6 Steps To Affiliate Marketing Success

1. 6 Steps To Affiliate Marketing Success
Can you guess how much money merchants pay to blogs and website owners for affiliate
marketing fees? Over 2 billion…Yes. It’s billion with a B in 2008 according to Jupiter Research.
Why the merchants rely on the affiliate marketing so much? Because they know it works! What
does that means for the affiliate marketers? There is affiliate marketing money to be made. There
are several ways to make money from affiliate marketing, but having your own blogs or websites
is proven the most effective. The following is a step-by-step guide for creating an affiliate
marketing blog or website.
1. Finding A Hosting Service – There are many free blog or webhosting companies. You can use
free Google’s Blogger for your blogs. You can also use paid services such as Movable Type or
Typepad from Six Apart. Although Blogger is free, the designs are quite limited. For hosting,
there are many inexpensive website services such as Hostgator and Godaddy. If you don’t have
any domain, you can register one with Godaddy for as little as $4.95 per domain on promotion.
2. Deciding What Products To Promote – You can market virtually everything but choose the
ones that you know about and have some interests. It’s hard to sustain your affiliate marketing
effort if the product you are promoting is something that you have no interest whatsoever. Keep
in mind that you do some research before you pick your products. The products you are
passionate about may not have enough demands to make your affiliate marketing worthwhile.
3. Affiliate Networks – Those are the sites where you join to become an affiliate marketer.
Clickbank, E-Junkie, and PayDotCom lead the pack in connecting the creators of e-books and
software with affilates to help sell their download products. Commission Junction is the most
popular network for traditional products and services.
4. Create Content Rich Websites and Blogs – There are two approaches to this step. You can
create “Resource Sites” that are filled with how-to articles and posts in which you put your
affiliate links and banner ads to click for more details. It’s important to have fresh contents for
this kind of site to encourage people to come back to your site for more information. Another
type of site is “Review Sites.” After you pick your niche products, you write reviews about them.
For each product you review, you provide a link or banner ad that clicks through for sales on
your merchant partner’s site. You do not need to update that kind of site unless your products
have new versions.
5. Attracting Target Traffic – It’s easier said than done. Most people who visit your affiliate site
will not click your links or banners. That’s the truth. So you must use a mix of tactics to attract
potential customers. There are four main ways to increase web traffic.
Paid Advertising – This is a quick and effective way to attract customers but it can be expensive.
You put your ad copy with a short yet attention grabbing messages to redirect the customers to
your own affiliate site.

2. Free Advertising – You can use Craigslist and US Free Ads to advertise your products and
services with links and banner. They are classified ad sites so you don’t have to be shy about
what you are promoting even though you want to sound legitimate and professional.
Article Marketing – This is by far the most effective way to build the much needed traffic. There
are several benefits. You become credible and reliable source for your niche products and gain
high search engine rankings depending on your contents and backlinks (your links that appear on
other websites). Organic contents and manual submissions to article sites work best. There are
several high quality article sites. Hubpages is obviously one of them. Ezinearticles and
Articlebase work well too and they tend to tolerate more for commercial driven articles to
promote your products. Their main intention is to attract potential customers for you.
Email Marketing – When visitors come to your site, it’s important to capture their names and
email addresses. The main purpose is to stay in touch with them and promote your products.
Spamming becomes intolerable these days therefore permission-based (opt-in) email marketing
work the best. Aweber is the most popular for email marketing.
6. Keeping Up-to-date With Your Affiliate Marketing Knowledge – There are many quality
affiliate marketing forums for tips, advice, and discussions. Digital Point is big with several
thousands active members. It’s an excellent place to learn affiliate marketing tips, plus other
techniques that impact your success such as link building and SEO. ABestWeb is another site
with more than 100 sub-forums. You will find many hardcore affiliate marketers there. It is by
far the site with the broadest range of topics and discussions. The last, but not the least, is
Warrior Forum. It’s a networking forum for beginners and advanced alike.
There they are. Six basic steps to success in affiliate marketing! I hope you can use some of them
to start your affiliate marketing journey.