Affiliate Marketing Beginners Guide

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8 years ago

Affiliate Marketing Beginners Guide-2016

hether you are a seasoned vet or green to the subject of affiliate marketing this guide will hopefully shed some light on affiliate marketing, and guide you hopefully in the right direction and not down the rabbit hole like so many new marketers end up going.

Here is what I will cover in this guide and hopefully you will find the information helpful and somewhat entertaining.

Affiliate Marketing- What is it? How do I make money doing so?
Take it seriously
Choosing the right niche that works for you
building a website ( easier than you think )
Choosing products to promote
Keyword research
Writing quality content

Affiliate Marketing- What is it? How do I make money doing so?

Affiliate marketing is essentially promoting products and services that others create, whether being a digital product or service and you earn commissions on any sales generated with your own unique affiliate ID.

Clickbank.com and Jvzoo.com are just a couple of places that offer these types of products. The nice thing about this type of affiliate product is that you can easily find a digital product to fit the nice that you are targeting. For instance if my blog or website is about how to make money online I would promote a few products that are relevant to the content of my site.

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Take It Seriously

You need to understand that if you really want to be successful in this industry and not end up like 99% of people who try, fail and give up, than you need to take it seriously.

Have a plan, know your goals, work to meet them and know that things won't happen over night. Here is what most new affiliate marketers do and this is why they fail over and over again.

Find a niche
find a product
promote product using ppc ( pay per click ) advertising
spend more money on advertising costs then generated sales
go broke and quit

Moral of the story, you have to understand that this is really a long term commitment and there are learning curves and experiences that will make you a better marketer as time goes on.

So what does work then?

Valuable information, quality and relevant content. If your passionate about a particular niche, topic or hobby then you can really start something great.

You need a website to launch your ideas, products and articles. Your website can be used for selling your own products or selling affiliate products that you choose to promote , including Amazon products as well but that's a whole other article.

Here's an outline of what does work

choose a niche that you are familiar with
create a website
choose products that suit your topic
give valuable content to your readers
build trust through quality content
gather users emails with give aways
send automatic emails to lists promoting products
monetize website with affiliate products and Adsense ads

Sounds simple right? Not really obviously this is about as vague as you could possibly be. Again this is why I state take it seriously and treat it like a business. There is a lot of work that goes into any business whether it be online or not. You have to treat your website like a piece of real estate , and as you build and add content it will only add value to it.

Choosing A Niche

Stick to what you know. This will only help you and will make writing content for your website easier and more exciting. It is much easier to write about something you actually have a passion for and not caring one bit about the quality of content.

A niche can really be anything from making money online to how to play guitar, perhaps you have a passion for gardening or skateboarding. There are countless ways of making money online and finding the right products and companies with similar products or services that will fit your website and niche.

Building A Website

Domains- owning your own domain name vs owning a free domain, if you are just starting out and a little on the fence or even unsure of what you want to call your website you might want to start with a free website just to get your feet wet. Plan on owning your own domain and hosting if you are serious about your online business.
Hosting your website- once you have a domain name you will also need to have a hosting plan, either monthly or yearly , it is totally up to you and can range anywhere from 3.99/month and up usually. This is a service that allows your website to be vied live on the Internet.
Installing Wordpress- installing Wordpress on your domain and hosting account is really not all that difficult, especially with sites like Godaddy.com and others that make it pretty simple to install and you can usually be up and running in under 30 minutes.
Choosing a theme- Wordpress has thousands of free themes you can pick and choose from to obtain the exact look and function of what you want your overall site to look like, take some time and really explore this and remember you can always change the look of your site easily within Wordpress.
Quality Content- remember as much as you want your website to be visually pleasing you also want to focus on delivering quality content to your readers, offering answers to questions and problems they might have no matter what your niche or topic is. This will take time , organize your sites posts and pages and start to integrate offers and products into site. Don't get hung up on trying to make money right away, deliver content and the money will come later as your site matures.

Choosing The Right Products

Don't go crazy filling your site with all kinds of ads rather focus on placing relevant ads like google Adsense ads strategically in posts and pages and a few sidebar widgets.

Googles Adsense program can deliver you the relevant contend ads and images that you desire. Tip, a good strategy is to place text ads directly into your posts and pages.
Clickbank and other related sites offer a wide variety of products to fit any niche or topic. CBengine.com is where I go to view products from clickbank and the nice part is that you can sort out all the bad ones, cbengine gives you all the information available to you about the product, even how well it is selling.
Amazon- A lot of online marketers use ads from Amazon to monetize their websites and blogs, again whatever works for you and your overall plan. Amazon is just another example of how you can begin to generate an income with your website.

Resources:

Keyword Research

aving the right tools for the job is always a plus, especially in this case. How do you know what to write about? Well with proper keyword research you can see what people are actually searching for on the internet.

You will then deliver quality content to help your visitors get the answers they are looking for to begin with. This is a very important part of any successful online business.

There are a ton of free to use keyword tools available to you out there, but none that I have tried have even come close to Jaaxy's keyword research tool.

This tool is really all you need to get started. I offers you a free to start trial version offering 30 keywords to test out at first. Keep in mind this is a paid service but it is well worth the value and keeps you one step ahead of the competition.

Writing Quality Content

It is important to be able to write quality content, each post or page should really be about 1500 words , give or take a little hear and there.

Keep your posts and pages organized, relevant and deliver good quality. Offer services that will help whoever is reading your posts or pages.

And it always helps to have a system in place. I use Wealthy Affiliate . I have a full review of the system you can find here , basically what it is is a way to stay organized and learn how to be successful in your business, it also includes step by step training and videos that you follow along with as you go teaching you everything from picking a domain name to how to write content.

Hope you enjoyed this article and feel free to share this post.

In case you are interested in the Wealthy Affiliate program you ca find it below.