Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways to get started making money online. This is basically because you don’t need a website, you don’t need a blog, you don’t even need any cash to get started, since there are plenty of ways to reach your perfect audience and start selling to them. There are millions upon millions of dollars being earned in affiliate marketing with every year that goes by.
But if you really want to achieve some success with affiliate marketing you need a plan that will get you the level of income you want. Every time someone buys something online, the chances are that someone else is making a commission on it. That’s how affiliate marketing works.
HOW DO YOU GET INVOLVED
The best place to start is by going to a website, like Clickbank, that houses a wide range of affiliate products. This keeps everything together in one easy to access place and gives you plenty to explore. You can also get an idea of which particular areas you would like to concentrate on.
DON’T DO THIS!
The worst thing you can do in affiliate marketing is to use the scattergun approach. This is when you try and promote a wide range of products that aren’t connected with each other, all from a single website. In essence it isn’t aimed at anyone – and you’ll make fewer sales as a result. Instead, do some research and come up with a specific group of people that you can find a wide range of products for. Not only do you stand a much better chance of making a sale, you’ll probably make more to each person since they will automatically like what you are offering.
But if you don’t have a website, how can you promote your products?
There are several ways of doing this. One of the best is to use sites like Squidoo, which allow you to build web pages for free on pretty much any subject you like. Once these get indexed by Google you’ll start getting a steady stream of traffic – if you’ve picked a popular subject. You can also write articles and distribute them to a number of article directories – but make sure you use ones which allow you to link to affiliate links. Not all of them do.
GET A PLAN
At the beginning I mentioned the need to have a plan to reach the level of income you want. Not many affiliates actually do this and it’s one of the main reasons why more people aren’t making a lot of money with affiliate marketing. It’s certainly not because the potential isn’t there – it’s because they don’t plan to take advantage of it in the right way. You should always look at how much you will get by way of commission for each product. Obviously the less the commission, the more units you will need to sell to achieve your desired income. You’ll achieve this through a balance of products obviously, but it’s worth bearing in mind.
DEFINE YOUR NICHE
You also need to think about the type of people you are marketing to. What kind of income do they bring in? How much are they likely to want to spend on the products you’ll be offering? If you don’t match these two aspects up properly you will struggle to make any real sales. It’s also helpful to set short, medium and long term goals to help keep things in perspective. A short term goal might be to sell five products a week continually, for example. A long term goal could be to make $100,000 a year from affiliate marketing. Goals will help you to decide where you want to go with your fledgling affiliate marketing business.
PROTECT YOUR LINKS
Another important point to be aware of is that it’s wise to protect your income wherever you can. What I mean by this is that affiliate links can be rather obvious at times, and some people will actually delete your link and go into the site and buy something while denying you the commission. The easy way to prevent this is to use a link cloaking service. There are plenty of free versions of this online, and it’s really the safest way to protect your interests. It also changes a long ugly link into a nice short one – much nicer for the article directories!
FINAL TIP
Start slowly and keep those visions of a huge income in perspective to begin with. You’ll soon get to know your way around the business and with each new experience you can build your knowledge and earn even more in the months and years to come.
