How To Start Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Are you looking at getting into the affiliate marketing business?

Do you believe this is the road to quitting your day job and making a heap of money really fast. If this is you then you should consider another career because you are looking at the affiliate marketing business model the wrong way.

However if you are looking at building a strong and reputable affiliate marketing business that will be trusted by your readers then this is the information you have been looking for.

Steps To Start An Affiliate Marketing Business

Market research is basically the first step you need to do, not just with an affiliate marketing business but any online business you wish to be involved in. You need to do this so that you can have an understanding of your market and what keywords you will be looking at targeting.

With market research you have a few options when it comes to selecting which tools work best.

We use a keyword tool called Market Samurai, however when first starting out all we had at our disposal was the free keyword tools such as the Google free keyword tool and the free Wordtracker tool.

By doing this research, and this is before doing anything else you will be able to then choose a domain name for your site and suitable hosting package. Yes we are actually talking about building your own site not using free services such as Squidoo or Hubpages as they have a very limited benefit to you as an affiliate marketer.

By having your own site with its very own domain name and email address where you can actually be contacted will go along way to giving your credibility with your affiliate marketing business and especially for those involved in the affiliate marketing business.

I can’t tell you how many times I have seen an affiliate build a successful business on a free hosting service only to find that it gets shut down or the terms of services change, which results in them losing all that hard work.

You need to be thinking long term and constantly building your business to be successful with affiliate marketing. I am not talking about building an email list and then sending email after email promoting products that you have never even seen or used.

OK Lets Take A Step Back Here..

With your market research it is practical for you to find a niche you are comfortable with, not one where you think you can make thousands of dollars instantly. As an example to this, here is an email that I received just the other day form someone who wants to start an affiliate marketing business…

I’ve decided to become a successful affiliate marketer. However, being in the very early stage of setting up, my first challenge seems to be to choose a good domain name. I have read the information on your website and I’ve downloaded Domain Samurai. It’s all good, but how does one choose what to focus on. If I choose a name that focuses on some specific product type then I would need a different site for each type.

If I choose something general, just a name, then nobody will know what it stands for.

Any guidance would be great.

Here Was My Reply..

Yes this is something that slows most affiliates, however the first thing we need to determine is what are you passionate about or have the ability to write about?

Once we determine that, we will know where to look to find a domain name and when saying that it is not always about chasing the money. As an example my very first website which I created back in 2001 was on baby showers, I had no idea about baby showers and it was a really hard struggle to get content, so much so that I had to pay ghost writers to do all the content work for me.

Send me your interests or what market you think you would like to get involved in and I will take a look for you, another aspect to look at before registering is are there any affiliate offers you can present in that niche, and what is the return on your time as well as the commission you receive.

A low commission rate means that you are going to need more sales which equates to lots of traffic, higher commission means not as much traffic but may be more competition.

And Here Is Another I Received Just This Morning

hello! I just started an affiliate marketing business and I was wondering if its possible from me to earn 55k this year? with about 20 hours of productive hard work.

Here Was My Reply

Yes this is possible, however this is going to depend on the product your are marketing and also the traffic that your website is receiving.

However in this last email you can plainly see that the focus is on the money and not the quality of the product being offered or service to the site visitors. Focus on providing quality information and the money will follow.