Your First 5 Steps to Affiliate Marketing

Posted by stephfoster

April 7, 2008

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to start an online business right now. It’s easy for individuals to get into, and some people make serious money at it. It’s a highly appealing situation.

Only trouble is, with all the information out there it’s hard to figure out quite where you should start.

There’s a lot of learning you need to do in order to actually succeed as an affiliate marketer, but most of it is best done when you have at least a small start. Something to work with.

How do you get to that point?

1. Pick your topic.

Just about everything is sold online these days, and you can find an affiliate program that will pay you to promote just about anything. Pick something you know a lot about, whether it’s an interest of yours, a hobby or something you’ve done at work. This background will help you.

If you don’t have a background on your topic it will be a lot harder to get started. You’ll have to do a lot more research on it to figure out your target market and how to appeal to them. Especially in your early efforts it’s best to have enough information at your fingertips that you aren’t struggling just to understand your topic.

2. Look at other websites on that topic.

You need to see what others are doing. This will help you to figure out angles for your own efforts. You may spot an area that doesn’t seem to be well served by other sites. This means you have a great niche to think about as you build your own site.

Don’t be intimidated too much by the competition. Just about any topic these days will have a lot of sites about it. A good number of sites on something also means that people are probably interested in it.

Some topics really aren’t too good for beginners. Credit, ringtones, how to make money and such are highly competitive areas. It’s not entirely impossible for an inexperienced marketer to do well in these areas, but you’re picking something that is more challenging.

3. Start a website based on your topic.

While a website isn’t an absolute requirement for affiliate marketing success, it’s a huge help. Also, many affiliate programs want to see your site before approving you for their program.

Take a little time to build up a decent site. You don’t even need to monetize it right away; in fact a lot of people recommend that you not do that. Take a little time and build up something people will be interested in.

4. Apply to relevant affiliate programs.

If you’re having trouble figuring out where to find affiliate programs for your topic there are several places you can check.

Your competition, for example. How are they earning money off their site?

Sites such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, Clickbank and even Amazon have a lot to potentially offer you. A lot of companies would rather pay a third party to manage the affiliate side of their business, which is where the first few companies come in, while Amazon has an Associate program and of course sells all kinds of things.

5. Start marketing.

There are plenty of ways you can market a website, from having time but no budget (article marketing, blog commenting, forum posting), to having a budget that allows you to get things moving more quickly (pay per click advertising, ezine advertising and so forth). It’s possible to succeed with any of them, but you have to find what works best for you.

Even on a small budget you can do something with pay per click, for example, to get that immediate traffic. Set a budget to protect yourself and start testing ads and landing pages. This gives you some traffic to work with as you do cheaper types of advertising trying to get the traffic to start flowing in naturally.

Stephanie Foster blogs at http://www.aspectsofhomebusiness.com/blog/ about running a home business. Learn more about starting an affiliate marketing home business at http://www.aspectsofhomebusiness.com/blog/general-home-business/get-your-home-business-going-in-the-new-year/

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