Monday, October 26, 2009

Starting An Affiliate Marketing Business

I am not going to lie to you. Affiliate marketing can be complicated. It can be really complicated. For anyone just starting out it can feel like a horrible twisting and turning labyrinth. Reaching that end goal of total financial freedom can feel like it is a long way off. Well relax because I am going to clue you into the dirty secret of affiliate marketing. The secret to success turns out to be extremely simple. All you have to do to succeed is master the basics.

I would argue that these are the two most fundamental techniques you need to master:

- Blogging (for affiliate marketing)

- Article Marketing (Writing an article for the web is not the same as writing for print!)

Once you have those two methods down to a science you can then look at some more advanced techniques such as:

- Pay Per Click (Adwords, Yahoo, Miva, etc)

- Video Marketing (YouTube, Revver, etc.)

The most difficult technique of the four listed above is pay per click advertising (PPC). Be very careful when you experiment with Pay Per Click advertising. I know people who have lost a small fortune trying to get the hang of it. While I do think you should spend some time learning about it, I recommend you spend most of your time working on the other methods which can make you just as much money as PPC advertising, but will cost you virtually nothing to implement.

Other good methods for building your affiliate marketing income include: Squidoo, social bookmarking, and leveraging free blogging sites.

Do not ever lost site of your primary goal: To drive traffic to your websites. The entire purpose of an affiliate marketer is to get prospects on their landing page so they can 'pre-sell' their affiliate products to them. Every tactic mentioned in this article is focused on that singular goal. Additionally every tactic mentioned in this aside from PPC is absolutely free. You will not need to spend a dime on these tactics in order to learn about them and make them work for you. Although purchasing some good educational material is never a bad idea.

In fact the first thing you need to do in order to be a true affiliate marketing success story is to learn. Do not even think about starting your first affiliate marketing venture until you have learned everything you can about this business. Read everything you can about affiliate marketing. Do a Google search for this topic, browse some article directories to see what others have to say about it, and pay a visit to some of the affiliate marketing forums on the internet. There is a lot of good information out there that is available free of charge.

There are a lot of affiliate marketing "gurus" out there. Some of them really do have some very good information that I would call a must read for any serious internet marketer wanting to build a sustainable affiliate marketing income. Listen to what these guys say, but watch out for the hype, these guys are salesmen and they will throw a lot at you. Remember that these guys are trying to sell you something, so take what they say with a grain of salt … at the same time do not forget that if you are reading their pitch they have successfully gotten their message in front of you, which means that they probably do know a thing or two about driving quality traffic to their web sites.

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