Affiliate Success
How to Get Started as an Affiliate Marketer
By Frank Woodford
Oct 14, 2008 - 5:40:46 AM

If you are thinking of starting your own online home based business with affiliate marketing, you are definitely on the right track for making money from home with the Internet. There are many companies with an Internet presence that are looking for affiliate marketers to help them boost their sales. Better yet, a free affiliate program is easy to find; it takes only a search through an affiliate program directory, and a quick application process.

Once an affiliate program network has approved your application, you will be assigned a unique link that contains your own individual affiliate ID. It is through this link that the merchant will keep track of the sales that are generated by your site, and your commission is calculated.

Here are some affiliate marketing tips to help you get started.

• The first thing you will have to do is to find affiliate programs to join; one of the best ways in which to do this is by visiting an affiliate program directory. Directories will list many different types of affiliate programs for you to choose from. Before you join an affiliate program, it is always best to do some research on the program and the merchant’s products or services. You will likely want to promote a product that is very popular, and preferably work with a company that will pay you a high commission for joining their affiliate network, and selling their products. Once you have chosen the best affiliate program, you will be almost ready to start your home-based business online.
• Next thing on your agenda should be to decide how to send people to your affiliate program merchant’s site to buy products. You will have many more options if you have your own website. If you have little, or no HTML programming knowledge, you can easily build an affiliate marketing website with a free website builder. A quick search online should provide you with many options for free website builders for your affiliate marketing site.
• The next important step is to decide what your site’s content will be. This should be content that is in tune with the merchandise you are trying sell. For example, if you are going to be promoting a travel company, you may want your site’s focus to be on travel guides that would help you to send visitors to your affiliate program merchant.
• Driving traffic to your site is one of the most important steps to a successful advertising affiliate marketing program. The catch is, you don’t just want Internet traffic; you want targeted traffic that will be interested in what you are advertising. The more targeted traffic you get, the more sales you are likely to generate. Learn all that you can about driving web traffic to your affiliate programs website. One affiliate marketing tip to help you get traffic is to think about investing some money in a paid advertising campaign, such as Googles Adwords. This has been known to generate tons of traffic in a short period of time.

Getting started in your own home based internet business is really just this simple, and you’ll have lots of free time to do everything you have ever wanted if you start your own home business by being an affiliate marketer.