traffic and they all work very well, but free traffic still limits you a bit. To get the kind of sales that allows you to quit your day job or at least supplement your income in a big way, you need to add paid advertising, specifically search engine pay-per-click advertising. It's the cheapest, quickest and easiest form of online advertising and it brings you the visitors most interested in what you have to offer. However, pay-per-click advertising isn't for the faint of heart. You must first understand how it works and tread lightly. Very important! There's nothing that will drive you to the poor house faster than using PPC advertising without knowing what you are doing, on the other hand it's an extremely powerful and effective tool if used correctly.

I remember just spending $10 a day on an ad campaign would keep me up worrying all night. But if you've started out getting free traffic to your website and you can make that one sale per 100 visitors then that's a good test that beefing up the advertising should work. If you find the keywords that pay and write ads that attract, you'll be getting those 1000 visitors a day ...and more!

Information and resources for affiliate marketers

Software and tools - These are tools and resources that will make your life as an affiliate marketer easier. Some will help you research topics and keywords, while others will help you work with affiliate product data feeds to build your sites lightning fast!