How To Start Affiliate Marketing
Posted July 29, 2008 
Comments(0) Affiliate marketing is the first step for most people trying to make money online through Internet marketing. This isn’t surprising, considering affilaite marketing can be started with no investment, no product of your own and even no website. As long as you have a computer and an Internet connection, you can start making money online through affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Put simply, affiliate marketing is the online version of the offline world’s commissioned agents. Just as a real estate agent earns a commission for selling a house they neither built nor own, with affiliate marketing a person earns affiliate commissions by referring buyers to a web site’s salespage. When those referrals buy the product on that visit, the affiliate has earned a percentage of that sale.
Depending on how the affiliate marketing program is structured, that commission may be paid instantly, through an online service like PayPal, in 2 - 4 weeks, or most commonly, on the 15th of the following month to allow time for any refunds that must be removed from the sales and affiliate commissions before payout.
Various types of affiliate programs exist, including those run through major affiliate marketing management companies like ClickBank and PayDotCom and those run by the site owners, such as our own Team Champigny Affiliate Program. In general, affiliate programs for physical goods pay 2% - 15%, while affiliates promoting digital downloads like e-books and software should expect to be paid between 35% and 75% of each sale.
How Do I Start Affiliate Marketing?
I’m often asked why I recommend people new to Internet Marketing start their online businesses through affiliate marketing. There are a myriad of reasons, the most impotant few being a) One can start affiliate marketing investing only their time, not money, b) The affiliate marketing world provides the greatest variety of free training resources for learning the basics of all Internet marketing, and c) One can begin right now, today - no need to create or buy products, design or purchase a website, etc.
The simplest formula for starting your afrfiliate marketing business involves blogging, writing and submitting articles and using the Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites. Step one is to decide what area, or niche, you want to promote products to. It may be the Internet marketing arena, pets, children, sports enthusiasts, gardeners, the home improvement crowd, etc. While each of these areas is too broad to attack in whole, each has sub-niches with plenty of products for affiliates to promote. Once you settle on a major niche, look through the available affiliate marketing opportunities to see which sub-niche appeals to you AND has plenty of products for affiliates to promote. Chosen sports? Maybe you’ll go after the golfing niche first, or tennis, or even skiing - each has plenty of products with affiliate marketing programs.
Next, set up a blog - either on your own domain or through Blogger or Wordpress. The content of your blog is up to you - just make sure every post is relevant to your niche. If you’re a little more advanced and want to go after two or three niches, use a separate blog for each. Don’t dilute the power of your blog by cross-posting articles appealing to different niches. There is a rising trend among affiliate marketing and Internet marketing bloggers to simply write reviews of the products they’re promoting, providing an ample supply of affiliate links to the products in the process. While this is perfectly acceptable and does work, remember that you want to appear as an authority on the topic, and want to promote other related affiliate marketing opportunities to this same crowd down the line, so the more info you can bring to your blog on the subject the better, instead of simply reviewing/promoting the products directly.
Once you have the first 3 or 4 blog posts written and posted to your blog, set up free accounts at Technorati and MyBlogLog and notify them of your blog. Each of these two sites will help you attract more traffic over time, which will often convert to a larger number of buyers, making you more from your affiliate marketing blogging efforts. Similarly, use a service like Pingoat or Ping-O-Matic to notify the various blogging directories of each new post. Set up a free account at Twitter, and announce each new blog posting there too.
Next, write two or three articles on the topic - they can be brand new articles or modifications of the posts you made to your blog. Do not include any links in the article, as most directories will not accept articles with links in them. Instead, your affiliate marketing links go in your signature or Author’s Box at the end of the article. Since most directories allow two or three links in that area, use one directly to your affiliate link and one to the blog you’re writing for your affiliate marketing in that niche.
With a bit of practice it becomes a lot easier to research and write articles and blog posts on any subject, and your affiliate marketing efforts will kick it up a notch. Don’t expect results from Day One, nor even to make any money in your first month at it - although it does happen sometimes. Instead, think of the growing collection of blog posts and articles you’ve submitted a ‘paying it forward’ - each of these affiliate marketing efforts will remain online for some time and provide a growing empire of online materials with your affiliate links in them, being seen by an ever-increasing number of people. It takes time for your writing to be indexed in major search engines like Google, and even longer for some of your posts to work their way further up the results pages.
Pay attention to the resources provided by the merchants whose affiliate marketing programs you’re part of, and learn as much as you can about both the products you’re promoting and about affiliate marketing in general. Team Champigny Affiliate Manager Jeff Levesque, for example, holds weekly teleseminars offering free training for our affiliates, and makes sure to stay on the call til every question has been answered - both about our products and affiliate program and about affiliate marketing in general. While most affiliate program managers don’t go that far, be sure to find out just what training is available from the companies whose products you’re promoting. If you’re targeting the Internet marketing or affiliate marketing crowds, by all means join our Team Champigny affiliate program and make the most of our free affiliate training sessions.
As the first few weeks go by, start marketing your blog through the social bookmarking sites as well. Set up pages at FaceBook, MySpace and Squidoo, and be sure to link all 3 to your blog, your Twitter account, your Technorati & MyBlogLog pages, and to each other, of course. Try to post to your blog once a day or more, and to write and submit at least 3 articles a week to the directories. All of this can be accomplished in about an hour a day, but on days when time is tight settle for just a blog post and a tweet (a Twitter post).
If you’re not starting to see notices of affiliate commissions earned by the third month, however, it’s time to review your affiliate marketing efforts. Start by auditing your own affiliate marketing efforts. Have you been diligent and consistent? After two months you should have at least 50 blog posts, at least the same number of tweets, 20 or more articles in the various directories, and have kept your MySpace and FaceBook sites updated. If you’ve been lax in your affiliate marketing efforts, by now you’ll be realizing you only get out of it what you put in - so redouble your resolve to put in the required time EACH DAY on your affiliate marketing. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time online, and would be further ahead looking outside the house for a part-time job instead.
If you HAVE put in the time on your affiliate marketing and still aren’t seeing any results yet, contact the affiliate managers for the products you’re promoting and ask them to evaluate what you’ve done so far and what suggestions they can offer to improve your results. Affiliate managers LOVE affiliates who have demonstrated they’ll put in the required time and effort, and will be happy to help out. If you run into one who won’t, simply drop their product and find another affiliate marketing opportunity to replace it with - immediately! If they don’t treat their affiliates right chances are they don’t treat their customers right either, so they aren’t a company or product you want your name attached to.
Advanced Affiliate Marketing
Once you have some affiliate commissions rolling in, it’s time to take your affiliate marketing business to the next level. Set up an account with a company like Hosting4Marketers.com that provide you with your own web space, unlimited autoresponders, etc. The low investment in these tools will repay itself many times over once you start building your own double opt-in lists for each niche you’re promoting products to. One of the most valuable tools you’ll build in your affiliate marketing arsenal is your e-mail list of interested buyers, since you’ll be able to provide them with ongoing information, and have them prepped and ready for the next product you want to promote.
Along the line you’ll probably also run into related products in your niche that offer resell rights; now you can add to your affiliate marketing revenue by moving into your own Internet marketing as well, setting up these resell rights products on your new web space and marketing them right alongside the affiliate products you promote. Since both appeal to the same niche, no doubt some of your existing clientel will opt to buy both, while others will buy your products even though they may not be interested in the affiliate products you’re promoting. On your new sites, as on your blogs, be sure to provide an easy way for interested people to opt into your e-mail list as well.
By this point you’ll be making money with your affiliate marketing, and starting to see revenue from your own Internet marketing as well, and you can chart your own course from that point on. You may decide to continue to focus on affiliate marketing, may want to keep growing both areas of your online business, or may want to start creating your own information products to sell online. Once you’ve chosen your direction, the fastest route to growth is to hire a professional coach or mentor in that field, but that can be a very expensive option, usually ranging from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars a month. If that’s within your means at that point, by all means do so; if not, follow your instincts and what you see successful super-affiliates doing in their affiliate marketing practices, along with following what the mainstream Internet marketing ‘Big Dogs’ are doing in their area of operation until you ARE making enough to hire a mentor.
As time permits, start to visit and participate in the affiliate marketing forums and Internet marketing forums as well - to find the best, do a quick search at Google and then visit the forums, paying attention to how busy they are and how many of the big names you recognize participating in them. Do a similar search for forums in the niches you’re targeting too, such as ‘dog forums’ or ‘golf forums’, and start participating in those, answering questions whenever you can to help establish yourself as an expert in that niche. Again, don’t blatantly advertise unless the forum rules specifically state that’s acceptable - most don’t allow it, and that’s not your main reason for being there anyway. But DO put your affiliate marketing links to relevant products in the signature file at the end of each of your posts.
Be honest in all you do online, be ethical in your dealings, and keep up the diligent efforts in your affiliate marketing, and this business can be very rewarding. Be greedy, dishonest or lazy and you’ll get nowhere fast - word of shady characters or garbage products spreads unbelievably fast online, and you’ll be burning bridges you’ll need to cross as time goes on. As stated much earlier, you will only get from affiliate marketing what you put in - but it can be a wonderful way to earn a living, and a very good living indeed if you have the patience, the tenacity and the integrity - and can keep yourself focused on moving forwards at all times.
Best of luck with it - I hope to see you at the top of the affiliate marketing leaderboards in no time!
Technorati Tags: Affiliate Marketing, successful affiliate marketing, learning affiliate marketing, Team Champigny, Jeff Levesque, Doug Champigny, making money online, starting an online business, starting a business online, online business success
