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Make Money
Online with Affiliate Programs: Getting Started Guide
Affiliates
make money by referring customers to their merchants. There are many
companies and webmasters offer affiliate programs to promote their online
sales. When you sign up for an affiliate program, you will be given an
affiliate link with an unique affiliate ID which will be used to market the
product. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you make
money (earn affiliate commission). Below are the steps to starting an
affiliate marketing business:
Step 1 - Join an Affiliate Program
Clickbank.com is one of the best places to find an affiliate program that
interests you as there are a ton of sellers looking for people to promote
their e-books and info products. Before you join any affiliate programs, do
a little research. Find out which products are most popular, the conversion
rate of the products and visit the sellers’ websites to see whether their
sales letters are convinced enough to generate sales. A conversion rate of
5% is reasonably good. This means that for every 100 visitors to the
website, 5 visitors will buy.
Step 2 – Promote an affiliate program
through a website
You need to have a website to promote your affiliate programs. Creating a
website isn’t difficult nowadays. You can use an easy website builder to
create a website with little or no technical knowledge. To learn more about
how to set up a site with website builder, you can go to Google and enter
the search term 'website builder' to find a site builder that is right for
you.
Step 3 – Decide the Content on Your Website
As you are promoting e-books, you can write a review on each e-book with an
affiliate link to the sales website of each e-book. If you do not wish to
write reviews, you can create a product recommendation list on your website
(e.g., ‘Top 5 SEO e-books,’ ‘Top 3 MP3 music download,’ etc.).
Step 4 – Drive Targeted traffic/visitors to
Your Website
To earn affiliate commission you need to drive targeted traffic to your
website. The more traffic your website gets, the more likely you’ll generate
more sales. There are several ways to drive targeted traffic to your site in
short period of time (2 to 5 days). Here’s how……
Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
You can get a lot of targeted traffic using PPC advertising. The two most
popular and effective PPC advertising programs are Google Adwords and Yahoo
Search Marketing. So how PPC advertising program works? PPC advertising
programs allow you to bid for top rankings on the keywords of your choice.
When someone enters a search term matches your keyword in the PPC search
engine and press the search button, your contextual ad will appear on the
sidebar of the search result page. If the visitor clicks through your ad to
your website, you’ll be charged base on your bid amount. To learn more about
PPC advertising, please click
here.
Article Marketing
Writing an article related to your affiliate products with a link to your
website in the article’s resource box and submitting it to many article
directories can bring some free targeted traffic to your site. To get more
and continuous targeted traffic, you need to write more articles. Try to
publish a new article every week. Doing this for a year can drive truckload
of free traffic to your website.
Post Messages on Forums
Another way to get free traffic is by posting messages on community forums
with a link to your site on the signature of each message posted by you.
Here’s a technique I learned from an affiliate marketer.
1) Run a search on Google to find out forums and message boards that are
related to your affiliate products and try to join as many forums as you
can.
2) Make sure that each one of your forums profile is edited to include your
website link within the signature option.
3) Spend a few hours navigating the pages of the forums. You can ask
questions and post informative and helpful replies to other peoples’
questions or messages to build your status. The more people trust you, the
more likely they will click your link.
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