Affiliate Marketing 101

Although I have always stressed the importance of diversifying and multiple forms of income, one of the most common questions that I am asked by email is how do I make x dollars quickly? Do you know the quickest way?

Affiliate marketing has to be the best way to make money online. Some of the advantages are:
1. You do not need any stock or inventory
2. There is very little or minimal initial investment
3. If promoting some particular scheme/program does not work, then you can just move on to the next one

The top reason that I think that affiliate marketing is so successful and effective is because you are not promoting your own product but someone else’s. Therefore you are giving extra credibility to somebody else. The equivalent is me telling you that I am a great athlete who someone else telling you that I am a great athlete. It is more likely that you will listen to somebody else as it is not then just self-promotion.

What I want to do, is to show you some quick and easy ways to promote a product which does not just involve sending somebody an email.

Google Adwords

Even with the recent changes which has made affiliate marketing harder, Google Adwords is still extremely effective in promoting an affiliate scheme. Within 5-10 minutes, you can set up an account and a campaign to promote somebody else’s product through your link. My main tip if you are going to do this, is to monitor your campaign very carefully to make sure that you are not spending more than you are making. Also, to keep tweaking and split-testing your ads so that you improve their click-thru. If you want to find out more about Google Adwords, then I would advise you to read almost anything by Perry Marshall.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing sounds very complicated, but in fact it is very simple. Once you have chosen the niche that you want to market in, do a search on Google to find the top 100 websites that are in that niche. Then write an ebook which contains 2 or 3 of your affiliate links in. However, make sure that it is not too obvious that you are promoting them but make them relevant to the text. Once it has been transformed into a PDF, offer the resale rights free or for a very low fee to the webmasters of those 100 sites. In this way, the ebook will find its way into a lot of people’s hands who are in this niche and will be interested in your affiliate link. One way to make this even more effective, is to use a viral list builder such as that at http://www.virallistbuilding.com/ in order to collect the email addresses of everybody that reads your ebook. Although this is a simple method, it is also very effective and can make you some nice cash very quickly.

Real Estate

Are you using your Online Real Estate as effectively as you can? What I mean by this, is are you taking every opportunity to present your prospect with your affiliate link? Some suggestions of places which you may not be using are:
a. Error 404 pages
b. Signatures to your emails
c. Download Pages
d. Thank-you for signing up pages
e. Adsense pages
Presenting an affiliate link to somebody which they are looking at your information can be extremely effective. And even if it only produces very low sales, these are sales that you otherwise would not have had.

I hope that this has been interesting and will help you to start or continue making some money with affiliate marketing. If you have any comments or questions, please leave your comment below.

Best Wishes,

Ben Shaffer

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.