You may have just had your first glimpse of how affiliate marketing works and you are probably feeling a bit overwhelmed. I promise you that by the time you are finished reading this article it will all seem too easy. Now let’s get into how basic affiliate marketing actually works and what you need in order to succeed. I will point out again that this is merely one way to get into the business of affiliate marketing. It will require that you spend some money and learn a few things that you may not be too familiar with. What I am giving you is nothing more than a recipe. There are thousands of donut recipes out there but in the end you still end up with a donut. If you want you can even make substitutions to the recipe, make it your own, but in the end the original recipe is going to be the safest bet to end up with a delicious donut.

As an affiliate marketer you will need four things,

1. A Domain of your own

2. A service to Manage your Mailing Lists

3. Google Adwords

4. Clickbank

A Domain of your Own

The first thing I am going to recommend that you do is get your own web domain. This will give you a place to archive and host all of your squeeze pages for all of your campaigns. It is possible to use free web hosting sites for your web pages but I personally think it looks tacky to have advertisements all over a squeeze page. As you get more into and comfortable with affiliate marketing there are a few campaigns that you may want to run that require small websites and multiple web pages. These are much easier to put together with your own web domain.

I use and recommend that you go through Dreamhost.com. They are cheap and allow you to keep everything in house. They also have excellent tutorials and easy to follow navigation. If you have never handled your own web domain before they make it easy to set up and to manage your domain with very little prior experience.

A Service to Manage your Mailing Lists

When you are dealing with a single mailing list with a few dozen names it is possible to just use a free email account like hotmail or Gmail. When you have a dozen mailing lists with hundreds of addresses in each list you need a professional, dedicated service. I recommend and use Aweber. Aweber allows you to create mailing lists using double verification which is required by the new anti-spamming laws.

Aweber allows you to set up extended email campaigns sending out multiple emails every week that are fully automated. Just set it up and it runs on its own. Aweber makes it easy to create squeeze pages and direct traffic with automated forms and routing. Aweber also has the best track record in the industry by sending out 99.34% of all automated emails on time for 11 years.

Google Adwords

There’s more than one search engine that you can advertise through and there are more than a few ways to advertise but I am going to recommend you start off with Adwords. Adwords is Google’s advertising program. It is free to set up an account. Once your account is set up you should go through all of the tutorials to learn your way around. It isn’t too complicated to figure out. Adwords provides a lot of tools that you can use to optimize and track your campaigns to increase your click through rate and make more sales while spending less money.

Once you are ready to start your campaign you will have a few payment options. You can either have Google charge your checking account at the end of the month or you can make a deposit that the monthly payments will be taken out of. I recommend making a deposit when you are first starting out. It can be very easy for a newbie to make a few mistakes and end up owing a huge amount of money at the end of the month. When you make a deposit Adwords will not charge you more than you put in. Once you get the hang of things you can switch over to a monthly charge.

Clickbank

Clickbank is the affiliate program that I use and recommend that you go through. Clickbank is free to register and use as an affiliate. Once you register Clickbank will mail you a weekly check for the commissions that you earn and since it began in 1998 Clickbank has never missed a payment. Once you register an account with Clickbank you will be able to search through their marketplace for eproducts to promote.

Clickbank handles all sales so you can be certain you are getting your commissions. I recommend that you take some time and search through Clickbank’s tutorials for a better understanding of how to use it. When I use Clickbank I generally start my search by category then sort by high gravity rating. You want a gravity rating between 125 and 75. That will tell you that the eproduct is selling but there is not a lot of competition from other affiliates. Once you find an eproduct that you want to promote just click create a hoplink and a window will pop up. Copy your hoplink and use it in your advertising. Your hoplink is how Clickbank tracks your commissions. You will receive a unique hoplink for all of the products that you advertise.

                                                    A few words of Advice

Protect your Hoplinks

It is possible for a hacker to steal your hoplink, and your commission. I recommend that you purchase a copy of Affiliate Cloner. It cloaks your hoplinks making it near impossible for someone to steal your commission. The software itself is easy to use and only takes a minute to set up.

Tax Considerations

You should keep in mind that any money you make online is subject to taxes. At the very least I recommend that you open a new checking and savings account at your bank. Be sure to get a check card for your new checking account. Make all your business purchases, such as DreamHost, Aweber, Adwords, and even your office supplies and equipment through this account. Deposit all of your commission checks through this account as well. This will create a paper trail that your accountant can search through when tax time comes. I would take at least 40% of each commission check and put it into a separate savings account, high yield if possible. This will ensure that you will have more than enough money to pay the tax man at the end of the year and you will be earning interest on that 40% as well.

Keep Organized

It is very important that you keep records of all your campaigns and account information. One of the most important things that you will be doing is tracking your marketing campaigns. I recommend developing some kind of system early on for keeping your records in order. As long as you set up some kind of system, and use it, you will be fine. You will regret not staying organized and here is one of the main reasons.

The key to successful affiliate marketing is repetition. After setting up your basic tools you will find a product that sells, set up a marketing campaign that brings in money, and then repeat the same campaign with a different product. If you create a campaign that brings in $5,000 and stop then you have made $5,000. If you take the same tools that you created for the first campaign and apply it to 3 more products with equal success then you have made $20,000. The more campaigns you run and the faster you set them up, the more money you will make.