Affiliate Marketing Articles home : Making Money With Affiliate Marketing

Making Money With Affiliate Marketing

by Jay Johnson

Making Money Online With Affiliate Marketing : The Step By Step Guide

I've been working full time the past two years as an affiliate marketer on the internet. During that time it has become more and more difficult to earn money with affiliate marketing and I think it's going to only get harder. I'm only saying this because I think if you want to get started with it, there's no better time available than right now. It's not going to get any easier. There's more competition every day.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a billion dollar industry. This is not something that is going away, it's still growing and getting bigger. Almost every major company you can think of (and even more of the smaller companies) have affiliate programs now that are free to join. As an affiliate you basically become a salesman for whatever company you are an affiliate for. But you do not get paid a salary. You only get paid for commissions on sales you refer. Before you click off this page though consider this: You can get paid hundreds and even thousands of dollars for a single sale. Also consider this: There's no limit to how much money you can make as an affiliate marketer if you do it well. This is one of the main things I love about working as an affiliate marketer. My hard work equals more money for me. It's not like at a 9 to 5 job where your hard work only means more money for the owners of whatever company you work for.

The Step by Step Guide (this can be repeated over and over again with new markets, new websites etc, bookmark this article so you can come back to it next time and the time after that):

Step One: Choose A Market Or Product.

You need to find a market or product that has the following traits:

1. Not Too Much Competition: This is getting to be more and more difficult. There are very few markets or "niches" that do not have an extreme amount of competition at this point. I like to think I can do well in any market as long as I choose a subcategory. In other words instead of going into the cheese market I would go into the Swiss cheese market. Know what I mean? Don't be greedy by going after the biggest top level. Choose something more exact so you'll have a better shot at it. This is one of the biggest mistakes new marketers make. They go after the most competitive keywords/markets and when they see how hard it is they quit. There's plenty of money to be made in smaller markets with less competition.

2. Good Commissions: For example. I personally don't waste much time with Amazon because they pay only 4 or 5% commissions. Unless you are promoting very high ticket items this is just a waste of time. One market that affiliate marketers really like is the digital download market because the commission rates are so high (as high as 75%.) This is because there's no cost involved once the product is created. Another very good market is the penis enlargement affiliate market. This is why you get so much spam of this nature. People buy that stuff. And the commissions are huge. You can earn up to $200 for a single sale. By the way I am not endorsing spam in any way. I never ever use any email marketing of any kind. I'll get to how you are going to be marketing in step four.

3. Traffic: This is very important. If you think you've found a great market because there's no competition and the commissions are high you better hold on until you check the traffic. This basically means "How many people are searching for this?" If no one is searching for it then that means there's probably nobody buying it either.

A great tool for all of this type of research is Keyword Elite.  I use this program all the time on all of my projects. Keyword research is absolutely necessary to succeed in the online marketplace. If you are an Associated Content producer you may already familiar with keyword research. Using a program like Keyword Elite  really takes things to the next level.

Step Two: Get a Domain and a Webhost

You can usually combine these steps with most webhosts. You certainly can with AN Hosting  which is the hosting company that I recommend. I use them for many of my websites. I also use Host Monster</strong> and <strong>Host Gator.  These are all quality cheap (less than $10 per month) webhosting companies that you should have no problems with. They also all offer a free domain when you sign up and the ability to host unlimited domains if you wish to add more websites later.

Of course you should spend some time thinking about what your domain will be. There are not that many good domains left. I will suggest getting a .com domain if you can. They are the industry standard and in general they are preferred. Certainly you won't be able to get a domain like swisscheese.com (to go back to my cheese example) but perhaps you can get swisscheeseonline.com or myswisscheese.com, just keep trying different domains until you find one that works. You can also try putting dashes in your domain names like swiss-cheese-online.com but it's usually preferred without the dashes unless the dashes help make the domain name more readable.

Step Three: Promote Your Product On Your Website

There are about a million different ways to do this. Among the popular ways are to create a personal review site of whatever product you are trying to sell or you can create an informational site about whatever market you have chosen that includes links to your products. Look around in your market and see what your competition is doing. This advice is worth it's weight in gold. Always check to see what your competition is doing. Learn from them and then do what they do even better. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, there's already people doing what you want to do successfully.

Step Four: Get Traffic To Your Website

There are two basic ways to get traffic to your website. The first is through "natural" means which is to show up high in the search engines for whatever keywords are relevant to your site. The practice of trying to show up high in the search engines is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO and this is an extremely huge subject matter to cover. I recommend SEO Elite software and an SEO ebook called "Get Your Site on Google."  Getting traffic this natural way is great in the long term and I believe it's the best strategy long term results but it does take a long time. In most markets you can expect it to take six months or even longer to start getting a lot of natural traffic from the search engines.

The other major way to get traffic doesn't take near as long to get going but it's also much more expensive because you have to pay for it.  This method is to use pay per click advertising (PPC) like Google AdWords  and Yahoo Search Marketing  to buy traffic for your site. KeyWord Elite  also comes in very handy when running your PPC campaigns. I also highly recommend getting an eBook all about how to best run your Google AdWords campaign otherwise you will waste a lot of money running your campaign the wrong way. I know I have. I waited a long time to buy any sort of information about AdWords and because of that I ran my campaigns poorly. Knowing what I know now I'm sure that I've cost myself thousands of dollars in lost money and lost income. So to put you out in front of the AdWords game, I suggest AdWords Miracle.

In Conclusion:

These are really the basic four steps to getting started with affiliate marketing. If you sincerely want to become your own boss and work from home than I think you may have found your dream. But please don't think that I'm telling you it's easy. It is not easy at all! It's a lot of work! But it can pay off in the end for sure if you truly want to be your own boss and be independently wealthy.

If you are looking for an easier road where you have someone taking you by the hand the whole time (and even giving you a website for the first year) then you may want to try a program like Making You Richer.

Good luck with your affiliate marketing endeavors and breaking free of the 9 to 5 grind!

About the Author

Jay is a contributer to the Affiliate How To Guide

Affiliate Avalanche

Affiliate Buzz

Affiliate Templates

Insider Secrets

Adsense Secrets

Affiliate Masters Course

Affiliate Newsletter

Affiliate Marketing Primer

bookmark this site