Help For The Newbie Affiliate Marketer

So you're new to the world of affiliate marketing and you're confused about just how to get started. You have joined up as an affiliate for a product you'd like to promote, even sent out a few of those free emails, but no commission checks yet. Heck! It's been 3 whole weeks without any sales whatsoever!

Never fear! Real help is at hand. Here are a few tips to get you started in the awesome and inspiring world of internet marketing as a newbie affiliate marketer. I call them newbie affiliate secrets, because they are precisely the strategies that you will need to learn and master in order to succeed in the world of affiliate marketing.

As this is an article, and not an ebook, these tips will be brief but nonetheless important. When you've finished reading this article your next step is to thoroughly research all the methods I will be mentioning here. Doing Google searches on these strategies is a great way to find out more about them. There is heaps of free information out there, also some very good information that will cost you between $5 and $10. Then there's information which can cost you anything from $97 to around $5,000 to $6,000.

My advice is to read all the free stuff first, then head for the info which is priced between say $5 and $50. At no stage should you ever need to spend thousands of dollars in order to learn, as a newbie affiliate marketer.

OK here goes.

Article Writing. This is one method of free advertising which can get you an unlimited stream of free traffic. There are literally hundreds, probably thousands by now, of article publishing sites such as "Ezine Articles", "Go Articles" etc. Writing an article is not as scary as it seems. If you can talk, then you can write. You simply write as if you were talking face to face with a friend. If you still think that you can't write, then you can have your article written for you, although you will have to pay for this.

Once your article is written you need to send it to all the article publishers. If you were to do this manually it would take forever. A better way is to join up with an article submitter - once again, do a Google search. They will distribute your article to hundreds of publishers for you, which leaves you free to knock out another article or two.

I keep saying this, write as many articles as you can. In affiliate marketing you need to generate massive exposure for the product you are promoting. In each article, try to target different keywords from the previous article. This can ensure that you rank highly with the search engines on several keywords or keyword phrases. You will need to do some keyword research, though, in order to find good keywords to target that are aligned to your particular product.

Blogs. They're my next favourite method of advertising, and once again, this type of advertising is free for you, the affiliate marketer. You just need to be prepared to put in the time. You should set up your own blog - it's relatively easy once you get the hang of it - and you should add content to your blog on a regular basis, like every day. Don't forget to "ping" it so that the search engines can find it. Your keywords are important here as well.

The other thing you should be doing is visiting other blogs on related topics and adding your comment. You may not advertise directly, but you can add your link as part of your signature. You should visit and comment in other blogs every day.

Forums. Another free way of getting yourself known out there. However this is my least favourite method as it's very time consuming and can be rather confusing. But it's still well worth the effort. In the forums you should add comment in the relevant threads, once again, every day.

You cannot advertise, but you can add your link in the signature area in most forums. Do look for forums that will let you post your linking signature either straight away, or after just a few posts. Stay away from forums that tell you that you cannot add your signature until you've posted 250 times! Heck! If you post once a day, then it's going to take you 8 months before you can add your link to your signature! So be aware of this.

To sum up then. Articles - as many of them as you can pump out, at least one a day. Blogs - build your own and visit others, daily. Forums - search for and visit forums that will let you add your link in your signature after only a few posts, or right away.

Affiliate marketing can be a tremendous amount of fun once you get the feel for it, and of course, determined and consistent effort on your part will bring great rewards.