The Simplest And Quickest Way To Start Affiliate Marketing

©2011 Doug Champigny, http://captain-affiliate.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Affiliate marketing successfully involves proficiency in a variety of online marketing strategies & techniques, but at the core there are just a few issues to deal with when you start affiliate marketing. Let’s take a quick look at the requirements for first getting started – not as a ‘quick-buck’ artist, but as a serious online business owner who wants to build a solid, long-term online business whose revenue stream is generated in whole or in part by affiliate marketing commissions…

Your Affiliate Marketing ‘Home Base’…

While it is possible to have minimal affiliate marketing success without a website or blog, building a sustainable online business will require you to have an online ‘home’, a centralized presence online to base your affiliate marketing activities from.

The importance of this base cannot be overstated – you’ll use it to draw free traffic from the search engines, social networking and social bookmarking sites, article directories, podcast and video hosting sites and community sites like Twitter, Facebook and the various forums you visit.

And once those targeted visitors have arrived at your base, you’ll use it to presell them – to warm them up and put them in the buying mood – before sending them along via your affiliate marketing links. And during that visit, where prudent & possible, you’ll get that visitor to opt-in to your mailing list – otherwise those warm leads may well be lost forever once they depart from your site.

Currently, affiliate marketing blogging is the route most likely to succeed for you in this area. While static sites are still effective, they take much more time, effort and knowledge of HTML and/or CSS to keep current. For example, affiliate buttons and banners can be added or removed from every page of a blog by editing one file – on a website, each page would need to be done individually.

Additionally, adding new content to an affiliate marketing blog simply requires you to type in your message and publish the post – all of the linking by category, date, subject tags and other navigation is done automatically by the blog operating system. The WordPress blog platform, which is most commonly used, can also be configured to then notify the major search engines each time new content is added, along with dozens of directories that index blogs only and are not available to static site owners.

Perhaps most importantly, though, is that an affiliate marketing blog can be installed and up and running in 15 – 20 minutes by even those with no programming experience, following available step-by-step instructions in How To Install Blogs videos…

Affiliate Marketing Hosting And Autoresponders

Having established that hosting your own affiliate marketing blogs using the WordPress blogging platform, to enable it obviously requires you to have hosting for your blogs. Two bits of good news for affiliate marketing bloggers – first, you can host numerous blogs in any desired niches all in one hosting account, and second the price of hosting has dropped significantly over the past ten years as web hosting has become more and more competitive.

The next online service you’ll require is a professional autoresponder account, preferably one that allows you to establish an unlimited number of individual mailing lists, as you’ll want at least one that’s exclusive to each of the niches you’ll be targeting. Put simply, your extreme sports affiliate marketing subscribers aren’t going to be interested in the information you send to your gardening niche subscribers and vice-versa.

Fortunately there is one resource that gives you both of these resources in one plan, allowing you to have both affiliate marketing hosting and autoresponders for one low monthly investment, and means you only need to deal with one interface to access both services. As to setting it all up, the package referenced in the blogging section also includes a full ‘How To Install Numerous Blogs in One Hosting Account‘ video tutorial.

Monetizing Your Affiliate Marketing Blogs

At first your blog traffic will be slow and affiliate marketing commissions will be few and far between – but don’t let that stop you! Remember, you’re building a long-term affiliate marketing business of your own here, one with the potential to let you eventually leave the boss and commute behind as you start affiliate marketing full-time online.

To get your income stream started, use Google’s Adsense program and some niche-specific affiliate programs. Adsense is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program run by the world’s largest search engine, and the system automatically displays ads targeted to match the content of the page each ad appears on. Each time one of your blog readers clicks on one of the ads, you make money, ranging from a few cents to a few dollars depending on the niche and the particular ad. Sign up for the Adsense program through Google, then either work your way through creating and installing the code on your blog or, simpler yet, just use one of the blog themes optimized for Adsense.

Next, sign up for affiliate accounts at ClickBank (digital products) and LinkShare (physical products) and browse each for the best affiliate programs for your particular niche. Don’t choose based on how much each affiliate program pays, but rather by which products and services will be of most help to your potential target market – you can sell a lot more that way, and the total affiliate marketing commissions will exceed what you’ll make from just the most expensive products.

Also, don’t forget to add a banner or other link to your own webhost’s affiliate program – with luck, over time you’ll build your affiliate commissions from your host to the point where they exceed your monthly hosting charges, effectively giving you your blog hosting and autoresponders at no net cost! The affiliate marketing hosting and autoresponders service we mentioned above has just such a program, for example.

Increasing Commissions From Your Affiliate Marketing Blogs

All of the above should only take you a day or two at most, especially if you’re following along with the video tutorials in the Adsense Alive Pro bundle (which could just as easily have been called How To Start Affiliate Marketing).

So with your base installed, operational and monetized, increasing affiliate commissions becomes the focus. Add a new article or post to your blogs every couple of days – once a week at least – and make sure each article has information relative to the particular niche you’re targeting. The more helpful information you offer, the sooner you have a steady blog audience and start to build the credibility as an expert in your field, necessary to maximize your affiliate commissions.

The rest of your available time should be spent on generating as much targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing blogs as you can – increase web traffic and you’ll see a corresponding jump in commissions as long as you keep that traffic to highly targeted leads.

There are many free ways to generate targeted blog traffic – it took Willie Crawford and me over 3 hours to detail just 15 free ways to increase web traffic on our Top Traffic Tips teleseminar. Start with that guide or research the various methods on your own – just be sure to try as many as you can find and track the results from each. Over time you’ll be able to increase your success – and your affiliate commissions – by focusing more time and energy on those working best in any given niche and much less time on those that aren’t producing as much targeted traffic to your affiliate marketing blogs.

How To Start Affiliate Marketing in 3 Simple Steps

So there you have it – the simplest and quickest way to start affiliate marketing…

  1. Get Your Hosting & Autoresponders

  2. Install Affiliate Marketing Blogs

  3. Increase Web Traffic with Free Targeted Traffic

Now, get ye hence and start making affiliate marketing profits of your own! ;-)

Pro Tip: Bookmark this post and come back to re-read it once you have your affiliate marketing blogs installed. This post is a perfect example of affiliate marketing pre-selling: It provides extremely helpful information to this blog’s target audience, showing how to set up an affiliate marketing business quickly and simply while demonstrating the need for and usefulness of three separate products. Try to emulate this in your affiliate marketing blogging on your chosen niches… – DC.

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  1. Affiliate Marketing Using Your Own Website Or Blog

Doug Champigny - The Success Lifestylist
Doug Champigny, The Success Lifestylist, is a world-famous author, speaker and mentor who has been helping corporations, companies, retailers, entrepreneurs and other individuals and organizations to achieve true success for over 30 years so far...

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