ClickBank is a great place for affiliates

By Stu Sensei

Too many times, beginners get caught up with purchasing the latest ‘shiny new object’ when all they really need is to learn the basics first. They try to make money with the latest Facebook App or the latest WP plugin before they even get a simple website up and traffic.Internet marketing is not a race. Although you might feel like you need or should be making money fast. Believe it or not (and ask anyone) it takes time and a lot of hard work.

Start with learning the basics. Learn to walk before you run. You’ll be able to go far with just some simple website building and marketing skills. Here is a simple lesson about the basics of creating an internet business and online marketing. Learning these skills, you can build yourself a successful internet business.

Step 1. Find or create a product you want to sell online.

This can be a product you’ve created or someone elses you can promote as an affiliate. Ultimately, you should be aiming to create a product of your own. I love and recommend the digital info-product business. It’s how I make 95% of my money online and it’s awesome because it’s 99% fully automatic. No shipping, no products to constantly create. I get paid instantly and my customers download it anytime like clockwork – even when I’m asleep.

Digital products are easy and cheap to create too. Ebooks, audios, articles, videos, graphics, templates, software – these are all examples of hot selling digital products. And once you make them, you can sell them over and over again. Find what people want to buy and create a simple digital product about it. Internet millionaires have been made by following this simple business model.

Don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise. You need a website if you want to be a successful online marketer.

I know newbies get hung up on website set up because of the find it difficult to learn the technical stuff like FTP, domain names, hosting and Autoresponder systems etc. but it’s this basic skill that once you learn, you’ll be able to use to take your internet business far.

To sell your product, set up a website, write a sales letter and place your order button on it. Copywriting is also one of those important fundamental skills you need to learn to be successful as an online marketer. If you really want to get rich, learn tobecome a good copywriter!

If you’re selling online as an affiliate, create a website centered around that particular niche and position yourself as an expert in that field. Using WordPress makes it easy and quick to build an affiliate site. If you have good helpful content and can build solid traffic to that site using SEO and/or viral marketing, you can make money from recommended products on your site.

List building/marketing is a proven strategy for making sales on demand. It’s easy to build a list at your blog or on your sales letter. Use a pop-up, embed your opt-in form in the web  page itself, or use a squeeze page. When you build a list, you can follow up with your subscriber and recommend products to them -yours and others’ as an affiliate.

This will only work if you’re selling your own product or a product you have resell rights to. There are several sales and download management software scripts you can install on your website that will automate the whole sales and delivery of your digital products.

I like and use the RAP script because it has a ton of features like:

* instant payments to affiliates,
* auto-optin of your customer to your autoresponder,
* multi-product management from one domain, etc.

RAP isn’t not the cheapest sales/affiliate management script but you only need to buy it once and you can use it over and over on any number of domains. The other advantage of using a self-hosted script is that you have complete control over your website and affiliate program. You also save money because you don’t have to pay fees for listing products ora percentage of every sale.

There are a ton of web-based affiliate management services online such as Clickbank, JV zoo, Mooshpay and Paydotcom. The benefit of using these is that you can tap into an already existing JV network. Your product can get spotted and promoted by affiliates who bring you sales.

I say ‘yet’, because having your own product should definitely be in your plans. You simply need a product to dominate your niche.

If you’re not selling your products from your website and doing the affiliate marketing thing for now, your main job is to get traffic to your affiliate links (merchants order pages). There are several ways to get traffic (as discussed below) but most affiliates go for search engine traffic.

Last year, I started a couple of affiliate blogs and SEO optimized them for Google traffic. It’s a fairly complex game but the rewards are great when you’re on page 1: hands-free, non-stop traffic. Not to mention it’s highly targeted.

The basics of SEO are simple and easy to understand but usually basic SEO will only get you so far. It’s the little extra secret tactics you apply that get you above your competition. I learned from one of the best affiliate/SEO marketers Andrew Hansen how he makes simple $300/day affiliate sites, so I recommend you check his course out if you want to learn affiliate marketing.

In other words, get traffic to it. This is the fuel which will power your business. These are some ways to drive traffic…

•  SEO (search engine marketing)
• Video marketing
• Social networking (Facebook etc)
• Article marketing (write and submit to article directories)
• JV marketing (swapping ad space on your website or in emails etc)
•  Affiliate recruiting (as we talked about in Step 3.)
•  Paid ads (PPC, banner ads, ezine solo ads etc)
•  Forum marketing (place your links in your sig)

There are many more ways than this to market your website but it really comes down to your budget and amount of time you’ve got. For free traffic, I suggest article marketing, SEO, JV and affiliate traffic. If you want to pay for quick targeted traffic, then ezine/email solo ads are the way to go. I don’t have a lot of experience with PPC but it’s something I’m looking into.

Extra cool tip: With the traffic you generate, send it to a squeeze page so you can build a list. (works for affiliate marketing too ).

6. The final secret. In the end, the secret to it all is just going out there and doing it. You probably know all the things I already explained above – but they won’t help you if you don’t take action on them! 90% of success is a result of simply taking action! (10% inspiration, 90% perspiration)

Work out a plan and then break it down into small jobs. Work and aim to complete those small jobs in a time frame you decide. If you just do one small but significant
task a day, you will get a lot accomplished every week. Doing the basics leads to big things.