How To Be A Successful Affiliate

Bam! Bam! Bam! Three strikes you are OUT! Well in this case, you’re safe, as long as you follow through with my three step program to being a successful affiliate! What is an affiliate? And who would I be an affiliate of? An affiliate is roughly a volunteer promoter of a company, and by volunteer I mean you only get paid by commission, sometimes you will get paid per click (PPC/CPC), and even more rarely you will get paid per thousands of impressions (CPM); the PPC and CPM side of this is more being a publisher, but I won’t get into that now. Most affiliates get paid by CPA or Cost Per Acquisition, also known as CPS, Cost Per Sale, or even CPL Cost Per Lead. Here’s how this whole situation plays out: There are three things you need to know about before I explain how the system works. First there are networks out there (like Commission Junction, CLixGalore, LinkShare, or ClickBooth), advertisers pay these websites to list their need for affiliates to sell their products or services these are called programs, finally, you, the affiliate join these programs in search of advertisers programs to make money off of by promoting their products on your website (or some other means, I will get into later). You join an affiliate network and apply (and get accepted into) a company’s program, the affiliate network will provide you with a tracking code specific to the company’s website and often times a specific product on the company’s website. Simply after that you promote the product or service and each time you refer someone through your tracking code to the website and they purchase something, you get a commission off of it; seldom are commissions more than 10%. As for CPL (Cost Per Lead), it works just the same only CPL offers are usually for loans and mortgage type advertisers, you won’t actually get paid unless the customer is approved for a loan. However, sometimes there are CPL advertisers who want a customer’s information (phone number, email address, ect.) in this case; as long as the advertiser gets this information you will get paid regardless if they purchase the product or service! So here are your steps to success:

Step 1: Domain, Hosting. . . Template?

Just as all my articles’ step 1 starts out: Domain, your favorite registrar (For example: DomainRegistry.com) and find a domain based on the products you want to sell (pick something you are interested in selling). Then, get a great hosting company I recommend, as always, hostmonster.com, in my opinion they are the best of the best! Great service, fast hosting, and almost 100% server uptime! And then find a great website template, yes I said template! You won’t want to use a blogging format, unless you want to promote the service as a "product review" type website, but even then I don’t recommend it. So here’s what I suggest, get WordPress (you just said no blogging, let me explain…) and find an ecommerce template. Does that make sense? No? Let me explain further, WordPress will help you maintain the best SEO techniques with a few simple plugins as well as you will be able to easily promote products using article postings. If you find a template that doesn’t exactly look like a blog you will get better results. Act almost like you are selling the product yourself, and make sure to put text links for their products all over your site as well as a few banner ads. Now on to step two!

Step 2: Find The Right Affiliate Network And Advertiser

I recommend using any of the programs I noted above, especially LinkShare; they will have the best selection of advertisers available. After that, search for your advertiser! A few quick tips, as I said above, make sure you choose a product you are interested in selling, especially a product that you use yourself, this will definitely help you write content promoting the products. Also, I know I really don’t need to say this, but find something high paying, you don’t want anything below 3%, it just doesn’t pay, unless you’re selling cars.

Step 3: Market, Promote, Advertise.

This section is normally where I tell you how to advertise or promote your website using conventional means. Well, here’s the thing, most of the time you will be promoting products that, one, are already being promoted through multiple advertising venues, two, is already being promoted through search engines (like Google Adwords), and three, there is a very good chance that it is against the programs special rules to advertise for certain keywords in certain areas. And there is a very good reason for that policy, so you aren’t competing with the company you are trying to promote! Here’s what I suggest, lots of times companies like this are either too stupid, or too high and mighty to advertise for free or at least very cheap and effectively. What I am talking about is Search Engine Optimization and forum or blog posting. As I said earlier, using WordPress with a few add-ons (All-In-One SEO Pack add-on) will greatly help you out in the website optimizing, all you pretty much have to do is write content for your website, then post it out on a few forums relating to your websites product, and submit to article directories. Now, blogs come in hand because chances are that other people have blogged about the same product, or same kind of products. Find a bunch of these blogs and post comments about the articles they have written, say something like "Great Article! Hope to read more from you!" Then post your link at the bottom, or often times the comment box will have an area for you to put your URL in. This is free promoting! And it’s pretty damn easy too!

Just that easy! It really shouldn’t take you more than an hour to set up your website and choose an affiliate network. After they accept you, you can start writing a few articles, promote them, and start raking in cash! And this is great because you don’t have to worry about shipping products or keeping them in stock or anything like that! Not even customer service! That’s why being an affiliate is a fantastic home run!

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you stick around to read some more fantastic articles! Please subscribe to my RSS feed at the top right! It will notify you of any new articles to the website so you can keep up-to-date with all the new fantastic websites to make a fortune off of!

Thank you very much!

Sincerely Your

Internet Income Teacher

-Galen Schneider