This article was written by my husband, Glenn, on the ever popular subject of affiliate marketing…

“Affiliate marketing is the fastest way to get started making money online. When I first started out on the internet, I didn’t want to promote other people’s products and services. I was very busy writing books at the time, and I simply didn’t have the time to learn the technicalities of creating squeeze pages and auto responder messages, and so I never quite made my first dollar online.

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Fabricating a good landing page that will entice visitors to either buy your product or subscribe to your list is the key to generating sales on that site. Once you have that going, then you can focus on creating more niches, products, or niches in the future. I still sell affiliate products to my list using this formula:

Find a product – preferably one that you have bought and used yourself and like.

Find keywords – these are the words or phrases people write into the search engines when they are looking for information about the product you are promoting. You can use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to research keywords that are related to the product you are promoting. (If you don’t have a copy of the product you’re promoting, you can always use the keywords you’ve already researched.)

Write articles – or get someone else to write articles for you – about your affiliate topic. You can also use free articles that you can find by searching for articles, or better yet, use a program like Kafkai, Article Bob and Article Redspin to generate and create ready-made articles that you can distribute for free. (You can also use this with e-zines or other websites where you have a message to bring the reader to your website.)

Bells and whistles – add graphics or other things to liven up your message. (There are some rules about this and I’ll get into that at another time.)

Now, I said you can promote as many products as you want, and that’s true, but I think it’s also important to choose which products to promote, and when. If you’re new to affiliate marketing, then it’s best to follow the bum marketing model: Find a product that’s already selling well, and get customers to that product first, but remember that the conversion on the internet is usually around 1%.

In other words, for every 100 people who visit your website, you might expect 1 person to buy something. Not exactly good when you are trying to earn money on the internet, is it? But if you focus on higher conversion rates, you can do well. So choose your products wisely. The most important things to consider are price, conversion rates, and quality. If you’ve got a pretty site, then a lower conversion rate might be fine, but if you have a very complicated site, might want to consider spending some money to get higher conversion rates. You can choose to promote everything or just a selected product type.

Now you know what to promote! The next step is to advertise, and there are a lot of ways to do this. Probably the best paid way of advertising right now is AdWords. You can also try some free techniques, such as a blog or a forum post.

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With AdWords you have two basic choices. You can choose to do keyword research and then create highly targeted ads for each keyword, or you can choose to let Google find you keywords for you and then choose ad phrases that are related. I recommend using a mixture of both. You can also use search engine optimized articles to get your site indexed and ranked, although this takes a bit of extra work.

You can also promote through a web 2.0 site network. The two most popular are MySpace and Facebook. These will also allow you to get links directly to your sites for the search engines.

For a site made solely to be an affiliate marketer, there are a couple of programs that you should check into. There are many of them, but my personal favorite is an site called Pandora. Pandora is a shopping store that offers affiliate products. You can also get paid for people signing up for Pandora, and the best part is you can also promote other shopping websites like amazon and Google!

The final thing I want to mention is how you’re likely to get rated on the different search engines. In Google the search term “Amazon” will be included in the keywords people type in to the search engine when they’re looking for products from Amazon. But, if you put in the term “Amazon directed link”, you will be presented with all kinds of links to Amazon.

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading this article and I hope you have learned something valuable about affiliate marketing!”

Glenn Riley

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