Newbie Affiliate Marketing

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Having your own website to promote your affiliate products is a good option. But it is not necessary. There are many methods available that can be used to do your affiliate marketing business. The list is long, but the most important methods are email marketing, writing articles to e-groups, joining online discussions etc. Let us discuss some important methods that can be used to promote your affiliate products without having your own website.

Email Marketing

In this method you can promote your affiliate links and you don’t need your own website. People can click on your affiliate links present in your emails and can go directly to the merchant website to purchase the products.

Your email should contain the introduction about the product you are promoting and your affiliate links. Try to make your emails interesting and brief.

Try to expand your contact list. Use as many methods as you can to grab the email addresses of new people. Use online forums, chat forums etc to make new friends. Your email list must contain a few hundred contacts, at least. But don’t spam. Don’t send emails to the people who don’t know about you or who don’t want to receive your emails. Otherwise they will just block your emails and you will lose your contacts. As I said, your emails should be interesting to get the reader’s attention.

Offline Promotion

You can use the offline methods of promotion, like the classified ads, flyers etc. The best choice is the classified ads because its exposure is largest.

Writing free e-books

It is similar to email marketing. But in this method you will write the informative and interesting e-books and will send to the people via their email address. These e-books should be easy to read and helpful for their readers. The topics should be related to your affiliate products so that you can recommend the products in the body of e-books. Alternatively you can add a brief note about your affiliate products and affiliate links for promotion. If the readers like your e-book, they may visit the merchant website and make a purchase.

Writing in Forums

Search for some forums, at least three, that are related to your product and have high page rank. Register on these forums and start some discussion in the forum where maximum people are involved. Just post your questions there or answer some questions of other members. But don’t add any promotion text in the body of your posts. You are allowed to put your signature at the end of your post. Here you can write you name and your affiliate links.

When you become an active member of this forum then you may get some traffic from these forums to your merchant website through your affiliate links. This will ultimately result in more sales of the products you are promoting.

Writing Articles

You can write articles and publish them in the free article directories. You can embed your affiliate links in the text of your articles. If your articles are well formatted, informative and the article directory has large traffic then you can expect some good traffic to your affiliate links. And you know that more traffic on your affiliate links will result in more sales through your affiliate links.

Conclusion

The use of a website to promote your affiliate products is a good idea but it is not necessary. You can use the alternate methods to promote your affiliate products and links. The most popular among these methods are email marketing, writing to forums, article writing and offline promotion like classified ads. The main idea is that instead of promoting your website you will directly promote your affiliate links and people will directly go to the merchant website by clicking your affiliate links to purchase the products. This way you do not have to pay extra for your website creation and maintenance.

When it all comes down to it, making money online starts and ends with the market you decide to enter.

These days, all you hear is about “finding your niche” or you need to “find a profitable niche”. Well, I happen to agree as do all other successful internet marketers.

But how exactly do you find a niche to get started in?

First of all, let’s clarify what a niche is. A niche is like a sub section of a broad market. For example, a broad market might be dating, but the niche you might discover would be Over 40′s Dating in North America.

Do you see the difference? Clearly, the niche is targeted to a certain type of people within a wider market (which is Dating in this example).

So, your job is to find a specific set of people who are looking for information, products and services or that generally have a burning interest in that subject. Here’s your checklist before you go out and start looking for a profitable niche to get started with:

1.  Make sure they are buyers.

There’s no point targeting people who aren’t interested in buying anything related to that niche.

2. Make sure they are active online.

There needs to be forums, groups and other communities that congregate online so that you can target these people and get to know them properly.

The next thing to do is actually start your research. You can go to Dmoz.com and start looking around at categories listed there. Drill down to find small topics that you’d never think about. Then once you’ve found something of interest, go to eBay and Amazon and see if there are books/products/services that are selling which are related to this topic.

Then take some keywords that you think are related to the topic and do a search for related forums and groups. You can do that with a search like this:

“your keyword” + groups
“your keyword” + forums

Just replace “your keyword” with the actual keyword you have in mind, and then hit search in your favorite search engine.

Once you’ve established that there are products that are selling and people gathering actively online in forums and groups, you know that you are onto a winner.

The next steps are to find out what information people want and to start creating some simple articles on your own new domain which relates to this topic.

Then you can focus on monetizing the website and of course, the most important part is getting some good traffic to your site, which is the make or break part of the entire internet marketing process.

It’s also far too much to go into detail in this article, so make sure you check out this website to find out how to drive a lot of traffic to your site, plus more ideas on how to find even more wildly profitable niches and ways to shortcut your way to online success..