This is a guest post written by JR Lang who is an affiliate marketer running several niche websites and an Internet Marketing Blog, where she focuses on providing honest and step-by-step guides and strategies to create, optimize and market online campaigns.
She loves lists and has created some popular blockbusters, including 144 Do-Follow Forums Categorized By Niche, and 195 Keyword Suggestions to Find a Niche. Recently, she was able to quit the day job and focus all her efforts on working from home and making money online.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Millions of companies on the Internet pay a performance-based commission if you can drive sales to their websites by promoting their products and services. An affiliate is able to make money online by being a middleman between online surfers and merchant products. By referring consumers with the products they are looking for, the affiliate gets a commission for every sale from the merchant through an Affiliate Program.
Hype and Fact About Affiliate Marketing:
There is a lot of hype and dishonest claims out there about making money online. Basically, if something sounds too good to be true it probably is.
Mostly these claims are tactics to get people to buy some product or over priced e-book. Unfortunately these tactics often shed an inaccurate light on this business and the fact that it is a viable, honest and good way to make money online and create a home business. Learning the truth about affiliate marketing, and the correct techniques to develop this business is crucial to success. Don’t fall for the hype!
Hype: “Get rich overnight” “Make Millions Entering Data” “Make $1,000 by Tonight”
Fact: Affiliate Marketing provides endless opportunities to make money online and the freedom of having your own home business BUT it takes a lot of hard work, correct knowledge, dedication, commitment and patience for success.
Hype: Making Money Online with Affiliate Marketing is easy.
Fact: It is basically simple, but it is not easy. It takes a lot of hard work, commitment and patience. The key to success is learning the correct tools and techniques and consistently applying them.
Hype: You have to buy an expensive e-book or course to learn the business of Affiliate Marketing and to Make Money Online.
Fact: There is a ton of free information about the how-to’s of affiliate marketing and making money online
Hype: Affiliate Marketing requires a lot of money in start-up costs.
Fact: In fact, Affiliate Marketing is special because you can start a home business with very little in start-up costs, especially compared to the traditional brick and mortar business. All that is truly required is a computer, an Internet connection, knowledge of correct tools and techniques, a willingness to work hard, and of course the desire to make money.
Hype: The Internet is too competitive and the opportunities to make money online are no longer available.
Fact: In fact, there are countless viable opportunities within Affiliate Marketing, and while certain market areas are quite competitive there are thousands that are still wide open. Everyday there are millions of new users joining the World Wide Web and there are plenty of untapped niches/markets available where money is waiting to be earned. The key is learning the correct research techniques.
One important fact to always remember is that learning honest and correct techniques is crucial to your success in affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Concepts:
As an affiliate your job is to send people to a merchant’s website via a link from your own website. For every required action that the visitor performs on the merchant’s site through the specially coded affiliate link, such as a purchase, a registration or a download, the affiliate makes money by earning the set commission.
The Nutshell of Affiliate Marketing:
Visitor visits Affiliate Website + Clicks on a Link ? Visitor goes to Merchant’s Website + Visitor performs respective action = Commission is recorded for affiliate ? Affiliate Makes Money Online!
Affiliate Programs:
Affiliates make money by joining Affiliate Programs for the products they want to promote. Believe me, there is an Affiliate Program for pretty much everything. And there are Affiliate networks that host many merchants’ programs in one place.
Some of the top affiliate programs include:
- Commission Junction
- Share-A-Sale
- Pepperjam Network
- Link Share
- Clickbank – Digital Products
- Google Adsense
- Never Blue Ads
Basic ways that affiliates make money online:
- Pay Per Lead - The visitor completes a lead, such as a free trial.
- Pay Per Sale - Visitor buys something from the merchant and a set commission is paid
- Pay Per Action - The visitor installs, uses a product or a service.
- Pay Per Click - For example, Google Adsense. The visitor clicks on an add link and the affiliate is paid for just getting the click.
The merchants and products you choose to promote will depend on your niche, as you always want to promote what is related to your niche.
How-To Do Affiliate Marketing
The most common venue for Affiliate Marketing is a website, which focuses around the niche. A niche is a certain segment of the population where you intend to concentrate your efforts and also can be viewed as a market.
Examples of Niches:
- Cars
- Health
- Video Games
- Golf
- Weddings
- Computers
- Cooking
- Real Estate
- Stock Market
- etc…
How to Find the Right Niche:
There are 3 main factors involved in finding the right niche that will make money for you as an affiliate.
1. Individual interest and expertise within the subject areas of the niche.
The more knowledge you have about the niche the easier it will be to build content and create a truly useful site that will attract and retain visitors and establish you as an authority. I truly believe in the saying “do what you love and the money will follow” in affiliate marketing.
2. Niche popularity and demand for the products within the niche.
If the niche is not in demand and is not being searched for daily in certain numbers then it will be hard to make money. The key is finding the keywords, via keyword research tools, that people are searching for within the niche and optimize your affiliate website for those.
Also, these tools can give some great general ideas about the hot product searches on the web: Google Trends and My Simon Top Product/Service Searches.
Another technique is to visit Niche related forums - Search for “forums + your niche.” See what people are talking about within your niche on the top forums. Find out who the customers are, what they want, what they need, what are they looking for. This can really give some insight into your niche.
3. The number of competing websites within the niche.
While the competition on the web is huge, there are lots of niches still wide open, a close look at the numbers will create viable and successful online money making campaigns.
There are many so called micro niches, that are basically more detailed subjects within a main niche, that people are searching for and often these micro niches are much less competitive and yet are still popular enough to build a website around.
For example, if you look at the niche “golf” there are over 35,000,000 competing websites, that is way too many to deal with, but when doing some simple keyword research, there are several micro niches that come up under golf, such as, “golf instruction”, that keyword has over 15,000 monthly searches and 54,000 competing websites, this is a very viable and wide open micro niche market!
Learn step-by-step tools and techniques to niche and keyword research, analysis and guidelines with lots of helpful screenshots at: Step-by-Step Niche and Keyword Research
Do I Have to Be a Web Designer to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business?
This is probably the number one question that people interested in this business have. The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT! There are tons of affiliates, including myself who are complete amateurs, who started in this business with absolutely no knowledge of web design or code. There are website builders, such as WYSIWYG’s, that are designed for the non-pro and make building an affiliate marketing website really easy.
A WYSIWYG, which is an acronym that translates to “What You See Is What You Get”, is a website builder that allows you to enter content in English and the software translates everything into HTML code automatically. WYSIWYG allows you to design your website with drag and drop capability, colors, images, and to see your website instantly on the screen as it will look when it is live and published!! HTML and all design codes are configured automatically! You add the content and the programming is done for you.
Two of the best WYWISYG website builders are WebEasy7 Pro and Coffee Cup HTML Editor, both under $40 and require absolutely NO programming skills.
Also, there is Wordpress, which is free, easy to use and while it is primarily a blog software, it can be used to build static niche sites as well.
As far as, Affiliate Links go, every affiliate program generates the code for you so all you have to do is copy and paste.
But, believe me as you get more experience in this business you will inevitably start to learn code and you may find you really love it after all, Huh??? 
You can learn the complete procedure, start to finish and step-by-step to building an Affiliate Marketing website at my post: Building an Affiliate Marketing Website – Step-by-Step
In conclusion, let me say that there are endless opportunities to make money online with Affiliate Marketing. This is a respectable and viable home business that anyone can start, including students, stay at home moms, those with jobs and those without, non-website designers and those without any marketing or business experience.
It does take a lot of hard work and dedication, but if you really love it and work it the possibilities are endless!
Learn more at my Internet and Affiliate Marketing Blog, and please feel free to contact me at any time.
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