Why affiliates don’t need a website

Save on costs

The best thing about stating out in Affiliate marketing is you can do it without a website and avoid any start up costs at all. We will discuss exactly how in this article.

When you find your feet and begin to make a few sales and build up a bit of a bank you can expand your efforts. One way to expand is to get a website to add an extra facet to your promotional efforts.

Connect with your audience

Affiliate marketing is about making a connection with your audience. No matter which audience or niche market you choose to target.

Sure it helps to have a website. It will only add to your online presence. However there are other ways to build a profile online and get people to believe in what you have to say. And now in the age of Web 2.0 offering quality content and advice is the only way to make a good living online.

Web 2.0

You may have heard the term Web 2.0 and wondered what it means.

Basically it means version 2 of the internet. The old internet was static. Basically the webmaster would create a site with content for people to look at. People might come here to buy something or just get some useful information and click away from the site onto another static site. In essence, one way communication, from the webmaster to the website visitor.

Fast forward to now and the web, like anything, has evolved. Web 2.0 offers one great advantage. That is interactivity. All the new social media sites, blogs and forums that have sprung up over the last 2 or so years have given the internet a whole new way of sharing information. It is real time, viral and a very powerful concept.

Social Media

I’m sure you have all heard of facebook or twitter. Facebook and other sites (click here for a list) are a great tool for any affiliate marketer to start to build a profile online. All yon need to do is participate, grow your friends list and you can offer you opinion and insert your affiliate links directly to people who you know will be interested in them.

There are literally hundreds of these them have popped up over the pas couple of years and all of them have their uses. The trick is to find the ones that will service you best. Create a profile be active in them on a regular basis and in a short time people will begin to know and trust you. This will give you a great advantage when you try to sell them something.

Social media is a long term strategy. Don’t expect to join a dozen of these sites on day and see instant results. It will take time to build up relationships with people. Give it time to develop. Truth is it won’t seem like work. But the more you participate the stronger your relationship and online presence becomes. If you have something interesting to say people will find you on their own.

Squidoo

Squidoo is a godsend for affiliate marketers starting out. It’s like having a website without the cost involved.

That’s right it’s free and you can publish any of your own content and even make money directly from squidoo. You will need to sign up for an account and from there the sky is the limit. Talk about and promote whatever you like. Use this in conjunction with the social networking sites linking back to each other and you have a very powerful tool for promotion of your products.

You can build as many pages as you like on the same or different products. These pages get noticed by Google and all the other search engines and they can give you great traffic and exposure.

Forums

There are thousands of forums out there. About almost any subject you can think of. A great way to stamp your presence as an authority in your chosen niche is to regularly participate in these forums and offer real answers and quality feedback.

People will become to know you as an expert and trust what you have to say. Throw in a few affiliate links in the mix and you will be surprised at how many sales you can generate this way.

Best Affiliate Recourse

These are just a few of the methods that I have discovered and that worked for me when starting out affiliate marketing. They are a great starting point for any aspiring affiliate marketer.

One of the greatest resources I have found is Sean Rasmussen’s book, Year of the Affiliate. All of these strategies and more are covered in depth in the book. He gives step by step examples of how to implement all of these strategies. Well worth a read. His years of experience as a successful internet marketer are in the pages. It will save literally hundreds of hours of research and put you on the front foot.

As you can see I have implemented all of these techniques discussed in this article. Please click the follow me on twitter icon or digg icon on this page for a live example of how social media can work. See my profiles I set up long ago when I was starting out affiliate marketing. Join or follow me and I will follow you as well.

until next time
Lets make millions together.

Nickquinlan

Finding Affiliate Products

There are literally thousands of affiliate products that you can promote. The trick is finding the correct product or program to promote.

You can try to Google “find affiliate products” or any search of that nature. Problem is there are so many out there, this can be time consuming and you might not even find the right program for you. Fortunately there are a few sites that make it easy to navigate your way through the quagmire that is affiliate marketing.

Clickbank and Commission Junction are two of my favourites and I use them everyday. These sites are basically huge directories dedicated to helping affiliates find programs and products to sell and on the other hand they help publishers or vendors (the owners of the product) find affiliates to join their program.

Once you have a product to promote it is as easy as copying and pasting your hoplink all around the internet. Your hoplink is your digital signature that ensures you get paid for your referral or sale.

How to Find Affiliate Products

Clickbank

Clickbank boasts the largest array of digital products or e-books anywhere on the internet. And is one of the easiest ways to find affiliate products to sell.

You will need to sign up for an account with clickbank. It’s free to join and as soon as you do you will have access to thousands of e-books that you can begin promoting instantly.

So which one do you choose?

To find affiliate products that are right for you it is best to stick to what you know. Choose a topic that you have an interest in and have some knowledge about it.

Clickbank makes this easy as they categorise all their products and have a rating system to help potential affiliates locate the right fit and see how well it is selling.

Commission junction

Commission junction, like Clickbank is a directory of thousands of vendors and affiliate products. The difference is that most of affiliate products are physical items rather that digital e-books.

You will need to sign up for an account here too. Again it’s free and is a great resource to help you find affiliate products.

Finding affiliate products could not be easier at commission junction. The search feature allows you to search for specific advertisers, links and specific products. You can also just browse their entire directory to find affiliate products that you will be confident promoting.

Benefits of joining sites like these

There are many different reasons it is a good idea to sign up for these sorts of sites. Mainly they make it easy to promote many different products and keep an eye on your sales and traffic all in one place. Signing up to a lot of affiliate programs is not a bad idea just the more you join the more you can loose track of what you are doing. Clickbank and commission junction allow you to use one account to manage the selling of as many affiliate products as you can promote.

How to get paid

When you sign up to these sites they each have different methods of payment. Clickbank for instance pays by check twice monthly. As long as your account has enough activity and reaches a minimum payment threshold.

Commission junction has several ways you can choose to get paid. Like clickbank they will issue a check once you user defined minimum is reached or they will even pay straight into your bank account. This makes it much easier, they pay monthly.

Year of the Affiliate

I hope you have some insight and a place to start in finding affiliate products to promote. I learned these methods the long hard way. Searching the internet eventually finding these services.

A friend of mine and very successful internet marketer (Self made internet millionaire), Sean Rasmussen has recently written a book called Year of the Affiliate.

In this book he spells out these methods in great detail. I recently purchased the book and read it from cover to cover without outing it down. I wish I had this resource when I first started out. Read about Year of the Affiliate here.

]]> http://nickquinlan.com/2009/06/22/finding-affiliate-products-to-promote/feed/ 2 http://nickquinlan.com/2009/06/01/affiliate-marketing-explained/ http://nickquinlan.com/2009/06/01/affiliate-marketing-explained/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:31:25 +0000 Nick Quinlan http://nickquinlan.com/?p=40

Affiliate Marketing Explained

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. Weather you have your own product or not.

In basic terms affiliate marketing is becoming affiliated with another person or company and selling their product for them. After you have completed a sale for them your affiliate merchant (the company with the product) will pay you (the affiliate) a commission on each individual sale you make.

In order to explain affiliate marketing best, refer to the diagram below.

Affilliate Marketing Explained

Affiliate Marketing Explained

The merchant is the one with the product. The merchant can sell their product directly to the public and receive 100% of the profits. The merchant can also enlist the help of an affiliate and get them to market the product on their behalf.

You might ask why the merchant would want to do this and be cut out of so much of the profit. Well what if the merchant was to get 50 Affiliates to market their product for them. Their sales would be much higher right, and the Affiliates would be getting just reward for their efforts too. So it’s a win, win situation really.

And for internet beginners, affiliate marketing is the quickest and easiest method to start making money online.

Affiliates make money basically through commission on every sale they make, up to 75%.

There are several ways to go about promoting your affiliate efforts and I will spell them out on this blog over the coming weeks.

Advantages of Affiliate Marketing Explained

Zero Start-up Costs

A lot of people wonder how much money it takes to get started affiliate marketing. And the answer is zero. If you have a computer and access to the internet (if you’re reading this I assume you do) you are already set up and ready to go.

No Product, No Worries

You don’t need a product of your own to sell. This is definition of Affiliate marketing. You take someone’s already selling product and tell people about it. It’s that easy.

Further down the track when you are comfortable with marketing other peoples affiliate products you can develop your own product and get affiliates to market it for you.

No Website, No Worries

Now you might be thinking “I don’t know anything about building a website.” This is one of the things I love about affiliate marketing explained. You don’t even need a website. There are many free services that will get you on your way.

It is best to start with these and build your way up. As you go you will gain knowledge experience and then you can add the next method to your campaign. I will spell all of these methods out over the next few weeks in future posts. So don’t forget to subscribe to this blog through Google reader or via email and I will be spilling the beans regularly.

Some of the topics that I will be covering in the Affiliate marketing explained series include:

Finding Affiliate products to promote

• How to get paid
• Choosing the right affiliate product to market

Why you don’t need a website

What you can do with a website

• How to set up your first website

Free traffic sources including:

Article marketing.

Free Classified Sites

Squidoo

Social Networking Sites:

• Facebook
• Youtube
• Myspace
• Blog Catalog
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter

Plus More

All of these methods are free and can be leveraged in one way or another to make money as an affiliate marketer. I will show you how.

Each blog post will concentrate on one method and build on from the last one.

So don’t forget to subscribe and keep informed.

Until next time..

To your success

Nicholas Quinlan

Hi, my name is Nicholas Quinlan.

Welcome to my personal blog nickquinlan.com. Internet marketing and making money online is a passion of mine. I have had some success over a relatively short period of time, mostly through selling digital products as an affiliate marketer across several different niche markets. I have also tried my hand at drop shipping over the internet.

Here’s a short history of Nicholas Quinlan.

Now I already told you that one of my passions is making money online. The other great passion of mine is travel.

I was born in Australia in the small town of Bungaree in Victoria. I’ve lived in Canada, Greece and England and have travelled all over the world.

Some of the places I’ve been include North America, Mexico, and Central America, The UK, Ireland and almost all of the countries in Europe and Eastern Europe. I’ve also visited Thailand and the list goes on and I’ll probably never be finished.

After school I went to University and got myself a degree in IT, Mainly because of my love of computers and the internet. All the while I worked as a manager in the hospitality industry which I love.

This work gave me a great understanding of people and how easy it is to make them happy. Great friendly service is the key.

Once I had finished my degree I began work with a large company putting my skills to work. I always felt that that there was something missing. I guess I’m just not the type to be stuck behind a desk (the same desk) all day long, day in and day out. I was going stir crazy. So I packed up and went on the road.

I found myself in Canada. Where I could be outside in the nature, snowboard everyday and meet new people. I loved it. I took another job behind a bar and proceeded to have the greatest time ever. I didn’t want it to end.

I started to think of ways that I would be able to keep travelling without having to find a new job everywhere I went. That’s when my research into internet marketing began. Sure I have a degree in IT but I didn’t know anything about marketing. And guess what. All my computer knowledge means next to nothing in the world of internet marketing.

Through my research I found that even somebody with no knowledge of computers would be able to set up an affiliate marketing business.

I continued on my trip through North America and down through Mexico and Central America. All the while building my online presence. It took me a long time to learn some of the things I know about being an affiliate marketer. I did some things the hard way. There was a lot of trial and error involved.

I got my business to a stage that I was happy with. I was making enough money to travel around without having to find a job in any country I wanted to go to. The best thing about it was I could do it anywhere a wanted. Anywhere there is an internet connection of course.

I carried my laptop everywhere and worked form the beach in the Greek islands and in the cafes of Paris. I’ve worked from my flat in London. On the odd day with nice weather in London I moved my office to the park.

That’s the beauty of affiliate marketing and making money online. You are not tied to any one place of office and you don’t even need a physical product. You basically sell information, digital products. No need for a warehouse to hold your stock. Although you can do it this way if you wish through a method called drop shipping.

After doing a lot of travel I started to miss my family and being so far away so I decided to move back to Melbourne to be closer to them. I had a lot of friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time either.

I’ve been a professional internet marketer for a short time and have been growing my income all the time. I was looking for new products one day when I stumble across a site by two Aussie bloke’s names Sean and Shaun. They claimed to be internet marketing millionaires and they were putting on a seminar not far from my house in Melbourne. And they were inviting me to come.

So I thought why not? I might learn something from them. After all they have made millions doing the same thing I am trying to do. And boy, am I glad I went. It turned out the best thing I could have ever done.

Sean Rasmussen and Shaun Stenning are their names. They were true to their word and were in fact millionaires, all from online efforts. If only I had met them about 12 months earlier. They teach all the things I had learned through my own research and a whole lot more.

They are the reason I’ve started this blog. They have made millions as affiliate marketers and now want to give back and teach others how to do it. I think that’s a great idea. I haven’t made my first million yet but with a positive attitude, some luck and their help I’m sure I’m going to do it, sooner rather than later. Follow me and I’ll pass on every tip I know and everything I learn along the way.

We can all make millions, together.