Tuesday, September 22, 2009

What is Affiliate Marketing and How does it Work?

There are thousands of affiliate products out there to promote. Affiliate Marketing is when you take that product and promote it on line. Now for beginners this could be as simple as creating a blog, or Squidoo lens which are both very simple. You then direct your visitors to your link to the affiliate product in your site where they purchase and you get paid.

Now for a newbie, this can be overwhelming as you have to learn how to drive traffic to you site, how to get indexed by Google, and about keywords. There are thousands of ways to promote your site. As a newbie to affiliate marketing, you will be overwhelmed in the beginning. Its a huge learning curve that takes months. The good news is there are programs out there, some of them free, some very low cost that can take weeks or months off of your learning curve.

You also have to decide what you are going to promote, many choose a business in a box, but that's not for everyone. I think if you can find something you are passionate about your success will be much greater. Think about what you love, then Google it with the word affiliate behind it and Ta Da, there are your choices. You can market ebooks, vitamins, electronics, almost anything you can think of there is an affiliate program out there for that product.

The best thing to do is get your site up with you affiliate link, then start the learning. This way you can tweek and apply what you learn as you go, but get started first. Once you get one site up and running, then you can go onto another and then another. I average creating a new site every week now. When I first started it would take me a month to get just one up. So lets say 1 week per site, 4 sites in one month all bringing in income even as you sleep. Rinse and repeat. I use a one week marketing plan and it has got me off the ground.

I started this 5 months ago part time and at first had little success. I got laid off 2 weeks ago so I knew I had to start getting serious. I spent 10 and 12 hours a day on this to get it up and running . I was a newbie and totally lost. Well it paid off, now I make money and in the last 2 weeks I made very close to what I made at my "real job", which by the way wasn't exactly peanuts. The best part is I love it. I have put together a guide that will help with your learning curve if you want to move ahead faster and start bringing in some cash. Its called Affiliate Marketing Made Easy. Start making money faster and take some of that learning curve away.

I hated my day job, my hours were awful and I did not have a life. One day I just Googled "make money from home" and wow the opportunities, a lot of them scams. I lost a lot of money in the beginning. Now 8 months later I am headed for financial freedom. Did it take work, yes it did, is it worth it to be able to have my freedom back oh yes. I want to share this, because in today's economy, times are hard. I also want to let those new to this know that it can work and its fun and don't give up, I almost did, but so glad I didn't.

More of how I used one week marketing to get here is below.