The Basics of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a GREAT way for mew webmasters to start making money with a website.

Affiliate sales may very well be the ultimate home business. There is very little start-up cost, no inventory, and the products you sell don't cost you a dime. What business could be better than that? The merchants take care of the inventory, payment processing and shipping, all you need is a computer and an internet connection.

It's not all that hard to sell good products. One good product can easily net you several hundred a month... several good products can make you a living. It's not hard to see why there are so many people making a very good living with affiliate sales.

The trouble is that there are so many products and merchants, and so much to learn, that it's hard to know where to get started...
  ...What products should I promote?
  ...What merchants sell good products?
  ...Should I join an affiliate network?
  ...Where do I get the traffic?
  ...How do I convert that traffic into customers?
  ...How can I make enough to quit my day job?

It's no surprise that so many new webmasters feel overwhelmed, what with all the details, so much to do, so many new things to learn. Hopefully, this article will break it all down into the basic parts required to get started in the world of affiliate marketing.

  Part 1 -- Your Website

Design your website so that it's attractive, easy to use, and fill it with helpful information. The more of your content that you write yourself the better, but you can also use other content (RSS feeds, articles, etc.) to add value for your visitors.

For your first couple websites, it's a good idea to choose topics that you enjoy and know quite a bit about. Simply because it is a lot easier to stay motivated if you are working with a subject that you are interested in.... and staying motivated is important if you are going to be learning all the in's and out's of affiliate marketing and website building at the same time.

You don't need to know how to write HTML in order to build a good website. But, for various reasons, you should anyway. It's not hard to learn, especially considering all the free tutorials and helpful people that you can find with very little effort.

Add interactive features that will make your website more useful and personal to your visitors. (This is one place where knowing HTML will help a lot). There are a ton of free services, PHP scripts, add-on modules and the like available that you can use to add interactive features... like allowing visitors to add comments about something you've written, emailing pages to their friends, showing their name on every page... and many other personal touches.

  Part 2 -- Your Affiliate Merchants & Products

Once your website is up & running, then you can start adding links to products and services that compliment the topic of your website. It's important that everything you are promoting is related to your theme, as it does little good to promote high-paying services like satellite TV if your topic is the care & feeding of tropical fish. (Unless the only way they can get the Tropical Fish Channel is via satellite.)

The placement of your ads is just as important as the content of your ads. Try to keep the ads integrated into the design of your website, with the most relevant ads 'Above the Fold' where your visitors will see them as soon as the page loads. See the Google heat map for ad placement ideas. (Works for all types of ads)

Finding products or services to promote is a little tricky, partly because you don't want to be associated with any shady merchants or crappy products, and partly because there are so many merchants and networks to choose from.

From my perspective, not knowing what your website topic is, it's difficult to recommend any merchant or network to you. All I can say is 'Do Your Homework'. Look at all the options you can find that fit your topic, and decide who & what to promote by deciding who you would prefer to deal with as if you were the customer.

Oh, and, until the whole LMI controversy gets sorted out, stay away from Commission Junction if you can. If you don't know what the LMI is all about, then count yourself fortunate. If you want to learn about it anyway, go to abestweb.com and go through the LMI posts in the Commission Junction forums.

  Part 3 -- Getting Traffic To Your Website

This is the important part, isn't it? All the sweat & tears you shed putting it all together is wasted without a steady supply of traffic. How to find visitors in a reliable, repeatable, and cost-effective way is the one problem that we face daily, and which can never really be solved. It would take a lot more time and space than I have here to thoroughly cover this topic, but the following will help.

The majority of your traffic will be coming from two sources:
  Search engines and links on other websites.

There are entire e-libraries and hundreds of services, forums and discussion groups devoted to the subject of optimizing a website for the search engines, and there is simply too much to go into here... but it is so important that I must recommend that you do your homework for this too. At the very least you should find out what tactics to avoid.

Getting your link added to other websites is just as important as optimizing for search engines. A few effective methods are:

Link Exchanges... not as effective as they were a few years ago, but still worth the effort if you concentrate on trading with websites that have a similar theme... for both traffic and page rank. Google and the others are starting to ignore off-topic link trades, and even down-ranking websites that have old-style link farms.

One-Way Links... links on other websites that your website does not link to. These are harder to get than a link-trade, but worth a thousand times as much. The best ones are from well-ranked websites that place your link within their own content in a natural manner... read more about that here - Getting Quality Links To Your Website.

"Triangle" Linking (three-way link trades)... a good way to get one way links, if one partner has more than one website. With website (a) linking to website (b), which links to website (c), which links back to website (a). The main points to remember are that your two websites need to be on different IP addresses, they can not have duplicate content and should be completely unassociated. Otherwise your second website may be 'branded' as a gateway or duplicate website, which can reduce rankings for all websites.

Paid links... you can simply buy search engine friendly one way links from websites that have good PR and traffic. They can be difficult to find, but if you can afford it the benefits are very much worth it.

Blogging and Blog Commenting... blogs are popular, both with people and search engines, so take advantage of that by running your own, if you can, and by posting your own comments on others. When you add comments to other blogs make sure your comments are good content for the other website, (so they don't get deleted) and make sure to add your link in the appropriate place, not in the comment itself.

Forum Posts... posting comments, questions and replies in forums can bring in a lot of traffic if you make a habit of posting regularly and follow the rules. If a forum won't allow you to add your link in the signature, don't bother joining. Find at least one forum with a related topic and take the time to regularly add quality comments and advice. That will get you a reputation as an expert in your field, and that can get you a lot of visitors who already trust you.

Article Marketing... there are many benefits to writing articles for other publishers to use as content. They can help build your link popularity with their one-way links, they drive targeted traffic and they can help generate direst sales.

Write helpful, quality articles with good information and without hype or an obvious sales pitch and submit them to article directories on a regular basis. Webmasters and e-zine publishers are constantly searching for fresh content and you want your articles out there where they can find them.

Viral eBooks... like articles, ebooks are out there working for you long after you have moved on to another task. With a decent ebook compiler, writing an ebook is no more complicated than writing a small, simple website. See Viral Marketing With Free eBooks for more info on that.

  Part 4 -- Converting Traffic Into Customers

Content - it's not just for search engines. People on the internet are looking for one thing: Information. It is only after they have found the information that they want or need that they ever make the decision to buy something. If they find the information at your website, they are much more likely to buy from your affiliate links.

Give sincere product Recommendations & Testimonials. A few paragraphs detailing your thoughts and experiences can improve your conversion rates, but Be Honest. Your credibility may already be in question if your visitors see you as a salesman for the product.

Visitor reviews can help make conversions even more than a testimonial. If the product is good, the reviews will be good, and a few good visitor reviews are worth a hundred of your own reviews. (If the reviews start looking bad, drop the product.) As side benefits, visitor reviews increase your website credibility and the spider-friendly content that they create can help your page rank.

Adding a visitor review option isn't exactly for beginners, but it's not all that hard, either. There is a decent free comments script at AllSyntax and another paid script at Review-Script.com that has an Amazon-styled review format that people are familiar with.

When you are integrating ads into your content, remember that personal recommendations and plain text ads convert into clicks & sales much better than banners or those 'generic' text ads that merchants provide.

If you decide to use script-served contextual ads, don't overdo it; they generally make much less per click than affiliate sales. Also, AdSense isn't the only game in town: check into AdLandPro, Yahoo and Search Feed for more options.

Build Your Opt-in List From Day One, even before you start getting any traffic. Design your website with a newsletter signup form integrated into the page template.

Your newsletter is your prime money-maker. Seriously. I know you've heard it a hundred times, but have you really understood what makes it so important? Well, think of this: Would you prefer to send a visitor to a merchant for a one-time chance at a sale, or would you rather have a once-a-week opportunity to give that visitor a chance to buy something?

In addition to your integrated signup form, add a small, unobtrusive pop-up or slide-in to get more subscribers. Try the free JK Popup Window Generator or google for others. The idea is to make it so easy for people to sign up that even web newbies can add themselves to your opt-in list quickly and easily.

Use an autoresponder to convert your visitors into customers, and customers into repeat customers. The autoresponder has all your emails in que, all you need to do is entice people to sign up for it. Each message should contain quality information and also promote a related product or service.

For example: If your website is about Tropical Fish you can offer them a ten-part "E-Course" dealing with fish diseases. They sign up and your autoresponder sends them ten helpful, informative emails over the course of a month. Another example would be a once a week E-Course that runs for a full year.

Provide good, helpful information and they will be far more likely to follow your product recommendations.

Autoresponder services are all over, Aweber and GetResponse both get high marks, or you can google for software and set up your own.

You can also take those E-Course articles and compile them into an ebook, to get more mileage from your efforts.

  Part 5 -- Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Earlier I mentioned "For your first couple of websites"... if you really want to make affiliate marketing into a "Quit your day job, get a shiny new car, live in a big house" thing, then one website won't do it. (Unless you create the next eBay or something.)

If you want to make it in affiliate marketing, then a dozen smaller websites, optimized for one topic each, will be much more profitable than a single mega-site with dozens of topics.

It's not all that expensive, either. The price for good web hosting and domain names has been dropping steadily and, for just one example, you can get a package from 1&1 Hosting today that will give you 150gb of web space and 5 domains for only $15 - a far cry from my first website which was an absurd $695 a year. (and the 1&1 Beginner package is only $2.99 a month)

  Take It One Day At A Time

Don't worry about getting everything right all at once, and don't wait until you're ready to get started. You can't learn it all at once - but you can be earning while you are learning.

Jump in right now & get your feet wet!
  Don't get discouraged and above all - Don't Give Up!

To Your Success!
Tim

By Tim Brown © 2006. About the author: Tim is the webmaster at http://BLT-Web.com, where webmasters can find free tools, advice, tips and other useful resources designed to help them build a successful website.

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