Guide to Starting an Afiiliate Marketing Business

Find a Niche Market

Try to identify a niche market you want to focus on or you are passionate about. For instance, if you know a lot about debt consolidation you may think about promoting affiliate programs in debt consolidation industry. You should use a keyword tool to find out the demand of your niche market. This is to make sure you don't get into a niche market that has very little demand.

I recommend: You can use Overture Keyword Selector to check the demand of your niche. Type in a keyword or keyword phrase of your niche that are commonly used by search engines users and the tool will return you a long list of relevant keyword phrase to your niche with monthly searches on each keyword. More monthly searches mean more demand.

Join a Stable Affiliate Program

Find a stable affiliate program in the niche market you have identified. Do some researches before signing up for an affiliate program. Find out the conversion rate of the affiliate product. A product that has a conversion rate of 4% is fairly good. This means that for every 100 visitors you send to your merchant's website, 4 visitors will buy. Also, take a look at your merchant's website to find out whether the offer pages or sale pages are convinced enough to generate sales.

I recommend: Here are some of the top affiliate networks that might contain the affiliate program you are looking for:

ClixGalore.com
Shareasale.com
CommissionJunction.com
Clickbank.com

Create a website to promote your affiliate products

You can make your website looks like an online store by displaying all your affiliate products with a description on each product on your homepage. Or you can write a review for each of your product on your website to encourage visitors go to your merchant's website and buy the product. Another alternative is to provide a product recommendation list on your website such as 'Top 3 Affiliate Marketing e-Course', 'Top 3 Herbal Products' and so on. Don't recommend something that your are not certain about.

I recommend: There a number of free website builders you can use to build a website and I suggest you try Bluevoda Website Builder. The site builder allows users to create website without HTML knowledge. Take some time to learn how to operate the site builder and do some practices before you start creating your website.

Start Your Own Newsletter

Create Your own newsletter and invite visitors to subscribe your free newsletter when visiting your website is necessary in affiliate marketing because people usually don't buy in the first visit. You need to collect their email addresses to follow up with them. To encourage your targeted visitors or audience to sign up your newsletter, you may offer free gifts, e-courses, tutorials or tips. Teach and sale is one of the effective techniques to encourage your subscribers to buy your affiliate product. For instance, let’s say you are promoting SEO software, you can teach your subscribers how to optimize a website to boost the website's ranking in search engines and recommend the seo software to them. Tell them the SEO software will save their time and tons of SEO work.

I recommend: You may use Aweber Communication to build and manage your newsletters subscribers list.

Drive Targeted Visitors or traffic to Your Website to Generate Sales

There are many ways of getting targeted traffic. You may start off with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising programs like Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. PPC advertising can drive traffic to your site with minimum effort but the costs aren't cheap. You should test them first before investing a lot of money in PPC advertising. Article marketing is another way of getting traffic. This method is absolutely free. What your need to do is create some articles related to your website with a link to your site in the articles resource box and submit them to many article directory. Some of readers may visit your site after reading your articles and increase your website's traffic.

I recommend: Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing are two of the biggest PPC that product effective result. Here are the links to sign up:

http://www.google.com/adwords
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php

To gain a lot free traffic from article marketing, you need to submit your articles to as many article directories as possible. Here's a site that contains a long list of article directories sorted by Google PR.

http://www.arcanaweb.com/resources/article-directories.html#latest