Affiliate Marketing Quick Start Guide

(Another great article by my friend Charles Essmeier. Thanks Charles.)

As the economy slows down, more people are looking for ways to earn money online. There are numerous benefits to working from home, particularly with the price of gas nearing $3.50 per gallon. While there are numerous ways to earn money on the Internet, one of the easiest ways to do so is through affiliate marketing.
In the field of affiliate marketing, an individual joins a profit sharing program offered by a company to help promote the company's products. The individual, known as an affiliate, can help promote the company's products in a number of ways, such as direct mail, blogging, a product review Website or through pay per click advertising. If a customer purchases the product through a link provided by the individual, the affiliate receives a portion of the sales price.
How can one get started in affiliate marketing? Many different books have been written on the topic, and a lot of information is available for free on the Internet. You might seek out the Warrior Forum, a site devoted to helping people earn money online. Otherwise, a Google search on the topic will likely produce enough results to keep any reader busy for quite a while.
While everyone who works as an affiliate has his or her own methods of making sales, most people work in the following way:
Selecting a product. There are literally thousands of companies online that have affiliate programs. Amazon, eBay and Clickbank all have worthwhile programs that are easy to join as do other large companies such as Dell. You may have more success if you stick to products that interest you or products that you know something about. The market is competitive, so the more you know about the items you are promoting the more successful you will be.
Create a small Website or blog. A Website or blog are ideal for promoting products of all types. Search engines particularly like blogs, and often update their index several times a day with blog updates. A Website or blog that reviews various products in a particular niche and recommends those that are particularly good or useful are often successful.
Promote the Website so that people can find it. There are a number of free or inexpensive ways to promote a Website. You can write articles about your topic and submit them to article directories. Each article can contain a "bio box" that contains a link to your Website. You might consider joining a forum that is devoted to your area of interest. A simple Google search for "name-of-topic forum" will likely turn up several of them. You might also consider buying some search engine traffic through pay per click ads on Google, Yahoo! or MSN.
Affiliate marketing isn't necessarily a source of easy money, but thousands of people earn money every day using the methods described above. The methods are fairly easy to learn, don't take a lot of time, and don't cost a lot of money. In a tight economy, those are definite benefits.
Copyright 2008 by Retro Marketing. Charles Essmeier owns DoublingStocks-Review.net, a site that reviews the Doubling Stocks newsletter, and AffiliateMarketingMall.com, a site with a review of the Virtual Smart Agent program.
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