Affiliate Marketing: How It Can Skyrocket Your Bottom Line

By Luisa Drummond

Most people already know what affiliate marketing is, but for those just starting out, I will give a quick overview. Affiliate marketing is a form of marketing whereby, a person can promote either physical or digital products online, and the product creator or vendor pays that person a commission for a sale made.

It is no surprise that in recent years, affiliate marketing has become one of the top business models in internet marketing. A few contributing factors for this, the start up costs are quite low and potential for big earnings is high. The hard work is already done by the product vendor, since they provide the product and sales tools necessary for promotion. All the affiliate marketer has to do, is drive traffic to the product being offered. You can work from the comfort of your own home, and set your own hours. The income derived from affiliate marketing is directly related to the amount of time and effort you invest in your business.

Here are the essential steps needed to start your business:

Create a website or blog

The best way to start as an affiliate marketer, is to have your own website or blog. You need to decide if you are going to run a Resource site or a Review site, either option is fine and depends on your preference. A resource site is more focused on 'how to' articles and general information about the topic, whereas a review site is more about writing reviews about products that are on the market, obviously products that you have used yourself.

It is relatively cheap to register a domain name. One of the best domain name providers is GoDaddy. Another service that you will require for your site is hosting, and I have found HostGator to be one of the best in the marketplace.

If you are planning to set up a blog, I would strongly recommend using WordPress as your content management platform, that is WordPress.org not WordPress.com

Niche or Products to promote

By this stage you would already have an idea about what you would like to promote as an affiliate, since you would have selected a domain name that relates to your niche or product.

As mentioned earlier, these can be physical products such as clothing, toys, books etc. Digital products are the type that can be downloaded straight from the vendor's site to your hard drive. These include eBooks, software etc.

Some of the most popular sites, where you can find products to promote include ClickBank, JVZoo, Amazon, Google AdSense and PayDotCom. With most of these sites you will be required to create a free account.

One important point to remember when picking your niche, make sure that it is a niche where money is being spent by people to buy products. It is not sufficient to go for a niche with a high amount of monthly searches, as this does not necessarily mean that people are prepared to part with their hard earned cash, to buy products in that niche. One of the best ways to check if your chosen niche can be monetized is by checking out bestsellers on sites like Amazon. ClickBank can also give you this type of information. Look for products that have a high "gravity score". These are products that are making a lot of sales. A score above 20 is good, but the higher the better.

Educational Resources

It is obviously important to learn as much as you can, about your chosen niche. Authoritive blogs are a good source of information, just do a search for "your niche"blogs and you will find a lot of blogs worthy of your time. Also, join discussion forums, where people just like you hang out and have discussions on different topics related to your niche. YouTube, has in the last few years risen to be in the top three sites, for video content that you can source for your own education.

Traffic Methods

There are two types of traffic, paid traffic and free traffic. The fastest way to drive traffic to your offers or website is with paid advertising. What determines what method you use initially, is your starting budget, and or available time. If you have a healthy budget and can afford paid methods this would definitely get you off to a good start, otherwise you may choose to trade in time for free traffic. What I mean by this is, if you have limited funds, article writing, link building, search engine optimization, guest posting on other peoples blogs, posting on forums and making videos for YouTube may be the way that is most suitable.

Ideally, you want to have a combination of both if possible, so you get the benefit from the fast traffic from paid methods and the benefit of the slower but free traffic methods.

In conclusion, affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money online. The internet is a vast source of information, which can be tapped into, and whilst this is a great advantage, it can also be a detriment to anyone starting out, since it is quite easy to become overwhelmed, and suffer from information overload. Usually, this phenomenon causes people to procrastinate in taking action on what they have learned. The best advice I can offer, since I have gone through this situation myself, is to suggest that you find one or two, at the most, experts in your niche and follow their advice. If possible, link up with someone who can be a mentor to you and help you avoid some of the pitfalls involved with starting your own business online.

To your online success.
Article Source: Ezine Articles expert Luisa Drummond