How To Start Making Money As An Affiliate by James Woolley

There are many different ways to start earning money as an affiliate, but in this article I'm going to outline a simple method that someone with no experience, and no money to spend, can use to start making affiliate commissions.

It revolves around blogging - creating free blogs that actively promote your affiliate programs.

Before you start creating your blog though, you need to decide what affiliate programs you are going to promote. I prefer either high-paying affiliate programs, or those that pay recurring commissions on an ongoing basis, like web hosting, for example. Alternatively, you could head to Clickbank, and pick one of thousands of information products to promote.

Whichever product you choose, you want a product that's both in demand, and appears to have good conversions (so you're not wasting your time), whether it's a compelling sales page, or it's simply a top quality product that you know sells well.

Now you've got a product, or multiple products if you so wish, that you are going to promote, you can start creating your blog. There are various free blog accounts available, but for now I would recommend going with Blogger as they are owned by Google, which can only benefit your Google search engine rankings.

Your blog should obviously relate to the products you are promoting, and you should post regularly with links to your affiliate product(s) at the end of each post. You could also place affiliate links in the side bar and header bar as well, although don't overdo it as it may start to look like a spam blog, and will therefore run the risk of being deleted.

So, for example, if you were promoting web hosting companies on your blog, then you would want to post regularly on topics relating to web hosting. You could use other peoples' articles, or better still, do some research and write your own content as this will avoid the duplicate content penalty, and you will do much better in the search engines.

After each post, you want to 'ping' your blog. This is basically just a way of notifying the blog search engines that you have updated your blog, so they can spider your site, and increase it's exposure. You can do this quickly and easily using ping services like Pingomatic or Pingoat.

If you post regularly, and make sure you ping your blog after every post, then you should start to see decent levels of traffic coming to your site, therefore increasing the chances of people clicking on your affiliate links and making a purchase.

Blog and ping, as it's known, is undoubtedly a great way of getting started in affiliate marketing, but once you've started to make a few sales using this method, you should start moving on to the next level.

Sticking with blogging, you could add an opt-in form to your blog and collect the names and email addresses of your visitors, so you can market to them again in the future via email and the use of an autoresponder. You could also add more blogs and different products to your armoury, increasing the likelihood of making additional affiliate sales, plus you could host these blogs on your own domain giving you greater flexibility, and reducing the chances of your blogs being deleted.

Following on from that, you could also take steps to increase the traffic to your blogs, rather than simply relying on blogging and pinging. Popular methods of traffic generation include writing articles and submitting them to article directories and ezine publishers, writing press releases, exchanging and buying links to help with your SEO, advertising on pay-per-click search engines, posting on forums (that allow sig files), and creating free viral reports that link to your blog(s).

There are of course more advanced ways to promote affiliate programs, but creating your own blog(s) is one of the simplest and quickest ways to start your affiliate marketing career.

Author Resource: James Woolley is a full-time marketer who runs a number of profitable websites. His latest site is essentially an affiliate program directory that reveals his best high paying affiliate programs.

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