Making money online through affiliate marketing is tough, but only if you don’t know what you’re doing. This post will answer this fundamental question, “How do I start affiliate marketing?”
I’m going to reveal the truth. Just like anything, success is a process. It’s hard to condense years of experience and thousands of dollars worth of informational products into one post, but I’m going to try 
Here are all the steps you need:
- A blog or a website
- Traffic
- Back-end system
- A market or niche
- Product(s) to sell or recommend
Let’s begin
A blog or website: In affiliate marketing, the goal is to collect money from the sale and recommendation of products. You need a platform from which to do the selling and recommendations. Most of us affiliate marketers use the WordPress.org platform. Before you even get your first site set up, read this whole guide and then come back and get:
- a domain name
- hosting
I use either godaddy.com for domains and hostgator.com for hosting. Years of experience dictate that both of these sites provide the best bang for the buck. After you’ve got those purchased, you need to either have a free theme picked for your blog or pay for a theme. My site is run on the thesis theme.
Cost: $200-1,000
Traffic: Just like any traditional marketing, you need to get your offer in front of eyeballs. This is where you need to learn some marketing skills. Here are just some of the skills I have learned to become a success in affiliate marketing:
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Google Adwords (pay per click)
- Facebook PPC (pay per click)
- Youtube
- Article writing
The important thing to remember here is that you need to master 1 strategy for driving traffic. Newbies get lost at this step, but only because there are literally hundreds of different strategies for driving traffic.
Cost: Depending on the informational products you purchase. Me? $3,000 and increasing daily.
Back-end system: Many marketers start building their list too late or neglect this critical piece of the puzzle. In any traditional business, following up with your leads or customers is customary. Online, we use email marketing or back-end systems to communicate. I use aWeber to communicate to my leads on a daily basis. If you didn’t have this back-end system, you’d be saying goodbye to any future commissions and the ability to turn leads into new customers.
If you’ve ever opted into a website to get a free report, then you’ve just joined someone’s back-end system. In other terms, this is commonly called a mailing list.
Cost: Depends on the system you choose. I spend $20 a month for aWeber.
A market or niche: People ask me the funniest questions sometimes. Recently someone asked me, “How do I know what niche to pick?” My simple answer for you is: What niche or market do you want to be in? I don’t really like the idea of being in a niche. Many niches are too small to make significant income. The niches that I operate in are blogging, internet marketing, and network marketing.
The key here is to pick a market you want to be in and one that you are passionate about. Additionally, you can create websites around certain products that you’re excited about. That would be a product approach to selecting a market.
It’s hard to write about or recommend products that you don’t like or wouldn’t even use yourself. Once you’ve selected a market to be in, the next step is to determine the products you want to start recommending to visitors.
Product(s) to sell or recommend: I’m going to give you 3 simple ways to find products within a market to promote and start earning commissions on. You can use any of these 3 sites to find products:
- Clickbank.com/marketplace
- Pulse.ebay.com
- Amazon
Clickbank is one of the many sites that product owners put their products on to educate people (affiliate marketers) about their affiliate programs and products. You’ll find out how popular (gravity) the program is and how much it pays out.
Pulse.ebay.com will show you all of the most searched for products in a given day. It’s a great place to start looking for products that are physical rather than informational.
When on Amazon, make sure you look at the “best sellers” list in the books section. That’s if you want to sell books instead.
This is the beginning of my affiliate guides. Comment below if this helped you.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Adam – This was a good article. I believe having a blog and blogging is a great way to build trust by providing free high quality content, and also build a decent passive income through your affiliate links.
On the other hand, it is also true that having a blog… is not the only way to make big cash through affiliate marketing (but it helps – long term). I have seen top affiliate marketers make 5 or 6 figures per month using landing pages (to build their list fast), free and paid advertising to drive traffic to those landing pages, and converting those visitors into subscribers in order to build relationships with them and monetize from them multiple times.
The Key in here…besides all I mentioned above… is to have a killer funnel in place… doing all the work for you… in order to help you leverage your time to build other funnels with other affiliate products or services… and/or do whatever you would like to do with your time.
I strongly recommend Aweber (email autoresponder starting at $19/per month) iContact ( email autoresponder starting at $15/per month) or my new favorite, GVO (email autoresponder, video hosting, video conference and hosting for only $10 per month).
All of them will help you… depending on your business’ needs, but they are only one piece of the puzzle.
Good post my friend! Keep up the good work.
Absolutely Ricky. Many marketers lack the big picture. There are several pieces to the puzzle… and you need them all. Thanks for commenting!
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