A New Affiliate Marketers Journey

There are a huge number of positives to being an affiliate marketer.  I have listed the top three below.

1. You do not need to hold any stock
2. You do not have to deliver / ship the product to the client
3. You do not have to negotiate product pricing with suppliers

So what do you have to do? 

Find a reputable company to work with that has worth while products to promote.  By worth while, I mean products that people value.  In the Internet marketing world there is a huge number of “Internet Marketers” that will promote valueless goods (normally get rich quick Internet marketing books) with insane promises and catches.  The company also has to have a viable method of turning visitors to their offers into clients, preferably repeat clients.  To do this they have to have an easy process for the prospect to follow and make a purchase.  Many companies have still not worked this out and instead rely on huge volumes of affiliates sending massive traffic through - some of it will stick. 

I believe that there are a number of very good niche market down-loadable products available.  Ebooks like Halloween in the 1920’s and Finger wave Hairstyles, good quality entertainment and information.  Also I have generally focused on physical products such as mobility aids and power inverters.  There are large markets for just about any product that people currently us in their day to day life.

Your role as an affiliate marketer is to promote the particular product ranges that you are promoting either in the real or virtual sense.  I focus purely on the Internet as it is still a very small market place (compared to what it will be in 5 years time).

Promoting other companies goods and services for commission payments requires two basic components.  You need to have a good offer and you need to send traffic to this offer.  If you are new then Googles Adwords program is a good starting place, however you are then paying for your traffic in the hope that some one who has clicked on your link will actually buy.

The best method is to have your own website to push traffic to and use the site to pre-sell the product so that when they do click on your affiliate link to go through to the sales site, they already know a lot about the product and are much more likely to purchase.  This is your opportunity to build trust.  I realised very early in the piece that I had no control over what happened after a prospect clicked on one of my Google ads.  50 click troughs and no sales?  What could be wrong? You have no information to base any decision on.

I don’t have a site you say, or a site that you can work affiliate sales through.  In this day and age registering a website name and finding a low cost web host is very easy.  Don’t know how to make a website?  Again there is a lot of free software that will help you build one quite easily.  Remember, you don’t need a site full of bling - It just has to offer the right information to the prospect with a few relevant graphics and your affiliate links through to the sales site.

The huge benefit that you gain is that your prospects are in your environment for a period of time.  Using your web hosts administration area you can gain a lot of statistical information relating to the type of traffic you are receiving, and what they are doing on your site.  It will advise top entry and exit pages, break down of visitors by day, hour, country, search engine, top search terms and more.

With this information you are then in much more control of managing your affiliate business rather than just blindly using Adwords to refer to a site out of your control.  Now that you have a site, you can look at other ways of generating traffic to your site - no cost methods that will not only forward through visitors, but will also raise your ranking in search engine terms.  If you build a site about trains for example then type trains (or what ever key term your site uses) into Google.  Don’t be upset when you see that your site in not in the first couple of million or so - I have just typed Trains into Google which returned 70,500,000 matches.  What ever space you are in you are going to have to compete for traffic.  To check where your site stands, go to www.alexa.com.  

LegAids, my first site currently has an Alexa ranking of  5,959,531. Amazing, this was at 7,857,623 a month ago.

So how is LegAids getting a better ranking?  Through the creation of back links.  Back links are sites that link to your site, ensuring that spiders crawl your site more frequently.  As the spiders are coming, you need to ensure that you have a lot of very relevant content on your site to interest them.

When you begin building a back link program there are a variety of methods at your disposable.  As I don’t believe in buying links from companies, or using black hat spamming methods, I need to create quality links on the Internet.  For example, the link to LegAids above will create a back link from this blog through to my site slightly improving the rank.  I also write articles for Ezine Articles which gives me a more relevant back link as Ezine Articles is a much larger, older, more traffic-ed site with a huge amount of unique content than my little blog.

Squidoo.comis also another fantastic way to create a page that points to your site with relevant content - again Squidoo links have a high relevance (The links are in my profile).  As I am also a professional in other business areas I have a page on LinkedIn which allows me to list my sites along with my professional resume.  Squidoo and Ezine Articles  also are related to Twitter.

So by using the above sites, I have created around 30 very relevant back links to LegAids, which is a good start while each link gives me the opportunity to give my viewers relevant information about a particular subject.  As well, these linking opportunities allow me to link my Squidoo pages to Twitter and vice versa as well as linking to my articles on Ezine Articles - so I have created many more links than just to my mobility site.  I have had some of my published articles picked up and placed on complete strangers blogs with my author byline which includes the LegAids link.  Some of my previous blogs have also been picked up and used the same way.  All of this means growing relevance for my portfolio of sites and information content repositories.

It will take time to build these links, but the more relevant and foccused you are, then the better the outcome.  I have also posted relevant information on Blogs but that is another subject.

Please note that when I set out to write this I didn’t actually intend to include the number of links here, but if the article interests you, clicking on the links will show you exactly what I mean in terms of content and relevance.  Until next time…..

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing 101. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.