Note from the Editor

It’s been a busy week. I haven’t made quite as much progress as I hoped on my ebook or posting on this site. Such is life at times, but I am getting there. I also anticipate being back on track soon, which always helps matters.

Your First 5 Steps to Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to start an online business right now. It’s easy for individuals to get into, and some people make serious money at it. It’s a highly appealing situation.

Only trouble is, with all the information out there it’s hard to figure out quite where you should start.

There’s a lot of learning you need to do in order to actually succeed as an affiliate marketer, but most of it is best done when you have at least a small start. Something to work with.

How do you get to that point?

1. Pick your topic.

Just about everything is sold online these days, and you can find an affiliate program that will pay you to promote just about anything. Pick something you know a lot about, whether it’s an interest of yours, a hobby or something you’ve done at work. This background will help you.

If you don’t have a background on your topic it will be a lot harder to get started. You’ll have to do a lot more research on it to figure out your target market and how to appeal to them. Especially in your early efforts it’s best to have enough information at your fingertips that you aren’t struggling just to understand your topic.

2. Look at other websites on that topic.

You need to see what others are doing. This will help you to figure out angles for your own efforts. You may spot an area that doesn’t seem to be well served by other sites. This means you have a great niche to think about as you build your own site.

Don’t be intimidated too much by the competition. Just about any topic these days will have a lot of sites about it. A good number of sites on something also means that people are probably interested in it.

Some topics really aren’t too good for beginners. Credit, ringtones, how to make money and such are highly competitive areas. It’s not entirely impossible for an inexperienced marketer to do well in these areas, but you’re picking something that is more challenging.

3. Start a website based on your topic.

While a website isn’t an absolute requirement for affiliate marketing success, it’s a huge help. Also, many affiliate programs want to see your site before approving you for their program.

Take a little time to build up a decent site. You don’t even need to monetize it right away; in fact a lot of people recommend that you not do that. Take a little time and build up something people will be interested in.

4. Apply to relevant affiliate programs.

If you’re having trouble figuring out where to find affiliate programs for your topic there are several places you can check.

Your competition, for example. How are they earning money off their site?

Sites such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, Clickbank and even Amazon have a lot to potentially offer you. A lot of companies would rather pay a third party to manage the affiliate side of their business, which is where the first few companies come in, while Amazon has an Associate program and of course sells all kinds of things.

5. Start marketing.

There are plenty of ways you can market a website, from having time but no budget (article marketing, blog commenting, forum posting), to having a budget that allows you to get things moving more quickly (pay per click advertising, ezine advertising and so forth). It’s possible to succeed with any of them, but you have to find what works best for you.

Even on a small budget you can do something with pay per click, for example, to get that immediate traffic. Set a budget to protect yourself and start testing ads and landing pages. This gives you some traffic to work with as you do cheaper types of advertising trying to get the traffic to start flowing in naturally.

Note from the Editor

I’ve continued to make good progress on my starting a home business series. It’s a lot of work to write out, but a lot of fun too. I even have plans to chronicle my next big step in business – releasing my first ebook for sale! Not on an Internet Marketing topic, either. I’m looking forward to it.

How Important is a Good Niche?

Niche marketing is a big topic in home business. A good niche helps to define your target market and focuses your efforts overall.

Yet many people don’t worry that much about having a niche. They just want to get sales moving, to anyone who will stop by their website.

Only trouble is, it rarely works. Much of the time this hurried approach is the fast way to failure, rather than to profits. It’s too hard to sell to a vague audience in most areas.

Sometimes the product defines the niche well enough, but other times your smartest move is to narrow things down further yet. If you sell beauty products, for example, you may choose to focus your efforts on getting the most from the products you sell, despite a busy lifestyle. Having this kind of a target helps to give inspiration as you create content for your website.

And that’s one of the keys. Being focused means you have something definite to work on. You aren’t writing random item descriptions or articles, hoping to appeal to someone. You have a definite client in mind. It helps.

Failing to consider an appropriate niche is a mistake I’ve made plenty of times myself. I’m much better now at spotting that failure, so that I lose less time on unfocused efforts. I can see that my more niche-focused sites excel more quickly than the more general ones. I can make a general one succeed on its particular topic, but it’s a lot more effort.

I’ll echo what many people have said about finding niches. Wordtracker is a great resource. You can find out what kinds of things people are searching for in a given area, and gain some ideas for what you want to do. They have a free trial, but the paid version can be quite worthwhile, especially if you want to get serious about pay per click marketing.

But there are a lot more resources. Look at popular products on Amazon, eBay and other websites. Use a generic term for what you’re planning on selling, then see what kinds of sites there are. Some will be focused on a niche, and while I won’t say go for the exact niche, you can gain some inspiration as to the kinds of consumers you can target.

Combining some research into a niche with your own interests can product delightful results. While not an absolute guarantee of success, it’s a better place to start than many others.

Note from the Editor

Life’s been interesting lately. Had a 19 hour downtime with my best performing site. They’re on my most reliable host, so you can imagine what a shock it was. But they had a disc go bad on the server, and there was nothing to be done for it but to move everything over to a new server.

Thank goodness it happened on what is generally my slowest traffic day of the week. If one must have such horrendous downtime, better for it to happen on a slow day than on what ought to be a busy one.

As you can imagine, I could scarcely drag myself away from the computer during all that. My husband was wonderful – got out of the way the night it happened when he realized that I wanted to focus at first to figure out what was wrong, and when he came home the following evening from work and it was still down, went out and got me ice cream and dark chocolate. It did help the emotional state some, but even better was shortly thereafter when things started coming back online at long last.

If I were to ever go through such a mess again, I’d probably try harder to talk myself into doing some productive work for the sites that were still up. I kept thinking about it, but was really just too distracted wondering when things would get back to normal on my best site. It’s a lesson to be learned, even though I hope never to repeat such events.

7 Hidden Principles of Super Affiliate Marketing!

Regular affiliates and super affiliates are doing almost the same amount of work. Yet, there are huge incomes different between two of them. In reality they are not smarter but there are working a little bit ‘smarter’ and they are using a proven system.

Principle #1: Focus and “The Power of One”

To become super affiliates, you MUST do one thing at a time. One affiliate business at a time, one affiliate program, One web site and oneobjective. The main point is that you focus on building one business in one market before you move into another.

Principle #2: The Magic of Simplicity

You can create a clean and simple opt-in page, send ‘properly formatted e-mails and provide alternatives mediums for communication to make your customer’s life easier.

Principle #3: Active Brand Building

Super affiliates work to build instant brand and name recognition.

Tactics use by super affiliate to build their branding are:

1) Using your full name and personal picture on (some) opt-in pages, ‘Thank You’ pages, blog, etc

2) Making sure any graphics you use as site headers, in special reports or products you’ve created, display your name and personal image.

3) Creating a recognizable personality, tone or ‘performance’ style.

4) Coming up with a memorable ‘tag line’ or slogan.

5) Focusing on creating a logo and color scheme for all sites, reports and bonus products.

Principle #4: Lead Generation and List Building

Super affiliates spend as much or more time working to get qualified leads onto their opt-in lists as they do converting those leads.

When you build your own leads list, however, you benefit from the following 4 outcomes:

1) Potential customers interact with you (the affiliate) first, rather than going directly to the merchant.

2) You have more control over the customer’s perceptions of the product because you can pre-sell or ‘educate’ them in ways the merchant does not.

3) You are able to generate repeat business from existing customers.

4) Over time, the trust you establish with your list will generate more sales.

Also, when you build a list, your customers and subscribers benefit from:

1) You’ll be able to help them find the solutions they need to improve their lives.

2) Your trusted recommendations also lead them to appropriate solutions, and this takes the stress out of buying products/services on-line.

Principle #5: Follow Ups and List Relationships

Principle, the list relationship is really what drives sales. However, your communication with your list must be consistent, even somewhat methodical. A successful affiliate will plan his communications in advance, with a specific objective in mind.

You have TWO objectives:

1) Follow up on the information and offer made on the opt-in page, and

2) Begin building a relationship with your subscribers that goes deeper than just trying to ‘get the sale’ from them.

Principle #6: Conversion

As a super affiliate, you must focus on improving conversion at all levels. The only way to improve is to learn how to test and track your conversion rate.

Opt-In Pages can be run through a series of tests on these factors:

1) Use of graphics versus text-only page

2) Headlines and sub-headlines (which ones capture your visitor’s attention?)

3) Long versus short copy on opt-in page

4) The ‘offer’: or what you use to entice people to opt-in to your list.

Follow Up E-mail Conversion can be run through tests using factors such as:

1) Better e-mail subject lines (to improve e-mail ‘open and read’ rates)

2) Time sensitive offers

3) Bonuses

4) How you present an offer (the tone and language you use), which benefits are emphasized, whether it helps to mention guarantees and refund policies, etc.

5) Directing subscribers to a blog or main web site to read reviews, watch video tutorials, etc.

Principle #7: Back-end Affiliate Profits

Super affiliates’ sites have a system in place to funnel prospects towards several levels or types of “offers”:

1) Lead Offer: The lead offer is always the product offered up front on the opt-in page. It is not necessarily the highest priced product, nor is it the product you stand to make the highest commissions on.

2) Back-End Offer(s): This is where the real money comes in for the majority of super-affiliates. Back-end offers are the follow ups to the ‘lead’ offer. Back-end offers are generally higher-ticket (and higher commission) products, and often include products that earn the affiliate a ‘recurring’ monthly commission.

Anthony Chan is the founder of allnewbiecashmachine.com. For more details information about how affiliate marketing can instantly transform your life, please visit http://www.allnewbiecashmachine.com