New Web Business Guide Chapter 1A – Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing

The New Web Business Guide Introduction can be found here. Chapter 1 – Choosing the type of new web business to start can be found here.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing involves promoting products and services other businesses sell already. You join their affiliate program/s and build your website to promote their products and services. The goal is to get people to come to your website, then click over to your Affiliate’s website and buy their products or services.

Some affiliate programs pay for each visitor you send to their website. This is called “Pay Per Click” Affiliate Marketing. Some affiliate programs are Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs, where the user you send to their site needs to fill out a contact form to contact your affiliate before you get paid. Other affiliate programs are Pay per Sale Affiliate Programs. This means the user you send to them must buy something in order for you to get paid a commission on the sale.

You may sign up for more than one type of affiliate program and promote them all with the same website or you can build multiple websites, one for each affiliate or for each type of affiliate you plan to promote.

You can even do affiliate marketing without a website. You can do email marketing by producing a newsletter or ezine to promote your affiliates. You will need to either buy a mailing list or get people to subscribe to your newsletter or ezine before you can do this effectively. There are places where you can list your newsletter or ezine where people can find it and subscribe to it.

You can use google adwords, yahoo publisher, and msn adcenter to promote your affiliates. This means you will be paying for everytime a user clicks on your ad so you will need to make sure you are not paying more for your clicks than you are making with your affiliate. We will discuss how to use PPC in later chapters and will include information about affiliate marketing with PPC ads.

The first thing you will want to do, before you even choose a domain name or build anything at all, is choose which affiliates you will be promoting. Keep in mind that this is also something you will continue to do as long as you stay in affiliate marketing. You will always need to be on the lookout for more affiliates to promote. New affilate programs come out every day.

You can go to clickbank.com or cj.com and sign up and view hundreds of affiliates that want you to sign up and promote their products and services. You sign up with them and browse through their affiliates until you find the ones you like and then you sign up with them.

Read carefully all of what the affiliate program says in their terms of service. You will need to know how often they pay you and exactly what you need to get a user to do before they will pay you for that action. You will want to know what kind of tracking they do and if they have an affiliate login area where you can view your statistics such as how many users you sent to them VS how many signed up, etc.

You have to view your stats often for each affiliate you sign up for. If you are sending the affiliate a lot of good targeted traffic but they are not converting sales, you will want to drop them in favor of another affiliate. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to make sure you are bringing in good quality targeted traffic and getting them to the affiliates website. Their job is to sell those users once they get there. Affiliate marketing is only successful if you do your job well and they do their job well. If you do your job well and they do not, don’t hesitate to drop them in favor of another affiliate that can convert your traffic better.

You may also want to check google for the affiliate you are about to sign up for. Look for complaints about them to see if other affiliate marketers have had a bad experience in dealing with them. Do not just find one person that says the affiliate is bad and think that means the affiliate is bad. You can’t do business on the web without making a few people unhappy. it’s just business. but if there are a lot of people complaining about a particular affiliate program, you may want to skip that one.

Use your best judgement when reading both negative and positive reviews about an affiliate. Sometimes the positive reviews are from people who actually work for the company that owns the affiliate program. Again, you need to use your best judgement but it doesn’t hurt to check them all out before signing up with an affiliate.

There will be a whole chapter on Affiliate Marketing in the New Web Business Guide. For now, you just want to get signed up with your affiliates you plan to promote.

In the next part of the new web business guide, we will discuss contextual and ppc ad marketing.

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