Affiliate Marketing For Newbies
ByAffiliate marketing is by far the easiest way to start online business. You don’t need to create your own product, deal with customer support, returns, payments and other tasks. Affiliate simply is a middle man between product vendor and customer, and a sole role for affiliate is to market a product. For the effort, affiliate will receive a cut from the sale (commissions) frequently as high as 75%.
With a huge supply of products available to affiliates, you can start affiliate business in pretty much ANY market – from selling ringtones, how-to ebooks to cruise vacation packages. However, my recommendation is start with products that will pay you $20 and up in commissions. Many affiliates begin with selling ebooks from Clickbank and Paydotcom. Both networks provide big selection of ebooks and courses in a variety of markets.
Ok, you have selected products you want to promote as affiliate. Next step should be to clearly define your online presence strategy (no site, one-page review site, blog, others) and how you are going to market and drive traffic to a product (pay-per-click networks, free ads site, publishing product on a blog). Spend some time on these tasks, educate yourself if something is unclear, and make sure you understand what you’ll be doing. Don’t make a mistake to jumping into the marketplace too fast, especially advertising using Adwords. You can lose a lot of money before you know it.
Task 1. Go to clickbank.com and explore their product offerings. Open up an account with Clickbank, it’s free and easy.
Task 2. Choose products you’d like to promote as affiliate.
Task 3. Identify your online presence and marketing strategies, and how you’ll drive traffic to your affiliate offer.
6 Comments
November 6th, 2008 at 10:12 am
I would say affiliate marketing is where its at when it comes to making some decent cash online from a publishing standpoint.
There are (as you pointed out) several avenues to reach affiliate nirvana. Oh, cool domain name idea. LoL. (affiliate nirvana.com)
My number one advice to anyone who is thinking of creating any sort of affiliate site or store is…..do your research.
What type of research?
1.) niche research
2.) keyword research
Do proper research and you will have an affiliate winner on your hands.
Good post, Max.
Missy (from G34 Media)s last blog post..Problogger Launches Twitter Tips Blog: TwiTip?
November 6th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
good advice Missy. I’d add - if anyone wants to dive into affiliate marketing - define first what niche means. Is it number of competing sites? product choices? thin slice of generally popular market?
Hmmmm, great site name - affiliate nirvana.com - I gotta go and grab it now, before it’s gone
November 6th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Task one - don’t worry a thing about commission level and pick a product that you either know something about or can research before you even think again about promoting it.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
@Dennis - I think we are on the same page. Task 1 - go explore and then Task 2 - Choose products you’d like to promote as affiliate.
I think commission level is important to beginner affiliate. Would you really want to promote a product that pays you $2 commission? You might if you have huge traffic, but it’s not the case for newbies. Having $8 a month in commission and paying $7 web hosting will not bring much motivation
November 7th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
What you’d like to promote, that you know something about; yes.
I’m so tired of the blatant obviousness in thousands of affiliate promotions where it’s all about the money…they have no real idea what the object is at all….they ain’t gettin one cent from me, that’s for sure.
Commission is last…dead last.
Dennis Edells last blog post..8 Effective Viral Marketing Techniques
November 7th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
yes, Dennis, many affiliates jump to promote products they have no idea about. But… I can hardly blame them, because they get bombarded every day with “how to make millions online in 3 weeks” spam. So, they WANT to take action, but confused by the hype and ill-advice.