Affiliate marketing is when you use your selling skills to sell other people’s products, then the owners of the original product will give you commission for every sale that you make. There are both advantages and disadvantages to this system.

+ You have no worries about collecting money (using merchant accounts)
+ You have no customers (therefore no customer service) to worry about
+ You can do it with or without your own website

- You are not in control of the product or service, in the quality goes down hill, you might not get to know about it until you suddenly get loads of refunds happening (I like to check up on my suppliers from time to time)
- You might have to spend some money to get yourself going

Picking an Area

When you start thinking about what you should market, decide what area you want to specialise in. If you find televisions are an interest of yours, you could look into selling televisions, or sky/digital subscriptions. You can make pretty much anything that you enjoy doing, watching, feeling, or hearing – any of your hobbies into a way of making money.

Take some time to sit down and work out exactly what floats your boat. For example, I really enjoy water sports, so I might set up a website that offers links and information on local water sports companies and clubs. I get money from advertising products and services that my viewers will find interesting, using an affiliate program. That gives me complete control over what my viewers will see. Of course I could just sell ad space, but the message that gives is that I am just making money rather than caring about what I recommend to my viewers.

When you work in an area that really and truly interests you, your passion for the subject will come through in what you do. If you write copy in order to sell a product, you readers will pick up your interest for the subject and trust your opinion much more than if you were writing about something you really couldn’t give two monkeys about.

Although you might think that you can earn a lot of money by selling affiliate products that has content such as making money online, internet marketing and gambling, in reality there are so many people doing it that unless you have a really unique way of selling the same old products, you won’t get very far…of course there are always the exceptions!

Start Small

When you have found the area that you want to work in, find one or two products or services that you want to work with. If you work with any more you will have one of two problems:

1. If the products or services are too similar you will not be able to play the recommendation card. You want one product or service that you can truly, hand on heart, recommend to your viewers, they will trust that. (This is based on having your own website, if you are just playing with PPC affiliate marketing, the advice still stands, but for a different reason. You will want to focus on getting the keywords just right before moving on to more products)

2. If you have several products or services that cover all different sorts of things within your niche, you will be spending a lot of time building and writing content for all the areas you decide to cover. You will end up losing confidence or getting impatient with the whole idea before you get any income from it.

You might find that after a couple of weeks you aren’t managing very many sales. This could be that the products just aren’t doing it for your target market, think about what sort of people you are targeting with this product. If you are sure it is the right market, you might want to think about changing products, test another product or service for a few weeks.

Until you are confident that you know what works and what doesn’t for the 1 or 2 products or services you are currently offering, I wouldn’t even think about doing any more. But when you are sure you can cope with dealing with another one, go for it!

Don’t add more than 1 or 2 products to your portfolio at a time, doing so might be a little overwhelming. You might also find that as you build your portfolio of products and/or services, some early ones might start dropping off the map, this may just be because people are now going for newer versions of it, so check out what might be out there as an alternative and drop the one that is no longer performing.

Lets go over these in more detail.

Providing Information

As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth’s population has internet access. That’s alotta people!! A vast majority of these people will turn to the internet to find information and contacts if they need to research something, or get a job done. Potential customers will look you up, potential employees will look you up, maybe even investors will look you up. They are all after one thing – information on your business or products. Putting a website up will allow those people easy and quick access to that information.  Your website should be an interactive brochure for your business – give people information like product or service prices and office opening hours, but also give them value – link to articles on your subject area, or better yet, write them yourself.

Getting An Edge Over Competitors

If your competitors already have websites (do a Google search and find out), then they will already have an edge over you, but if not, then you will be able to scoop up much more business than they could ever hope to without a website.  Have a look at the websites of other people in your area of business, pretend you were a potential customer or client looking for the product or service you offer; what about these websites would make you want to use their business over others in your industry?  This exercise will give you a pretty good idea about how you should be going about your website.

Free and Cheap Marketing Opportunities

A website is a very cheap, very effective way of promoting your business.  What other media allows you to promote your business 24/7/365 to the entire internet connected world at once?!  Once you are online there are a multitude of ways that you can get your website address into the hands of potential customers.  Free ones might include participating in forums, using Facebook or getting friendly with the owners of websites whose customers might be interested in your product or services.

No Website Is Better Than A Bad Website

So far I have spent my time persuading you that a website is definitely the way to go for most businesses.  However, unless you are prepared to put the time effort and money into creating a great website, I would advise against it.  You can do your business more harm than good by having an unprofessional, illogical, messy website than by not having one at all.  It is important to remember that for many people looking at your website, it will be the first impression that they get of your business.  If your website is a well-designed, easy to use, helpful website, then people will naturally assume that you conduct business in a similar way.

A Daunting Task…

I understand that to the not so web savvy, the idea of creating a website can be daunting.  So I have put together a beginners guide to websites; I give you the bones, and over time I will write about each section in detail, but it gives you some information so that you know what you need to look for.  Incidentally, I do work with people to create websites – look at my web services section to find out more…

In the meantime, please feel free to ask questions below, or ping me an email if you require more information.