Tips to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing and Why Get-Rich-Quick Scams Don’t Work
Tips on how to make money using affiliate marketing, what you need to get started, different ways to proceed and why get-rich-quick schemes mislead you and will never work.
For those who don’t really know what affiliate marketing or affiliate advertising is, it is essentially marketing someone else’s product, either through selling it usually through a marketing platform like ClickBank or advertising it using a platform like Google Adsense.For those people who do not have products to sell themselves (probably most people) it is the most common way of making a serious income online. If you can sell products for companies, they are willing to give you big commissions for your troubles, and the income potential for advertising and selling for other companies is theoretically uncapped.
If that sounds exciting, it should do, because it is! Though the most important thing to get your head around before you start your journey is that it is extremely difficult to make significant money, and if you have a tendency to give up when things do not go your way, you WILL fail at this.
What do I need to make money using affiliate advertising?
First things first, let’s tell you what you need.
First, if you’re a beginner, for selling other peoples items, you will need either a Clickbank account or a Commission Junction account. These companies manage the relationship between you - the person making the sell - and the owner of the product being sold. Go to their website and create an account for free.
Secondly, if you want to do affiliate advertising (you display ads, people click on those ads, you get paid) then you need a Google Adsense account. Advertising is easier than selling, so this is a great thing for beginners. Adsense accounts are also free to sign up for.
Those are the easy things. The third thing you need – and there is really no way around this – you need a website. (yes Blogs count as websites as well) and that website needs to be useful or valuable in some way, whether it be a service it provides or just the information on that website. It needs to be useful because you need it to ethically attract visitors who WANT to visit your site. This obviously doesn’t mean tricking or lying people to get them to visit your site. Not only do you want people to WANT to visit your site, you need to get them to find it as well, and this is essentially what you need to get started with affiliate marketing (and advertising; herein just referred to as affiliate marketing) and this is not an easy feat.
It is here that the reality of affiliate marketing parts way with what most get-rich-quick schemes will lead you to believe.
Get-rich-quick scams will lead you to believe that this is easy when using their secret underground systems, methods or techniques. Problem is such schemes will distort the truth and will bait you with unrealistic promises and false guarantees so you sign up for whatever it is they are selling. Creating a worthwhile site and getting people to visit it is not easy and there are no secret techniques to make it a guaranteed success with little effort. For the beginner, it is time consuming and you need to learn masses of information unless you are rich enough to outsource everything.
We break down all the steps for you, with tips on how to do it, and also explain in each step why get-rich-quick scams will not work.
The Niche
The focus at this point in the article is about your website or blog as this is without doubt the most important factor to your success. We have already mentioned that the site has to be useful in some way, even if the information within it is simply original and entertaining, this is still a form of value. The other important factor is the niche which refers to a subject of the site. When focussing on the niche, its all about balance. The niche of the site must not be too specific because not enough people will need or want to visit it. It cannot be too vague or you will have problems getting search engines to list it and you would be setting up too big a task for yourself. The niche must not be too popular or you will be competing with too many other larger most established competitors, yet it must be popular enough to attract a worthwhile amount of visitors. Additionally, your niche will always be easier to write about if you are passionate about it. Writing about something that does not interest you will soon bore you and you will give up.
Get-rich-quick schemes often claim to provide you with websites for you to “sell” products, but these sites will typically be hyped up sites with copied sales garble. There is no niche to these sites that these scams provide, meaning there is no value. Ergo, you will not make significant money from these sites. They will not be listed highly in search engines (see later on in article for more information on search engines) because the search engines will be able to determine there is no value to these sites.
To choose your niche, check out the competition using Google. How many sites focus on the subject you want to focus on? Are there certain key phrases or words associated with your niche you can take advantage of that your competitors are overlooking?
Creating a site or blog
Is learning HTML, CSS and maybe even a little PHP and MySQL important to making money online? Well it is not absolutely essential, but it will dramatically boost your chances of success if you can.
This is where most people will become disheartened or think it’s not worth it. Its not easy learning how to create websites, but it is the best option, and you have total control not only over the way the site looks but how successfully it will be with search engines. Your chances of making serious money without knowing how to build a website are extremely little.
You other options are outsourcing it to someone else which requires an investment which can be ongoing depending on how often you update (and you should update often) or you can use a free or paid template where you have to write the content and that’s it. We always recommend learning how to build a site yourself.
Get-rich-quick scams will nearly always claim you do not have to have any technical experience to become rich online. Not really accurate at all. Your chances of making money with affiliate marketing are dramatically boosted if you have technical skills.
I've heard that I can become an affiliate marketer without a website. True?
Not really. You can do it, but you'll be relying on unstable short term tactics, like posting your affiliate link (your unique link to a products sales page) on forums or shoutboxes. This is considered by many to be an annoying type of SPAM, and many forums ban this sort of behaviour, and it will not result in large amounts of sales. Having a website allows you to publish your affiliate links on your "home turf" where you can use many other tactics to get people to buy the items you promote.
Search Engines
Search engines provide the majority of the traffic to your site. The techniques used to improve a sites visibility in the search engines is called SEO (search engine optimisation) and there are many tips and tricks to get your site listed high in the search engines and hence get more traffic. At this point we’d like to say that there are NO secret, underground techniques to guarantee you epic amounts of visitors to your site like many get-rich-quick scams imply.
It is this simple – the higher your site ranks in search engines, the more people visit your site. The more people who visit your site then the more sales they are likely to make from your site, or the higher number of adverts on your site that are clicked – this means more money for you. This simple rule is the backbone of affiliate marketing. This is why SEO is so vital so the success of an affiliate marketer.
So here are a few tips on how to get your site ranked higher –
Quality Content – we have mentioned this already, and for good reason. Search engines can tell if a site have quality content, and if it does, it will be ranked higher. Sites provided by get-rich-quick scams just contain hype. Search engines do not like these sites.
Site Development – another reason for learning how to build your own site includes the fact that many tips on SEO involve how build your site. For example, relevant META tags, keywords within heading tags and easy navigation.
Keyword Density – make sure all of your pages contain relevant keywords and phrases so search engine can find them.
Keywords in Title and URL of web page. Keywords should not be restricted to the actual content and should always be on the title of the page and within the URL address if possible. Learning HTML will allow you to do this.
Backlinks – Don’t SPAM, but try and get links to your web pages on forums and other web sites. Search engines like Google like it when other sites link to yours, and will rank your site higher because of it.
Article Marketing – Write articles for free article submission sites like EzineArticles.com
Social Networking – Don’t underestimate the power of sites like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace.
Personality
At the risk of sounding like a cheap motivational speaker, we will quickly cover this subject. How you approach affiliate marketing will dramatically decide your chances of success. If you are prepared for a long haul, starting at the bottom and building up visitors and even a mailing list, then your chances of success are high. If you think you will begin by making tons of sales and will essentially start of successfully, you will quickly end up disheartened. Perseverance and determination are vital factors.
This is another reason why get-rich-quick scams fail and do not create online marketers. From the word go they are creating the wrong mindset by implying the people who sign up for their "programs" will get rich quickly. These schemes provide stories of financial freedom that whilst possible, will not be achieved in any timeframe these schemes provide. The truth is a lot less appealing, and do not make sales.
Trust
If you are looking to sell items to people who visit your site, then you have to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. You do this through your website. If people trust your website then they trust you and if they trust you then they will be willing to buy products that you recommend.
However if you create a website full of meaningless hype then people will not buy from you.
Worth noting in this section is site design. Good site design will help instil trust into the visitor, which is why we recommend learning some basic graphics skills, or even investing in a copy of Photoshop. Tacky sites do not instil trust, yet many get-rich-quick sites are extremely tacky and/or offer tacky websites full of the bright red fonts, yellow highlight and little or no navigation.
Selling Tips
Here are some tips to promoting affiliate products and making sales.
Pick the right product. Sounds obvious right, but some people get thing drastically wrong. Make sure the product is linked to the niche of your site. No one will buy a DIY product on a site about Aussie Rules football.
Use the trust you have gained to endorse the product. If people who trust you know you endorse a product, they are more likely to buy it. This is why you need a good website full of great content. It will make people trust you.
Review the product in your style. Don’t just rely on the sales garble the owner of the product gave you. Write a review on it in your own style. Make sure it is honest by obviously praise the product and explain to people why you recommend it.
Don’t sell everything. The more products you promote the more products you are likely to sell right? Wrong. If you sell everything under the sun then people who see right through you and assume you don’t actually endorse the product. Be selective and only promote certain products.
To summarise...
Creating a worthwhile website or blog is essential if you want to become a successful long term affiliate marketer. You cannot do it without them. It needs to be useful, full of original content, well designed and developed and it should be a site that people want to visit. If you can do all this and get it ranked high in search engines, then the game is on and using the tips on this site and others you should be able to experiment and work out what tactics work best.
There is no definitive right or wrong here. What works for some people and some niches will not work for others. Do not trust sites that claim there are certain recipes that will guarantee success. There are not. Nor are there secret methods that will make you rich quickly. Again this is not true. Affiliate marketing is time consuming and requires you spend a lot of time building your website(s) to make sure that they will get sufficient traffic which you can convert to money.
As you can see though, get-rich-quick scams try and bypass all of the hard work and just focus on how easy it all is and how much money you can make. We hope from this article that you have concluded that this is not the case, and sites that claim to offer secret techniques or formulas to easily get rich are just trying to scam you. You cannot sidestep the simple fact that to make money online you need to create something that is actually useful in some sort of way. This is the way it should be and indeed the only way it can be. If getting rich online was as easy subscribing to a get-rich-quick scam, then no one would bother with the hardships of actually creating functional, helpful, entertaining or innovative websites anymore.
Additionally this article is designed to show you that if you want to take up affiliate marketing that you know what you are signing up for and that it is a job with lots to learn, and this article should have shown you some basic pointers. Is there a lot more to study? Very much so, the tips and tricks are endless, yet there is no one tip or trick that is guaranteed to make you any money. Remember that the next time you see a site that is releasing its “new found underground technique” guaranteed to make you rich for only a few hours work a day.
To point you in the right direction, we have recommended some good books which will provide you with a good foundation to get you started. This is what get-rich-quick schemes fail to do. The first book is a book on web design which makes affiliate marketing much, much easier. The second two are about affiliate marketing itself. Master the content of these books and you are maximising your chances of becoming successful online.
ThatsNonsense.com
