Affiliate Marketing

February 6, 2008 | No Comments

Affiliate marketing is the number one way people make money online. If you are looking into making serious money online then you need to invest your time in learning the facts about this business. There are no legitimate get rich over night programs, but if you want to make serious income then you should look more into affiliate marketing.

Now the basics of affiliate marketing….

In order to establish a successful affiliate marketing business model you need to first sign up for accounts with each of these companies. Each is free and reputable and you can rest assured any information you give out will be kept protected.

Make accounts with these services:

i-n-vest.com - By being in their system you can get personal assistance for any problems you may have while using affiliate marketing strategies. They also can pay you to work online. By joining them you have access to investing tools, free information, job opportunities, and other great services. Also if you decide to work with them, and complete 100 jobs, they will personally show you how to make thousands a year and guide you through every step of the process.

Google - this will be used for allowing you to post profit generating ads, and drive traffic to your site using Google groups.

eBay - eBay is a very powerful tool that makes it easy for you to buy and sell products. While this is not a pivotal part of affiliate marketing, it can be very useful. It can also drive traffic.

Clickbank - Clickbank is extremely powerful tool that will be discussed later, but right now you need to know that it provides you with detailed stats about products you can host links to and receive 75% of each sale. You register with Clickbank, then it will automatically give you products to choose from, once you have selected one it will create a link for you to use and you can get up to 75% of every sale that results from your link. It is completely free for you to use as well.

Forums - By creating accounts with multiple forums you allow yourself to easily reach a large amount of potential customers, drive traffic to your website, and generate advertising profits.

Once you have accounts established with each of these companies you have made a vital first step towards success with affiliate marketing. Now we will discuss the basic elements of affiliate marketing and how each of the tools you registered for above will help you with those elements.

A niche business
In order to make any profit online you have to start out by picking a niche. While many people will tell you that you should pick something you truly love, this is not necessarily the case. You need to make sure there is a good market for your niche. For instance if one of your hobbies is only possible in your local town there probably isn’t a good market for it online. You need to pick something you will enjoy talking about, but that also has a decent market to attract. While markets with less competition are easier to succeed in do not be afraid to tackle competitive markets as well, as there is usually a good reason why they are so competitive (they bring in the cash!). One of the major pitfalls beginners make when trying to succeed with affiliate marketing is trying to attract everyone. You don’t need to be the next Google, or the next eBay to be successful.
A good promotional program
Probably the hardest part about succeeding with affiliate marketing is generating traffic, and getting customers to return to your website or blog. In order to do this you must first make your information interesting and useful. You can not just quickly slap a website together for the purpose of plastering it with Google ads and affiliate links and expect to attract any customers. Just imagine what you do when you go to a web page. Do you search for ads to click on? Most likely not, you look for good informative content that will help answer whatever question you may have. So the first way to promote your content, is by making it good enough to promote itself. Make your content, informative, interesting, unique and most of all useful to the customer and you will begin building a strong customer base. The next and more difficult step is driving traffic. We recommend investing your time in learning all there is to know about search engine optimization because this will be a major source of all your traffic.

We will not outline all the details but here a few of the ways that you can help optimize your website or blog for the search engines.

Make a content rich webpage or blog and continuously add new information. Search engines like to see that content is being updated, and that a “set it and forget it” method is not being used.
Get links to your page from other web pages or blogs using the keywords you think customers would search for. The more links to your website there are from other pages, the higher your page rank and the higher you will fall in the search listings. Contact sites that provide information or services similar to yours and link to their website in exchange for them linking to yours.
Submit your website to multiple directories so that you can be sure it is even possible to find your website when the proper key words are entered.

Other ways to drive traffic to your website utilize many of the tools listed above so if you haven’t registered with them you probably should. First we will discuss using Google groups.
Google Groups is similar to a forum in that it allows individuals to post articles in a variety of different categories called groups. You can also start your own group and get people to join. The service is free and you can use it to promote your website. Create a helpful and informative article and post it on Google Groups, including a link to your website somewhere or at the end. If people want to find out more information they will visit your website and you will receive nice bursts of traffic from your article. It is important to remember that you don’t just slap an article together as people will quickly recognize it as advertising and probably not listen to what you have to say. Make sure your article will really help the customer and make them want to learn more. You can also use Google Groups to post your affiliate links in and with programs like click bank you can earn 75% of the resulting sales.

Another method for driving traffic to your website is joining forums. Forums allow you to post information on a huge variety of topics. Be careful however as many do not allow self promotion and you have to be very careful in the wording of your posts. Do not join forums just to spam advertising for your website. Give legitimate responses to topics in the forums and include your link in the signature or at the bottom.

An under used tool for driving traffic to your website is eBay. If you have e-books or items to sell, post the on eBay with links to your website in the listing. This is a great was to generate traffic because, before purchasing a product many customers will visit the website to see if they can get it for cheaper or learn more information about the product. Also if people send you questions about the item through ebay you can refer them to the website for answers. Once again make sure what you are selling on eBay holds some value and is not made just for the purpose of allowing you to create a sales ad.

Other methods for generating traffic include you tube, and services like myspace or face book. Its easy to drive traffic with these services simply by creating a video about your product or service and including a link to your website at the end.

Now that you know some methods for driving traffic to your website, promoting it in the search engines, and making the website attractive to your customers, how are you going to make money with this information. Well you need to put in the necessary time and effort o make these strategies work. While many of them are simple they may take some time to get the hang of and patience will be required if you want them all to work. Do not expect to get 10,000 new visitors over night, and don’t be discouraged if you just get a handful. Every visitor is important, and knowing that key concept you can tailor your website or blog to inform visitors and make them want to return.

Find a niche, create interesting content, utilize multiple outlets of promotion, find something to sell or use products like click bank to promote other peoples products, utilize ad services like google ad sense for additional revenue on the side and you will be on your way to establishing a successful affiliate marketing business.

There is still a lot of information out there to help you with affiliate marketing and you need to seek it out and learn everything you can if you truly want to be successful.

Written by J Plappert. For more information or if you want to work online in the mean time, check out http://www.I-N-Vest.com

Posted in Make Money Online