How To Start An Affiliate Marketing Business

Maybe you have heard how easy it is to make a heap of money online fast… Or maybe you think you have some good ideas that will help you make some money through affiliate marketing.

Why Do You Want To Start An Affiliate Business?

No matter what your reason is for wanting to start an affiliate marketing business this article will address everything you need to know in simple and basic terms, that will get you started online as an affiliate.

You Have To Do Market Research First…

Before you ever decide to spend one cent on your affiliate marketing business your need to do your market research.

What do I mean by this?

Simply put you  need to have an idea of what it is that you want to market as an affiliate and also have knowledge about it so that you can, in the start up stages of your business write and manage content yourself without having to pay some one to do it for you.

You also need to do market research so that you can get an idea on what keywords people are using in your selected niche, how many competitors (websites) you will be going up against you might find this post useful – Make More Sales By Going Broad And Deep In Your Keyword Research.

Choosing Your Domain Name

You will notice that this is second on the list as it is of absolutely no use to you or your affiliate marketing business if you race out and register a domain before doing any market research. Your domain name will be the key to better search ranking and search terms as well as branding and the authority that your website will  receive.

As an example if you had a domain name registered as gokartracers.com but started to place content about water skiing you will find that you are going to struggle to get any visitors and you will never become an authority on either subject. Your goal here is to create a memorable keyword rich name that will give you long term results,

So to be effective with your domain name use your imagination choose your keywords wisely and you will find not only that you have just branded yourself on the internet but you will be seen as an authority on the subject as well. Stay away from hyphenated domain names and try to keep the domain name under 20 characters.

What Type Of Website Should You Use?

This is totally dependent on your own skill and knowledge when it comes to having to design a website. If you have no knowledge and have a budget I would suggest having a site designed for you. However there are also many places you can start that will not cost you any money such as WordPress which is what we use for its ease of use and the many plugins that are available to turn out very professional websites.

However once we started making money as an affiliate we purchased a theme from Studiopress and we also now use themes for other sites such as WP Spire that are very easy to manipulate to create the style and look that we want for that market place.

Also be mindful that if you want to look professional you will need some quality graphics for your site and this will cost you money regardless of which platform you decide to use.

If your affiliate business looks cheap then that will be the first impression that your visitors will get.

Adding Content To Your Affiliate Marketing Business

This is where many affiliates fail by not using quality content on there sites. What they actually do is just write product review after product review hyping up everything that will offer them a commission. Or grab articles from other sites and hope that they can get indexed (This comes back to the fast money mentality).

This not only reduces their life span online but gives other affiliates a very bad name as well.

Make sure everything you are writing about on your site is useful to your site visitors. This will ensure that they return which is also good for search engine rankings and will build trust as an affiliate marketer in the eyes of your visitors.

If you have chosen a topic that you are passionate about then writing the content should be easy for you and with your market research already completed you should be able to strategically place your keywords throughout your site content again giving you more appeal to the search engines.

Promoting Your Affiliate Marketing Business Effectively

Once you have covered everything above it is now time to start promoting your site and if you have decided on a blog platform you can immediately start publishing your site feed to the many RSS services online. You might find this useful Promoting Your Money Sites

If you have taken the static html path this gets a little more time consuming as you are now going to have to write quality articles and place in article directories where they can then be submitted to the many bookmarking sites without it looking as if you are doing this your self. For more on this see our post on Article Marketing That Will Dominate Your Competitors Fast.

You can even contact other webmasters to see if you can place articles on their sites or even exchange links. Start up a twitter account and tell everyone about any new content you have written about. Remembering all the time that what ever you are putting out there needs to be useful and not spam in any way.

How To Use Email Email Marketing Effectively

This is another area online that seems to get abused constantly by affiliates and can really hurt your affiliate marketing business. You do need to have an opt-in list on your site, you do need to be sending out helpful information, and you do need to gain the trust of your subscribers.

You do not send out promotion after promotion that doing nothing more than annoying your subscriber. You do not entice your subscribers to opt-in under false pretenses. Check out our post on Email Marketing Getting The Most Benefit For Your Affiliate Marketing Business.

These are just some of the Affiliate Marketing Business tips that you really need to consider before you jump in head first. Nothing that we mentioned above is hard to do you just need the right resources and information to get started.

You can either post you questions here or on our Ask Your Affiliate Marketing Questions post where we will answer every and any question we receive on starting an affiliate marketing business.