Don’t choose an affiliate marketing opportunity just because other people are making money at it. That may sound like the opposite of what you want to do.  You want the programs that are making people money, right?  Not necessarily.  It all depends on the program.  If it’s something that intrigues you, that you think you can promote well, then it’s worth considering.  But if a program called “Become a Millionaire Selling Futures Online” is the one that every top Internet marketer is drooling over right now, no matter how much money it makes them, if you know nothing about futures or the people who might be interested in this subject, it’ll take a lot of work for you to make a profit from it. And why not spend that time and do that work on something you already know about, and enjoy?

Do choose affiate programs that interest you. If you have a passion for something, it shows.  Your website will have interesting content because you’re interested and you have knowledge to share.  Choose an affiliate marketing opportunity that’s related to a subject that interests you, and you’ll naturally spend more time promoting it, and you’ll have a better chance at success.

Don’t use a free service for your website.  Naturally you don’t want to spend a lot of money, especially not in the beginning when you’re not sure of your profits.  But free services put ads on the page in the form of sidebars, banners and worst of all, pop-up advertisements.  These make your website look cheap and less trustworthy.

Do purchase a domain name related to your topic.  Don’t just buy a domain name called jimsbusiness.com and expect people to flock there. Decide what kind of affiliate marketing opportunity you’re going to promote first, then make sure that’s clear in your domain name.

Do promote a few related products.  You can start out with one just to get your feet wet, but then casually add in references and links to a few more merchants offering related products and affiliate programs. This doesn’t just fill your site, it gives you more opportunities to sell.

Follow these dos and don’ts and read everything about Internet marketing that you can, and you’ll help yourself succeed with an affiliate marketing opportunity.

The beauty of earning affiliate marketing commissions is that you don’t have to change careers to do it.  You can keep that 40- or 60-hour a week job, so there’s no risk to you if it doesn’t work out (though there’s no reason that it shouldn’t). If you can just carve out a little bit of time to get started, and to put some effort into it, what may start small can become an extra chunk of income each month without you having to find a second part-time job or take on more overtime at work.

If you set up a website and market just one product, even if you’re doing everything right, you won’t make thousands of dollars the first month (at least, it’s not likely).  But if you continue good promotion, add valid and interesting content to your site, get the word out about your site, get your site ranked well in the search engines, that one program can see you earning affiliate marketing commissions that might surprise you, for so little work.

But if you market several different affiliate programs on that website that keeps growing and getting more visitors, each one will earn you money, and you’ll end up with several income streams made up of affiliate marketing commissions from different sources.

It’s not uncommon for affiliate marketers to start out with one website and expand to several more quite quickly, with some people actually owning dozens of websites, each focused on a specific niche and type of products.  The more you earn, the more can invest back into growing your affiliate marketing commissions, the more visitors you’ll get, and the more you’ll earn. . . it becomes a nice little circle of income that there’s no reason you can’t take advantage of.

A great way to earn several different marketing commissions is to use one of the many affiliate marketing companies available today.  You sign up with one company, choose from the merchants who use them as payment collectors, get all of your affiliate materials and links in one place, and then you get paid all of your commissions at once through the affiliate marketing company.

These are great for beginners, because you can track statistics, clicks, how many people purchased and what percentage of clicks that came from each individual link.  This allows you to see which worked best.  You can adjust your efforts based on those performance reports, to earn more commissions and sales. It’s easy to get started making affiliate marketing commissions with just a little time, knowledge and effort.

They may even show successful entrepreneurs kicked back on a beach sipping fruity tropical drinks while their computer does all the hard work.  While affiliate marketing partnerships are an incredibly easy and inexpensive way to get started making money online, you do have to do more than click a few buttons.  It’s not hard work, though, if you know how to do it.

Most businesses, whether online or traditional stores, fail.  There are several reasons this happens.  The expenses are more than the business brings in, quickly putting in into the red so deeply that it would take years to see a profit, and no business can operate that way for very long, unless the owners have unlimited capital available to them.

An advantage of affiliate marketing partnerships is that this is unlikely to happen.  You’re putting no money out when you sign up with an affiliate program.  And the money that you spend to promote your affiliate merchant can be very minimal, to nothing, depending on how you choose to start out.  So this particular problem retail stores have won’t affect your affiliate marketing potential.

Another reason traditional and online stores fail so quickly is that no one buys from them.  You have to have customers, paying customers, to succeed in business.  And in order for a person to become a customer, they have to first enter your store or browse your website.  This is where affiliate marketing programs are brilliant for online merchants.  They get people like you to sign up and promote their product, for a fee, called a commission.

The best way to make money with affiliate marketing partnerships is to maintain a website that you fill with related content.  You can do this inexpensively or you can spend a lot of money, it depends on how much you know about making a website and how much you’re willing to learn.  Once you have your site, write short articles filled with information that people visiting your site want to know.  This makes it more than just a sales portal, it becomes a valuable resource that people will continue to visit, maybe sites with similar content with even link to yours, and more people will click on your affiliate links.

If you can attract people to your site or even write ads that entice people to click your affiliate marketing links, you can make money with affiliate marketing partnerships.

Affiliate marketing is simply an agreement between you and a merchant in which you help promote the merchant’s product for a share of the profits of each sale.  You can promote the products a variety of ways, but the links that take potential customers to the merchant’s website are coded to notify him or her that the customer came from your efforts, and you’re paid whatever the agreed upon percentage of the sale might be. If that sounds simple, maybe even too good to be true, consider this: Because of its simplicity, affiliate marketing is one of the top ways to make money online.

There are different types of affiliate marketing programs:

Affiliate marketing Pay-Per-Click
In this marketing model, when a potential customer clicks on your link to the merchant’s website, you earn money.

Affiliate Marketing Pay-Per-Lead
In this marketing model, each time a potential customer clicks on your link and then registers at the affiliate website, you get paid.

Affiliate marketing Pay-Per-Sale
In this the most common marketing model, when someone clicks on your link and makes a purchase at the merchant’s website, you get paid a percentage of those profits as your commission.

Many people who want to make money online try to take a traditional store model and transfer it to a website.  This involves:

• handling physical products
• storing them somewhere until they’re purchased
• shipping them once they’re purchased
• having expensive merchant accounts to enable you to accept credit cards
• paying hosting fees for a business website account
• many more expenses and hassles.

And just because you set up a store online, doesn’t mean you’ll succeed.  You have to promote it to bring in new business and you have to do it correctly to target the right people.  Online stores, with their ease of set up, fail at a high rate because many people don’t understand all the things they need to do to succeed.

But affiliate marketing requires none of that hassle.  You don’t even necessarily have to have a website in order to make money affiliate marketing.  By posting advertisements online or writing articles you can use your links to direct people to the product you’re marketing and make money that way. Of course, if you already have a website, then placing an ad to the products is an easy way to get people to click and purchase, and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Not only does affiliate marketing benefit you by earning you profits for products you don’t have to handle, store, pay for or ship, but it’s good for the merchant, too.  They get free advertising from you, and increased sales that make it well worth the commission paid to you. Affiliate marketing is a great, easy way for anyone to make extra money online.

It seems though everywhere you turn there is some product promising you hundreds of thousands of dollars in affiliate profits. Most of this is mis-information and just rehashed information. The truth here is this…

Affiliate marketing consists of finding a good product to promote that has good commissions. Then taking that product creating an offer for it, and driving traffic to that offer.

You can’t make money without those four things…

1. A good product
2. Good commissions
3. An offer
4. Traffic

Let’s look at each of these in detail.

Let’s say you are interested in gardening, and have come across some products that you love. You know they’re good products, and you see they have an affiliate program that pays 40% commissions.

You just got two of the four things you need!

A good product with good commissions.

What if you don’t have any idea of a good product with good commissions?

Then just do a search on any affiliate network for a subject that you are interested in, and you’ll find great products with great commissions.

Now the next two things you need (An offer and traffic) is where the real struggle comes in.

An offer is simply anything you create that gets people to buy the product through your link.

This can be a blog post, an article, an ezine ad, a minisite, etc….

Creating multiple offers is actually ideal, but to get you started just create one, and then the last must have which is driving traffic.

Now once you have at least one offer created, you need to start driving traffic to it. I always use the following traffic methods…

Article marketing
Ezine advertising
Forum posting
Adwords

There are several other tactics that you can use too.

The key thing to remember here is to follow what I’ve just taught you here, create a plan and implement that plan. Don’t try this and that. Stick to what you know and only focus on it, and autopilot affiliate success will come!

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Liz Tomey is an affiliate marketing expert specializing in teaching people easy to implement affiliate marketing systems. Her newest course “The 5 Day Cash Machine” shows you how in just 5 days you can build an affiliate income and a list you can market to over and over again. You can get more information on this course by going to 5DayCashMachine.com

Immediate commissions are earned by presenting your affiliate link to a potential customer at the point they decide which product to buy. You will earn a quick commission on any sales made through your affiliate link, but you will not get the chance to earn from additional sales in the future.

Long term commissions are earned when you first form a relationship with the potential customer and over a period of time recommend various products to them. You will earn substantially more because of repeat purchases made by each customer.

You could concentrate on either method and build a thriving affiliate marketing business, but why not use both? Especially since concentrating only on short term commissions severely limits the amount you can earn as an affiliate from any single customer.

To increase your earnings, start by earning immediate commissions to fund the growth of your business, and then set up an email marketing campaign to form relationships with your subscribers. This creates numerous opportunities to earn affiliate commissions on a future sales.

Here are the steps involved:

1. Set up a review website which targets “point of sale” keyword phrases. These are the phrases people will type into a search engine when they know what they want to buy, for example model or brand names.

   Each review page on your website should focus on a single product, explain the features and contain your affiliate link to the sales page.

2. Create an opt-in list and write an autoresponder series based on the general theme of your review site.

3. On the top half of each page add an opt-in form to your autoresponder series. It is often easier to get subscribers when you give away a valuable bonus.

The review site allows you to earn immediate commissions on sales made through your affiliate links, and the opt-in form allows you to build a list of subscribers. Building a relationship with your subscribers increases their trust in you and allows you to recommend a number of products over a period of time, thereby increasing your earnings as an affiliate marketer.

Your job as an affiliate marketer is to send potential customers to the merchant’s sales page by promoting their product, and linking to it with your affiliate link.

One of the best ways to promote a product is to recommend it, and not to try selling it. People are aware of any effort to sell to them and most object to it… Pre-selling is a process where you recommend a product and explain how it can be used to achieve a desired result.

Explaining how a product can be used to achieve a desired result automatically raises interest in the product. Your potential customer will arrive at the sales page already interested and be more inclined to purchase the product.

Affiliate marketing is therefore any process which increases the interest of potential customers in the products you are promoting. These processes include:

• email marketing
• article marketing
• viral marketing
• niche marketing

Effective affiliate marketing involves using all of these processes, so they will be covered in great detail in future posts…

All you have to do is pre-sell the products created by other marketers, then get people to click on your affiliate link, and that’s the end of your involvement. The marketer’s sales process will take care of the rest.

What is “pre-selling?”

It’s much the same process as when you tell your friend about a product you have found to be particularly useful. You do exactly the same thing except instead of telling somebody face to face, you use some form of online communication, for example a website, or an email.

Pre-selling is something of a skill because you can’t resort to outright praise (or hype) – you have to explain the benefits of the product. In other words you have to explain how your reader will benefit from owning the product.

It is important when you pre-sell a product to explain how the product will either:

• Save time and/or

• Save money and/or

• Make money

If the product does any of the three easily, you’ll get a commission from the resulting sale…

Affiliate marketing is particularly suited to the Internet and unlike a physical sales organization, there is no personnel employment and no employment contracts to worry about.

To become an affiliate you sign up for the affiliate program and are given a special code to use when advertising products. When a potential customer visits the sales website through your special code, they are electronically tagged with your affiliate details. If the customer makes a sale, you as the affiliate are automatically credited with the commission amount.

Many sellers make use of cookies to track affiliate sales, so even if the visitor does not make a purchase on the advertiser’s site right away, a cookie will be set which is valid for 30-90 days.

A cookie is just a small piece of code which is left on the visitors computer which contains details about the website, product and your affiliate code. As long as the visitor has the cookie in their browser cache, when they return to the advertisers site a month or so later, you will still receive the commission from the sale.

What do you need to become an affiliate and become involved in affiliate marketing?

One of the easiest forms of affiliate marketing is article marketing, also known as bum marketing, because it is so simple any bum could learn how to do it. The only requirements are:

1. A computer with a connection to the Internet. It doesn’t even need to be your own – although owning your own computer will make the task considerably easier.

2. A text editor and the ability to write short articles.

3. A couple of hours each day to write articles.

4. Last but not least – a desire to succeed which will get you away from your daily distractions and seated in front of your computer writing articles…

When it comes to making money online, affiliate marketing is the best way to start. You start by selling other peoples products and as you gain experience start selling your own products and allow affiliates to earn commissions on their sales of your products.