Why Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is probably one of the most straightforward and cheapest businesses to start online. You won't have to develop a product, carry inventory, deal with shipping costs or interact with customers. You simply find a niche that interests you and promote products related to that niche.

Affiliate marketing means partnering with an online merchant and 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?

 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 required, gathering 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 resist the temptation to be everything to everyone.

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. 

How to be successful at affiliate marketing

It takes a few things all working together.

1. Find a product or service with a good sales record

Do your market 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. Create a website where people can find what they want. 

Know your product and know your audience. Understand what your customers are actually looking for and make sure your products can deliver what they need. Your website should also be easy to navigate and provide a logical flow for users. 

3. Getting traffic is your key to sales

On average it takes about 100 visitors to your sales page to make one sale.   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 only about $15 a day, but if you're getting a thousand visitors a day with your $15 product, that's could mean about $150 a day and that's much better.

So your job is to get as much traffic to your sales pages as possible.

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!

4. Develop quality unique content

Good quality content is key.  If you read Ken Evoy's Affiliate Master's course you'll understand that pre-selling is an important part of generating affiliate sales

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!

Resources for starting your own affiliate Program

How to start an affiliate program

Affiliate Management Tools