Have you asked yourself…
“Where do I start with Affiliate Marketing?”
I asked myself this a few years ago and fumbled around trying to figure it out. Here are some basic steps you need to do to start being successful. If I knew these simple steps, I would have been more successful from the very beginning.
For starters, you have a passion for something…
Even better, maybe it’s an addiction. Who knows, take advantage of it. It may be playing video games, reading books, shopping, cars, photography, computers or whatever… You know what I mean. It’s easier for anyone to sell something they already know. For example, when I started out, I love photography and cameras. I started my quest to quit my day job by marketing cameras. There is a huge commission on cameras that sell for $600 and up. So, I went out and looked into Amazon’s affiliate program. It looked pretty good and I started out by putting Amazon widgets on one of my webpages. Then I decided to look around to find a script to pull from Amazon’s affiliate data feed. I found Asociate-o-matic and I was all set!
Now I needed a domain name and website…
Ok. Now I need to figure out a domain name to put install this software on and build my first website. Wait… I need to host it somewhere. I looked and looked. So many hosting sites available. Well, after a few years of hosting at different hosting facilities, I ended up at Hostgator. Their systems support everything you need for affiliate marketing and we haven’t had ANY problems at all. Purchase your domains from Godaddy but stay away from their hosting. It’s not very good and the support is horrible!
Once I had my domain purchased and hosting account, I pointed my DNS to my server IP and uploaded my Associate-o-matic website. I picked what’s called a “Browse Node” and Bam! My site was full of products with my affiliate ID behind it.
Advertising the cameras…
Now I could pick specific pages and advertise them on the big three (Google, MSN and Yahoo). I started out by determining which cameras were HOT and started advertising them. It worked! I started making money. Not much, but I was on my way.
Later, I’ll fill you in on how to get the person’s email address so you can directly market to the people that subscribe to your newsletter.
