Making Money As An Affiliate

How to make money as an Affiliate is a common question asked by many budding entrepreneurs looking to create an income earning Internet Business, and whilst their is an absolute plethora of gurus out in the market telling you that their system is the ‘must have’ system to make money on the Internet, the truth of the matter is there is no ‘one size fits all’ type of system. Becoming an Affiliate Marketer, and developing it into a true online business over time, can be one of the most financially rewarding ventures you will ever undertake, and also providing you with an immense lifestyle freedom that is unsurpassed

Assuming you have a basic understanding of the Internet, and how to navigate your way around (I’m presuming this, as you’re obviously reading this article, and must have navigated your way to get here) the web, if you have the desire and passion to be an information product marketer on the internet, then these are the following steps you need to undertake (These are the basics, and further information about more detailed processes and techniques to follow are available by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page) to get your business off the ground.

1) Ensure you have the right mind set from the outset. Many people get involved in Internet Marketing with the belief that they only have to do a few things, press a few buttons, and bingo, the cash will start rolling in forever. Starting up your own Internet marketing Business is just as difficult, and requires just as much effort as creating an offline business. The mindset you need to have from the outset is that you are going to be creating and building a business, and that this will involve a reasonable time commitment from you.

2) Investigate, and Identify a Market Segment that interests you. It’s best that you get involved in an Industry or market that holds some interest (or better still some passion) to you, otherwise your interest will wane, and you’ll end up giving up on it before you achieve any success. During the investigation process, try to identify a niche within your chosen market, and then try and identify even deeper sub-niches of the main niche you have chosen. This is important as it will minimise your competition, and also enhance your conversions because the people that visit your site will relate to the sub niche as if you are talking directly to them, rather than trying to cover the major niche which will result in lost opportunities, as well as also being intensely competitive.

3) Find a suitable product to promote that fits with your sub-niche. Make sure it is a quality product that you are happy to promote, and sell to your clients. Once you have identified this product you need to become a ’sales rep’ for this product, or in other words an ‘Affiliate’.There are many Affiliate marketing companies out there that offer Affiliate Programs from many vendors, such as Clickbank, Commission Junction, to name a couple. Once you have joined a program, applied to sell some products, the next thing you need is a website presence.

4) Getting a website up and running used to be an expensive and time consuming exercise, however these days it isnt. You can get a website presence up and working in a matter of minutes through sites like Squidoo, Weebly, and Hubpages which cost you nothing to start with, however eventually you will require your own domain name, and some website hosting services. (This gives you more control, as it is usually better to own and control the virtual real estate, than to effectively only rent it) The cost of website hosting is minimal and for what you will need to start off shouldn’t cost you any more than about $50-$100 for the whole year. Often this will also enable you to have unlimited domain names (and hence affiliates businesses) hosted by the host, you just need to purchase the domain names to be hosted, and depending on what you decide here, you can obtain domain names from as little as $1 from some cheap domain name providers like GoDaddy.

5) Once the website has been built, and is live (whether this is your own domain or a Squidoo type page) you then need to begin marketing it so that it receives traffic. This is the lifeblood of your Internet Marketing Business because without traffic, you effectively have a business with no customers. There are many ways to obtain ‘organic’ traffic; this is traffic that arrives from the Search Engines through natural searching and search engine optimization. Then there is Paid Traffic which come from Advertising like Google AdWords, Banner Adds, Pay per click, etc. To start your business off initially I always suggest you begin with the Organic type of traffic, as this is free traffic, and it means your business starts off profitably. You can always reinvest your profits into advertising later.

If you would be interested in learning a way to begin your Affiliate Marketing Career where you actually can start earning an income (often inside the first week) without spending a single dime, then check out the One Week Marketing product. This helped me get started and is written in a very easy to follow step by step (hold your hand) style that would suit any newbie apprentice affiliate