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Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
Affiliate Marketing:
The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
by Rosalind Gardner
http://netprofitstoday.com/
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
Table of Contents
What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work? ................................. 3 15 Reasons to Become an Affiliate Marketer ................................................. 3 How Much Will it Cost to Start?................................................................... 5 6 Steps to Quick-Start Your Affiliate Business ............................................... 6 Quickly & Easily find High Demand Topics.................................................. 6 Find High-Profit Potential Products & Services ............................................ 6 Cheap Sources of Site Content................................................................. 8 The Fastest Way to Build Your WebSite ....................................................10 Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs.................................................................11 Get Oodles of Traffic Today! ...................................................................11 How Much Money Can You Make?...............................................................13 Resources ..............................................................................................14
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work?
Affiliate marketing is a Partnership or Joint Venture with an online merchant to sell their products and/or services in exchange for remuneration.
Your affiliate link is coded with a special ID which is unique to you. When a sale is made through your special link, the merchant credits that sale to you.
Then you just wait for the check to arrive! .
15 Reasons to Become an Affiliate Marketer
There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own home-based Internet business...
1. No Production Costs - The cost to develop and produce a new product is prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With affiliate programs, production costs aren't an issue. The product has been developed and proven - all on the merchant's nickel. 2. Low Cost Set-Up -Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is all the equipment you may need. 3. No Fees for Joining or Licenses to Buy - I often compare doing business as an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in the real world. The biggest difference is that the distributor must often pay for a license to distribute products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by the affiliate's ability to promote his web site. 4. Choose From Thousands of Products and Services -What isn't sold online? That list must be shorter than the one describing all that IS sold online. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under the sun. That makes it easy to find products related to your current or planned web site. 5. No Sales Experience Needed - When I started my affiliate business, I had absolutely no sales experience. That wasn’t a problem, however. The companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day. © 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
6. No Employees - The largest expense of most businesses is employee salaries. Although there might be times when you need or want someone to work for you as an affiliate, it's doubtful you'll ever have to worry about hiring full or part-time employees. When you have a project you want to hire out, it is easy to find specialists in every computer-related field who can work for you from the comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for the project, and never have to worry about ongoing employee-related benefits and deductions. 7. No Expensive Merchant Accounts Needed -Setting up a merchant account for any business is a time-consuming and costly business. It's even more tedious for Internet businesses. However, merchant accounts aren’t a concern when you're an affiliate. The merchant bears that cost and handles all processing of payments. You never have to lose sleep over potential chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account when you’re an affiliate. 8. No Inventory to Carry - Even if you live in a small one-bedroom apartment, as an affiliate you can sell large items without storage concerns. 9. No Order-Processing - Forget the problems associated with collecting and storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The merchant does all that! 10. No Product Shipping - The cost and hassle to prepare and ship products to customers worldwide could be staggering. Affiliates never have to worry about packaging supplies or postal rates. 11. No Customer Service Concerns - Do you hate the prospect of dealing with nasty people or customer complaints? Don't worry about it! The merchant handles the snivelers. 12. Make Money While You Sleep - What other business allows you as a sole proprietor to keep your doors open and keep making money even when you take breaks or after you go home for the night? 13. The World at Your Doorstep - The Internet is the world's largest marketplace. You can drive more visitors to your online store in a day, than many small-town merchants see in in a year. 14. Minimal Risk - The product you chose isn't making money? Dump it. Take down your links and promote another! It's that easy. There are no long-term contracts binding you to products that don't sell. 15. High Income Potential - If you have a job, your salary or hourly wage is probably pre-determined. Maybe there's not much, other than working overtime, that you can do to increase your income. With your own affiliate business on the Internet your income potential is limited only by your desire, effort and imagination. © 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
How Much Will it Cost to Start?
Unlike building a new brick and mortar business in Downtown Anywhere, the things you’ll need to start a business on the Internet are CHEAP.
Here’s a list of the basic tools you’ll need to become an affiliate marketer.
• Desk • Chair • Computer • Internet Connection • Email • Text Editor You probably already have all those things, right?
Even if you don’t have the desk and chair, you can always throw the laptop on your bed and work from there.
Here are some basic expenses…
Register Domain $ 8.95/year Hosting $ 8.95/month Web Site Template $10.00 - $50.00 (once)
With start-up costs this low, I don’t know why anyone would consider starting a business anywhere other than on the Internet!!
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
6 Steps to Quick-Start Your Affiliate Business
In this section I discuss the 6 steps you will take to quickly, easily and inexpensively get started in your affiliate marketing business.
Quickly & Easily find High Demand Topics
The topic you choose should both interest you and have high consumer demand.
You already know what interests you, but how do you find out whether a topic has high demand?
Well, the first place I check is a free tool call the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It is located at:
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion
At Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, you simply enter a term related to your site and it will show you:
• Related searches that include your term • How many times that term was searched in the previous month So, let’s assume for a moment that you are a mortgage and insurance broker who suspects that insurance might be a good service to sell online.
To find out how many people are looking for insurance online, I typed in the word ‘insurance’ and discovered that the keyword ‘insurance’ had been searched for 971,914 times at Overture and its search partners in just one month!
That’s almost a million people! Wow!
As I consider any term that receives 50,000 or more searches in a month a subject with good demand and potentially viable, insurance looks like it might just be a winning topic for an affiliate web site.
Find High-Profit Potential Products & Services
Once you’ve determined that your topic is in high demand, you need to find out now is whether there are merchants selling related products and services online, AND how much commission they pay.
For that, I go first to Commission Junction.
Commission Junction is an ‘affiliate network’ that puts merchants and affiliates together. They refer to merchants as ‘advertisers’ and the affiliates are called ‘publishers’.
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Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
To see all the merchants with products and services at Commission Junction, you’ll need to set up a free account.
To do that, go to Commission Junction, then click on ‘Solutions’ near the top right-hand portion of the page, then go to the left side of the Solutions page and click on ‘CJ Marketplace’.
At the very bottom of that page and you’ll find a link for the application process. Where it asks you to supply a URL, just enter yahoo.com or geocities.com if you don’t already have a web site.
Once your account is set up and you’ve logged into the Commission Junction interface, click on ‘Get Links’, and select ‘Advertisers’ in the drop-down box beside the word ‘Search’ near the top of the page. Next, type in the word ‘insurance’.
My search came up with 51 merchants. Your results may be more or less depending on whether merchants have been added to, or dropped from the network.
In choosing merchants, you want to select those with the highest EPC ratings and commissions.
What is an EPC Rating?
3-month EPC: 3-month EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows how well an advertiser converts Web site visitors into commissions, over a three-month period.
7-day EPC: 7-day EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows the average commissions paid to publishers for every 100 clicks, over the past seven days. Use this number to see the most recent EPC trend for advertisers.
So how well did our insurance merchants do?
Zurich insurance had a 7-day EPC rating of $250.88. That means that affiliates are earning an average 250.88 for every 100 visitors they send to Zurich Insurance.
Wow!
Now what about those commission rates?
Well, at the Good Sam Club, if the customer completes a form and becomes a member, Good Sam will pay you $5.00. That’s JUST to fill out a form.
And if they purchase an Emergency Road Service package, you’ll get paid $15.00.
Not bad!
You can find even MORE merchants at the following affiliate networks:
. Linkshare
http://linkshare.com/
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Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
. BeFree
http://affiliates.befree.com/
. Clickbank
http://clickbank.com/
Cheap Sources of Site Content
Because we want to leave the selling job up to the merchant, an affiliate’s job is to ‘pre-sell’ their merchants’ products.
To pre-sell, you need site content.
Content consists of articles and endorsements that explains how your visitors problems can be solved by using the products you promote. In most cases, webmasters write their own endorsements for the products they promote.
However, if you aren’t inclined to write product endorsements, you can:
. Find Free Content . Use Merchants’ Ad Copy . Pay for Content
I like looking for free content first.
Staying with our ‘insurance’ topic, I searched Google for the terms “Free Articles”+ “Insurance” and found the following articles listed at legalwhiz.com:
• “How to Save on Title Insurance Costs” • “Understanding the Terms of Your New Loan” • “Common Sense Mortgage Tips!” In many cases, the author will allow you to use his work on your site if you include credit to the author and a link back to his site.
This is even MORE effective when the author has an affiliate program and you can make money from that link.
To get approval to use the article, you’d simply email the author a request, and they will usually be very happy to have you use their articles on your site.
Another way to get free content is to use what the merchant makes available to their affiliates.
For example, here is an email promotion that Corey Rudl gives his affiliates to promote his very popular ‘Insiders Secrets to Internet Marketing’ course.
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Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
Dear Friend,
This e-mail is extremely urgent so please read the entire thing... I would feel terrible if you missed out on this because you did not get my e-mail in time.
I just got an e-mail from Corey Rudl and he said there were only 150 copies left of the new version of his best-selling Internet marketing course, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, that includes the $952 in FREE bonuses!
Chances are, as you read this, a lot of those 150 copies are already gone.
Just to recap my last e-mail, Corey Rudl is literally "the" guru of Internet marketing... he's grown his online businesses to over $7.6 million in online sales last year and he gets over 1.8 million visitors to his web sites every month!
And in the new version of his best selling course he is going to show everything from step-by-step instructions you can use to start your very own Internet business in as little as 48 hours to how to build a top-selling web site... for less than $100!
No matter how small your budget is, Corey shows you the cheapest ways to build a web site that sells!
He is going to show you where to find hot products (in 20 minutes or LESS!) that you can start selling TODAY! These in-demand products will sell like hot cakes, no matter what your experience!
Corey will even reveal his personal rolodex with 100s of FREE and cheap online tools, resources, and software that you can use to automate your web site (and save yourself at least 35 hours every week)!
And if that's not enough, he is going to even reveal, for the first time, some of his most advanced strategies like how to get #1 rankings in the search engines and get tons of free traffic from the "Big Guys" like Google... and his secret to writing sales copy that increases sales by 400% (or MORE)!
Like I said before, I know these strategies are going to make my business tons of extra money in 2004 and as my subscriber I want to make sure you experience the same rewards, so go to...
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
http://www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/3885
... if the page is still there, this means you made it in time and he still has some copies of his course with the additional $952 worth of FREE bonuses!
So please hurry! And if you have any questions, just let me know.
All the best...
YOUR NAME HERE
As you can see, that copy is written in the first-person, so it looks like it is coming directly from you. Use merchant copy judiciously however, as your credibility will take a beating if your subscribers and visitors have seen the exact same copy in other newsletters and on other affiliate sites.
Lastly, you can have articles written for you, sometimes very inexpensively.
To find ghost writers on the ‘net, check out some of these sites:
• Guru.com • FreelanceWriters.com • Elance.com
Once you have organized your content, it’s time to start putting you’re your site together.
The Fastest Way to Build Your WebSite
There are 3 steps to quickly build your website. They are:
1. Register a Domain 2. Domain Hosting 3. Buy Template Domain registration is painless, and CHEAP. Go to Godaddy.com where it will cost you 8.95/year for each domain. You can get them even cheaper when you register for more than one year.
Here are two good, yet inexpensive, hosting services that I recommend.
• GoDaddy.com - $8.95/mo. • HostRocket - $9.95/mo. © 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
The quickest way to build a website is to buy a template. Here is a list of some of the best template sites I’ve found to date:
o 4Templates.com o BigWebmaster.com o BoxedArt.com o DollarTemplates.com My personal favorite is BoxedArt.com. You can download as many templates as you want from Boxed Art, all for only $49.96 for six months access.
Once you’ve placed your content in your template and sent it to your web host, it’s time to join affiliate programs.
Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs
Go back to Commission Junction or the site where you found products you want to promote and sign up for the merchants’ affiliate programs.
The reason you build your site before joining the programs, is to have a site to show the merchant. This demonstrates that you are indeed serious about selling their product, and will almost guarantee your acceptance into their program.
Get Oodles of Traffic Today!
After placing merchant links on your site, it’s time to let the world know about your site.
Although I discuss ‘29 Ways to Market Your Site’ in the Super Affiliate Handbook, my favorite way to bring visitors to my sites is by using cheap PayPer-Click search engine advertising.
The primary benefit of PPC’s is that you can drive targeted traffic to your site quickly, instead of waiting months for the search engines to list your site… if they ever do.
Just a few of these include:
• Google.com • Overture.com • Enhance Interactive • Findwhat.com • Kanoodle.com
Pay-per-clicks allow you to bid on terms or keywords that are relevant to your site.
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
In our insurance site example, the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool produced a list that included terms like:
car insurance insurance health insurance life insurance home insurance
affordable health insurance travel insurance renters insurance insurance quote
car insurance quote
insurance lead You should be able to find and bid on HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of terms in any category you choose. The more keywords you list your site under, the more exposure your site will get.
I HIGHLY recommend that you use PPC’s to advertise your site. I get returns of 2, 3, 4, and sometimes even FIVE dollars for every dollar I spend advertising my site.
So, let’s summarize again the steps that it takes to build an affiliate site…
. Find a HUGE Market
. Find Products & Services
. Collect/Create Web Content
. Build Site
. Market Site
. and… Enjoy the BIG Kachings!
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Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
How Much Money Can You Make?
Here are some examples of successful affiliate marketers… Remember, these are ordinary people, just like you and me.
Cashring is the affiliate program for the I Want U online dating service. Their top affiliate earns an astounding 5000 per month, each and every month, and JUST from that one program! I’ve also heard that the top iFriends affiliate earns over $80,000 per month. My guess is that figure is LOW by a long shot, as iFriends pays up to $70 per free signup to their program, which is an adult web chat service.
Matt Haller is a young man who signed up for my Net Profits Coach newsletter, bought Ken Evoy’s Site Build it! ecommerce package and then started an affiliate site promoting hip hop items. Six months after he started, he sent me an email thanking me for helping to change his life. Why? Because he was already earning 10 grand per month!
Deborah Casey is another student of mine, a 53 year old disabled lady living in Seattle. Within eight months of starting her affiliate business she was making 8 grand a month, and she’s now up to $15,000 per month!
Jim Cockrum is an affiliate of mine who sells my ebook, the Super Affiliate Handbook. One day, every time I checked stats for my book sales, I was floored by how many orders Jim was generating. In a little under 24 hours, he’d made $1000 just by sending out an endorsement to his mailing list.
Oh ya, and yours truly, Rosalind Gardner… THAT’s why I wrote the “The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online”. I wanted EVERYONE who was interested in making money online to know what possibilities exist for people with no experience. Because, I had absolutely no business background, no selling experience and actually some disdain for sales people as a group, I’m proof positive that ANYONE can earn money as an affiliate.
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
Resources
Get the Internet business tricks and tools that I use in my business everyday at:
http://NetProfitsToday.com/resources/
Here’s the full list of goodies:
• Advertising (PPC) • Affiliate Marketing • Auctions • Audio • AutoResponders / Ezines / Mailing Lists • Consultants • Copywriting • Credit Card Processing • Domain Registration & Hosting • Dropshipping • Ebooks • Ecommerce/Credit Card Processing • Education • Freebies • Forums • Graphics • Income Opportunies & Products to Sell • Joint Venturing • Research Tools • Surveys: Get Paid for Your Opinion • Traffic Generation • Web Site Design & Packages • Writing © 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
About the Author
Rosalind Gardner has created numerous autopilot businesses selling as an affiliate for other people. In fact, Rosalind often makes more as an affiliate than the business owners she sells for.
In 2002, Rosalind generated over $436,797 in commissions selling other people's stuff online, and in both 2003 and 2004, she has earned MUCH more than that! She sells everything from dating services... to watches... to webmaster tools!
As a speaker, author and consultant, Rosalind is recognized around the world as a leading authority in both Internet and Affiliate marketing. Her work appears in a score of online and offline venues, including:
• The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online – Rosalind’s runaway best-selling ebook, which has been #1 in Clickbank’s B2B category since its publication. • Net Profits Coach Newsletter [NPC] – Her very popular free weekly ezine. • Affiliate Business Blueprint – Co-authored with Jim Edwards, the ABB includes 5 hours of tele-seminar recordings and transcripts, in which Jim and Rosalind reveal ALL their secrets and grill each other to squeeze every last drop of affiliate marketing information from each other. • Revenue Magazine - The first magazine devoted to affiliate marketing. Rosalind’s success was featured in the premier issue, in an article entitled ‘Five Who Thrive’. • Secrets to Their Success – Rosalind’s incredible success story is featured on Corey Rudl’s popular ‘Secrets to Their Success’ site. Rosalind shares the tools that she uses in her Internet business everyday at:
http://NetProfitsToday.com/resources
She lives with her family in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada.
Her online business affords her a healthy and active lifestyle that includes running, yoga and fine beer.
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
