Planning Legitimate Affiliate Marketing

I'm glad to be back and posting.  I have not vanished or otherwise left this site stranded alone in the Internet void.  I apologize for not keeping a more visible presence; however, I've been busy revamping my primary business site, updating site files, and making modifications to my shopping cart.  This has required a fair amount of work as I write and code my own pages, and this is not something I'm particularly good at. Read more

Affiliate Marketing–Easy Road to Profitable Online Business?

If you are looking for a low cost way to get into business online, then you have probably heard of, read about, or dabbled in affiliate marketing.  You often hear that affiliate marketing is an easy way to online profits.  Well I want to clarify this point.  You frequently hear about how "easy" affiliate marketing is.  In fact, I may have even suggested that this is an easy way to make money online.

In my opinion, it is easier in some respects to get started because it really costs very little, if anything at all, to get started selling other peoples products.  In any business endeavor, it helps to have start-up capitol, and affiliate marketing (from here on out referred to as AF) is no different.  When you bring up a page on Yahoo! you see the power of money at work it those ads on yahoo.com.  Yes, all of those ads lead back to a "money page," and some affiliate marketer or marketing organization of paying top dollar prices for the Yahoo ad placement, and probably making top dollar in return, as well.

What I like about AF is that it is a sophistication tolerant business model.  Almost anyone at any level of sophistication and expertise can make money with a little effort.  However, to do AF consistently well enough to replace your income–and I think for most of us that means anywhere from between $30,000 to $100,000 a year–takes skill, and that means having the willingness and persistence to go through the learning curve.  Affiliate marketing is not easy in that respect.  You have to respect it, just as you generally have to respect any job or profession to do it well.

Now, on the subject of respect, for those of you seeking to replace your day job, let me ask you this:  Are you good at your day job?  Even if you don't like it, even if it is just a garbage suck of job, even if your manager is pig mutant of a human being, are you good at your job?  The reason I ask is that it is generally advisable to leave a job for another from a position of success.  That's not always possible as some working situations are a complete mess from the get go.  All right, enough said.  Regardless of whatever home business you start, be prepared to plan and have the persistence to see it through.

Affiliate Marketing–Home Business Strategy

Affiliate marketing is essentially the marketing, or selling, of other peoples' products and collecting a commission per product sold.  I don't want to over simplify this because affiliate marketing, as with any business model, requires skill to be consistently successful.  However, one of the reasons this is attractive as a home business is that it can be incredibly inexpensive to put into action.  Having start-up funds is beneficial, make no mistake.  At bottom, though, you need only your imagination and products to sell.  You really can get started on a shoestring.  And some manage to start with nothing.  What you do need, however, is a plan, and by plan, I mean a business plan.  More about that later; right now I want to talk about affiliate marketing.

As mentioned above, with affiliate marketing you are selling other peoples' products in exchange for a commission.  If you ask, "What sort of products?"  Almost every product available can be and is sold as an affiliate product.  Every product that you find in your grocery store from pasta, cheese, wine, and steaks, every product found in Walmart, Target, Best Buy , Home Depot, Lowes, can be sold as an affiliate product.  Browse through Amazon or eBay.  Every product you see is sold by affiliates of those two sites.  Take a hike through a Walgreen's or CVS.  Everything there can and is sold by affiliate marketers.  Digital products, or information products also sell very well as affiliate products.  Examples of information products would be e-books, downloadable videos, and audio recordings.  Software is another sort of digital product in which there is a thriving affiliate business.

You can see that this is a huge area.  For this reason, it is important to have some idea of a business plan in order to focus the direction of your marketing.  I would mention again that you do a little research into business planning so that you have a notion of how to implement this as a business as opposed to a gimmick or some random activity.

It is not necessary to rely on the Internet to do affiliate marketing.  You can do this effectively with offline advertising, but the Internet is gnerally so easily available and has so much easy access to traffic–that is, potential customers–that it would be a shame not to use it or be able to use it.  Even if you have no computer or Internet access yourself, most libraries do have such access and can serve as a jumping off point.  We're talking about really bootstrapping it, here.  Naturally, if you have your own computer and access to a broadband connection, so much the better.

The Internet is helpful not only in providing access to buyers, but in giving you access to affiliate programs.  To save you time, three of the biggest affiliate programs are run by Commission Junction, Pepperjam Network, and Linkshare.  There are hundreds of affilate products between those three companies.  Share a Sale is another affiliate resource.  Your job, then, is to research your products and create a portal by which means buyers can be directed to the sales page(s) of the company actually selling the products.

By portal, I mean the way in which you direct potential buyers to the seller.  This could be done by email, with links in the body of the mail.  I'm not talking about spam email, but email directed to people willing to receive your mail.  Normally this is done by developing a list of interested, potential customers who have given you permission to send them email in exchange for receiving a newsletter or in exchange for some product you may have offered.  Another sort of "portal" might be online classifieds that direct visitors either to your site or to the vendor's sales page.  Newspaper ads directing potential buyers to a website could also be considered a sort of porta.  Normally, in Internet marketing, a portal refers to a site that you have set up for the purpose of directing buyers to the vendor website. 

I know of one very successful business woman who does this by setting up WordPress blogs devoted to a particular niche area, such as health care, education, or weight loss.  She populates the blogs with relevant posts, develops traffic of interested readers and potential buyers, and with sufficient traffic the blogs start earning income.  This is one example of a particular sort of portal, which works very well for this person's business model.  How you choose to direct buyers to a vendor site will have a lot to do with your own business model.

I'm not going to try and fool you into thinking you that you will make money with no effort.  Affiliate marketing requires skill to make money consistently, and you have to work it as a business to make a viable means of self-support. 

I've provided a low cost affiliate marketing course to show you the basics and to help you see how to focus your efforts.  The course includes 12 videos plus a 40 page report that expands upon the points in the videos and elaborates on how to build traffic to your sites.

One of the basic affilate marketing strategies relies on the following steps:

• product research (as described above)
• keyword research to develop ideas for site content
• building a portal site
• building auxiliary sites via squidoo, hubpages, blogspot, and so forth
• article publishing
• link development
• RSS feeds
• selected social bookmarking
• selected social news sites
• press releases 

The particular business plan I'm discussing here really relies on setting up a website (either free or your own domain) and then supporting it through a variety of methods.  Some of the standard techniques used to bring traffic and search engine recognition include the following (paraphrasing the above):  publishing 10 or 20 articles, building a number auxiliary sites, and announcing your content via social bookmarking.  This is an almost entierly Internet based approach in which you attempt to create a sort of funnel directing buyers to a vendor site.  You can supplement this by using offline promotion, such newspaper classifieds and even radio announcements.  How you choose to promote your portals will depend on your business model.

Personally, I really like the affiliate model simply because it is so easy to set up and for the vast, practically unlimited number of products.  It is also a model in which you can start making money within 30 days.  I don't want to mislead you into thinking that you'll be able to replace a day job or create a free standing second income in 30 days, but it is definitely possible, with a few hours of work a day, to see your first sales within 30 days.  I give affiliate marketing a big thumbs up as an income maker as it is relatively easy to get started and requires very little initial set-up other than access to an Internet connection.