Today I want to share some thoughts from what I´ve learned about affiliate marketing so far. This article won´t be any in-detail story on how to do marketing the right way, it´s only here to give you some insight in how to start marketing and what is involved in doing it. I´m neither an expert in this field, nor am I making a living from affiliate marketing, I´ve only done some research the past days and I want to share my knowledge with you. (Warning - Long article ahead!)

What´s affiliate marketing?

So, you´ve probably heard of affiliate marketing and what is involved with it? No? No problem, let me give you a short description.

Affiliate marketing is basically all about promoting products and services from different vendors to get some commissions on leads and sales. Let´s take shoes for example (don´t ask me why I´ve taken shoes here…). Say there is a company selling shoes. Let´s also assume that you have a website dealing about shoes, cheap shoes, small shoes, big shoes… So, affiliate marketing would be if you promote the vendor´s shoes at your own shoe website, when one of your visitors buys a shoe through some links you provide on your page, you´ll get a commission from that sale.

That´s it. You make money from referring people to services and/or products. You get a commission from sales. Or you get your money from leads, where people don´t have to buy anything, but only have to join a site or fill out a form for example.

How to start?

In order to start marketing those products and services yourself, you have to follow some basic rules, and I really mean BASIC because affiliate marketing is such a huge field with dozens of strategies, tricks, best practices and so on. I´ve simply put together some thoughts that will help you in getting your feet wet in affiliate marketing.

1. Choose the right (niche) market

In order to establish an affiliate business, the first thing you´ll have to do is to find the right market you want to promote. There are millions of different products and services out there, so it may be very difficult to join the right ones. The best way to find your market is to look at your own hobbies and what you personally like. If you´re an expert in search engine optimization (SEO), choose the SEO or webmaster category. If you like gardening for example, choose to promote garden products. The possibilities are endless.

A good way to find markets is to have a look at eBay for example, there you have different categories to choose from. Simply keep on clicking through the products directory and you´ll probably find a market that fits your needs. You can also take a look at the Google shopping directory to find more ideas on choosing the right market.

It´s really important that you choose a niche market! Find products that aren´t as well-known as mainstream products. For example, don´t choose “computers” for examples, but try to find a niche like “gaming laptops” or “desktop computer accessories”. If you choose a niche market, you´ll have better chances on making sales, because you have less competition from other people also doing affiliate marketing.

2. Find the best affiliate programs

After you´ve found the right product/service you want to promote, the next step would be to find the right affiliate program for the market you have choosen. You have different options on this. First you could go directly to the products/services websites and find out if they have an affiliate program. The most big companies have one, simply do some research for yourself.

The second option would be to join an affiliate network which brings advertisers (the guys that´ll pay you) and publishers (that´s you) together. They usually provide many advertisers (products/services) you can choose from. They also offer different advertising tools like banners or text links that you can integrate in your blog or website to promote a product or service. The best things is, they also manage the payments, so you don´t have to open dozens of different accounts, but only one where all your earnings come in. Some good affiliate programs to start with would be Pepperjamnetwork, Commission Junction or NeverBlueAds.

3. Find the right keywords

The next step involved in starting your affiliate business is to choose the right keywords. In order to promote a product or service you have to either have a website or you´ll need good keywords for starting some advertising campaigns. If you have a website for example, you would place those keywords in your content or as meta tags within your html code. So with both ways you need good keywords to actually bring visitors to your affiliate links or banners.

Here comes the “niche” thing again. I´ve told you to choose a niche market to promote, and the same goes for keywors you choose. To minimize competion with other people´s websites or ad campaigns you have to choose niche keywords. It makes a huge difference in advertising campaigns for examples, mainstream keywords may cost you some dollars per click, where niche keywords may cost you only some cents each click.

A good way to find keywords and new keyword combinations is the free Wordtracker keyword tool for example. Simply start with one simple keyword and find out different combinations that were actually searched on different search engines. The keyword tools also shows you the search volume from the last day, so you can find out if there´s a need for a product or service. Also check out the Google Adwords tool, you´ll find many extra infos there.

4. Start a website or PPC campaigns

After you´ve done your research on finding the right niche market, you´ve choosen the right affiliate program or network, and you´ve have established a good keyword base to work with, you have to either start a website (if you haven´t already) or an advertising campaign, where you´ll promote your affiliate links.

If you have a website, the next step would be to write good search engine friendly content around the market you´ve choosen. To stay by the shoes example at the beginning of this post, you could write about how shoes are made, all the different kind of shoes, materials, pricing…The more and better content you´ll have, the more likely it is that your site gets found via search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Remember to include your niche keywords within your text and html code!

If you would like to start an advertising campaign, you have to do some more research on the actual competition you´ll face. The higher the competition, the higher the bidding prices for advertising. For example, it doesn´t make sense to buy an ad campaign with $1.00 for each click, when you´ll get only an average of $0.50 per click through a visitor. Think about it. You may buy 1,000 clicks for $1.00 each, which is $1,000. With an average click through rate (CTR) of 2% and a commision of $25 for each click, you would get only $500 back and lose 500 bucks (so, it´s just an example).

Conclusion

The above article should only give a short insight in the affiliate marketing basics. It´s neither complete nor 100% correct. Feel free to do some research on your favorite search engine or check out this nice listing with affiliate marketing resources. Also check out Wickedfire, a nice forum to find ideas or infos on affiliate marketing.

All in all, affiliate marketing can bring you thousands of dollars each month by “only” referring people to products or services. It´s usually a lot of hard work involved, starting from keyword and market research to building and maintaining a website. But, if you really stay with your goals, you can definitely make it. Start simple, for example set your goal for making only $1 each day, if all works good, try to grow your business.

I hope to provide you with more in-detail information later on as I personally try to start some affiliate marketing by myself. So far I hope this article will help you to get the basics

Bye bye,
Querblogger