Many people start out trying to make money online through affiliate marketing, but unfortunately most people lack a reliable affiliate marketing strategy – a “plan of action” that they can follow (and more importantly .. stick to!)
If you are going into any kind of business, whether it be online or offline, a plan is absolutely essential if you want to increase your chances of succeeding.
So before you do anything else, I want you to ask this question of yourself…
What’s YOUR Affiliate
Marketing Strategy??
Unfortunately, I see far too many people desperately trying to make a few extra bucks online and failing miserably.
This isn’t always the fault of the affiliate marketer … It’s often the fault of the person “teaching” them.
How many times have you seen a clickbank product with an affiliate tools page that just gives you a link and tells you to “use it” and you’ll make hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in commissions?
Sounds easy, huh?
If you want to give yourself the best chance of success, you need to sit down and think through your process before you waste time sending spam emails to friends and family, trying to convince them to buy the next big thing.
Here are a few things to consider …
1) What market are you going to promote? Is it a market you know about and can write about?
2) What product are you going to promote? Does it have a professional appearance, a record of good conversions, and good reviews online?
3) Are you going to do a direct promotion? You should consider sending traffic first to one of your squeeze pages so you can build a list and follow up with your leads.
4) How are you going to drive traffic? Are you going to use pay per click (Google Adwords) or are you going to focus on getting free traffic to your website?
Plan Your Way To
Affiliate Marketing Success…
It may not sound very ‘sexy’ or fun, but developing a good affiliate marketing strategy is not only going to give you a better chance of actually making money, it’s also going to make it easier for you to work.
Once you have a set of instructions or blueprints to follow, you no longer waste time sitting at your computer, wondering what to do.
Remember, if you want this to be a successful business you have to treat it like a business – and that may mean coming up with your own business plan.
If you find difficulty doing this, imagine that you were going into see your bank manager to ask for a loan.
This is a great excercise because it FORCES you to think in terms of having a real business. After all, would you go into a bank, looking for a business loan to just “sell stuff”? 
Affiliate marketing *is* a great way to make money online. Even as a product owner myself, I put a lot of focus on promoting other products as an affiliate, but you need to know how, what, where and why you’re promoting a particular product.
What Are YOUR Favorite
Affiliate Marketing Tips?
One of the reasons I enjoy writing and sharing content like this is I know I’m helping people get over many of the hurdles with starting online.
But if YOU have your own suggestions or comments to share with others, whether tips and tricks, or things you are doing, feel free to share them using the comment box below.
They say two heads are better than one … so imagine what 10, 20 or even 100 heads could come up with!
To YOUR Success,
— UPDATE —
I just watched this free video on a really cool technique for making more money with affiliate promotions (or even your own products). It is a “pre-launch” video for a product but the free content is REALLY good and something that you can start applying today. Click the link below to watch it …
Hi Richard, What’s holding me back is =
When you buy a Domain, then get it Hosted, how do you acess the Domain( Which of course has nothing whatsoever in it) using Cpanel Manager.
How do I get Folders and Files into the Domain.
Hope you can advise me and Thank you
Jim Wallworth
Rich
I have seen that video a couple of days ago and had the same feeling as you did. I think everyone should take the time to watch it. It is an excellent tool to add to your affiliate or internet marketing tool box. The triangle theory match a lot of sense.
Thanks Rich
Rich
Sorry. — The last line should say ‘makes’ a lot of sense not ‘match’.
Thanks Rich
Nice post. You definitely must have a game plan before starting online.
Tip: Market your products to “targeted customers”.
Example: If your selling shoes, don’t buy 100,000 guaranteed leads…who knows what the are looking for?
Do
– write articles about shoes and establish authority and credibilty (link to your site in resource box)
– pay per click
– create a blog to help build your list
– put ads in classifieds in right category (recommend USFree Ads – they rank well in search engines)
There are plenty more strategies to get targeted customers. Remember, always do your keyword research before doing the above.
Good luck!
Straight to the point!
I guess we have all spent a fair amount of time just staring at the monitor with little, or no idea of what needs to come next.
I have found that a good mind-mapping program can be extremely useful when laying out a marketing plan. It gets it all arranged neatly before making the first step.
A great free one is FreeMind and you can get it here:
http://www.freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download
Have a great day
Mike
Hey Richard,
Great article, I feel one of the biggest problems is not having a plan for one and also not treating it like a business but more like a hobby. You must be consistent with your marketing efforts.
Travis
You must treat an online business like a business and you should have your own marketing plan to implement. You need to set your short,middle and long term goal to achieve.
Focus on the plan and commit to iy. Never give up even you didn’t get any result at the beginning. Online business can’t make you rich overnight! You need to be patience and continuous learning is vital to learn the new skills to compete in the competitive environment.
You need to provide valuable and constructive solution to your visitors. Email marketing is play an important role to build the relationship with your visitors. Once you have built the trust with them, the money will automatically come to you!
To your success,
Bryan Hee
Thanks for information that helps people like me that don’t know what the hank they’re doing.
Happy to give this post a link back from mine as you have the right approach and hit a nail on the head as far as I am concerned. Thankyou.
I came here in my research and just had to say I like what I found. Thanks.
I would suggest that you invest in your marketing education first. You can go to your local library if you have limited funds. You can also invest in some E-Books on Affiliate Marketing online as well as thru amazon.com
… and this investment in education is just for start, the real lessons on how to earn responsible money online come from life. That’s my conclusion. I bought few courses, worded it out, worked again… huh?
You are right. I’ve been struggling for 3 weeks now and My income = $00000000.00
I’ve invested more than $2000.00 buying junk from gurus and worst still I only sleep after 4am. I’m going crazy now! I know there are LOTS of money to be made but HOW? ~Scratching~ HEAD~
What gets me ranked on Google really fast is pretty easy. Get four 1000 word articles written and link them to your site using the anchor text that you are trying to target. Next for each four of those web 2.0 sites I build 5 more sites linking to each of the original web 2.0 sites. To top it all off I use a article submission software called article blueprint and I submit articles to each of those 20 sites. If the keyword is hard to rank for I will use the four original web 2.0 sites and I will make four different link wheels and link one spoke to each link wheel to the next link wheel. Once I get ranked I use a blog network called blog blueprint and I just build back links until it is in the number one position. This works really good and will get you ranked for many keywords. Anything you think I should do differently to improve this Richard?
This post really nailed the problem I’m facing right now. It’s true affiliate marketing is the easiest way to make money, but most people mess up or don’t stay in this business in the long-run is because they don’t have a fail-proof strategy.