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I am an experienced internet marketer with a decided love of affiliate marketing. I am using this as a platform to be a resource to those just starting out with affiliate marketing and also to those experienced enough to look for the best!

So Let’s Start Affiliate Marketing Today

Let me just say before we start – you can do this. It may seem confusing if you are totally new to online marketing, but that is just because it is new.

There are three simple strategies you need to focus on.

  1. Find affiliate products.

  2. Send targeted traffic.

  3. Make affiliate cash on the run.

List Building Silver Bullit

Let’s break it down a little further.

Step #1: Choosing a profitable niche.

People bog down on this being the first step. Do not let this be a stumbling block. All it means is you need to narrow your focus so that when you start on the following steps you have an actionable direction. By way of example – this blog in in the online marketing niche > digital products > affiliate marketing > how to be an affiliate marketer.

It could be anything, online marketing > digital products > pets > dogs > dog training  –  This now gives you some idea on how to proceed with the next step.

  • Considerations:
    1. Do a little checking to make sure it is a profitable niche.
    2. Going with a niche you have a real interest in always makes things easier, just make sure the first consideration holds. Snail breeding may be a passion of yours, it may be somewhat difficult to make money from it however.
    3. Don’t let this slow you down. Don’t feel you know enough to determine this? Fine, pick online marketing – always money there, and you can follow along easier and let’s get you to making money with affiliate products.

Step #2: Website set-up.

Don’t skip this. Yes, you can market online without one, but you need to be better at marketing in general. Having your own online real estate will make things so much easier. Even a free Blogger blog or free WordPress blog is better than nothing, but be careful to stay within the rules.

Power Tip: Use the Blogger platform and concentrate on good content….Google loves their own blogs!

Still, if you can, get your own domain name and hosting to start. Then there are no rules, and this will make so many things easier. As in having a place to host your advertising images, that’s just one example by the way.

As a great low cost hosting solution, c-panel based (which you very much want), with great support try HostGator, that link will get you a 1 penny first month.

You will also be able to get your domain name there. Or you can get the domain name at GoDaddy, the giant in the industry and they make the domain search process much easier. You can also get professional hosting there.

You must get an autoresponder. The solutions for this are legion so I am going to suggest two possibilities that I use. The first is a total package that can be a primary business for you – get autoresponder, hosting, domain in one fell swoop and have a total business to promote that has full support and marketing training/tools, GVO. The second is a low cost solution: European Safelist – take the Pro upgrade and you will have an easy to use autoresponder for around 10 bucks a month.

Step #3: Choosing the right affiliate products.

This is easier than you might think. Go to the big dog in affiliate marketing marketplaces: Clickbank.com. Look for what they call high gravity products within your chosen niche.

Step #4: Follow-up messages

This will be the messages you load into your autoresponder to help automate the marketing process to those folks that have signed up to your burgeoning list! Way to much information to cover effectively cover in a short blog post – Here is a very low cost tutorial that will more than get you started with your list building efforts: List Building Fire

Step #5: Drive targeted traffic to your squeeze page.

Another topic too complex to describe in a sound bite. Here’s a free 3 volume set that will give you an excellent grounding in what you need to do in order to get eyes on your offers/squeeze pages: http://funnel.startaffiliatemarketing.org/

Step #6: Sell affiliate products.

And start making online income – you will if do the work.

Step #7: Build a relationship with your audience.

This is the way you keep people interested in your offers that have opted in to you mailing list. This is very important to your long term success.

I will flesh out this topic more in future posts

Affiliate Marketing will work for you if you do the work! This is the lowest cost way to start your own business and can easily give you the means to an independent income online. Good luck and leave any questions you have in the comment section. I will respond!

Why Do I Focus On List Building?

List Building & Affiliate Commissions

The answer is pretty straightforward. It is a numbers game folks.

If you can send a million sets of eyes to your affiliate offer, you will make some sales.
If you send one hundred thousand sets of eyes to your affiliate offer that were looking for your type of offer, you will make more sales.

That’s called targeted traffic. And list building from day one can bring your affiliate marketing business to profitability and success so much sooner by letting you gather leads from people who have asked for you to send them information.

This will allow you to skew the numbers in your favor. The people on your list are already predisposed to pay attention to your advertising. They may have already purchased from you to have gotten on your list. They are interested in your types of offers (or they would not have subscribed). All these things make them assets of the highest caliber to your growing business.

For these reasons, integrate list building into all of your marketing efforts. Here are some tips to help accomplish this:

  1.  Put up a good web form in your site that immediately follows the end of your content.

  2. Make your homepage impressive.

  3. Provide good service and products.

  4. Keep a clean and private list.

    Never lose the trust your customers have entrusted you. If you provide e-mails to others and they get spammed, many will probably unsubscribe to you. Remember, a good reputation will drive in more traffic and subscribers as well as strengthen the loyalty of your customers.

Remember, all those program owners who claim you don’t need a email list to be successful in their system, well, they got your email address first. That is because they know the value of list building.

Here’s a free list building tips guide… Read it and use the ideas inside: 77 List Building Tips

Three Effective Strategies Every Affiliate Marketer Should Use

Everyone who starts affiliate marketing is looking for the successful
market that will return the most money. Many of them think there is
some magic formula involved that will lead to success for them. 'Tis
much more mundane than that. It is just good marketing practices
that have been proven to work over years of hard work and
dedication.

There are three strategies that have worked before with online
marketing and will continue to work for the foreseeable future. Here
are three such marketing strategies, which will be able to increase
your sales and make it possible for you to survive as an affiliate
marketer.

1. Use separate, unique web pages to promote each product you are
marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on
web hosting. While I know it can be daunting to think you should
spend more money when first starting out... keep it in mind, it is best
to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Power Tip: Use sub-domains around a more generic domain
name when you are first starting out. Get a WordPress blog
set up on the domain, using it as your main web site and use
sub-domains around it to promote your products. Such as –
xyz.com is your domain and you set up a sales funnel on
abc.xyz.com .

Build Your Own Funnel Empire!

Done for you solution to start affiliate Marketing.

Product reviews on your website will give visitors an initial
understanding what the product can do for those that buy them. Also
include testimonials from those who have tried the product. Be sure
that these customers are willing to allow you to use their info, photos
and such on your site. 

Write a few articles highlighting the uses of the product and make
additional pages on the website. Take some care to make the pages
attractive and compelling and always include calls to action on the
page. Your headlines should attract the readers to read more, or
even contactyou. Offset and/or highlight your main points. This will
help your readers to learn what the page is about and will titillate
them to find out more.

2. Targeted traffic is best and to that end... get traffic that is targeted
to your product! Look, if you send a million random people to a sales
page you will make sales. But if you send a hundred thousand people
who were looking for that product to that same page, you will make a
lot more sales. And a great way to help that along is to write articles
for publication in e-zines and e-reports. Then you can locate
publications that are focused on your target customers and your
articles will send them to your site.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600
words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these
articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your
site in a day. 

Keep in mind that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your
product or get your services. If you can generate 1,000 targeted
hits for your website in a day, you can made 10 sales based on the
average statistic. 

This is a cheap way to generate targeted traffic to your offer.

3. Offer free reports to set up lead capture boxes for your readers.
Position them at the very top side of your page if possible so they
simply cannot be missed. Create autoresponder messages that will
be mailed to those who input their personal information into your
lead capture box. Research shows, a sale is usually closed on the
fifth to seventh contact with a prospect.

This gives you multiple opportunities to close the sale instead having
only the page visit to accomplish the task.

In your emails focus on important points like how your product can
make life easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject
lines in the email. Avoid using the word “free” because there many
spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk
before anyone ever sees them. Convince those who signed up for
your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do
not avail themselves of your products and services.

These strategies are not difficult to do, if you think about it. It just
requires a little time and an action plan on your part. 

Use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You will
maintain a good source of income and survive the jungle.
Most affiliate marketers don't.

Affiliate Marketing Tools Of The Trade

Ok, let’s get started. I’m going to recommend a few affiliate marketing tools. Software tools that are basic to an online business. There are other choices to almost every suggestion made here, but these are the things I use. Most are free open-source giants familiar to many a geek. So… if you want to start affiliate marketing, go and download and install these programs at the links provided and I’ll give you a few reasons why below.

Affiliate Marketing Tools

  1.  You’re not going to like this unless you’re already using it… go get a gmail.com email account. This one I strongly urge. Doesn’t matter what you already have…. keep it and use it as you will but get a google account and use it for your business. Lots of reasons for this one. Mail sending and receiving interference, social site integration for your marketing efforts, multiple accounts, the list goes on. Make your life easier from the start, get the google account.
  2. You will want to get OpenOffice for your main office software. Powerful, handles nearly any documents including Microsoft and more. You can get it at https://www.openoffice.org/download/ .
  3. Nvu will be your best bet for what is commonly called a WYSIWYG (wi-see-wig) HTML editor. It is the acronym for “what you see is what you get”.  Easy to learn, great documentation, free, just can’t beat it. You will need it to manipulate html pages easily. Do not concern yourself… it is easy to do what you will need to use it for. You will find a good download here: http://download.cnet.com/Nvu/3000-10247_4-10412423.html .
  4. Last of the core four as it were is GIMP. Probably the most versatile photo manipulation software out. Open source and free, you will want this for its ability handle Photoshop files and vector images. No, I won’t let you get lost in a big learning curve. You will easily learn the few things you will want to do with it. Grab it here: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ .

Learning To Use Them

 

List Building Is Fundamental To Affiliate Marketing

Dumb Little System

Or – How I came to the conclusion I was an idiot for not starting sooner.

Is the Money in the List? Without a doubt. You will get sick of hearing it, but if you will start here you will save yourself months or years of resisting what you will eventually wind up doing, and your path to a sustainable work at home lifestyle will be much shorter.

Now, that is not to say that you will not come across some programs that will swear you do not need to worry about list building, but pay attention here: the first thing they will get from you is your email address and they will put it to good use, as they should, in marketing their program and possibly other offers to you.

When you start affiliate marketing the great thing is that you do not need a product to begin making money. There are thousands of viable products available that you can make a great income on. It does not matter what your interest or your niche is, there are plenty of products waiting for you to earn commissions. If you have a good product of your own to promote, that is also easily done as soon as you begin to advertise correctly online.

And as for affiliate programs, nothing could be simpler to get started with. Sign up, promote it, and watch as the money starts coming in
(hopefully). This is all great, but then what? After that find another product and start all over again.

If however, you have been active with list building when you find or create this new product, you will already have hundreds or thousands of
people to offer directly to. This will be targeted traffic, the best kind! You can shoot them a quick email and have immediate money in your pocket.
You can start advertising this product and add even more people to your list for your next great idea. This process tends to snowball into even
more sales and bigger list. And it won’t be long before your primary income will be from your online business.

How do you start building a list? Not so difficult once you learn the process. Put a couple strategies in place to run continually, integrate list building into your product promotions, and you will see progress immediately. Here are the basic steps:

  • Create a squeeze page. This is a simple one page website that is designed to capture your visitors name and email address. Also known as a lead
    capture page.
  • Offer a quality free incentive to get them to decide to give you their email address and maybe name to receive the freebie. This can be a free report, a free subscription to your newsletter, or e-book.
  • Integrate these addresses into an automated email system known as an autoresponder.

Don’t worry, none of this difficult. There are even done for you, plug and play systems you can use.

Email them regularly, making sure that you are offering them something of value. Some ideas: useful information, free reports, free software, online tools, physical products, and creative ideas that you come across.

Occasionally suggest your product and offer a link to your product or affiliate page. Offer your product with a strong sales message and watch the sales begin.

Do not oversell to your list. This will be your most valuable asset and should not be jeopardized.

Giving good solid information and only promoting worthwhile products will begin building trust with the folks on your growing list. This is important, treat your list as a group of friends that you want to help with the information that you are providing. Just follow the golden rule and treat your list as you would want to be treated and you will be on your way to success.

 

Have a great day…we’ll get to the nut’s and bolt’s of list building in the next article. Meanwhile, check out the Videos tab and you’ll find a great place to start building your affiliate empire!

Affiliate Marketing With Free Traffic

When you start affiliate marketing, marketing is the key word. You must get eyes on the offer you have or no one can buy it. This is called traffic and if you want to be making any money online, you are going to need a lot of it. This is where most people bog down, you must put the marketing into affiliate marketing and advertise the link of the product or services you are offering. You can pay for traffic ,it’s fast; or you can generate free traffic, it’s slow – but free! Free marketing can be quite effective, you are trading money for time here. Here is a list of the most popular methods for getting traffic for free.

Article marketing  – Old school maybe, but still very much worth doing . Over time good back links will appear adding organic traffic to your site. This may seem obvious but I shall say the words just in case – You need to know more about the topic you are writing about than do the people you are trying to target. If you do not know much about it, then pick another topic. Write in a conversational tone that is easy to read, you will have more readers. Don’t make your article too long, remember it’s an article you’re writing not a book. A length of 400-700 words is a good target. The article needs to be informative and relate to the product link you are trying to drive traffic to. A quality article, easy to read and informative, will get traffic to your site. A crappy one will get ignored.

Instant FREE 5 figure website! You pay NOTHING. Click here:
Begin Building YOUR List!

 

Blogging  Blogs have taken on a business dimension, they were originally used as online diaries, and still are by many folks. I will be encouraging this model often. It is the easiest and best way for any online marketer to stake out their own piece of web real estate, and there are many good reasons to have this property. List building being one the most important things to use a blog. WordPress has made blogging very reachable for any skill level. Be sure to check out the Video page.

Forums  Forum discussions are another great way to generate traffic and interest while getting your URL out there on every post you make. You should join forums related to the niche you are targeting or the product you are selling. When you sign up for a forum you have the option of adding a signature. This signature will show up at the bottom of every post you make in the forum and should be used to promote your website links and products. Whenever you make posts you will then be creating links back to your site, and generating traffic with the forum readers.

Social Bookmarking  Do not ignore social bookmarking and exposure,this is a valuable and reliable way to get traffic and backlinks to your site. There are many social bookmarking sites such as Facebook and del.icio.us. These sites allow you to share your bookmarks  descriptions with the public hence the term social bookmarking. The main purpose used to be to  put your links in front of people who would hopefully also bookmark your site giving you more backlinks, and it still is. But nowadays they are marketing engines in themselves. Ignore at your peril.