4 Steps to Making Money as an Affiliate Marketer

There are so many great ways to make money online, most of them require selling a product or a service. But, not everyone has a product or service of their own to sell. After all, creating a product takes knowledge, expertise and a lot of time and in some cases a lot of money. Thankfully, you don’t need to have your own product to make money online. You can make money selling other people’s product.

Selling other people’s product or affiliate marketing as it’s best known, provides a great opportunity for almost anyone to earn money online. It really doesn’t take much to start your own online business as an affiliate marketer. When it comes down to making money as an affiliate marketer, it basically comes down to these 4 steps:

Pick a product

Fist things first, you have to chose a product to promote. This is not that hard considering all the affiliate marketing networks operating on the internet. Simply register with a few affiliate marketing networks such as ClickBank and CommissionJunction and search their long list of advertisers to find a suitable product to promote. As a beginner it’s best to pick a product that while it is a good quality product that people will buy, there aren’t a lot of other people promoting it. Obviously, the more competition you have, the harder it will be for you to make money promoting the product.

Build your website

Although, it’s not necessary to have a website of your own to promote affiliate products, it is suggested that having a website with your own unique domain name, makes it easier to promote products and it also is more professional to have your own website versus using one of those free blogging platforms that display ads all over your site or give you a sub-domain of their main domain. Plus, when you have your own site, you have full control over it. With free websites, they can shut you down at any moment for any reason or no reason at all. Imagine, you work hard for years and build and maintain one of those free websites, you are making great money promoting affiliate products with it, but all of a sudden they decide to shut your website down! You can’t do anything about it, because they own it. Years of hard work will be lost and you will lose all the money you would have been making from that site. That is why I think its worth spending $10 a year to get your own domain and $60 or so a year to host it.

Create useful content

Now that you have your domain and and website ready to go, its time to create content. Content is what eventually will help you make money online. In order to attract visitors, you have to give them a reason to visit your site. That’s where great quality content comes in. Create content related to the product you are promoting. Create content that are useful and your future visitors can actually benefit from.

You can even base some of your content on the product itself, like why people need this product and how it will help solve the problem or what not. The better and more useful your content is, the more likely it is that people will trust you and buy the product you recommend.

Drive traffic to your site

Now, you’ve picked your product, built a website, created great content, but if no one can see it, you won’t make any money. It’s time to get some traffic flowing to your site. There are so many ways to drive traffic to your site. However, the best way is to optimize your site for search engines. Search engines bring your targeted traffic, which is what you want. People who are actively searching for what you offer are more likely to buy it as well.

Search engine optimization basically means optimizing your website and its content to search engine liking, so when people search for the product you promote, your site will be shown before your competitors. SEO can not be achieved over night, it takes a lot of time and a lot of work, from link building, submitting your site to directories to having good navigation system on your site to having good meta descriptions and more.

There are so many great SEO related blogs and online forums you can use to learn about SEO for free. Of course, there are other ways to drive traffic to your site as well, such as exchanging links with other webmasters and bloggers, commenting on other related blogs, participating in online forums, submitting articles to article directoires and etc.

Doing all of that is time consuming and at times frustrating, but they are necessary as they all help to generate more traffic to your site. The more traffic you get on your site, the more sales you’ll make which means you will be earning more money as an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate marketing truly is a great option for most anyone especially newbies who want to make money online. Of course, there is much more to affiliate marketing than this post, however, above mentioned steps are the 4 basic steps that you have to take in order to make money affiliate marketing.