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One way of making money from home is as a affiliate marketer. An affiliate
marketer is someone who earns a commission by driving web traffic to the
website of a company selling a product or service. Affiliate marketing is a
great small work-at-home business that costs next-to-nothing to start and
operate. Another great attribute is that it's scalable. You start small, yet
you can grow it into a business that can earn you thousands of dollars per week. The hardest part is the start. Like all beginners, you don't have the knowledge you need to make a go of it. You wonder how it works, what affiliate programs you should promote, and how to maximize your income -- preferably as quickly as is possible. That's why you're reading this article. You want to learn more. Here are four important tips you need to know before you get started in affiliate marketing. Tip number 1: Own your own websiteYou have to have a website. Yes, there are schemes that some people are flogging saying you can make money without owning a website but that's like building a house on sand in a floodplain. It'll work, but only for a short time. A website is the foundation of your online business, and as such, it needs to be of good quality and reputation. If your website is poorly conceived and executed, people won't bother hanging around checking out the products that you're promoting. They will go somewhere else. Don't just throw together a website and hope for the best. Make it look appealing, make it interesting, and make it helpful to the people coming to visit. If a person likes a site, they'll explore it, giving you a greater likelihood of someone clicking through to an affiliate offering.While it's possible to get free webhosting through Wordpress or Weebly, you might be better off getting an interesting (and memorable) domain name and hosting your website with an inexpensive webhost company. What you want from a webhost company is reputation and reliability. Tip number 2: Excellent contentThis tip goes hand-in-hand with the first tip. In order to make your website interesting, you need to provide interesting, informative, well-written content. High quality content will get visitors to explore the site. To hang around. It will also make them more likely to click on the product offers you present.Providing good information, in original (not spun!) articles, will make you appear to be somewhat of an expert in that particular field. If people think that you have expertise, they will respect you, and will be more likely to follow your advice. Including any recommendations regarding products and services. Such as the ones you're promoting. Tip number 3: Improve participation ratesOne of the powerful emotions in people is loyalty. All of us are loyal to a particular philosophy, a particular set of views and opinions. All of us feel a degree of loyalty to certain political leaders, or political parties, or sports teams and heroes. If you are fiercely loyal, you will tend to persist in hoping or believing in those things that you are loyal to, regardless the current circumstances.You need to create a sense of loyalty in your visitors. There are tens of thousands of people just like you who are striving to get ahead through affiliate marketing. If you don't create a feeling of loyalty in your visitors, what's to stop them from going to a competitor's website and poke around there? You must translate the reputation that you create (as discussed in the second tip) into loyalty. A person will automatically feel a sense of loyalty if they feel appreciated. That's why all email spam starts with "Dear Friend" or even your first name. The "friendliness" exhibited in the greeting will help cause you to be more open to the offer. I'm not saying that you should spam -- there should be a special place in Hell for spammers. My point is that you need to create a sense of appreciation in your website's visitors. An easy way is to increase their participation rate. Don't just have them visit, read, then leave. Offer them an opportunity to join a maillist or online discussion group where beginners questions can be asked and answered. A maillist or discussion group develops a sense of community in its participants. A sense of community leads to loyalty, which should lead to increased sales and revenue. Another easy way to increase a feeling of appreciation is to provide incentives. Offer a free gift, such as free software or free ebooks, if they sign up for the email list or newsletter. People like getting free stuff. And if you don't end up flooding their email boxes with offers and promos, you'll instill in them the loyalty that will help your business thrive. Tip number 4: Develop link popularityIn order to create loyal visitors, you need to attract people to your website. The excellence of your content and word-of-mouth from your loyal followers will help immensely, but the best way of getting more first-time visitors to your site is by getting the search engines to send them to you.One of the key ways of getting a higher placement on a search engine is by building incoming links. One of the ingredients that the search engines use to rank your website is by counting the number of webpages that link back to your site. While link popularity isn't as important as it used to be, having been superseded by other factors, such as domain authority, it is the easiest to improve. And while you can always buy links from other websites, the search engines frown upon such a practice. The easiest way to link build is through article marketing. You write a really good article, include your link in the resource box, then submit it to ezines and free article directories. This will increase your website's exposure, and it will increase the number of links coming into your site. The more genuine links you have, the higher in the rankings your site will be. The higher the ranking, the greater the number of visitors. Remember, it is your visitors who make you the money. Value them, respect them, and draw them in. That should be enough to get you started. |