4 Steps to Your Affiliate Business

If you would like to start making money on the internet, but have nothing to sell, becoming an affiliate marketer is a very good way to begin. It is possible to make a lot of money if you put in the time and effort and choose only good products with good affiliate programs.

Affiliate marketers are people who send internet traffic to a merchant's site and pick up commission when a visitors buys a product from that merchant.

STEP # 1:

STEP # 2:

This course was designed by Dr Ken Evoy for his own SiteSell affiliates, but is relevant to all types of affiliate-selling and is the best how-to guide available! It shows how you can get an affiliate business off the ground, just by putting 15 minutes aside every day for a week.

STEP# 3.

• Build your own website
• Use viral marketing and buy advertising.
• Combine these two methods.

The idea of affiliate marketing is that you want to drive as much traffic to your merchant's webpage as possible, so that they sell something and you get the commission. To drive traffic, you can have your website, with links on it to your merchant's site and articles about their product.

You can also drive traffic by buying Google ads, so that when people search for information on Google, your ad, linking to your merchant's site, comes up in the search results. The searcher might then choose to click on the ad and buy something.

You can also email people, as long as they are part of a legitimate mailing list that you have compiled, and are not unsolicited emails. Any emails you send out should always have the option for the receiver to unsubscribe from your mailing list. If you pester people, they won't want to buy from you anyway, so don't waste your time and theirs with unwanted mails! For this reason, I recommend never buying mailing lists.

You can also post in forums and social networks encouraging readers to click on a link to your merchant's site. However, I emphasise many sites now forbid this and many merchants don't like it. So always practice good internet etiquette and check first. There are so many ways to make money on the internet without upsetting people, or abusing the hospitality of their websites, it is never necessary to gatecrash a site, or make yourself an unwelcome guest!

Which method is best?

If you are going down the website route, you will need to build content that will attract the sort of visitors who will buy the products you intend becoming an affiliate for. You will have to put some work into building up your own traffic, which you can then redirect to your merchant. This is not as quick and easy as buying ads, but in the long run it is worth the effort. You are building something for the longterm.

If building your own website, it is even more important to choose products and a theme that you are interested in and can provide good quality information on----either from your own experience, or from researched information. Don't choose products along a theme that bores you! It will make work difficult.

There are many ways to build a free web page on the internet, or to get cheap hosting. This leads people into thinking having a successful website is easy and costs nothing. However, when people sign up for these options, they often realise afterwards that they hadn't worked out how to get traffic to their webpage. Without traffic, there are no visitors to send to your merchant, and therefore no commission for you. It is difficult with free web pages to get traffic. These free services don't have the features you need to get your site indexed and linked by the search engines. You will end up buying a lot of add-ons to make things work.

From the beginning, it is better and cheaper to make sure you get a website package and hosting that has all the features included that you need to build up your own traffic. You need to create an ever increasing snowball of visitors, which you will "own" to send to any merchant you wish! For more information on building websites, see my page on this subject with lots of free resources.

STEP # 4:

(If you think you like the SiteSell company, you could sign up as a SiteSell affiliate and be in business within eight days, although I would advise you to learn about their products before selling them. SiteSell's affiliate program is rated the Number One affiliate program on the internet, offering a generous 25% commission and a two-tier program endorsed by leading affiliate experts. (SiteSell's affiliate program is the only one that I personally recommend to anyone interested in setting up an affiliate business. They are an ethical, trustworthy company and their product is an excellent one to be selling.)

Some people choose just one product and really concentrate on that. I think it's better to have a few things to sell, but not too many. The crucial thing is if you have a website, to make sure that all the products are somehow linked, so that you can create website content along a single theme. Otherwise you will confuse your visitors and dilute your effectivenes.

To look for products to sell, I recommend you to sign up with a good affiliate managment system , such as Commission Junction, Linkshare, Shareasale, or E-Junkie etc. These services bring merchants and affiliate marketers together, and track payments and click throughs. This means you don't have to worry about your partners not paying your commsion properly. These services also do their own checking before they allow people to sign up with them, so you have an extra wall of protection there. Reputable affiliate partners shouldn't charge a fee to you to "join their program" ie. sell their products! There are so many things available for you to sell that you don't need to do this.

PS My advice is to avoid most MLM's (multi-level-marketing) and anything more than two-tier programs like the plague---they are just glorified pyramid schemes and will waste your time and only bring you grief. There are some genuine MLM programs but there are a lot more dodgy ones! With many, the people who get in early do make a lot of money, but many thousands of others lured by the get-rich-quick promises end up disillusioned and angry when these programs fail to deliver.

Then When You Are Ready to Roll I Recommend STEP #5

See my mini-website university

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