How to Start Your Affiliate Marketing Business the Right Way

Affiliate marketing generates 45% of worldwide eCommerce revenue. But only a handful of affiliates, estimated to be 1-2%, really makes it to the top to generate a full time income from their affiliate business. What separates a successful affiliate marketer from the one who is struggling to make a few hundred bucks?

Though affiliate marketing is touted to be the easiest make money online business, it may not be as easy as it sounds. Yes, you can start an affiliate marketing business without spending any money and effort but are you going to be a super affiliate who generates a full time income from her online business?

A successful affiliate marketer creates a business plan, executes it, track every aspect of the business, and tweak it to make it the most effective money generating machine. If your plan is to get Clickbank hop links for free and spam every forum, blog comments, and classified site, you will never be a successful affiliate marketer. To layout a your business on a solid footing, follow the step described below.

Create Your Own Website: Your own web site is the greatest important and indispensable tool in starting an affiliate marketing campaign. The number one step in any thriving affiliate marketing business is creating a good, believable and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts. Thus, you must first create an -easy-to-use website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the goods and services you are promoting and hopefully create a purchase.

Consequently, you must first focus your efforts in building a site that can cater to what your prospects need and desire. The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to search for information, not automatically to go and buy something.

Above all else, make your website full of original, pertinent and practical content. People love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is always the key and top quality content will not just raise your credibility, it can also help you fulfill a higher-level search engine ranking.

By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible authority in the field, displaying you a trustworthy endorser of the product or service you support. Establishing a good reputation is a good move in building up a loyal consumer base.

Provide Incentives: Competition is extremely fierce in the internet world. You should always be one-step in advance of your rivals to ensure that you capture a critical share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every conceivable means to inspire people not only to visit your website but also to click and go to the merchants’ websites that you are promoting.

Creating an opt-in email list is one of the ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to inspire them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can offer free software, access to unique services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.

Increase Your Site’s URL Popularity: The value of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. Attracting people to your site has to be the first action you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a top search engine ranking.

Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to establish search engine rankings. So, to elevate your link popularity, you must launch an aggressive link building campaign.

One of the ways to do this, at no cost at all, is by submitting articles, with your site’s web address in the resource box, to e-zines and free article directories. You may not only earn exposure, you may also have the opportunity to advertise for no cost, just include a link pointing to your site.

The more sites you send your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Ensure your articles are unique, pertinent and practical so that other websites may pick it up and post it.

Once you start mastering the three most important steps outlined above, you will discover hundreds of other free techniques to drive traffic to your website and other ways to monetize your web site.

Four Easy Steps For Online Money

Do you like to generate some quick cash? Stop searching for information about making money online. There are many different ways to male money online and some are more difficult than others. Let’s face it, many people that first come online and find out they could make a few bucks realize really quickly that it’s not all that easy.

There are a lot of sites out there that will let you purchase information that you can use to learn how to make money using the Web. Each site promotes a different way of making money online. Some may talk about affiliate marketing, others discuss how to use their blogs or the power of Web 2.0 and yet others review how to use AdSense and PPC (pay per click) to boost their business.

In all cases, the new and aspiring Internet marketer is confused, lost and all too quickly fed up and frustrated after just a short time and most likely a ton of money they feel was thrown out the window.

And yet, making money online doesn’t have to be difficult, you don’t even have to have a website, your own products are not needed and you don’t have to run a massive affiliate program of your own to at least make some money to help you get started and you can quickly plug that hole in your wallet where all those precious dollars have been falling out of.

One of the simplest and quickest ways to get started generating some revenue online is to use articles coupled with affiliate marketing.

Here’s a simple guide to help you get started:

1. Head over to Clickbank (search for clickbank using Google) and take a look at the many products waiting for you to promote them.

There are a few things you might want to look at while you are browsing around the Clickbank marketplace. Clickbank has a pretty good guide that will tell you how to differentiate between products that are performing well and those that are bombing.

Here’s one simple tip to keep in mind as well. As you look through the pitch pages, think to yourself for just a moment, if I were interested in this product, does this page even grab my attention? Would you be likely to purchase what you saw?

Once you have picked out a couple of products you really like, consider purchasing them so you can provide high-quality reviews of them.

If the budget is tight, that sometimes isn’t an option, so you will have to make note of the features, benefits and any other important information you got from the sales page.

2. Write one article. Yes, that’s it. Write one simple article that features some of the key benefits of the product you will be promoting. Keep it simple and don’t make it look like a sales page.

For example, if the product you plan to promote is about Planning Your Wedding, you could write your article based on “The Top Seven Things To Keep In Mind When Planning Your Wedding” and then list the seven things from the sales page that are related, such as Choosing The Location For Your Reception, How To Avoid Relatives Embarrassing You, How To Keep Your Bridesmaids From Looking Like Clowns.

Whatever the information you found, write it out in a bullet point list and then add a few short sentences to each bullet point. It doesn’t have to be fancy, short and sweet works better. For example, if you are working on Choosing The Location For Your Reception, you could add a sentence or two about the things to keep in mind if you are planning an outdoor reception.

3. Use The Resource Box. If you go look at some of the popular article directories, such as eZineArticles, you will find at the bottom of each article a section known as the Resource Box, also called About The Author.

This is your place to shine. Your article was to the point, without any sales pitches, but now in this last part you are free to tell a little about yourself and if you have a website you can add a link there too. You can also suggest a helpful solution that could further assist the reader with the challenges of planning their own wedding.

Keep in mind that you only have a few lines for the resource box, so you will definitely have to rewrite it a few times just so you can tweak it and get it just the way you want it. Ultimately, the goal is to have the reader click the link at the end of your article and purchase the product you are promoting. So make it straight to the point. A simple and yet effective example might be: “For more helpful information as well as awesome ways to save hundreds if not thousands on your wedding visit youraffiliatelink today”.

Again, you don’t want it to be fancy, but your call to action has to make sure the reader has no choice but to click the link and hopefully the sales page you are referring them to is good enough to close the deal and earn you some referral commissions.

4. Use Article Directories. If you go to Google and type in Article Directory, you will find hundreds of different websites where you can submit your article for inclusion. There are other ways to spread the word about your new article, but directories are a quick and easy way to get the word out there and they are all quite easy to use.

Just search for the article directories and then submit your new article to as many as you can. If possible, try to submit it to at least 20 or 30, but the more the better.

What will happen is that webmasters, bloggers and newsletter publishers that search through these directories will come across your article and if it’s a good match for their readers and visitors they will be inclined to post your article on their website, or publish it in their newsletter and they will include your Resource Box, along with the link to the product you are promoting.

This has the potential to get your article very quickly on thousands of websites, in front of tons of newsletter readers. You don’t have to spend a single penny for all this exposure and advertising, you don’t have to have your own fancy website or subscriber opt-in list and you don’t have to create your own product.

This same method has been used for quite some time very successfully and has in many cases returned more than just a few hundred bucks within a couple of weeks. In some cases, a single article has returned over a thousand dollars in a month and the best part is that your article will continue to be out there, week after week for others to see, click your link and order the product, making you more commissions.

The final thing to help you get started is when you’ve gotten this far congratulate yourself. You have done more than many of the people “day-dreaming” of making it online; you’ve actually done something about it. Now get back over to Clickbank and find yourself another product to promote, start back at step 1 and have fun making money.