Becoming an affiliate marketer is a new career choice for people who want to run their own businesses. Whether you find yourself without a job, or you are interested in generating extra income, or you want to change careers and live the dream of being free of the 9 to 5 rat race, venturing into the internet marketing industry may be the way for you to accomplish these goals.
The trouble is, while it sounds like it would be an easy pursuit to sell products on the web, it requires a skill set that many new business owners do not have and need to acquire before venturing into the internet marketing industry. Thousands upon thousands of new internet businesses are created each year, but only about 20% of them become successful. Why? Because the business owners did not do two important things: first, they did not acquire the skills needed to succeed before starting up and, second, they did not do the research to identify a lucrative market – a niche – where their business could be successful.
To acquire all the skills needed to become a successful affiliate marketer takes time and there are many skills to acquire on many levels. This can be overwhelming to a person new to the industry. Luckily, there are seven basics steps to follow to become proficient at running a successful internet business, learning how to be an internet marketer, and getting on the fast track to making money.
1) Find an internet marketing training course. There are many training courses available to get you started with computers, internet technology, and marketing online. Check out courses on the internet. There are some courses offered for free that are excellent. See Eric’s Tips for an excellent course. Also check out my offering of Marketing Quickies 3 . Join a community of marketers who are sharing up to the minute techniques for building and enhancing an internet business.
Step one also involves thinking about business foundations like accounting skills. You need to develop some computer expertise and learn some internet marketing terminology, but you also need to know about hiring, firing and tax accounting.
You’ve chosen a business on the internet, so if you hate computers, you may want to rethink your choice of new careers. It is possible to outsource much of the work to setup your physical websites, but this will sap your profits and you’ll pay later for not knowing what you are doing. It’s best to learn to set up hosting, register domain names, use software tools, and do the technical work on your own. Although many marketers will tell you that acquiring knowledge of markup languages like HTML isn’t necessary, a good understanding of the code behind your websites is extremely helpful.
2) Have a business plan. There is no such thing as a perfect plan, so don’t wait to start because you think your plan is not perfect. You need to have some idea of how to structure your business before you start, but you also need to start moving. The business model that seems to work the best for internet marketers is based around 10 to 15 small websites of 4 to 5 pages each. Each website focuses on a very specific niche market. This type of website creation is called “sniping.” To “snipe” is too learn how to identify a profitable niche market for each of your sites and find the keywords that will drive traffic to it. You must learn to wind your way through the thousands of keywords that have low volume or are over targeted, to find those that have enough search activity to generate decent traffic, and subsequently, generate sales volume. You will have to do research, gain knowledge of specific research tools, develop analytical skills, and have patience. For more information about how to snipe in the market, grab the ebook at Super Affiliate Sniper . Also offered through this promotion is a book on list building which will be invaluable to you as you begin launching campaigns to promote your products.
3) Are you a good writer? Can you write a high-conversion sales letter? High-conversion sales copy is the bread and butter of your internet business. Learning to write sales letters is the third step in making your business successful. The content on your sites must be focused and designed to grab attention and convince visitors to buy your products. I’ve included a tool for generating some nice looking sale letters. The tool can help you write professional sales letters in 15 minutes and eliminate having to pay for copywriting services, see Sales Letter Creator. I will be advertising more tools that I hope you will find helpful and that I use in my interent business.
Can you create interesting graphics that hold your visitor’s attention? If you aren’t proficient working with computer images, you need tools like Photoshop or Gimp and/or professionals that will help you with this part of your success story. Be prepared to invest a chunk of money to buy the tools or get expert help in this area. The money you spend will be well worth it. If you are starting on a shoestring budget, then you can expect to buy a few very inexpensive graphics tools and learn to be a convincing copywriter. It can be fun, and you may like the idea of producing videos, taking pictures, or sitting down and getting your ideas on paper.
4) Mastering Search Engine Optimization or SEO is next on your agenda. SEO is fast becoming a science unto itself. It will be mandatory to optimize each site for the highest search engine page rankings so you will get the greatest visibility possible on search sites like Google , Yahoo and MSN. You will need to understand how to structure your websites to get the highest rankings and how to write content that contains the right percentage of keyword saturation as well as keyword relevance. Your aim will to be to get your site ranked high enough to be included in the organic results on the first page of a search done on your keyword phrase. Like website creation, SEO tasks can be outsourced to save time. If you are a beginner, it may be much easier for you to outsource SEO tasks to professionals, but do not substitute outsourcing for learning what is going on behind the scenes. Your knowledge of what needs to happen will help you negotiate with contractors for their services.
5) Affiliate marketers get credit for the sales or leads they generate by “affiliate links.” These links are the real reason why you create websites, so mastering affiliate link placement on your sites is the fifth way to make your sites very profitable and the key to success. An affiliate link is like a recommendation. It points or links to a location where your visitors can purchase a product which you are recommending and it has your account number contained in the link. When your visitors purchase something which you have recommended, you make a commission which can be as much as 80% of the selling price. You can go to Clickbank or PayDotCom or Amazon become an affiliate right away, allowing you to sell other people’s products. If you prefer working in the more traditional affiliate networks investigate Commission Junction and other affiliate network companies. You can identify products in your niche and build a website to begin promoting the products.
6) At step six, you have acquired computer and internet skills; you have business and accounting knowledge; you have a website built; you have identifed a profitable niche and products to advertise; and, you have placed your affiliate links on your site in the right places. Now you are most concerned with getting your sites indexed fast by the web crawlers and driving as much traffic to the sites as you can to improve your chances of making money. On average about 1% of your traffic will generate a sale, so the more traffic you can drive to the site, the better your sales will be. There are a number of free techniques to generate “choice traffic” and also some techniques which you can pay for like Pay-Per-Click. Article submissions, forums, blogs, email campaigns, and social bookmarking are just a few of the ways to get the traffic you need. You should try out all these techniques to see which provide the most traffic for you.
7) Finally, the seventh and last step is to repeat this process 10 to 15 times. For only a few hours of work a week, you can earn 5-10K a month and build tremendous passive wealth. If you can grab the basic skill set quickly and follow this basic outline, you will be well on your way to having a profitable internet business in affiliate marketing. It will be hard work at first, but if you take action each day and use profits to keep building your business you will have excellent results.
