How to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

Making money on the internet with Affiliate Marketing involves more than taking a magic pill or buying the latest get rich program, sitting back and waiting for it to happen...



Unfortunately, while many people do in fact make loads of cash through affiliate marketing, success only comes through formulating a plan & putting in some effort to making it work.

It's worthwhile noting that sitting back & just waiting for it to happen generally doesn't create wealth - however, the following Affiliate Blueprint together with a liberal dose of action, effort & commitment will go a long way to giving you a good chance of achieving a semblance of affiliate marketing success...

Blueprint for Affiliate Marketing Success

Below are 12 essential affiliate marketing principals that need to be followed to establish a money making, sustainable affiliate business.

1. Discover a Demand or Niche Market

Don't make the mistake of marketing a product or service without first discovering whether there is in fact a demand for it.

Thankfully, with the internet at your fingertips, market research is made a lot easier. Following are some of the steps you should take for researching your market:
 
• Visit online forums to see what questions people ask and what problems they’re trying to have solved
• Figure out which keywords there are a lot of searches for but for which there are not many sites competing for
• Check out your potential competitors by visiting their sites and taking note of their marketing strategies
• If your product or service can be based on something you are interested in (and fit the above) the whole process will become much easier for you
  
  
Once you've completed the above find a product (or create one) that you can sell as an affiliate or have affiliates sell for you.

Check out ClickBank's Marketplace for a product (you'll find thousands there), sign up as an affiliate (for free) and then start marketing your product with your affiliate link.

Steps 2 to 4 involve establishing your web presence which you will need in order to market your products effectively and communicate with customers.


2. The Next Step is to Register a Cheap Domain Name and Start Establishing Your Web Presence

Even if a website is the furthest thing from your mind at the moment, you really need to secure & register at least one cheap domain name that can be used for your e-mail address (for example; john@johnbiz.com) which also adds to the overall integrity of your online business.

Remember never to use free web addresses as they will not inspire confidence in your prospects - rather buy a cheap domain name from a reliable registrar (also it's not advisable to have the same webhost as your domain registrar).


3. Get a Professional and Reliable Web Hosting Account

This professional webhosting account will cost only $4.95 per month and will give you huge flexibility as well as a range of website tools for managing your websites, pages and new domains. With such an account you can usually host unlimited domains which is essential for your internet marketing endeavours.


4. Create Your Website

You need to portray a professional image and first impressions are what count when it comes to keeping your site visitors interested. Therefore if your web design skills aren't the best you can always grab a professionally designed website template that can be customized for your affiliate business - these website templates are available for immediate download


5. Write Sales Copy that Sells

Now's the time to put it all together to create a money sucking machine

On a website, your copy has to do the selling for you. There’s a proven formula for writing sales copy that'll take visitors through the selling process from the moment they arrive:


• Arouse interest with a compelling headline
• Describe the problem your product can solve
• Show them why you can be trusted to solve the problem
• Add testimonials from people who've used the product
• Talk about the product and how it benefits the user
• Make an offer or a guarantee
• Create urgency
• Ask for the sale

When writing your sales copy, think about how your product or service is uniquely able solve people's problems or improve their lives. Think like a customer and ask, what's in it for me?


6. Join an Affiliate Network

An affiliate network will offer you a wide range of products from which you can choose to promote on your website or with other means.

I would recommend signing up (absolutely free) with these ones below which are well known and from which I continue to make decent affiliate income.


• ClickBank
• Sharesale
  
• OfferForge SA »
  
• Traffic Synergy »
  

Incidentally, you must read this to learn how to combine ClickBank with the power of Google to realise huge online profits »


7. Cloak Your Affiliate Links

These are the reasons why it is essential to cloak your links with a reliable affiliate link cloaker »


• Affiliate links can be very easy to spot and many potential buyers will not click on an affiliate link for some reason
• The cloaking must be done correctly so as not to upset the cookie process. You will only be credited with the sale if your customer has the cookie enabled from your affiliate link
• A decent link cloaker will prevent affiliate commission theft which unfortunately is highly prevelant on the internet

So before you go live with your website ensure that all your affiliate links have been cloaked properly


8. Use the Power of E-mail Marketing to Harness your Visitors and Convert them into Buyers

If you've read anything about making money online you will know that one of the most important things is to build a list.

This means that you need to attempt to capture your website's visitors details, with a sign up form (like I have on the left side of this page) in order to mail them newsletters, special offers and so on. You can be sure that the affiliate marketers who have the biggest lists are the ones who are making the most money.

To manage your list you'll need an email software package that captures your visitor's details and mails them automatically when they sign up and can mail them a series of pre-prepared sales letters.

It is essential that you automate this part of your affiliate business - apart from adding credibility it will enhance your online sales without you having to do anything but prepare the sales letters.

In this regard AWeber is arguably the best email package that has all the features you'll need as well as being the one that most of the top and most successful internet marketers use.


9. Monetize Your Website with Adsense

Adsense is a great way to generate a passive income from your website.

First off you can sign for Adsense for free here »

Once your account is open all you have to do is copy and paste the code supplied by Adsense into your web pages.

Once your page has been uploaded with the adsense code you'll see Google Ads on your page's topic which will generate revenue everytime a site visitor clicks on them.

*Caution*
Never click on your own ads or try to generate revenue through fraudulent clicks as Google's intelligent tracking systems will discover this and ban you, your website, url and anything to do with you and you'll never be able to open an Adsense account again.

PS - Whilst you can make a few dollars here and there, there is a definite science to making the big money from Adsense...to find out more read Adsense Decoded »


10. Drive Targeted Traffic to your Website with Search Engines

You can get a flood of traffic to a brand new site within 15 minutes of it being live on the net with a Pay Per Click campaign.

Whilst PPC campaigns can be extremely effective they can also cost a lot of money for no real gain for the uninitiated. It is therefore advisable to acquaint yourself with the best PPC practices with either of the following guides Adwords Miracle or Google Profits

The benefits of implememnting a PPC campaign are as follows:
 
• The ads show up on search pages immediately
• They allow you to test different keywords, headlines, prices and selling approaches
   
Not only do you get traffic immediately, but once you've figured out what keywords are working best, you can use them throughout your copy and code, which will help your rankings in organic search results.


11. Create Back Links to your Website

For your site to get traffic you need to create backlinks to it to give it credibility with the search engines.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to write keyword optimized articles on your subject matter with a link to your site in the author's resource box.

Submit your articles to some of the many article directories (eg ezinearticles.com) and the good ones will get read many times and linked back to your site.


12. Wash, Rinse and Repeat

Repeat doing the above by developing new sites and minisites, stay focused and committed.

---

You might be interested in finding out how The Lazy Affiliate Took Only 6 Months to Make His First $100K From Affiliate Marketing

So to fast track your affiliate earning potential, you owe it to yourself to at least read the Lazy Affiliate's Sales page where you will pick up more useful tips there than in many $47 ebooks!

Download your copy of the Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate here »

PS.
Here are some more easy ways for you to setup your own internet business and start making money in a very short time - without even needing a website or a product...