GETTING STARTED-HOW TO FIND GOOD AFFILIATION PROGRAMS TO PROMOTE
When you are ready to get started with affiliate marketing it can seem overwhelming at first, but this should not be a problem now since I have given you the basics of what you need to know. It is often hard to know where to start and how to begin to market products online. With thousands of affiliate programs, different marketing strategies and countless people trying to pull you into their program how do you know where to start, or how you could go about it, you might wonder. Well….let me tell you.
With this getting started section, you can be up and running in as little as 6 months and seeing some results. Here is how you can get started in some quick and easy steps.
#1-Don’t look for Get Rich Quick Method
If you have been alive for the last few decades, chances are you have come across the "get rich quick" schemes that are plastered everywhere. If you are going to succeed as an internet marketer you will want to get that thinking out of your head first.
Think about it; do you know anyone to ever make 10 grand in there first three months in a business, especially one that anyone can get started with for less than $50 bucks? Probably not, so do not think that this is how affiliation will work for you. Instead, you need to understand that anyone that makes serious money in this industry has been at it for a while, and they realize that they have to work for a business to make it work for them. By understanding that your going to have to learn the ropes so that you will not be setting yourself up for disappointment weeks later as your wondering why your not seeing any revenue. So let’s get started!
Basic Skills you will need To Do Well Online
Ability to Create and Maintain Your Own Site(s)
Hosting Of Your Own Websites
Get Proficient with Email
Grasp Basic SEO Strategies & Online Marketing Ideas
At Least Basic HTML code understanding
Motivation and Patience
Chances are that if you are hoping to be a master affiliate, you already have these skills and you will have an easier time during your fist few months. If you don’t, I would suggest that you do get these skills before you even try. You should begin by creating what is known in the industry as a "content site" this type of a site is also known as a hobby site. This practice project is meant to get you familiar with the process using the techniques in this manual.
How you do this is that you choose any topic that appeals to you, such as fishing, boating, hot rods etc. it can be anything you enjoy to do you can create a website about. This is meant to be your guinea site that you can learn on. During this time your goal with this site over the next three months is to find your target visitors and learn how to get their attention and keep it:
Increase you site traffic weekly
Create a Memorable Site that has no pop up, hard navigation, crazy flashing banners or anything related to making money.
Understand How People Use Search Engines & Learn Which Terms People Are Finding Your Site For and Increase Those Numbers by Monitoring them Regularly
If you follow those basic skills over the next several months you will learn the most important aspect of online marketing which will drive targeted traffic to ANY site you create. Most people get it wrong with online marketing because they think HUGE NUMBERS of visitors to there sites will generate income. That is just not true. I mean; have you ever searched Google for a particular topic and ended up on some unrelated site? If you did I bet you were off that site
faster that you can count to three.
However, that is how many people try to drive traffic to there site and then hope those people will in some way do something, weather it is by subscribing to a newsletter or buy a product or service. Until these people learn that sear numbers do not equal dollars they will always be scratching there head.
The "trick" here is to drive as many "targeted" visitors to any site that you ever create. Weather your website is a hobby site about your favorite hobbies and music, or a commercial site that sells high end real estate, targeted visitors will be the visitors that will make you your money in the end, so these are naturally the visitors that you want coming to you.
Now that you understand about targeted visitors and just what type of visitor you want at your site you can spend your first several months of your "online affiliate marketing career" in designing a site that will have them coming back for more and telling their friends about you. It will be much easier to learn about keyword optimization while you are creating a site about outdoor fishing than creating a sales site about "selling Trim Spa" while prescription drugs are incredibly profitable you need to practice and perfect your craft before you jump into a highly competitive arena like prescription drugs, credit card or loans.
Things to Watch out For As Your Traffic & Site Grow
1. Site Traffic & Referral Logs
2. Visitor Feedback
The Importance of Traffic & Referral Logs
You will want to be able to monitor very closely any site that you ever build because you should be able to know how many visitors visit your site daily, where they came from, if they have ever visited before and most importantly what keywords they searched for when finding your site (this only works when they came from a search engine). All of this information has to be logged so that you can know who to approach when you are researching who your target audience is and what they want from you.
Getting Visitor Feedback
You have to keep track of what types of feedback are your visitors giving you, and whether or not people enjoy the site and the content. Do they find the navigation is tricky and hard to understand? Take this information and use it to your advantage. If you can offer a suggestion or rating section in your site that allows visitors to tell you directly what they like and what they don’t like. This feedback is going to be invaluable to you when it is time for you to build your marketing website and track your feedback information for gaining partnerships with merchants in the future.
Your Money Making Commercial Site
Once you have spent some time working on your hobby site and you begin to feel that you have learned some of the skills that I talked about above you will be much more prepared to jump into the competitive affiliate marketing field. Now you are ready to take the knowledge you have learned and apply it to a commercial site that requires you to sell some sort of product or service. Again the most important thing to consider is "how will you drive targeted visitors to your site.
You would be doing yourself a favor if you think before you choose your commercial site topic before you choose your next program to promote or site to create. Take a look at the supply and demand. Try to find a product or service online that has an existing consumer base and little or no competition. The best thing that you can do to get started with choosing the right commercial products to endorse on your website.
You should study the various programs that look appealing to you and then make a list of your top 10 programs. From here you can take your list and run a handful of searches on Google to get an idea just how many other websites are catering to this program. Take a look at the Google results below which helps you get an idea of what you can expect to see when you type in keyword queries:
1. Searched the Google for fishing:
Results 1 - 10 of about 46,200,000
2. Searched the Google for Trim Spa:
Results 1 - 10 of about 16,800,000
3. Searched the Google for car parts:
Results 1 - 10 of about 8,850,000
4. Searched the Google for tank parts:
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,080,000
From the information that is gathered from the keyword query, you can get an idea of the amount of competition among those websites and pages that are selling any of those things mentioned above. Form this it should be easy to see that tractor parts has the least amount of competition and would be easier to get a higher ranking on the popular search engines simply because there are less sites than a Trim Spa or fishing site.
Now that I have pointed that out so subtly, it is also important that you try to understand just how large of a consumer base each industry actually has. I think everyone would agree that car parts outsell tank parts because more people own cars than tanks.
When it comes to your method of tracking the data, you can use a service called wordtracker which will do this automatically. I use wordtracker myself to find niche areas, it won best affiliate tool on abestweb.com in 2002. I use it because it is reliable and takes much of the leg work out for me.
You have to work for any results that you are expecting to get. Don't expect to be able to put four of five hours into a site and have that site generate thousands of dollars worth of commissions for you because that is just not realistic. Like anything worth while it does take work, If you know that going in and are prepared to put in the time that it takes to make a great site chances
are much better that you will see hundreds to thousands of dollars worth in commissions monthly at your leisure.
If you make it this far you will be past the affiliate newbie stage and ready to take on the affiliation world. With the popularity of the market ever rising it can be at the stage of collecting so much money that you can live on this income alone. If you just follow your dreams and be willing to put in the effort to see them become a reality. When your ready to choose you second sales site stop by my top programs, you might find a winner that makes sense to you!
With this getting started section, you can be up and running in as little as 6 months and seeing some results. Here is how you can get started in some quick and easy steps.
#1-Don’t look for Get Rich Quick Method
If you have been alive for the last few decades, chances are you have come across the "get rich quick" schemes that are plastered everywhere. If you are going to succeed as an internet marketer you will want to get that thinking out of your head first.
Think about it; do you know anyone to ever make 10 grand in there first three months in a business, especially one that anyone can get started with for less than $50 bucks? Probably not, so do not think that this is how affiliation will work for you. Instead, you need to understand that anyone that makes serious money in this industry has been at it for a while, and they realize that they have to work for a business to make it work for them. By understanding that your going to have to learn the ropes so that you will not be setting yourself up for disappointment weeks later as your wondering why your not seeing any revenue. So let’s get started!
Basic Skills you will need To Do Well Online
Ability to Create and Maintain Your Own Site(s) Hosting Of Your Own Websites Get Proficient with Email Grasp Basic SEO Strategies & Online Marketing Ideas At Least Basic HTML code understanding Motivation and PatienceChances are that if you are hoping to be a master affiliate, you already have these skills and you will have an easier time during your fist few months. If you don’t, I would suggest that you do get these skills before you even try. You should begin by creating what is known in the industry as a "content site" this type of a site is also known as a hobby site. This practice project is meant to get you familiar with the process using the techniques in this manual.
How you do this is that you choose any topic that appeals to you, such as fishing, boating, hot rods etc. it can be anything you enjoy to do you can create a website about. This is meant to be your guinea site that you can learn on. During this time your goal with this site over the next three months is to find your target visitors and learn how to get their attention and keep it:
Increase you site traffic weekly Create a Memorable Site that has no pop up, hard navigation, crazy flashing banners or anything related to making money. Understand How People Use Search Engines & Learn Which Terms People Are Finding Your Site For and Increase Those Numbers by Monitoring them RegularlyIf you follow those basic skills over the next several months you will learn the most important aspect of online marketing which will drive targeted traffic to ANY site you create. Most people get it wrong with online marketing because they think HUGE NUMBERS of visitors to there sites will generate income. That is just not true. I mean; have you ever searched Google for a particular topic and ended up on some unrelated site? If you did I bet you were off that site
faster that you can count to three.
However, that is how many people try to drive traffic to there site and then hope those people will in some way do something, weather it is by subscribing to a newsletter or buy a product or service. Until these people learn that sear numbers do not equal dollars they will always be scratching there head.
The "trick" here is to drive as many "targeted" visitors to any site that you ever create. Weather your website is a hobby site about your favorite hobbies and music, or a commercial site that sells high end real estate, targeted visitors will be the visitors that will make you your money in the end, so these are naturally the visitors that you want coming to you.
Now that you understand about targeted visitors and just what type of visitor you want at your site you can spend your first several months of your "online affiliate marketing career" in designing a site that will have them coming back for more and telling their friends about you. It will be much easier to learn about keyword optimization while you are creating a site about outdoor fishing than creating a sales site about "selling Trim Spa" while prescription drugs are incredibly profitable you need to practice and perfect your craft before you jump into a highly competitive arena like prescription drugs, credit card or loans.
Things to Watch out For As Your Traffic & Site Grow
1. Site Traffic & Referral Logs
2. Visitor Feedback
The Importance of Traffic & Referral Logs
You will want to be able to monitor very closely any site that you ever build because you should be able to know how many visitors visit your site daily, where they came from, if they have ever visited before and most importantly what keywords they searched for when finding your site (this only works when they came from a search engine). All of this information has to be logged so that you can know who to approach when you are researching who your target audience is and what they want from you.
Getting Visitor Feedback
You have to keep track of what types of feedback are your visitors giving you, and whether or not people enjoy the site and the content. Do they find the navigation is tricky and hard to understand? Take this information and use it to your advantage. If you can offer a suggestion or rating section in your site that allows visitors to tell you directly what they like and what they don’t like. This feedback is going to be invaluable to you when it is time for you to build your marketing website and track your feedback information for gaining partnerships with merchants in the future.
Your Money Making Commercial Site
Once you have spent some time working on your hobby site and you begin to feel that you have learned some of the skills that I talked about above you will be much more prepared to jump into the competitive affiliate marketing field. Now you are ready to take the knowledge you have learned and apply it to a commercial site that requires you to sell some sort of product or service. Again the most important thing to consider is "how will you drive targeted visitors to your site.
You would be doing yourself a favor if you think before you choose your commercial site topic before you choose your next program to promote or site to create. Take a look at the supply and demand. Try to find a product or service online that has an existing consumer base and little or no competition. The best thing that you can do to get started with choosing the right commercial products to endorse on your website.
You should study the various programs that look appealing to you and then make a list of your top 10 programs. From here you can take your list and run a handful of searches on Google to get an idea just how many other websites are catering to this program. Take a look at the Google results below which helps you get an idea of what you can expect to see when you type in keyword queries:
1. Searched the Google for fishing:
Results 1 - 10 of about 46,200,000
2. Searched the Google for Trim Spa:
Results 1 - 10 of about 16,800,000
3. Searched the Google for car parts:
Results 1 - 10 of about 8,850,000
4. Searched the Google for tank parts:
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,080,000
From the information that is gathered from the keyword query, you can get an idea of the amount of competition among those websites and pages that are selling any of those things mentioned above. Form this it should be easy to see that tractor parts has the least amount of competition and would be easier to get a higher ranking on the popular search engines simply because there are less sites than a Trim Spa or fishing site.
Now that I have pointed that out so subtly, it is also important that you try to understand just how large of a consumer base each industry actually has. I think everyone would agree that car parts outsell tank parts because more people own cars than tanks.
When it comes to your method of tracking the data, you can use a service called wordtracker which will do this automatically. I use wordtracker myself to find niche areas, it won best affiliate tool on abestweb.com in 2002. I use it because it is reliable and takes much of the leg work out for me.
You have to work for any results that you are expecting to get. Don't expect to be able to put four of five hours into a site and have that site generate thousands of dollars worth of commissions for you because that is just not realistic. Like anything worth while it does take work, If you know that going in and are prepared to put in the time that it takes to make a great site chances
are much better that you will see hundreds to thousands of dollars worth in commissions monthly at your leisure.
If you make it this far you will be past the affiliate newbie stage and ready to take on the affiliation world. With the popularity of the market ever rising it can be at the stage of collecting so much money that you can live on this income alone. If you just follow your dreams and be willing to put in the effort to see them become a reality. When your ready to choose you second sales site stop by my top programs, you might find a winner that makes sense to you!
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