October 28, 2012 by akhilendra

Affiliate Marketing- Can You Make Money Online?

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Affiliate marketing is the buzzword and it has been same for a while now. Human desire to make money and that too, make money online, is as erotic as it gets.

The primary reason affiliate marketing is so popular because it is the easiest and best method to make money online from a blog or a site. But as it is not as easy as it sounds but due to the general perception, everybody seems to be jumping on it. Now there is nothing wrong with it, what wrong is, is the logic used by most of the JUMPERS.

Let’s look at the reason why people want to do affiliate marketing or make money online;

• They believe it’s free.
• They believe it works on autopilot and they don’t have to do anything.

These are the only reasons why so many people are attracted towards it and failing consistently.

Yes, affiliate marketing is for everyone but believing that you can make money (in huge amount) without investing anything in it or putting any hard work, is simply ridiculous.

Affiliate Marketing-Make Money Online

Every business requires investment and more than that, it requires;

1. Persistency
2. Skills
3. Hard work
4. Innovation

Just because wordpress is free, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to put anything else in it and you can just make money with any kind of blog or website.

So if you are not ready to invest in your blog and work hard to succeed it, I don’t think there is any point you reading beyond this point.

And if you are ready, then let rock together and see “how to make money with affiliate marketing?”

What is affiliate marketing?

First question first, what is affiliate marketing? Let’s see what Wikipedia has to say about this;

“Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’), and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third party vendors.”

Type of affiliate marketing programs

1. Pay per sale
2. Pay per click
3. Pay per lead

So in short, you are going to promote other’s product and you will be paid when someone buy from your link.

Why affiliate marketing is so good?

Affiliate marketing has emerged the primary method of making money online. Now let’s see why it is so popular;

• No need to create product.
• No infrastructure requirement which are generally required to support a product.
• No cost involved.
• No hassle of handling customers and employees.
• Consistent income.
• No fees.
• Ease of joining of affiliate programs.

Mother of all reasons

• Work from home

Affiliate marketing Tips to Make Money

Setting up a blog is easy but you cannot expect it to convert without any reason. You need to set up a dynamic blog to which should be appealing to your visitors.

Everything should be at place to drive them to take decision. Set a simple, clean and attractive blog using premium wordpress themes to make it unique.

Invest in your blog’s infrastructure like using hosting services and quality plugins to power it.

You must have quality plugins for;

• Social sharing
• Page speed
• Image optimization
• Email opt-in form plugins
• Plugins to encourage visitors to comment on your blog
• Cloak and manage affiliate links
• Keyword research plugin
• On page optimization plugin
• Seo plugin

Remember, if you don’t use high quality plugins then they may adversely impact the performance of your blog.

Recommended themes to set up a nice, seo friendly blog with clean design and easy navigation;

1. Elegant themes
2. Studiopress themes
3. Thesis theme
4. Affilotheme

Recommended plugins to set up a dynamic blog to support everything for your blog;

1. Commentluv
2. Covert Copy Traffic
3. SEOPressor
4. WPSubscribers
5. Keyword Winner
6. Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate
7. All in One SEO WordPress plugin
8. Easy adsense
9. Google XML Sitemaps
10. WP Robots Txt
11. Subscribe To Comment Reloaded
12. Twitter Facebook Social Share
13. WPTouch
14. Ad Square Widget
15. WP Super Cache
16. WP Smush.it
17. P3 Plugin Performance Profiler

Good and reliable hosting service so that your blog is not down when your visitor visit it, most economical and reliable web hosts are;

1. Hostgator
2. Godaddy

Now once your blog is ready, we need to follow following guidelines to pick and promote affiliate products.

• Choose few products to promote.
• Before finalizing the product, do a market research to gauge to the demand and see if people are ready to pay for it.
• Pick good products
• Use diverse traffic source for promotion like seo, social media marketing and referral traffic from other traffic source.
• Use Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate to cloak your affiliate links and manage your affiliate campaigns.

If you are absolute newbie then I will suggest you to step back and think again about it.

There is nothing which can make you money without investment or no efforts.

But if you are still interested in this, then you are better of with some soul searching before you jump into it.

Affiliate marketing course for absolute beginners who want to quickly make money;

• Gsniper2
• Work From No Home

Recommended Ebooks for blogging and affiliate marketing;

Blogging Tips: Confession of a six figure blogger by Zac Johnson

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income By Darren Rowse & Chris Garrett

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is not easy and it is impossible to make money online if you continue to believe that you can make money online without using adequate resources and working hard with dedication. And if you are skeptical about it, then you should take your time, sleep over it and then decide yourself. It worth investing time and money into it if you take it seriously and follow basic steps outlined above.

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