Everything You Wanted to Know about Affiliate Marketing But Was Afraid to Ask
Posted on February 18, 2010 by Amit
- What is Affiliate Marketing
- How Much Money Can I make
- Do I need to Know HTML
- How Much Time will I need to Spend on Affiliate Marketing
- How and Where do I start a website
- Do I need Web hosting, Can I not use Free Sites
- Who or What Do I promote
- Where Do I Get Traffic From
- When do I start promoting?
- What Are CPA Networks
- Do I need a LLC
- What is SEO
- What is Social Media Marketing
- What are Landing Pages
- Can You Show me a Few Affilaite Site
Affiliate marketing is promoting an online vendor’s products or services and then receiving a commission from vendor based on a sale or lead.
There is an agreement between the vendor and the affiliate as what constitutes a commissionable action. Sometimes its sale of a product or a service through your affiliate link. Sometimes its lead form submission, like a request for a quote where no money is exchanged, no credit card transactions.
For a new affiliate marketer, this question must be the last question to ask, but most newbies give it a lot of importance and ask it very early in their quest to solve the mystery.
Affiliate marketing is like any other bushiness. You can make a ton of money or you can fail completely or you can be moderately successful. But there is no fixed answer. You will need to find the answer yourself.
Yes. And many other things other than html, like php, javascript, css. As in any other business, you need a set of skills to be successful. The more you know is the better. You need to know or be willing to learn the basic html. And then there are a hundred more things that you will need to know or learn. But you can pick up the skills as you put more time to it. Your current skill level when you start will help you get off the ground faster. But anything you need to know to be successful in affiliate marketing can be learned.
Depends on how much time you have and want to spend and what your goals are. But for starters a couple of hours a day is fine.
Use a CMS (Content Management System) to build your website. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you can use a CMS.
My favorite is WordPress, which is a blogging software, but can be easily used as a CMS without any customization. Its free, you host your own site and own the code behind it and its scalable. The look of your site can be changed by changing your theme with a click. And you don’t have to write html code to build pages. If you can type, WordPress will do the rest.
There are hundreds of free plugins that you can install on your site to further improve the site functionality. I have a list plugins an affiliate site must have.
There are other free open source CMSs like Drupal, Joomla. But for a beginner with limited html/php skills, there is nothing simpler that WordPress.
IF YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO INVEST IN YOUR BUSINESS, you can use free sites like blogger, squidoo to build your affiliate sites.
As I said before, affiliate marketing should be treated as a business if you want to be successful. Free sites aren’t really free, there is a cost to it. First you don’t own what you develop on the free sites, not even your content. Plus you are at the mercy of the free site for the longevity of your site. What if they close tomorrow, what if they say you have violated some terms so they deleted your free site. All your efforts will be in vein.
Domain names and web hosting are really cheap. For a few bucks per month you can have your own hosted site. Spend a few bucks.
I use BlueHost, HostGator for my sites. I can host many sites under one account I pay 4/5 bucks per month.
This is the most difficult part. And this is where you will fail many times before you succeed.
You will need a profitable, less competitive niche and believe me finding a profitable niche is the most challenging.
But since this will be first try, pick a topic that interests you, something you follow, something you are passionate about. Then find a marketable niche within that topic which has marketable products or services. Say your interest is baseball. Write down things that people buy online in the baseball niche. Baseball gear, baseball tickets, baseball memorabilia. If you think there is enough interest about the niche. Build your site to cater to a not too wide, not too narrow niche. A somewhat wider niche will help you branch out and promote related products.
Say for instance you chose base cards as your niche and you chose a domain name famousbaseballcards.com, your site will be restricted to cards only, you cannot branch out, promoting autographed baseball caps from cards site may not seem right. So choose your niche and your domain name wisely and don’t make it too restrictive.
If this question hasn’t come up on your thought process yet, then you have failed. Sorry. You can build a hundred sites, but without traffic, you fail.
If you are new, it will take some time to graduate to paid traffic as in ppc (pay per click) via major and minor search engines like google, yahoo, bing and others. Think content first which will get you free traffic. Build your content, lots of it before trying to sell anything. Your first 20 posts/pages need not have any affiliate related stuff.
Of all the content you develop, don’t post everything in your site. Right, share your content.
Submit a few pages to article directories like ezinearticles.com. Create a Squidoo lens and post some of your content there. The rest, post to your site.
All the content you gave away to ezinearticles or squidoo, make sure you have some back links from them to your main site.
Once you are done with the above, write 10 more pages and give away a few and post the rest to your main site. This will help your site getting spidered by the search engines which will help in your overall effort.
Now. Apply and join a few affiliate networks, like Commission Junction, ShareASale, NeverBlue. Once you are accepted into the affiliate networks find some merchants in your niche and apply to them. Once accepted you are ready to promote them. Grab their links and banners and put them on your site.
You can go back to your older pages and add affiliate links inside the body of the pages. These are called contextual links and they convert better than any other link.
The traditional affiliate networks like Commission Junction, ShareaSale mostly have merchants who pay on sale. A sale is when a credit card transactions is made. CPA (Cost For Action) networks mostly cater to merchants who want generate leads where a use submits their email id or their contact info for a quote or for a lead. But no actual sale is made. Let’s say a user submits some information about their car to get an auto insurance quote. Though no sale is made, the vendor gets some contact details about a prospective customer who they can later pursue to sell their auto insurance. Affiliate networks like Neverblue, Clickbooth work primarily with these type merchants are called CPA networks.
No you don’t. You can think about forming a llc later once you make a few thousands.
Search Engine Optimization is optimizing your pages/posts around keywords so that your pages come up in search results of major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing. SEO is all about getting free traffic to your site. If you are using WordPress, there are tools (plugins) that will help you in your seo efforts. SEO is too big a topic to cover in one sing post. Do a search on google and read up on it. You will need to SEO from day one.
Social media like facebook, myspace, twitter, stumbleupon are sites where users gather in large numbers. And they are free to join and participate. If you can participate in those sites, build a following and then promote your site to your followers (without spamming them), it will generate free traffic to your site. Social media marketing, which is what I just described, is free but will take time, effort and patience, but its god mine of free traffic.
Its a page on your site that you send your paid traffic from search engines. The concept is making a page that will appeal to certain section of searchers to help derive better conversions. Instead of sending all your paid traffic to your home page, you send them to specific pages related the search keywords. Like if the search keyword is ‘Blue Widgets’, you create a page about blue widgets and send all your blue widget traffic to it. Then you create a page for red widgets for red widget keywords.
But since as a new affiliate you may not be doing pay per click advertising, you will not need to create landing pages.
Just do a search for any of your keywords and visit a few sites from the search results. You will come across a few affiliate sites. If you click on a certain product link on a site and it is taking you to another site where you can make the actual purchase, then the first may very well be an affiliate site.
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