Getting Started
If you’re just starting out in Affiliate Marketing and want to work at home online this page contains a few items of interest to give you some focus. I have barely scratched the surface of some of the topics below but this is kind of an outline.
- Have you picked an industry or “niche”?
If you’re just starting out and trying to learn affiliate marketing there are so many little things you will need to know when getting started?
In my opinion it is important to know what your niche or “industry” is going to be when starting out. Others will tell you different but I think this is the best first step. The reason I think it should be the first decision you make when starting out is because of what I think of as “information overload”.
My suggestion is to start in an industry you already know and are passionate about. So whether you’re great at fishing, model air planes or anything else I would stick to something you know well. This gives you the ability to be an authority in your niche. This means that you will not have to learn your niche in addition to everything else you need to learn to be an effective affiliate marketer.
- Do you know what you want to sell within that niche?
Within any niche there are many products, take music for example. In the music niche alone there are virtually thousands of products from actual music i.e. CDs and downloadable MP3s, to MP3 players and IPods… and the list is almost endless.
I found for myself that focusing on one part of my niche at a time not only gives me focus but it enables me to become more of an authority on the subject. The more of an authority you are the more your customers will trust you because you’re not just throwing up products you know nothing about.
I have also found that a well focused website will achieve the same goal in gaining peoples trust. If people who visit your website believe that you are an authority on the content of your page they are more likely to revisit and you will be more likely to retain them as customers by getting and keeping them on your list (more on the list later).
See our products you can sell page for products and ideas.
- Do you have a website?
If you do not have a website you need to get one, there are no excuses; you will not succeed in affiliate marketing without one. A website gives you a face to the world, a place where people find you and your products. If money is the issue in this matter AMG offers a completely free website and hosting for life, as I said, no excuses. Get One!
- Do you have a list or know why a list is important?
Very simply put a list is your lifeline in affiliate marketing. A list is how you will communicate with your customers or clientele when you have a new product or service to offer within your niche. Building a list sounds harder that it actually is.
For example if you look at the top of this page to the left you will see what’s called an, opt in, box. An, opt in, box is a place where people sign up (give you their name and email address) for something you are offering them. Usually this is going to be a free product or a report you wrote about a particular product like the evaluation of a particular MP3 player (for the music niche).
Once a person has given you their name and email address and has given you permission to email them at will, you now have started a list. A good way to keep and maintain a list is to outsource and use a company like Aweber. Aweber, for a small fee, will keep all of your lists in one easy to access place.
Aweber has a large variety of different email templates to choose from, they also supply the, opt in box feature. This is as opposed to spending crazy amounts of money on software that you will have to learn how to use, setup, and then maintain your own list on your own computer and this can get a little overwhelming.
As a rule of thumb you can average about one dollar per person on your list per month. This is not always the case it can be more or less depending on the strength of your niche and marketing habits.
I can honestly say I have learned more about list building from the Guru himself Tellman Knudson of Listbuilding.com than anywhere else.
Tellman’s website has so much information about how to get started with list building and several methods of getting quick surges of traffic to your site. I can honestly say that I have not been able, in almost a year’s time, to read all of the print and see all the videos on the website.
As a list building member you will have access to all the information and support resources of the List Building Club. You will find exclusive audios, articles, Q & A columns, downloads and much more!
Check out the List Building Club!
- Do you SEO?
Search engine optimization or SEO can significantly increase traffic to your website organically. Using the right keywords within titles and throughout your website creates organic search engine results.
Organic traffic is when a person uses a search engine like www.google.com and types a word or word phrase into the search engine to find results they are looking for, and done correctly they will find you.
For example if you were to go to www.google.com now and type the words free traffic tycoon into the search engine you will find my sister site, www.ashland-marketing.info/freetraffictycoon, listed on the first page. Not necessarily the first one on the page but within the top ten which is still within the first page. That search resulted in free organic traffic to my site and an offer for an eBook on free traffic.
Let’s explore a little about why this works. First, if you look at the name of the page you will see the actual words “free traffic tycoon” in the URL of the page. Secondly, if you were to read through the page you will see the words repeated several times throughout. This in a nutshell is SEO.
By using good SEO practice in conjunction with the top keywords for the products you are trying to sell you will achieve the same results.
I look at SEO as an investment in time, what I mean to say is SEO is not a quick method of getting traffic to your website but in the long run it will have better and cheaper results than non-SEO websites with free organic search engine results every time.
SEO works only as quick as search engine’s search bots and spiders index your page and some can take as much as three months to do so most of them are not quick to do this. But to repeat, a SEOd page will beat a non-SEO page. Check out how search engines index a page, this will give you an idea of what and how search bots and spiders work.
If you would like to see how SEO works for your site check out our free SEO edition of SEO Power suite.
- Affiliate Training Courses
I have only used one full course about affiliate marketing so I can only speak about that one.
I bought The Affiliate Code course by Michael Jones (The Underground Affiliate). This was kind of an all in one crash course that covered the how tos and the not tos about affiliate marketing. He covered everything from picking a niche, to how to set up an, opt in, box, to what to do when you get rich with affiliate marketing.
This is a very useful tool to say the least. I cannot say I agree now with everything he taught but that was only due to trial and error on my part and figuring out what worked best for me. Only after I learned how to be an affiliate marketer did I alter how Michael was teaching me to do things to suite myself and my needs.
I would offer some advice if using Michaels course or any course like Michael's. I would try to do everything as explained and once you get the hang of it than tweak it as you see fit. The only thing I would not do is use the free squeeze pages provided with the Affiliate Code course. I just think they were unappealing to the eye and squeeze pages are pretty easy to come by.
- In closing I would offer this advice about affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a legitimate work at home enterprise where you are your own boss. That is the good news. With being your own boss you are responsible for your successes and failures. If you invest the time in affiliate marketing that is needed you will be rewarded accordingly.
