5 Crucial Steps to Building a Highly Successful Affiliate Business
Have you ever wished there were a real, honest-to-goodness easy way to make money online, even if you’re brand new? Everybody wishes that when they’re just starting, and I have good news as I am going to share with you the 5 crucial steps to building up a successful affiliate business.
1. Find a hot market.
The first step is to find a hot, profitable market. This market will be your niche and will form the basis of your first affiliate business.
In order to sell a product, you need to have a buyer. So, you want to find a market with lots of buyers first, and the only way to do this is through market research.
Of course, most of the time, you can probably guess what the profitable products are, however you also need to where you fit in that market.
The market selection process starts with you. First of all, you must examine your areas of knowledge, and the things that you are highly passionate about.
Following that, focus on providing information on your niche area as information products are the most popular online. The next thing to do is to go to websites that sell information – namely, Amazon and ebay. Find out through the sites’ search engines on what kind of information pertaining to your niche area is the most popular in these websites.
2. Find products for that market
Since affilliate products are your cash generators, it is very important that you choose your products wisely.
The main criterion to choosing a good product is its conversion rate. It simply means how many visitors out of 100 bought the product. If you take a product Clickbank.com, you will see a figure highlighting the gravity (“grav”) of the product. The figure refers to how well the product is converting for affiliates, as it is a measure of how many sales have been referred by affiliates. The higher the gravity number, the better the product is converting.
Also, look to the left of the gravity number at the % referred. In this case, you can see that 84% of sales for this product have been referred by affiliates.
There is another reason why this information is important,and it also points to the 2nd criteria to use in selection an affiliate program :
Make sure the merchant is not competing aggressively with his or her affiliates.
It is quite impossible for me to give you a thorough education on clickbank through this article. If you are interested in knowing more, you can visit my author’s bio.
3. Register Your Own Market-Generic Domain Name
In order to set up your affiliate business, you will need to get a market-generic domain name. A market-generic domain name as defined by Ewen Chia means any domain you can come up with that uses market specific keywords in the name. For example, if you are going to market a photography ebook for newbies, you may wish to register a domain like “bestphotographybookfornewbies.com”.
The reason you want a generic domain name is so that you can market a variety of products with different titles. Also, using related keywords can help your site fare better in search engine rankings.
4. Create your own opt-in page
Always remember this. Your business lies in the list. It is not sufficient to just have a good website that converts visitors to customers. You got to have a mean of retaining visitors who do not purchase from you from the very first visit. Build up a relationship with these visitors by sending them regular free information on their interest area (that’s pertaining to your website).
Therefore, it is important that you should have your autoresponder account. An autoresponder account creates the HTML form for you to capture the vital data that you wish to retain of all the visitors to your website, namely their email addresses and first names. An autoresponder account also allows you to send follow-up message to your opt-in list at stipulated dates or timings to strengthen or enhance the relationships with them.
One point to note is that you should never never stinge on the subscription fee to an autoresponder account. If you are thinking of signing up for free autoresponder accounts, forget about it. Free autoresponder accounts only flood your websites with ads and that is how these autoresponder companies survive – through the ad fees paid by the advertisers.
5. Drive Market-Specific Traffic to Your Website
The knowledge that you have of your market will come in handy this time round. You will utilise this knowledge into a traffic generation campaign that utilizes:
a. Articles to ’steal’ search engine traffic
b. Pay-per-click advertising
c. Message boards and groups
d. Social networking
e. Blogs
The great thing is that virtually all of these targeted traffic methods we’ll be looking at are free. The only method requiring a real budget will be your pay-per-click campaigns, and even these can be done cheaply.
Now before we conclude this long look at the affiliate marketing system, I’d like to share some final thoughts with you about the internet business, and what you need to keep in mind no matter which money-making system you use.
I sincerely believe one of THE most important factors to your success is consistency.
By this I mean consistency of both your thoughts and your actions. You see, making money on the Internet is really pretty easy once you know what to do. Anyone can hand you a working blueprint, and the tools for your business. But once you have got a model, you got to stick with it.
Thou Shalt Prosper!
By: Tim Ng
About the Author:
1. Find a hot market.
The first step is to find a hot, profitable market. This market will be your niche and will form the basis of your first affiliate business.
In order to sell a product, you need to have a buyer. So, you want to find a market with lots of buyers first, and the only way to do this is through market research.
Of course, most of the time, you can probably guess what the profitable products are, however you also need to where you fit in that market.
The market selection process starts with you. First of all, you must examine your areas of knowledge, and the things that you are highly passionate about.
Following that, focus on providing information on your niche area as information products are the most popular online. The next thing to do is to go to websites that sell information – namely, Amazon and ebay. Find out through the sites’ search engines on what kind of information pertaining to your niche area is the most popular in these websites.
2. Find products for that market
Since affilliate products are your cash generators, it is very important that you choose your products wisely.
The main criterion to choosing a good product is its conversion rate. It simply means how many visitors out of 100 bought the product. If you take a product Clickbank.com, you will see a figure highlighting the gravity (“grav”) of the product. The figure refers to how well the product is converting for affiliates, as it is a measure of how many sales have been referred by affiliates. The higher the gravity number, the better the product is converting.
Also, look to the left of the gravity number at the % referred. In this case, you can see that 84% of sales for this product have been referred by affiliates.
There is another reason why this information is important,and it also points to the 2nd criteria to use in selection an affiliate program :
Make sure the merchant is not competing aggressively with his or her affiliates.
It is quite impossible for me to give you a thorough education on clickbank through this article. If you are interested in knowing more, you can visit my author’s bio.
3. Register Your Own Market-Generic Domain Name
In order to set up your affiliate business, you will need to get a market-generic domain name. A market-generic domain name as defined by Ewen Chia means any domain you can come up with that uses market specific keywords in the name. For example, if you are going to market a photography ebook for newbies, you may wish to register a domain like “bestphotographybookfornewbies.com”.
The reason you want a generic domain name is so that you can market a variety of products with different titles. Also, using related keywords can help your site fare better in search engine rankings.
4. Create your own opt-in page
Always remember this. Your business lies in the list. It is not sufficient to just have a good website that converts visitors to customers. You got to have a mean of retaining visitors who do not purchase from you from the very first visit. Build up a relationship with these visitors by sending them regular free information on their interest area (that’s pertaining to your website).
Therefore, it is important that you should have your autoresponder account. An autoresponder account creates the HTML form for you to capture the vital data that you wish to retain of all the visitors to your website, namely their email addresses and first names. An autoresponder account also allows you to send follow-up message to your opt-in list at stipulated dates or timings to strengthen or enhance the relationships with them.
One point to note is that you should never never stinge on the subscription fee to an autoresponder account. If you are thinking of signing up for free autoresponder accounts, forget about it. Free autoresponder accounts only flood your websites with ads and that is how these autoresponder companies survive – through the ad fees paid by the advertisers.
5. Drive Market-Specific Traffic to Your Website
The knowledge that you have of your market will come in handy this time round. You will utilise this knowledge into a traffic generation campaign that utilizes:
a. Articles to ’steal’ search engine traffic
b. Pay-per-click advertising
c. Message boards and groups
d. Social networking
e. Blogs
The great thing is that virtually all of these targeted traffic methods we’ll be looking at are free. The only method requiring a real budget will be your pay-per-click campaigns, and even these can be done cheaply.
Now before we conclude this long look at the affiliate marketing system, I’d like to share some final thoughts with you about the internet business, and what you need to keep in mind no matter which money-making system you use.
I sincerely believe one of THE most important factors to your success is consistency.
By this I mean consistency of both your thoughts and your actions. You see, making money on the Internet is really pretty easy once you know what to do. Anyone can hand you a working blueprint, and the tools for your business. But once you have got a model, you got to stick with it.
Thou Shalt Prosper!
By: Tim Ng
About the Author:
Tim Ng is a seasoned affiliate marketer and a student of Ewen Chia – “the World’s Top Affiliate Marketer”. Tim frequently guides people in internet marketing forums on how to make money through affiliate marketing. For more information, do refer to http://www.wealthtreasure.com
Tags: Affiliate Business, Conversion Rate, Honest To Goodness