Guide To Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a wonderful beast. It can allow you to earn vast sums. But gone are the days of being able to set up 100,000 page site in a lunch time and 48 hours you'll be doing $20k a month from it on AdSense.

I loved those days for that exact reason. It was fairly easy to make large sums without a huge amount of effort.

Today, Google has rightly made it much harder to game the system. The only issue now is that it appears too hard for new people to break into the industry without huge sums to invest in content creation, technology and PPC.

Niches always used to work well. But now it is the age of the affiliate niche. You not only have to work hard to build up your online social connections and content, but you have to be so savvy to the tricks of other affiliates, the goals and objectives of networks but you also have to spot great Account Managers and work hard with them.

Affiliate marketing has really turned into a team effort. You'll always get "bad apples" but, all in all, there some great people to help you make your way in affiliate marketing.

How would I start out, if I had to today?
I'd start blogging on a niche, something I knew very well. I'd not even think about monetising it as you can always do it with Adsense and Amazon.

Just concentrate on communicating about the topic, find news sources and get them sent to you via email so there's always something to comment on.

Have a dabble, play around, see what starts to work and build on it.

You could always see what's coming on in the future and get in there early.

Don't make the mistake that I've often made and that is see too many opportunities and try and benefit from all of them. From my early dealings with Amway with my ex-girlfriend's family they always said focus on one thing and give your best. That is something you should definitely do in affiliate marketing. Give your all and do it well.

Another affiliate marketing tip would be to make sure that you track all your sales. You need to know which keywords are working and which pages drive traffic. Get Google Analytics installed and make sure you learn your user's profile inside-out.

Also, don't be afraid to make mistakes or stand up for what you believe. I do both regularly. Making mistakes is a bi-product of success. Failures make less mistakes than successful people because they give up earlier!

When you've got one niche working and you've got traffic from registering with directories and other related sites look at your near-neighbourhoods - niches that are related to your speciality and build a blog/site in that niche and continue to expand and re-invest.

Also learn who to trust. There are some that will offer advice, but work out if they do have your best interests at heart!

All in all, there are advantages and disadvantages of getting into affiliate marketing now. With social media easing your route-to-market you don't even need to be technical to make money. The difficulty, however, is that there is huge competition with big money to invest in niches. You have to be more clever than technical!

Good luck, and enjoy the industry! Don't do evil ;-)

You may want to read some of these posts of mine about affiliate marketing:

• Brand Bidding / Agencies / Networks: The Inconvienient Truth?
• Another Look At Brand Name Bidding
• Meet The Network: Search Logic
• Meet The Network: dgm
• Meet The Network: Webgains
• What Will
• Affiliate Marketing Be Like In 5 Years?
• Affiliate Summit Caption Competition
• Must Have Affiliate Tool Launches - Compete
• My Take On The Merchants Survey Report 2007
• Affiliate Tip of the Week; Don't Forget Your Old Sites
• Affiliate Future "Do" at Camelot Theme Park
• Affiliate Marketing Books From Amazon
• Beating Affiliate Apathy
• 10 Top Tips: Successful Affiliate Marketing During a Recession
• Buy.at Content Engine - Making Active Content Creation As Easy As ...
• What Do You Need To Be a Successful Affiliate? The Ten Traits
• And Why I'm Back
• Why I Effectively Left Affiliate Marketing
• Affiliate Classroom Magazine
• How the Affiliate Marketing Industry Killed Itself...
• 3 Reasons to Avoid Affiliate Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing - The Way Forward - Comparison Sites Out
• What are the 5 Most Common Affiliate Mistakes?
• Why I Wasn't At The Affiliate G2G - Good Reason
• At Last Some Sense In An Affiliate Article
• How to Benefit Most When Choosing an Affiliate Program - Started So Well
• Complete Rubbish About Affiliate Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing Conference - A4UExpo
• Don't Forget Your Old Sites
• Are UK Affiliates Being Pushed Out?
• Apologies to Affiliate Window
• My Take On The Affiliate Census
• Dissecting Affiliate Marketing
• Merchants: Keep your site updated (Annoyance #1)