They are many webmasters and of course average people hearing about the internet and how easy it is to make a “Million Dollars Online” and for some this is true but for 98% of these people it is a complete failure.
The CEO of Clickbank recently did an interview and stated that only 1% of all affiliates on Clickbank can claim that they make a full-time living online as an affiliate. That is an extremely low number considering the amount of opportunities that are available online today. And you will find that this is occurring in all the affiliate networks across the internet.
A Step By Step Guide To Success
So what would be the biggest reason for this low success rate well there probably isn’t just one reason there are many things that can affect you when it comes to being an affiliate online. Firstly, motivation would have to be the most predominant, followed by attitude and then knowledge.
Why Is Motivation So Important
One of the hardest things as an affiliate when you first start out is the solitary nature of this business, there is just you and the computer screen where you will sit for hours on end researching keywords, building affiliate campaigns to make money and doing more research again and the fact that all you friends probably think you have gone mad.
This on its own and unless your are highly motivated is a recipe for disaster for many would be online entrepreneurs.
It’s About Having The Right Attitude
Attitude is another area where many webmasters and affiliates fail due to falling into the trap of believing that they can just build a webpage and make money without doing all the hard yards, yes even the Super Affiliate Guru’s at some stage were sitting right where you are now doing 16 hour days 7 days a week and feeling that they were going nowhere fast but their motivation for success pushed them through the barrier to make that million dollars a year online.
Another huge factor for affiliates is knowledge, and for those affiliates that have been online for a while will agree that there is so much information out there on how to make a million dollars that you find it very difficult to stay focused and on track with what it is you are trying to achieve with your affiliate marketing business.
Finding the Right Market To Promote And Launch Your Affiliate Career
There are many tools online today that can help you find the keywords such as Wordtracker, Market Samurai and Keyword Elite or even Google’s Keyword Planner that you can use to enter into a niche market and many of the Super Affiliates will tell you to go after the long tail keywords, you know the low hanging fruit as they say, so that you can get instant traffic to your website and start making money. And yes there is no denying it, this tactic does work initially. Read my post here on how to become a super affiliate.
However if you are looking to build a solid foundation for your affiliate business wouldn’t it be more viable to go after the prime keywords where you can get the huge majority of traffic which then leads to massive sales if you have done your research correctly and picked the right market.
Start Your Journey Here
- Ask Your Affiliate Marketing Questions
- How To Avoid The Seven Deadly Sins Of Affiliate Marketing
- Get More Sales By Going Broad And Deep With Your Keyword Research
- Why Do Market Research
What’s that your saying it is impossible, well do you want the good news its “Not Impossible” in fact it’s very achievable but there are many out there that would like you to believe it’s not like the many SEO experts that make huge amounts of money doing this.
What I need you to do right now is stop reading and open another browser and go to Google search and Type In “Affiliate Marketing” you will see that this site AffiliateXFiles with the Title “How Does Affiliate Marketing Work” actually ranks at number #17 at the time of writing this post. You will even see on a good day a feeder site the I have (www.affiliatexfiles.net) ranks in the top twenty of Google as well.
To save you some time here is a screen shot I did to show you where we are ranked out of 38,100,000 other websites.
Once you have completed your research and found a market you like, oh and by the way if it has only taken you an hour to do this I would suggest you go back and dig a little deeper adding additional words to your research like “How To” to grow your keyword list even bigger. After all this is going to be a long-term business for you right!
Picking Your Domain Name And Hosting Account
You then need to register your domain name which is going to be under 20 letters long and it definitely is not going to look like this register-domain-name.com and it is also not going to have “best” or “my” or “AAA” it has to be something you can brand if need be and preferably something that is generic for your chosen niche. What hosting you want to use will be up to you but we use Hostgator Reseller Accounts so that we can also sell our domains a keep the hosting that site for a yearly fee.
The general idea here is to pick a domain name that allows you to promote more than one product you want to be able to promote many different products in a niche to be an actual success. If you are looking at only one product and register a specific domain name for that single product then you only have one income stream correct and if that product drops from be popular you have no income.
How To Choose The Right Domain Name
- How To Choose A Profitable Domain Name
- Why Your Domain Name Is Important
- Should You Use An Expired Domain Name
By using a domain name that is generic to the niche you not only have the chance to promote many products but you can also add and remove products as their popularity changes.
This is the first post in our series and in the coming weeks I will be posting more and more information and answering questions that are posted below on such things as where to get quality unique content for your affiliate sites, how to write articles to get the best SEO benefits, how to generate thousands of one way back links to your site, creating your own social media accounts as well as what tools we use to make all this fall into place fast without any “black hat tactics” or spamming social network sites. As well as any other questions you might have.
This is a series of tutorials that will be released slowly to our visitors and subscribers, out intention is to stay well clear of overloading you with too much information so you can research all the information that is supplied for yourself first before taking action. You shouldn’t just take this as gospel get out there use this as a reference and find the information you need to succeed.
Update 16th January 2014 – with so many changes within Google and the way they look at not just external links but internal as well it is now very advisable to focus most of your efforts on writing highly compelling content over wasting countless hours researching keywords. Another aspect that I believe has already changed is the importance of keywords in link text, my gut feeling is that soon Google will announce that they no longer what keywords used at all.
Our Next Lesson is Why Affiliates Need To Do Market Research
This is one of the most complete lists I’ve seen to affiliate marketing. I search the web for new ideas every day and must say you covered all the fundamental first steps. You should write this in an E-book.
.-= Saventa@Affiliate Marketing´s last blog ..Resell Rights – Make Money In The PLR Business =-.
Hi Saventa…
Thanks for the post, as for writing an e-book this is more of a passion where as I just write when I feel the urge to do so….
Affiliate Marketing is great if you can compile a large list of people who are interested.
Hi Clark,
You are not actually correct when saying that many subscribers today are just sick to death of getting offer after offer sent to them. You need to provide quality content on your site, build trust and then maybe send them information about a product or service that you use which of course has had good results.
Unlike many affiliate marketers today who set up a quick series of emails to get your trust then blast your inbox every day with offer after offer, I simply unsubscribe from these types of lists. This is something many new affiliates need to understand, this tactic has been over used and abused.
I would have never thought there was so much thought process going into affiliates. Because it seems that everyone is reverting to the internet as a mean of business- it’s also seems even harder to get off the ground and started. When trying to find a domain, what type of server do you recommend as a host? With the chances of succeeding, I don’t know if it’s worth the money to try with an already secure server, or start with something smaller like a shared host.
Hi Val
When I first started out into affiliate marketing I used nothing more than a shared hosting account. However as my business grew I found my sites were loading slower so I needed to upgrade to a dedicated server.
If you are only looking at one or two sites then I would recommend only using a shared hosting account, you need to keep your costs down when you first start out simply because you will have little to no income and if have to keep paying huge bills with no return that may cause your business to decline fast.
As for domain names, I totally understand your dilemma you can try buying an already existing domain name from Sitepoint where you can find some good bargains or use a free keyword tool to help you find and register a domain name that is related to your marketplace.
I was actually surprised it was as much as 1% making a living from clickbank!
I just found my mojo again reading your article. Thank you very much Ron!
Hi Richard, glad I could help…
In my experience, most affiliate programs don’t work because the returns on them are so low that it’s not commercially viable. You need money, time and more importantly, the right knowledge to generate quality traffic that will buy your offers. In order to make it commercially viable, it helps to join affiliate programs that pay big commissions and give you a high return so you can profit quickly and grow your business fast. Anything else is the slow road to failure so you need to make it profitable fast!
Hi Sunil
I would have to agree with you, however to sell big ticket items as an affiliate you really need to find the niche with-in the niche. This way you have eliminated most of the big competitors from the picture right from the start and you are now targeting a smaller group of people that are buyers not lookers. Once you start making sales in the sub niche you can then use some of those funds to try and improve your sites position and take on some of the bigger competitors.
With high priced items its not about how much traffic you get but the sales you get from that traffic. If for example you are selling something worth $1000 dollars and the commission to you is 25%, you only need a few sales to start seeing decent money.
You can also make good money with the smaller affiliate programs that only pay around $25 dollars but as you said you need to be working at it all the time and it can take a long time to get to the top where you can be making decent money. This is why many Clickbank affiliates fail, they enter a marketplace that competitive and saturated with review pages and sites that they never see any results for their efforts.