Simple Steps to Online Income – Affiliate Marketing

There are many ways to earn income online and one of the best and fastest is affiliate marketing.

So what is Affiliate Marketing?

Well before I explain, first let me tell you what an affiliate product is.  An affiliate product is a product that allows other people (known as affiliates) to promote it and earn predetermined commission on all sales made as a result of the affiliates own promotion of that product.

The awesome thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to waste time and money creating a product and sales pages etc in order to earn money from the sale of the product. You simply can leverage off other people’s efforts and can literally be up and running making commissions almost instantly if you know what to do.

As an example, a product creator named Fred creates a product which he is selling for $200.  Fred wants other people to promote his product and is willing to pay them 50% commission on any sales resulting from their promotions. Jane knows a lot of people who she thinks would be interested in Fred’s product, so she promotes it to them and 8 of them decide to buy Fred’s product. So that is a total of sales of $1,600 (8 x $200). Of the $1,600 worth of sales that Jane referred, Fred would get 50% ($800) and Mary would get 50% ($800). The more sales Jane refers, the more money both Fred and Jane earn. After a sale is made, Fred sends the product directly to the customer. Jane just collects the commissions.  They are both happy.

Any form of marketing or promotions for an affiliate product is known as Affiliate Marketing. So an affiliate marketer needs to get as many targeted people to see that offer as possible, and in doing this over the internet, it means the affiliate must send as much targeted traffic to the offer as possible.

A smart affiliate will capture as many as possible of the email addresses of the visitors sent to the offer by setting up a lead capture page. That way he can send other related offers to those contacts, over and over again in the future for free. This is known as list building and it allows affiliates to create income as simply as sending out an email to the list of contacts.

So the basic steps you need to take to start seeing leads and sales are:

Step 1 – Select Product

Step 2 – Set Up Capture Mechanism

Step 3 – Send Traffic

 I think a lot of people overcomplicate affiliate marketing. And yes there are many variations of doing the above 3 steps. But if you implement these basic steps, you will succeed.

Now let’s break down these steps further.

Step 1 – Select Product

Before you select a product, you need to work out what niche you want to target. Now this can be what you are passionate about, knowledgeable on or simply a niche that you think will be profitable! There are literally thousands of niches. Some profitable niches that I know of are weight loss, health, internet marketing, FOREX trading, learn guitar, dating and dog training.

Once you work out your niche, you then need to create an account at an affiliate network that has products in your desired niche. Affiliate networks have catalogues of affiliate products and they also automate and track the payments/refunds for the vendors and affiliates. They provide useful reports for vendors and affiliates. One of the most popular affiliate networks is Clickbank which has products in multiple niches.

Once you log in to the affiliate network, you will need to search the network for a product that is high converting. This means that it sells easily with the right target market. You can check out the sales pages to see what looks enticing and there are also a few other ways to find out if they are high converting that really take a lot of the guess work out and save a ton of time in the process.

Step 2 – Set Up Capture Mechanism

You then want to set up a lead capture page (also known as a landing page or squeeze page). It is the page that captures the visitors email address. There are numerous tools out there that make this simple. My recommendation would be Instabuilder as it is a one off fee and is really easy to use. You do need a domain, hosting and an autoresponder if you want to use it though.

When you create your lead capture page, make sure you use good images and/or videos with well written sales copy to entice the visitor to give their email address. Learn more about setting up lead capture pages and all the essential ingredients that make up a high converting lead capture page by clicking here.

You also need to point your lead capture page to your affiliate link, so that after a visitor opts in they get redirected to the sales page of the offer you’re promoting.

Step 3 – Send Traffic

After you have your product selected and lead capture page set up, you will need to drive targeted traffic to your lead capture page. There are many ways to drive traffic, some traffic is free whilst other traffic costs money.

Free traffic sources include:

• Posts to Social Media (eg Facebook)
• Article submission
• Video Marketing
• Organic Search Engine listings (although it will cost money and/or time to get rankings)
• Exit Pops
• Blog posts
• Affiliates (although they are paid a commission for every sale they make)
• And there are many more

Paid traffic sources include:

• Social Media Advertising
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Cost Per View (CPV)
• Cost Per Action (CPA)
• Banner Ads
• Retargeting
• And there are many more

To learn how to set up these traffic sources click here.

In summary, Affiliate Marketing can be very lucrative, but you need to take action and diligently apply the above steps to get results.

Gary

This is a guest post written by Gary Alach, find out more about his traffic training and grab my bonus here.