How To Become An Affiliate Marketer

Thinking about making money online? One of the best choices you have is to become an affiliate marketer. There are many great benefits of becoming an affiliate marketer as opposed to other forms of making money online and I'll tell you about them a bit later.

To become an affiliate marketer, you will need:

• Internet Access
• At least 2 hours per day
• Ongoing training (I recommend Wealthy Affiliate University)
• A little persistence

As you can see you do not need much to become an affiliate marketer. Your investment is mimimum and you can actually start without any upfront costs. Affiliate marketing is one of the only businesses that you can start with little to no investment and start seeing profits in very little time.

The first step to becoming an affiliate marketer is to find something that you would like to make money from.

This could be something that you are passionate about and enjoy doing such as a hobby or past time, something that you know a whole lot about (expert knowledge) or a problem you had that you found the solution for and resolved.

This process is called finding your niche. If you cant think of anything from the above don't worry, there are other ways to find a niche that you will enjoy making money from.

Next you are going to find a product that will fit in with your niche market - something that will be a perfect match to your customers.

If you didn't find a niche in Step 1, then you will have to find a product that you can sell and then find the niche. Always try to figure out who the people are that will be using the product. This is your niche.

There are lots of places online where you can find products to fit your niche or products to research and make money from.

These places are called affiliate networks. They contain thousands of products to choose from in dozens of categories. They offer commissions payable as a percentage of the sales price or a flat fee.

A very good place to start is Clickbank.com. This is one of the easiest networks to use since signing up is easy. They do not require you to have a website and you will never be turned down from applying to any of the merchants. Payout is twice a month and as long as earn at least $25 you will always be paid on time. Go ahead and sign up as an affiliate.

Other affiliate networks are:

www.cj.com

www.linkshare.com

www.pepperjamnetwork.com

Some of these networks require that you have a website to sign up.

The next step is to choose a promotional method.

This is the step where most people get stuck. Its about getting customers or as we say on the web - getting traffic.

There are several different ways to get traffic but it can be divided into two major categories - free traffic or paid traffic.

There are disadvantages of both types of promotional methods as well as advantages.

Free Traffic

Advantages

• if you get good position you can enjoy great long term benefits
• you get to keep all your profits

Disadvantages

• takes a lot of time
• will not see immediate results
• results may not be stable

Paid Traffic

Advantages

• Doesn't take a lot of time - you can have a campaign running within 15 minutes.

• Quickest way to make money online.

Disadvantages

• your profit is the difference between how much you spend and how much you make and can be negative (losses)
• If you don't get it right you can lose a lot

That said, free traffic techniques are a great way to learn how to become an affiliate marketer while you learn paid traffic techniques.

Examples of Free Traffic

• article marketing
• search engine optimization (building a website and making it search engine friendly)
• forum marketing
• social network marketing (myspace/facebook)
• blogging

Examples of Paid Traffic

• Pay Per Click (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing)
• Buying banner space

Once you've chosen a niche, found a product to offer to your niche and decided on which traffic technique you're going to use, you're going to have to find the keywords that you will need for your campaigns in order for you customers to find you.

Keywords are what people enter into search engines. This is the way they find the information that they are looking for, kinda like how you found this article.

There are lots of tools to help you find these keywords as well as different processes depending on the type of traffic technique you chose.

Some of the tools are:

• Google Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker Free Keywords

Both are free to use.

Now those are the basic steps to become an affiliate marketer but there are lots more that I didn't cover, like:

• Building an affiliate site
• Niche research
• how to do article marketing
• how to do pay per click
• Finding profitable keywords etc.

With a little research, you can use the information presented to become an affiliate marketer although it might take you a bit of time.

One of the resources I recommended was ongoing training and you can actually save time and learn how to become an affiliate marketer by signing up with Wealthy Affiliate.

This is a great way to cut down on the time it takes to become a well paid affiliate marketer as there are tutorials, courses and videos available as well as keyword resources (lists, tools, manuals) available for you to do research.

And whenever you need support, you can always email the owners of the site or ask questions in the friendly and supportive marketing forum. I'm also a member there and you are welcomed to ask me any questions to help you get started.

Here's the link again for Wealthy Affiliate University.

I know you have a lot of questions about how to become an affiliate marketer so please leave a comment below.