How To do Affiliate Marketing
People new to affiliate marketing may be forgiven for being overwhelmed by all the things that they are being told to do by their chosen program. Many affiliate programs do have very good step-by-step training - but even these are not always perfect, and many suggest ways of marketing that are too expensive for the newbie who is struggling to pay their bills very month. So, here are a few tips on how to do affiliate marketing without blowing your budget.
1. First of all, in order not to blow your budget, you need to set a budget in the first place. What can you afford to spend every month without putting yourself into debt? It doesn’t have to be much - but I would suggest an absolute minimum of $50. This should just about cover website hosting and at least one monthly upgrade fee.
2. If your program does not provide you with your own website, I strongly recommend that you get one.
If you want to get your own, I also recommend using Host4Profit for your website hosting. It costs just under $30 per month, but it has its own affiliate program so once you’ve recruited 3 people, it pays for itself. The PIPS program (see right) uses H4P and automatically promotes it on your website.
3. Next, you need to find out how to optimize your website using keywords. There are some good e-books about this subject - some free and some that you need to pay for. You need to learn this in order to get traffic to your website. You can learn about websites and optimization in this e-book, Dotcomology.
4. The other most important way of getting backlinks and traffic to your website is by blogging and article writing. The good news is, these are both FREE! Writing a daily blog, with your website address at the bottom and your own personalised style of writing is a great way of building trust and also creating backlinks. The more links you have directed back to your site, the higher you will rank in the search engines.
5. Article writing is not as difficult as it sounds. If this is totally new to you, I suggest you read my article here: How to Write Articles if You Are Not a Writer.
6. Submit your website to free directories. This is hard work, but it is well worth it. Again you will be creating backlinks - the more the merrier! Do a google search for free directories and try to submit to between 5 and 10 a day.
7. Use traffic exchanges and set up your own ads. If you join a traffic exchange for free, you will need to do a lot of clicking in order to get traffic credits. If you pay, you will get a certain amount of credits, which will give you time to work on other things. The best one I know is TrafficSwarm.
8. You will come across many offers and promotional tools as an affiliate marketer. Many of these cost money. Before splashing out on anything, do some research to make sure it’s something that really works and won’t be a waste of your cash. The best way of doing this is by joining an internet marketing forum. Many people on these forums are experts and have experience of different programs and will give you straight answers on what works and what doesn’t.
That’s pretty much it for starters. The good thing is that you can learn how to do affiliate marketing while you are doing it! You don’t have to do the training before you begin. You can just plunge right in and get going and learning on the job is the best way of learning anything.
For opportunities and ideas to get you started, see my website below.
Ros Bott
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