Affiliate Marketing Tutorials
Basics
How does marketing happen in real physical business? How do shampoo manufacturers sell their Shampoo to a consumer? They have a chain of distribution agencies, distributors, wholesalers and retailers. In affiliate marketing the distributor (called affiliate or publisher) visits an online store, signs up with them for a product or many products. He gets a link for him and he will promote that link to customers. Whenever customers click on that link and buy the product he (the affiliate or publisher) will get the commission. In some programs he gets paid when customers just click on the link, those programs are called PPC (pay per click).
Confused? Do you have questions like where can I get links to promote? And how can I promote those links? Let me explain; there are many web based companies where you can sign up and choose a range of products or services to market on internet, like Clickbank, Chitika, CJ, Oxado, Paydotcom, Cleafs, bidvertiser, SFI Affiliate and many more.
Now how will you promote the link on internet? There are many ways you can promote it through your own site or blog. But for that you need to do more SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques or else no one will see your website. You can promote it through forums, YouTube, chatting, post in classified sites like craigslist, facebook, MySpace, twitter, post articles in article site like ezine, submitting to directories and even you can try Google Adwords.
Yes, it is not that easy to become an affiliate. Please, if you are a newbie don’t try for affiliate marketing, you may lose money and there are more scams than the genuine opportunities. Here I can help you to find genuine online jobs.
Advanced
Affiliate marketing is the best way to build your own online business for long run objectives; I mean plan for a niche, build a website, have many pages useful content on particular niche, promote it through many ways, and monetize it. Yes it is not going to happen over night, you have to be really smart and do hard works to achieve this. You must be thinking; how long it will take to earn 200$ or 300$ from online business? I really don’t have any answer for that, its all depends on your research and work; internet is very sticky and you may mislead in many ways. As per experience and research I can say, there is no Get Rich Program on internet and Yes you can make huge money over night once you become really expert on this. I strongly suggest you to read Ken Evoy’s Affiliate Master Course, download it, print it and read many times at your comfortable zone. It’s a 10 Days plan free to download and don rush, read many times until you have clear picture about it.
Don’t even think to start a next MySpace or twitter and don get all the topics under one website, concentrate only one particular niche what you would like to discuss or what you have experience with. Here I will explain in few steps how to build your own online business or how to get in to affiliate marketing and please note that, I am trying to explain these steps to a beginner and if you are really an expert please provide your comments and suggestions in comments column.
Step 1- Research it
Research and keep research on online business and opportunities; there are lots of basics you should know before you get in to the next step. Please refer our basic definitions list to have better idea on each term and please search it in Wikipedia. Please note that, you are note going to make the money from the beginning, you are building an online business so it will take time. Meanwhile you can do few online jobs what we have given in earn through Amazon; this would make you engaged and you could make some money to meet your expenses or to buy some products like SBI. There is no short cut to make money; even if you have Site Build it! they will be giving you lots of training materials and their action guide, believe me you need really long way to read them But Yes SBI will work if you work for it.
I would suggest you to learn basics or HTML and Dreamweaver to edit the web pages, otherwise you need to keeps begging any designer or developer to work for you and that too would be expensive for you. If you have SBI, you don’t need to know any basic technical skills; they have everything inbuilt in it.
Learn here (this page is under maintenance) more about web designing.
Step 2- Plan it
You need to have proper planning before you decide your niche and work accordingly with your plan. Lets say your target is to make 250 US $ in a month (its very least one) and have proper planning and schedule to reach them… you are going to build “your own” internet based business or online marketing so be patient, take time and don’t rush.
For reaching your 250$ target; there are many ways you can have Google adsense ads in your site, you can promote affiliate products, you can sale you ad space and PPC. So now set you goal to reach 250 US $ in a month. If you can not spend the fee for SBI, you could consider Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. She is successful online entrepreneur, she explained in detail how she did success on online and she has given lots of ways to get huge traffic to your site and you will learn from an affiliate marketing guru. This eBook would be good for you if you don’t have much to invest.
Step 3- your topic/niche
This would be very crucial stage; choosing a niche. You should always choose a niche what you know and what you are expert with and always better to avoid “online money making” niches; it’s highly competitive and you may need to go a long way to start getting visitors as there are huge number of websites, and moreover if don’t know have any experience making money online you better not to promote it. Have a niche what you can easy to write a lot about it, let’s say you like interior designing and you have lots of tips and suggestions for better interior, now do good research through Google Adwords Keyword Tool type “interior designing” there and you can see competition, CPC (cost per click), local and international volume of search etc… better to leave high competition niches and high paid keywords, high paid keywords must be having high competition. Always choose some niche which is having very less competition and cheap keywords, but Yes that must be your interest or hobby or it can be your experience.
Step 4- find affiliate merchants
Now you have decided you niche/topic to have your own website, but for making money through it you need to know the availability of affiliate merchants on that particular topic. The better ways to find affiliates is always research on competitors’ websites and find out what all products them promoting through their website or you can search in Google typing your niche + affiliates (interior designing affiliates) there will be lots of affiliates merchants, you can do a study on them by reading reviews and ask thought in some forums. You always give preference to affiliate merchants who offer residual income.
It’s always good to have study on affiliate merchants on your particular niche before you choose a domain name.
Allan Gardyne who is founder of associateprograms.com has given detailed list of affiliate program directory, he is an affiliate marketing veteran earning from 1998. I have learned a lot from his website.
Step 5- your domain name
Domain has to be very catchy and very easy to remember and then you will have more visitors; see how did I written my domain name FreelancerOutsource.com freelancer is in capital letter and outsource is in small letter coz it makes easy to read. You can experiment many different ways for that; if you planning to have website on interior designing; register domain name something like interior-designing-ideas.com or plan-your-interior-design.com, please note that you are going to make search engine based visitors not next Google.com or Yahoo.com so always better to expose your niche on the domain name and it will help search engines spiders to catch easily.
Now you have to search if the domain name is available for registration; you can search domain name availability through Google apps. Google apps is an application package for business; when you register with Google apps you can have custom email id, calendar, you can 50 user ids on your domain name for free and there much more advantages if you sign up with Google apps. There is paid option also in that where large organization can use it as their intranet. Even if you already have a domain name you can merge it with Google apps and have 50 email ids for free.
I would highly suggest purchasing domain name and space from Website palace they have very good packages and easy to have Wordpress theme, it’s really easy to host a wordpress blog through Website Palace. Do you think you need any technical person help to do all these works? No, you can do all these yourself or just let me know I would be helping you to learn all these technical stuffs and it’s really easy.
Step 6- build your website
Its always better to learn some basics of html and any webpage building tool; this is a long term plan so you may not able to hire a developer or designer, that would be time consuming and expensive as well. I would always suggest to buy Dreamweaver it’s really easy to make web pages through it, I use Dreamweaver and I am editing this website through it still I am not an expert on it. You can download unlimited free web templates and open through Dreamweaver and edit text and color however you want and please make sure that you download only CSS (cascading style sheet) templates, it will save your lots of time for editing the site looks.
I have given detail information to design you own website; please visit build your website (this page is under maintenance) page, to learn more about web designing. If you have site build it you just don’t need to worry all about these technical stuffs, you just need to press some buttons and the system will do remaining part.
Step 7- build useful and informational content
This is more important- you need to have huge useful and informational contents coz search engines love content and more contents and so there is no scope for flash design and pictures, search engine spiders will never catch them. You should keep on adding contents, may be daily basis in the beginning and make it in a week, month something very often once you had huge numbers of visitors.
Your content has to be unique and your own words; don’t think that you can copy content from your competitor website, NO that will not work out coz search engine spiders are more smart these days and that is really unethical steps. If you provide free useful contents visitors will love to return to your site and if you update your contents, you will have more returning visitors. You can sign up with Google analytics to have more statistics on your traffic, how many visitors, from where, what all pages they are looking, how long they are there etc… Google analytics is really awesome tool and it’s free. When you find there are fewer visitors on particular page, you could work more in to that page and watch the result.
Step 8- build traffic to your site
Now you have to bring more traffic to your site; there are many ways to get quality traffic. Webmaster used to put keywords all over the website to get search engine traffic, but things have changed a lot now back links and contents are main reason to get traffic. Please refer bring traffic (this page is under maintenance) to lean more about traffic; I have described these traffic tricks in very simple way so you can try it yourself without hiring a SEO expert.
Step 9- monetize it
Here the final step; now you are going to monetize your site through many ways. You can sign up with Google adsense; this is really easy way to earn from your website. Once your website ready with lots of content you can apply for adsense account, they will review you site and may approve or reject. These days they are bit strict and not giving approvals for blogs and single page websites, but still you don need to bother if you have a real content full blog. I got approval when my website was just one page.
Your site should not be related to sex, alcohol, child labor etc… Google will never approve such kind of website; you can have more details here . Refer our article about Google adsense (this page is under maintenance) to learn more about it and we have given detailed steps to create an account.
Now you can have your affiliate link in your site; you should avoid banner ads and your pages should not feel like it’s just a sales websites. You always recommend some products what you tried and brief the about it. When people love your website, they always prefer buy products from your site. After 6 to 7 months following my steps; you have more than 30 pages content and average 100 visitors everyday, I am dam sure you would make average 250$ every month and this would keep increasing.
If you need more detailed training or tutorials; please contact us, we would definitely help you through chat, email, phone and even in person.
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