
After 8 Years of trial @ error and thousands of hours throughout the years learning affiliate marketing I have put together a checklist of things that you should be doing if you want to start making money as an affiliate marketer:) Without further delay let’s begin:)
The Ultimate Checklist To Make Money Online As An Affiliate Marketer What You Should Be Doing Now @ In The Future To Turn Your Affiliate Efforts Into Cold Hard Cash:)
Never be afraid to pay for quality affiliate marketing training it can literally slice years off of your learning curve.
Pick a profitable niche where there is money already exchanging hands and drill down to find a subniche of that main niche so it will be easier to rank in the search engines and easier to make money with your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Buy a keyword rich short catchy domain name for that profitable niche .com’s .net and .org in that order if possible.
Start a blog or Website in that profitable niche. I personally have 2 webhosts but you only need one I use Godaddy and Hostgator I like them both for different reasons.
Sign up for an affiliate that has products for you to promote on your blog or Website. Examples: Clickbank, JVZoo, CJ.COM, and Amazon
Look for a mixture of high ticket affiliate products to promote as well as affiliate products that will pay you a recurring commission so you will build up your affiliate earnings per month with the same amount of effort:)
If you are running a WordPress blog use a paid theme like the one I have running on this blog called Elegant Theme you can pickup a developers license and use it on all your blogs. Don’t use free themes if you can afford not to a good paid theme will make you a lot more money in the long run remember you get what you pay for:)
Start monetizing your widget area if you are running a WordPress blog with relevant affiliate banners that fit the description I stated above as either high ticket affiliate offers, or recurring commission affiliate offers so you can maximize your affiliate earnings from your blogs visitors.
Test, Test, Test! You may want to monetize your blog with Google adsense ads or just traditional affiliate offers every niche is different. I find affiliate offers to be a lot more profitable than promoting adsense ads on my blog based on my testing.
Start blogging about your niche while recommending relevant affiliate products in the mix:) Review sites work well and you may want to keep in mind that you want to create epic content by that I mean very large well written blog posts of 2,000 words or more because these kinds of blog posts will rank better in the search engines, be shared more by your blog visitors, and drive more eyeballs to your blog and affiliate offers. In short you will make more money by producing awesome content that will bring you hands free traffic for years to come:)
Update your blog at least once a week at the minimum @ if possible even more. I realize everyone’s schedule and work ethic is different but by updating your blog at least once a week you keep Google happy and your blog will rank better in the search engines.
Always post at least 85% unique content for your blog posts @ the closer you can get to 100% unique the better. No stealing other peoples content it’s wrong first off and Google will penalize your blog big time. If your outsourcing your content to a freelancer you can check if it is unique by using an awesome free tool I have been using for years here: http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/
Learn how to drive traffic to your blog because traffic equals money online in the form of free and paid traffic sources. This is a good blog post that will give you some ideas on ways you can drive traffic to your blog and affiliate offers click here to check it out.
Always have social sharing buttons above your blog posts so your blog visitors can share your excellent content with their friends and family for a nice boost in your traffic.
Very Important: This is the most important tip that I can give you guys and girls if you want to start making good money with affiliate marketing down the line start and keep building that email list. I use Aweber and have been for years the single best investment I have ever made in my online business was to start an email list.
Free Offer: Be sure you have a carrot or an awesome free offer to giveaway so you can entice your visitors to giveaway their email address for your free offer.
If you do not have a free offer to giveaway and I realize if you are just starting out most people do not there are some great Private Label Rights offers out there that you can use as freebies to build your email list. I recommend this one Click Here if you want to check it out he has some good stuff:)
Your blogs #1 goal is to collect email leads everything else is secondary and that includes the affiliate programs that you promote.
Email marketing is your #1 goal because you can build a list of great prospects that are interested in what you have to offer build a relationship with your subscribers and they will buy stuff from you for a long time to come.
Place blog opt-in forms on your blog to the right or left hand side of your blogs widget area ( Depending On Your Themes Layout ) and below your blog posts so you can capture as many of your blog visitors as possible.
Create an Aweber lightbox popup form for your blog set at 5 seconds to display once to capture your blog visitors email addresses. This works the best by far to generate the most leads from your blog visitors:)
Create professional squeeze pages and drive traffic to your squeeze pages through your blog posts, forum posts, social networking sites, and everywhere else that you advertise online. I love Landing Page Monkey I use them for all my newest squeeze pages and the opt-in rate is great, and the squeeze pages look fantastic.
Do not be afraid of paid traffic it is scalable and can make you a lot of money once you find a profitable traffic source.
If you are using paid traffic never direct link to an affiliate offer always direct link to your squeeze page so you can have a potential customer for life and not be just building someone else’s business.
Bing, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and any other established sites are quality places to advertise if you are paying for traffic. Test, Test, Test.
Solo ads can be a great paid traffic source if the solo ad provider has a lot of positive feedback so do your research before buying any solo ad and do not be afraid to ask questions.
Spend 20% of your time creating content and the other 80% of your time marketing your content.
Be persistent with your affiliate business Rome was not built in a day:)
Make a gameplan and stick to your gameplan you do not want to be jumping around like a bullfrog from one money making idea to the next you will get no-where fast!
Solve peoples problems and genuinely help people and good things will come to you.
If any business opportunity or affiliate offers you over night riches it’s a scam run like hell:) Affiliate marketing is a business and it takes time to build your business just like anything else in life:)
In Affiliate marketing there are good times and bad times sometimes be prepared for the ride.
Affiliate marketing is challenging and you have to use your brain to outhink your competition and make more money with your affiliate promotions.
Affiliate marketing is the best business model to me because you can make money 24/7 even while you sleep:) Bet you cannot do that with your 9 to 5 job:) Not to mention you literally have the potential to reach the Whole World right from your home computer.
Outsourcing some of the tedious tasks of affiliate marketing is a great way to free up some of your time Fiverr can be a great resource for that as well as sites like freelancer.
Try not to burn any bridges with people if possible it may come back to bite you in the ass.
Enjoy what you do but also make sure there is money in what you do and you will never work a day in your life:)
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