Is Affiliate Marketing A Fit For You?

If you were to describe an Internet affiliate, what would they look like?  They look like you!  Male or female, any race, any nationality, any age – the main thing that makes someone an affiliate marketer is having a hunger to make a success of whatever it is that they touch. 

An affiliate loves to market to people’s needs!  An affiliate marketer often takes on one project after another as they accomplish what they had hoped in each separate project.  Like climbing a new peak, a marketer takes on the challenge of digging up keywords and feeling out the audience for which the product is intended.

Unlike the businessperson who loves to focus on one niche and become the authority on that topic, an affiliate marketer is constantly looking for the next great program to promote and dominate.

Is just anyone cut out to be an affiliate marketer?  In all honesty, no.  Anyone can become an affiliate, but only some will stay with it long enough to make a real go of it.  It takes grit, determination, creativity, bloodhound instincts, and love of a challenge.

You’ll also have to learn some technical tactics to ensure your promotions see the volume of traffic that’s required to generate a decent stay at home income over a long period of time. You’ll want to build a list of subscribers, learn about getting your pages on page 1 of the Google search results, and possibly discover how to operate a pay per click ad campaign.

In the end, marketing of any kind is all about discerning people’s hot buttons and then pushing them.  If that describes you, then by all means you can count yourself in the small, but growing class of entrepreneur called affiliate marketers.

How to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

Of all the ways for both newbies and seasoned marketers to make money online, affiliate marketing is probably the most often used.  It gives the marketer the opportunity to focus his or her energies just on the marketing aspect of the sales funnel.

After all, the hardest part of starting a business online is to develop a great product with sizzling sales copy – elements already taken care of when you’re promoting affiliate products.  With these two milestones taken care of, your energy can be focused on driving traffic to the affiliate sales site. 

Think of it this way: someone writes a great product that teaches specialty dog training – but then doesn’t know how to reach his or her audience.  On the other hand, you know that there is a huge market for specialty dog training, and you know how to generate traffic to a site, but you have no personal knowledge of the dog training niche. 

Enter affiliate marketing.  You do what you do best – market and drive traffic.  In this way, you become a traffic driving expert rather than an infopreneur that sells a dog training course. 

At the same time, it helps the owner of the dog training product because they would rather write and teach dog training tips than have to find ways to research hot keywords or write articles.

Affiliate marketing is a perfect opportunity to help immerse you into the world of Internet marketing.  While there are many dozens of ways to make money online, affiliate marketing definitely offers the most flexibility and variety for the serious online entrepreneur.

Getting Started With an Affiliate Marketing eBook

When you’re just starting out trying to make money online, you’ll hear a lot of people telling you to invest in an affiliate marketing eBook. But not knowing who’s who in the industry or what information you need, it can be hard to choose the best guide for your investment.

There are several concepts that you want to learn for this career, so make sure your affiliate marketing eBook covers core concepts that will help you start making money and grow your income into something that will sustain you for a long time period.

First, the affiliate marketing eBook should explain that this isn’t some overnight, get rich quick scheme. If they’re telling you that as a newbie with no list, you’ll wake up tomorrow to a stuffed bank account – click out of their page and find something more realistic.

Second, you want to make sure that the authors of the affiliate marketing eBook aren’t just interested in teaching you paid traffic techniques. Often, they’ll receive a commission on paid advertising tools and sites they recommend to you, so their intentions aren’t all in your best interest. There should be a healthy balance that shows you how to promote products using free traffic methods like social networking sites.

And lastly, the affiliate marketing eBook needs to help you learn how to choose a niche and products that will convert easily and not cause you to struggle to make a single sale. Some marketers advise that you simply “follow your passion,” but successful affiliates know that you also need to have a certain volume of searches by consumers combined with a concept where people are ready and willing to spend money for the solution you’re promoting.