Bellow I will try to write a beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing. According to wikipedia affiliate marketing refers to :

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. Compensation or commission may be made based on a certain value for each Impession (CPM), click (Pay per click), registrant or new customer (Pay per lead) or (Cost Per Acquisition / CPA), sale (usually a percentage, Pay per sale or revenue share), or any combination of them.

Affiliate marketing is the hardest way to make money online, but it really worths your effort as it can produce really impressive results and much bigger earnings than any cpc program, including adsense. The idea is simple. You drive targeted traffic to a web site - the site that you are affiliated with - and this site is converting this traffic to sales. As an affiliate you earn a commission for every sale that is produced with your traffic.

The important part is how you get “targeted traffic”. Well in the affiliate marketing world we need traffic that can convert to sales. So if we are promoting a program about ring tones, we can’t buy traffic at a webmaster related web site, but a site that has audience which is more eligible to buy what we offer. So a basic tip regarding traffic is to avoid those “10.000 visitors” offers

Anyway enough with the theory. Let’s see how we can start with affiliate marketing in real.

Step 1. Choose a product to promote

There are hundreds of affiliate programs to choose from. What we need here, is

1. Find a company to affiliate with, which is reliable and well known. This way we will get the best support and we’ll be sure that we are not going to be scammed on the pay day
2. Choose a few products that we know something about and can write some information about them. All product must be in the same market

The first part is easy. Go with the well established affiliate networks and everything will be fine. Here is a list of networks that are reliable and pay on time :

• AzoogleAds
• ClickBank
• COPEAC
• Commission Junction

No matter which network(s) you will use, you must choose some products to promote. The important in this is to choose products from one market (niche) and you must be able to write some content about those products. The best would be to choose a market that you know enough about, but it is very important to choose a market that is not saturated (eg. make money online market)

Step 2. Create a landing page

A landing page is a mini site which we will use to promote the products we choose. Some people prefer to promote the affiliate’s page directly, but I wont recommend you to do so, as there are much more benefits from using a landing page. To create your landing page/mini site, you can use an automated blog system like wordpress, which has everything you need for that kind of site. Also be sure to create your site under a new domain name.

I wont tell you right now why you need to have a landing page - instead of promoting the affiliate site directly - or why you need a domain name, but you should trust me on this. Both are very important

Step 3. Write some content

When you are finished with the setup of your blog, you need some content. Write a few articles about the market that your products are in - I mean articles that are related to this niche - and make sure to put a few affiliate links in those articles. Writing content is a very important thing, and I guess we could write a whole book with tips and techniques so I wont say much about that. You can get some writing tips here.

In general make sure that your writing is not screaming “BUY!!!” but try to make some informative posts about the products you are promoting. The purpose is to point to a reader’s need and make sure that they will find our product good for filling that need. The “buy now” part is a work for the affiliate site so we don’t have to worry about that. Try to make your articles as much as targeted as possible. For example if you want to promote a ring tone site, write an article about “RnB ring tones” or “The best ring tone providers for XXX”. This will help you with sales and SEO.

Step 4. Add a mailing list

A mailing list is one of the most important things regarding affiliate marketing. Having a base of subscribers can give you a stable source of income. You can create one using an automated service like email aces or set it up in your server by using some kind of software like phpList.

To populate your list make sure that you give some freebie (eg. an ebook) or some special promotions to your subscribers.

Step 5. Time for traffic : Bum marketing

Bum marketing is the easiest ways to bring traffic to your site, and when you are consistent about it, it can work great. The idea is once again simple You write some articles in subjects regarding the market your products are in. This time you don’t post those articles in your mini site, but in article directories. The purpose is to drive traffic to your mini site, not to the affiliate site directly. So make sure that you put some links back to your site from your articles.

You can try this method of marketing with videos too, but this will need some more time and expertise. In this case you will need to create some relative videos - with the domain of your site attached in the screen - and post them to youtube and other popular video sharing web sites.

Step 6. Paid traffic

Paid traffic is a difficult way to make sales, and it requires to have a budget to spend until you find out what works for you and what is not. In general you need to drive some high targeted traffic to your mini site, and make sure that the money you spend on advertising is less than the money you earn. Here is an article to start over with adwords, the best program right now for paid traffic.

Hope this article was really informative, and hope those techniques will work fine for you as they work for me. I will write more about ways to bring traffic to your affiliate web site and optimize it soon, so keep in touch