Newbie Roadmap To Affiliate Marketing

Newbie Roadmap To Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing has been booming. Forrester Research
predicts that Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Networks will
produce $280 billion annually in e-commerce sales in 2008.

And the number of Affiliate Marketers is ever increasing for
ONE simple reason - it is easy and possible to make a
comfortable living. So what exactly is Affiliate Marketing
then? Before that, let’s think of a normal business setup
which you will need to have one or more products, strategize
the ways to market the product, sort out payment and
delivery methods etc.

However, as an Affiliate Marketer, you operate like a dealer
or salesman for the company to promote their products or
services and get paid a commission when there is a
transaction. Affiliate marketing has contributed to the rise
of many leading online companies. Amazon.com is one of the
first significant adopters and has hundreds of thousands of
affiliate relationships. I have listed out a 7 Steps Guide
to provide any newbie a roadmap to be a Successful Affiliate
Champion.

STEP NO. 1 : BRAINSTORM AN ARTICLE OR NICHE

First and the most important aspect of all, brainstorm a
topic that you are interested with or have some knowledge
that you could share with anyone else. For example if you
are into web design, write an article of ‘How to build a
website with Dreamweaver’ or ‘How to keep your pet dog
happy’ if you are a dog lover.

A decent article should have at least 500 to 800 words. You
will also need to identify your potential customers and
clients. Understanding your niche market will attract more
customers because you are not loading information that they
don’t need.

STEP NO. 2 : A DOMAIN NAME

What is a domain name? A domain name is the www address line
that you will type to visit a website. For example, my
domain name is www.LiveOnOthers.com. Think of a domain name
that matches your article or niche and is easy to remember
so you are able to get repeated traffic.

A domain name is your Identity, Brand and Personality roll
into one so take your time to choose. First, list down at
least 10 keywords that will be related to your website in a
notepad. It will be best to get a domain name with one of
the keyword in it. The domain name will work towards forming
an impression about your online presence. A good domain name
will usually form a good first impression in a person’s mind
but a bad domain name will always be a bad one. For example,
based on the article of ‘How to keep your pet dog happy’,
perhaps something like HappyDog.com will be suitable.

The next thing that you have to think through is whether to
get a paid host or a free hosting. Both have its Pros and
Cons. For free hosting, the word FREE is already a big Pro
by itself. However, most free hosting sites will displays
advertisement banners and such on the hosted site which may
seen as a turn off by visitors. And the website will not
look professional enough. And when you are using a free web
hosting, you are actually promoting their website and not
yours. And what if the free host decided to end its free
hosting? All your hard work will go down the drain.

STEP NO. 3 : PURCHASE YOUR ONLINE PROPERTY

When registering a domain name, try to keep it short and
easy to remember. Once you have the idea for your domain
name, register it!! As there may be other people who share
the same idea as you. Thereafter, visit this 000domains and
type in one of your selected keyword in the content box and
uncheck .net and .org, then click search. The program will
then inform you whether the domain name is available or it
will suggest to you some alternative domain names.

Always try to get the domain name with a dot com extension
(example.com) instead of others like dot net (example.net)
or dot org (example.org). Why is that so? This is because
most people tend to remember website name ending with dot
com more than any others. However, most popular domain name
with dot com are mostly taken up long ago. If so, do make
sure your domain name is catchy enough for your visitors to
remember.

STEP NO. 4 : CREATE A WEBSITE

To create your website, there are WYSIWYG (What You See Is
What You Get) programs like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft
Frontpage to start with. Now, you may say ‘Hey, what’s that
and how the hell do I create my own website?’ Relax, because
building a website has never been easier.

There are various programs available in the market that will
help you create a website with relatively low prices. Most
of these website building programs are specially made for
non-technical person. So that even people with zero
knowledge of HTML can also build a dynamic website. For
example, Plug in Profit set up a affiliate website for you
free with you paying only for the domain name and hosting.
While also providing you with tutorials and customer
support. Similarly, Site Sell.com will also build a
affiliate website for you and they will customize it to suit
your niche market.

You can also seek services of qualified website designers to
do the job. For example, you can outsource this task to a
website designers on Elance. The site will let you create a
project where professionals will place bids to build your
website. This will allow you to benefit from their
professional experience at inexpensive price.

STEP NO. 5 : CONTENT IS KING

A Affiliate Website is a place to promote the services and
products you have to offer. Potential customers will be
interested in your niche and will also crave informational
articles about your products or services. Therefore, you
need to have related articles at your website. These article
contents will also help to improve your search engine
ranking by incorporating niche keywords and phrases into
your website content. There are tons of free articles
available on the Internet.

For example, you can head to freezinesite.com,
articlesubmission.com, goarticles.com or ezinearticles.com
to source for your related articles. There are plenty of
them, so take your time to choose.

STEP NO. 6 : SOURCE FOR THE BEST AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Now, the most important of all is to join the Best Affiliate
Programs that grow your bank account. Don’t just join ANY
affiliate programs, only join those that will make you
money. Source around for good and sound companies who pay
good commission to their affiliates. Since there are many of
them around so how do you judge then?

The rule of thumb is to sign up with those that have been
around for long. You don’t want the shock of them going
offline before you can cash in your commission right? For
example, company like Internet Marketing Center have been
around for as long as I remembered and their payout
structure is awesome!

STEP NO. 7 : TELL THE WHOLE WORLD

One of the most important step is to SHOUT around, tell the
world wide web of your presence!! It will be sad if you have
a great article but nobody knows about it. Promote your
website through link exchange, join forums, email everybody
you know, at your facebook, myspace, friendster etc.

You can also start promoting in less than 15 minutes with
pay-per-click advertising with Goolge AdWords. Overall, this
is the part where you can be creative. Remember, effort and
money are needed in order for the your Affiliate Website to
thrive and flourish. If you choose to leave your site alone
without doing any forms of advertising or promoting, you
will not earn Anything! Put In Effort To Promote Your
Website and you will find yourself earning some money slowly
but surely real soon!

Good Luck!

Alex Ang www.liveonothers.com

Alex Ang @ www.liveonothers.com A Singaporean who is
happy to be making real money with Affiliate Marketing on
the internet while having a full time job. A normal income
ain’t enough, get residue income with the Internet and start
Living On Others!

Article Directory: EzineArticles ezinearticles.com

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