Hi, everyone.
What if I were to show you how to make money using affiliate marketing, and tell you what steps to take, without charging you for the information? Would you listen? What if I summed everything up and gave you direction, so you would be equipped with the knowledge needed to make a legitimate income, even if you don’t have OR want a website? How about in addition, I break down advertising strategies, and tell you how to make the best of internet traffic, so you don’t go OUT of business once you start? Does any of this sound good? Well, I am about to tell you FOR FREE how to get a brand new marketing business off the ground. Even if you are a slow learner and have VERY limited time, I can assure you that this information can allow you to retire from your nine to five lifestyle within your first year of business. All you need to do is learn and apply it.
So let’s start from the beginning. In order to make money online you need three things: The mindset to succeed and not quit. The skills to put knowledge into action. And last, a good product or service to promote, so you are not selling junk and building a bad reputation for yourself.
Well, to have the mindset to succeed, you simply need the passion to do whatever it takes, and it appears that you already have that or you wouldn’t be here right now. So, great.
The skill comes with practice. Once you start DOING it, it starts to make sense. Slowly but surely you can put together a network of affiliate links all across the internet to build yourself a flow of immediate as well as residual income.
Finding a good product or service to promote is actually pretty simple. You have seen hundreds of scams yourself, I’m sure. Use your instincts. Your gut will tell you what and who is legitimate.
So, let’s get started. Let’s say your long term goal is to build a website that rivals the big corporations, but there is too much work involved if you are new to marketing. Many people get a template, fill in the blanks, and call it good. After spending a few hundred dollars in pay per click ads, they quit because they haven’t made ANY money. I know, some people have to learn the hard way. You can tell if a site was put together too fast, and so can everyone else. Even if you have a couple affiliate links on your site that would make you money, the sales won’t come in because your site looks cheap. Bottom line.
Here is the good news. Technically, you don’t need a website to make money. If you go to Clickbank.com you can register for free as an affiliate. Go through their list of programs and choose an ebook or membership program to promote. Click where it says to create an affiliate link. When it comes up, it should look something like yournickname.thecompanyyoulike.hop.clickbank.net/. Now, you can buy ads and put your link in them to send visitors to the site you are promoting. When someone clicks on this it will send them directly to the company website. When a sale is made on the site, your affiliate link is tracked back to Clickbank and they will send you a check for a percentage of the sale. Clickbank sends out checks to all their affiliates every two weeks. They are the biggest “affiliate network” online and act as a middleman to make all financial transactions safe and secure.
There is only one problem. Your affiliate link looks totally ridiculous and every other affiliate in the world knows it, and won’t click on it. This sounds mean, but other affiliates don’t want YOU to make money. But, there are a couple solutions. First you could set up a .php directory. Just Google it and read how to do it for free. This is where you store many links that you have renamed so they are somewhat disguised.
This will work to a certain degree, but if you really want to go all out, you could even buy a completely separate domain name for each affiliate link you have. Then you can forward the new domain to your Clickbank link in such a way that the old link is not shown on the site. This is called masking. When someone types your domain into their browser, or if they click on the link in your ad, it will take them directly to the main sales page of the product or service you are promoting, with YOUR new domain name at the top of the page. You could Google “domain masking” and choose to buy a domain from someone that offers this service at no extra charge.
So, assuming you have a product to promote, how should you advertise? As far as pay per click ads, I would stick with the popular search engines, and bid cheap. The best way is to actually have different ads in different search engines. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The idea is to diversify. Use very specific ad content too, so you have targeted traffic. There is nothing worse than having people click your ads that are not really interested in what you are offering. This will result in loss of funds and very few sales. Don’t get into bidding wars either, where you are fighting for the top spot in a certain search result. Everyone clicks on the number one spot out of curiosity. Most clicks don’t covert into sales. It is actually better to be number 5, 6, or 7, than 1 or 2. Even if you are 10 pages down because your bid is so low, eventually someone will see your ad. The best part about this is, the person who clicked your ad is TRULY interested in what you are offering, and this will most likely result in a sale. You could make $30 off a $.05 ad. If you were to repeat that over and over, you would become wealthy your first year.
If you don’t have the money to do paid advertising, no big deal. Read, research, write, and do it again. There is plenty of free information available. Anything you don’t understand, just Google it, and read what comes up. The hardest part to making money is acquiring all the information. Putting it into action is the easy part. Study up on what you are promoting, and write a few articles about it. This way, you get free advertising. Submit your articles manually though. Automatic submission may not always work the way they claim it does. You pay for it. It gets blocked as spam. They keep your money, and you get nothing. I’m not big on traffic exchange either. You view sites for credits, and your site gets viewed in return. You can even buy credits so you don’t have to surf for credits. The problem is, the people viewing your site are doing the same thing. No one makes a sale except the traffic exchange company. I am not saying that you can’t make a sale this way. I am only trying to keep you from wasting YOUR PRECIOUS TIME.
Good, you are still with me. Now we can talk about bigger deals. Maybe you DO want an entire affiliate website. Well, a plethora of companies offer that too. Just Google “affiliate website” and see for yourself. I have read ebooks from numerous membership companies that offer affiliate websites. I actually bought the memberships and read the information. I have gained vast knowledge through most of them, though some were junk. I’ve noticed quite a bit of marketing marketing, if that makes any sense, but it is still good. There is also a lot of step by step info which is even better. Most of the information is certainly worth reading if you have the money to spend on it. Like I said, each company offers a free affiliate website with a membership purchase. That was the whole point.
These are called review sites. They do vary a little, but most review sites are generally the same. You have to look at it this way. There are millions of other affiliates out there with the same old review site. In order to outsell someone, you have to do MORE than what they are doing. Most of the time the new affiliate doesn’t even know the content of the 2 or 3 programs they are promoting. Then they say they have reviewed hundreds of money making opportunities when they really haven’t.
Now I’m not trying to downgrade having an affiliate website. Many companies really do have quality information for sale, and when you buy it, they REALLY DO give you a review website that is already set up to make money. I am just saying you could send someone to THEIR MAIN site through a forwarded link, like I discussed earlier, rather than sending them to another review site. Now, I don’t want to make up your mind for you. There IS ACTUALLY an upside to having your very own review website. Google Adsense. With your review site, you get paid when people click on the Google ads on your site. This luxury is not available when using the forwarded link trick. If you plan to own one of these affiliate review websites, I should mention that you have to register with Google Adsense to get a code. You have to plug the code into the control panel of your site. If you don‘t do this, the company you are promoting will get YOUR Adsense money. They might forget to tell you that.
Now, be careful, because some marketing sites can be full of hype. I don’t want to sell you an ebook that says, “Resell this ebook to get rich. End of Story.” Notice how there is NO ACTUAL CONTENT in such ebooks, and they are essentially worthless. So, let’s say you decide to buy a membership to one of these companies. You should try to find a program that offers several ebooks as a bonus to your membership purchase. Sometimes they even offer resale rights. This means you can resell the ebooks from one of your own websites and keep 100% of the profits. That's it for today.
Have a Happy and Prosperous Year.
Internet 
