subject: The Full Guide - How Do I Get Started in Affiliate Marketing Today? [print this page] The Full Guide - How Do I Get Started in Affiliate Marketing Today?
The First Step: BRAINSTORM - Find your niche market, (research products to help with this.) Your choice will ultimately lead to ideas for the design, theme, and overall look of the website. It really helps if you are passionate about the product, it will make the creation process a lot easier and much more enjoyable.
Step Two: IT'S ALIVE! - Create a website. There are lots of FREE tools and templates that can help you get started easily and with little out-of-pocket expense. Websites such as Blogger.com and Wordpress.com are free ways to get your first website online!
Step Three: BE CREATIVE - A "creative yet refined" website is a good idea, when I say "creative" I mean visually aesthetic, and "refined" in the sense that the website has to be easy to navigate without being too "busy" which can distract the customer from the goal of the site. In the end its content over design, meaning High quality content is the key factor in drawing in interested visitors to your site and optimizing your position in search engine ranking.
Step Four: YOUR MAIN SQUEEZE - A squeeze page or pop-up on your main page is a great way to build your list. A squeeze page is a small, refined page with a linear focus: to inform the user of your mission statement while providing the visitor with a taste of what's to come if they sign up for your list, mostly it funnels them to sign up for your list with a prominent section to acquire NAME and EMAIL. A list is a collection of names and emails of people that you will be sending offers to. So it's ultimately a mailing list. One thing that you will hear REPEATEDLY in this industry by professional and novice internet marketers alike is "The money is in the list!"
Step Five: HERD THE SHEEP - get people to "opt-in" on your list. Posting articles is the most affordable way of gaining traffic and search engine optimization. In your articles, provide interesting and relevant product information; write articles that relate to the theme of the website. If you don't provide helpful quality information, people will find it somewhere else. Post articles on your website and/or post on other relevant sites, REMEMBER to leave a link back to your website or squeeze in your article.
HINT: You can gain extra subscribers hundreds at a time by hosting a giveaway event. (offering something of value in exchange for peoples email addresses)
Step Six: FOLLOW UP - The easiest and most productive way to build trust with potential customers on your list is a newsletter, whether it be monthly, weekly, or even bi-weekly.
How often should I send a newsletter? That depends; when your list is huge, sending one email can add hundreds of dollars to your bank account. But too many emails means SPAM to a lot of people, and spam causes people to unsubscribe. All the newsletters you have to write or obtain on your own anyways so be sparing. You can get started easily enough by writing a few newsletters and saving them to your computer. These will hold you over for a couple of months. The average person could easily write at least 8 newsletters easily in one day if they wanted. With this being said, if you send a weekly newsletter and you write 8 in a day, that day's work turns into 2 months of money making emails.
Once you have the newsletters written, the newsletter process becomes almost hassle free with the help of an Auto Responder. An Auto Responder is a program that will let you load all of your newsletters, let you specify the dates each letter is sent to your list, and the order in which they go out.
Step Seven: START CASHING IN - Once you have built your list to a comfortable amount you can start to monetize it. You have several options but the three best and easiest are:
1) Affiliate products: This is the most common method. Sell affiliate products that relate to your website for commission. This is done through the newsletters.
2) Sell newsletter Space: Eventually your subscribers will trust you for good information, whether it's yours or not. Other internet marketers with information relevant to your webpage will want to pay for space in your newsletters once you have accumulated a list. But be careful, too much clutter or non-related information in you newsletter can cause people to unsubscribe.
3) Sell your own product: Once you have created a related product, you can market it on your webpage for 100% gain. HINT: A few days before you launch your product BUILD A BUZZ about the product using sneak peeks or clips.
