How to be a successful affiliate marketer

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One of the best ways to make great money online is with email marketing and affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing programs range hugely in quality, scale and reliability. There is in fact, a way that you can merge both of these together and start making a huge amount of sales. The first step is finding a profitable niche and affiliate products related to your niche to promote. The second step is creating a website that highlights your niche and draws in visitors. The third step is to gain traffic using several free and paid methods.


1. Finding Niche and Affiliate Programs


The first step is to find a niche in which you can profit from and affiliate programs to start earning money. You can try heading over to Magazines just to start familiarizing yourself with all the different topics. If you already have a niche in mind, search "(your niche) affiliate programs" and spend some time choosing the ones that appeal to you the most. If you don't have a specific niche,then one of the fastest ways to find a niche is within affiliate programs themselves. There are many affiliate program such as Amazon, Commission Junction, Clickbank, eBay Partner Network, PeerFly, Digiresults and Rakuten Linkshare.

I recommend you join Clickbank as it is one of the largest affiliate marketplaces out there. Sign up and click "marketplace" here you will be taken to all the affiliate products; filter results by "gravity" which shows which products are making the most sales and choose a product with a low initial sale to high average sale ratio(this means the customers continued to spend on the product after the initial payment). Another great affiliate service is Digiresults. This site works basically the same as Clickbank with the only difference that you have to apply first to market a product. Click here for more help on finding a profitable niche.

Now that you've got your niche and affiliate tools, its time to create your website!


2. Creating Your Website

First, start by purchasing a domain; I recommend Godaddy (choose a domain name relevant to your niche and remember that .info is much cheaper than.com) and set it up with a hosting company; I would recommend Hostgator. Choose the "baby" plan for Hostgator as it hosts unlimited domains or choose "hatchling" if you want to stick with just one domain (I recommend baby as creating more websites really helps expand your business and increase profits). Make sure to change your name servers so Godaddy knows your website is hosted by Hostgator (Click here for how to change your name servers). your two name servers will be provided by Hostgator once you've made your payment. After you've set up your name servers, wait a few hours for your website to recognize Hostgator (you will know this when you enter your Url and Hostgator's panel appears). To sign into your website type "(your domain).com/cpanel". (you are provided with lots of passwords in the process of making a website so make sure to store them).

Now you have to create 3 pages on your site, the squeeze page (which will be the page visitors see when they visit your website, typically promoting your product), the confirmation page (the page in which you ask your subscribers to confirm their email and thank them for signing up), and the download page(Here is where they download your product which I recommend to be a free offer). First, begin to customize your pages; id recommend installing WordPress on your site as it offers many customization templates(Click here for how to install wordpress). I would also mention some exceptional, but paid services, to customize your squeeze pages are Lead Pages and Optimize Press. One thing you can do to begin designing your site is to use Fiverr, a website where people will do just about anything for only 5$; you can search people to create banners for your site or just design them yourself if you have the knowledge.

This is a great tutorial on the features of wordpress and setting up your website pages.

You're squeeze page should pop out and have a professional look to convert more visitors into subscribers; one recommendation is to create a large sub-header with a promotional message, then include bullet points detailing why and how your product can do what was stated in the sub-header, then include a call to action (one example is "I could be taking this down in the next few days so order now") . Click here to learn about the different types of squeeze page designs and why they work and here to learn how to make a great squeeze page. The confirmation page should be a simple thank you to your visitors for subscribing and asking them to check their email to confirm. For the download page, offer a free gift related to your niche. To upload files to wordpress just go to the "media" tab and select upload (you will get a unique URL for your file). a great website for free ebooks with resale rights is Seymour Products, but I would recommend using Odesk or Elance for some high converting PLR content(this will cost some money), or you can just offer a product of your own. To add a nice looking download button, paste this code on your page(replace with your own url's):

" <a href="url of your ebook(this will be dispayed when you upload the file on the media tab) e.g http://yourwebsite/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/19_your_ebook.pdf><img src="where you placed the image in your website e.g. /img/downloadbutton.jpg" alt="downloadbutton"></a>"

After creating your pages, set the squeeze page as the front page (Click on "Settings => reading" then check "a static page" and selct your squeeze page). Also change your permalinks for better SEO by going to "Settings => Permalinks" and check the option "post name" (this will change your page URL to your page name). Now its time to get an autoresponder; I would recommend Aweber or Getresponse (these services are for building your list of subscribers and creating follow up messages to promote future products; I personally use Aweber). Create your list with your email address, name, and name of your list (name it something relevant to your website). Create an Opt-in form on any of these services (this is where your visitors sign up) and link it to your confirmation page url (to add the Opt in form on your website, select "create sign up form" in Aweber / Getresponse, personalize your Opt in box, select "custom thank you page" and enter your confirmation page URL; in the final step, copy the raw HTML code, then go to "pages" on WordPress, click "edit" on squeeze page, hover down to "Opt-in Options", check "activate Opt in" and copy the HTML code in the "autoresponder" section); after this, choose "list settings" in your autoresponder and select "confirmed Opt in". customize your confirmation message and copy your download page in the "success page"box, where they will be sent to after they confirm their email address and you're good to go!

In your autoresponder there is an option to create "follow-up messages" (these are messages that will be delivered periodically promoting your products to your subscribers). Include a good subject line to make sure it gets opened and try to set a feeling of trust and friendship with your subscribers. You can either choose to give valuable information and then promote your affiliate product at the end, or talk about your affiliate product that you will recommend in that email and why they should purchase it. Try to keep your subscribers engaged so that they expect another email from you soon. Click here to learn how to make great follow up messages.

Some useful advice after gaining significant subscribers is to make a separate list called a "buyers list" in which you will include all the people who have bought from you and the current list will be known as the "freebie" list. What this does is you can use monetization techniques and cpa offers to convert a freebie into a buyer, while you promote recommended products to the buyers list as they will be more responsive to buy.

Now that your webpage is up and running, you need to take ownership of the site in the large search engine's. Visit, Google Webmaster's, Bing Webmaster's, and Pinterest Site Verification to get your website verified and improve it's visibility(these sites explain how to verify). I would also recommend to submit your website to various search engines using these free tools: Submit Express and Entireweb.


3. Gaining Traffic

Getting traffic is one of the most important tasks for any web master. What is more, you can't get traffic once and then just reap the benefits. Getting traffic is an ongoing task and you must be constantly doing it, if you want to get traffic and keep it. Here are some of the ways to get traffic:

Forum Marketing

URLs in forum signatures are also a way to get traffic for free. Now there are many methods of getting more traffic: one of them is by forum marketing. There are forums, which get millions of visitors a day and if you are a popular user on such a forum, you can use this to get traffic to your site. Every time you post on the forum, your signature (which you can include your links in) will be displayed and be viewable to all members. Some members may be enticed to click on your links and thus you gain more traffic (make sure to post quality posts and not spam).

Reddit

Reddit is a very powerful website to gain traffic to your site. It is divided into many sub-reddits, each with its own topic. What you need to do is find a sub-reddit relevant to your niche. After doing this, participate in the forum and let your account age for a few days in order to prevent your website post to be marked as spam. After you've waited a few days, click "submit link" and enter your website, then make sure to write a catchy title that will attract redditors to click on your link.

Solo Ads

The next traffic method is solo ads. What you do is you buy a specific number of clicks from a seller (example: 100) and create an email swipe, which is a message with a subject line and a body promoting your site ( Click here for information on making a great email swipe). After this, the seller will promote your email to their list and provide you with the clicks. A great site for solo ads is Udimi. Make sure to spend some time researching the sellers and find one that delivers what he promises or even overdelivers; also one who has a responsive list, because you don't just want clicks, you want subscribers and sales.

Facebook, PPC, and Fiverr

Another great form of increasing traffic is using Facebook ads. A good idea is to make a Facebook fanpage of your site and start promoting it (Click here to learn how to get more likes to your fanpage). After this you can start creating your ads. Click on "create ad" and there will be many categories (clicks to your website, boost your posts, promote your page, etc) you want to click on "clicks to your website". Now its time to select your audience. Try to really narrow down your targeted audience; more is not better, you want to target a specific audience that is interested in your product(under "behaviors" you can choose people who have made online payments before). Now you have to make a bid for how much you pay for each click(the ad manager will automatically show a suggested bid). Now its time to choose an image and create your message that will really attract clicks (Click here to learn how to make great ads).

One of the best PPC's (pay-per-click) is Google adsense, just set up your ad and your click price and you're good to go (this may be costly at times and you have to get approved first); other great PPC's are Bidvertiser, Media.net, Infolinks, Clicksor, Kontera and Chitika.

Once again, you can also use the service Fiverr to promote your site. Try to look for services that will tweet or post your website in popular pages, write guest blogs on sites about your site, will post your site on popular social media sites etc. Make sure to also spend time researching these gigs and finding one that may work for you and your niche(do not pay for traffic towards your site, as these are useless clicks that will not convert into sales or subscribers).

Writing Articles

Writing articles can also be a great way to get recognition for your website or product. I recommend Hubpages and Ezinearticles. If you are not skilled in writing articles or don't have the time, you can hire very cheap writers that will create quality articles at IWriter (as always, spend some time looking through the writers and try to go for the higher ranked writers).

Optimize your site for search engines.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the foundational methods to get more traffic as it increases your page rank on search engines like Google so that your site becomes better known. SEO is not that difficult and if you want to get familiar with it in a nutshell. To learn how to increase your page rank i recommend a great website called, Source Wave which includes great training videos on SEO, backlinks, and more and it is completely free.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is also a great way to promote your products. Start by posting quality content on your niche, promoting your YouTube site and gaining a steady fanbase. If making your own videos is not for you, you can always make a review YouTube channel and post many different videos of people reviewing your product.To download the review YouTube videos, simply type an "ss" before "YouTube" in the URL box, then download it there, upload to YouTube, add your affiliate link in the description (use Bit.ly to cloak it) and publish to YouTube (making your own original content is far more likely to gain many views).

Ad Swaps

After you've gained momentum and have a few hundred subscribers to your list, it's time to take the next big step in gaining traffic by ad swaps. What you do is you find someone with a similar list size and niche as yours and swap promotional messages; you promote their website to your list of subscribers and they promote yours, hence the swap. This is a great way to earn thousand of new subscribers with an interest in your niche. One of the best websites for this is Safe Swaps (be wary this is a paid website).

Click here to also look for options for free classified ads.


Conclusion

This guide is a basic way of setting up your first website and promoting it. Be sure to look up more information and not only expand your knowledge, but put in the effort to make it work through trial and error which is crucial to becoming successful in internet marketing. Be sure to post any other advice that I may have missed and I wish the best success on you and your web business!