Affiliate Marketing A New Career For Virtually Anyone

There are numerous ways to make money online but the easiest, fastest, and most cost effective way is to get started in affiliate marketing.

Name a topic that interests you...any topic at all. There are probably dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of related businesses out there who will either pay you a minimal amount to drive traffic to their website, or a percentage of any sales made from the traffic you send them. It truly is just that simple.

Well, almost just that simple...but not really. This is where you blink and say, "Huh?"

There are three basic ways to drive traffic to a website. The first and most reliable is the best long-term solution.

1. Put up an interesting website or blog filled with "unique" content.
This step is actually a lot easier than you might think. If you are willing to do a little research. You can easily purchase an inexpensive domain name from a reliable domain provider for less than $10.00 a year, and combined hosting for numerous websites for less than $10.00 a month. Then, once you have your domain name and hosting in place, there are literally hundreds of products (of varying price and quality) for sale online that will help you quickly and easily write your unique content and put it online.

If you want to get started quickly and easily and cut down on the learning curve...and you are willing to put a little more money into your online startup the best option is to have a web designer either build you a custom site (Very Expensive Option!) or have a turnkey provider install a "Biz in a Box" (More Affordable Option!) website for you. For the most part, there is pre-built website or blog available for just about any and every purpose you can possibly imagine.

This method works especially well if you want to build a personal brand, or plan to eventually move beyond affiliate marketing and offer your own products or services, and it is a must if you want to enhance your brick and mortar "real-world" business.

If you are more adventurous and really want to get into the nuts and bolts of creating customized websites and contents, there are also a large variety of easy to use software programs available to help automate the process of building, adding content to, and advertising or promoting your blog or website. Most of these programs are very simple to use these days, because many of them work with pretty much the same commands and menu items that you use in Windows and Mac programs and browsers. The best of them generally offer either a free trial or a rock solid 30 day money back guarantee.

Finally, if you just want an almost totally automated affiliate business, there are a variety of packaged options available. There are several high-end affiliates out there who will actually give you a "free" website to promote their products; however keep in mind that none of those "free" websites are going to be unique so it will cost you more time and money to attract visitors. Also keep in mind that there may be an over-inflated hosting charge involved so always read the fine print. As a general rule of thumb, free generic websites are best thought of as a try before you buy, or free introduction to premium services that are less widely available.

So now that you have a blog or website where do you go from there? Content! Content! Content! Content always has been and always will be king on the internet. If you are an expert, or even fairly knowledgeable on any topic in the world there is a market out there for you. But do not worry if you are not an expert, you really do not need to be. The search engines pick up unique, contextually and topically relevant words and phrases. So basically all you have to do is write about a topic--the more interestingly the better, of course. You do not necessarily need to be an expert, or even the world's greatest writer if you can interestingly discuss various aspects of your chosen topic, or give your layman's opinion, or even write reviews of products you have personally tried.

If you feel that you cannot write there are other methods of providing unique content to your website or blog. One method is to invite commentary from others. Another method is to add RSS feeds to your website that create constantly updating news on your chosen topic. A third method is to take Private Label Rights products and rewrite them. This is one of the easiest and most popular methods, but if you put up the articles without rewriting or putting your own special spin on them, they will not be unique and you will not rank very high in the natural search results unless you put lots of time or money into attracting people to your website. Finally, you can make videos--usually the funnier the better--and put them up on YouTube and add them to your blog or website. The search engines will pick up the words you use to describe your topic and the videos will draw your audience. Videos are hot for the pure and simple reason that people who do not care for reading will watch a video.

So you have your website filled with unique content...how does that "monetize your website" i.e. make you money? That is actually the simple part, surrounding your unique content will be a variety of affiliate advertisements. These can either be for a variety of different affiliates or for specific products that you have personally chosen to promote--which is the most profitable option. These are generally going to be Pay Per Action ads, where you are paid for people who click on your unique affiliate link and then visit the targeted website and sign up for a product or service. These advertisements can also be Google AdSense type ads that appear on pages that rank highly for certain search terms. This is generally a less profitable option since you are only paid a few pennies per person who clicks on these ads. There are many variations on both of these types of advertising revenues which you will need to research to understand.

2. A second method of driving traffic to a website is more complex, even though you personally do not need to set up a blog or website. To do this you need to buy (or bid on) search terms from a search engine. You have seen the Google AdSense ads on websites and blogs all over the Internet. Well those ads appear on those websites because someone has purchased the right to have their ad appear whenever someone types in a particular search term in that search engine. With Google, this is called an AdWords campaign. In this method you would for example pay $.10 per click for every click on your ad on someone else's website or blog. The link that person clicks on would be your own special affiliate link that would credit you with bringing the traffic to a third website that results in a paid visit or sale. This is not something I recommend for beginners, since not knowing what you are doing could end up costing you a lot of money with very little return.

3. The third method could well be the riskiest of all. This method depends entirely on sending out emails that either exclusively advertise your affiliate link, or as a less expensive option, includes your affiliate link among others. This can be accomplished in two ways...you can purchase a list of email addresses, which is very risky because the addresses may have been harvested without the owner's permission which makes you liable for spamming. Or you can use a service that sends out these emails. This one is the less risky option since these services are generally operated by people who have too much too lose to risk spamming people who have not voluntarily opted-in to receive these emails. Neither of these methods offer any real guarantee that the recipients will actually read these emails or see your ad or click on it. So once again you could pay out a large sum of money for little or no results.

To summarize:
1. You can make money online.
2. The best way to do so is by utilizing unique content on a website or blog that you control.
3. You still must put woman (or man) hours or money into attracting visitors/traffic.


Affiliate Marketing A New Career For Virtually Anyone - To learn more about this author, visit Teresa Bohannon's Website.

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