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!

10 Oct 2008 21:31:05

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