How do you become an affiliate?

In today’s world of information overload, it can become easy to get caught up in analysis paralysis when looking at all the options of jumping into the affiliate marketing game. What we will do here is provide 7 steps you can take today to become an affiliate.

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Step 1: Join an affiliate program

With the many affiliate programs available, how do you know which affiliates program is right for you? Sometimes you need to crawl before you can walk, so we’ll start with the easiest.

Amazon Associates

The easiest place to start out is with the big dog. Amazon Associates is the king of associate programs. People trust the Amazon brand. This makes them more inclined to follow your links.

 

Setting up an account with Amazon Associates is FREE and you can start making commissions of 4%-8% as soon as you sign up. Yes that does not seem like a very high commission rate, because it isn’t. The beauty of the program is once you’ve brought your traffic to Amazon, they are very, very good at converting your traffic into sales.

 

Also the biggest benefit to the Amazon Associates program is that your link sets a 24 hour traffic cookie.  This means that any items the user purchases after following your link until either (a) 24 hours passes, or (b) they click someone else’s link, you get credit for the sale. You bring them in for a T-Shirt, Amazon up-sells them with a matching bathing suit and a new dresser, and you get a commission on all of it.

Other Providers

There are other affiliate marketplaces that you can join that will provide products to promote. For this guide, we are just trying to get your feet wet and get up and running. Later on you can check out Commission Junction, Click Bank, and As Seen on PC, among others.

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Step 2: Research what niche to serve

This is potentially the most critical step in process, deciding what to sell and who to sell it to. Determining what products to promote can be a daunting task, Amazon again has our back. Amazon provides a section of the site called Best Sellers. This allows you to see what products are already selling well in each product category they provide.

 

Next, we need to find out if the products we’ve found on amazon are being searched for on Google. Google provides a resource in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool which will soon be replaced by the Adwords Keyword Planner. These tools will allow you see global and local search volume for the entered keywords. You could use this tool to see the search volume for the type of products you found on the Amazon Best Sellers list that you might promote.

 

Like most things in the computing world, if there is a process that is time intensive someone will create one or more software products that saves some of that time, but costs you money. Spencer Haws has created a software product called Long Tail Pro. This tool also provides the search volume information that the Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides, but it also can research the availability of exact match domains. This is the tool I use to get my bearings on which markets and which keywords I want to tackle. I signed up for the Platinum upgrade which allows me to Calculate the Keyword Competitiveness as well as save my favorite keywords for future action.

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Step 3: Purchase a relevant domain name

When it comes to purchasing a domain name, there are two main things to decide. First we need to decide what vendor to purchase the domain from. Second, we need to decide what we want our domain name to be.

 

When it comes to domain name vendor, there are quite a few choices. I primarily deal with two vendors, NameCheap and GoDaddy.

 

I use NameCheap for my new domain purchases. They have competitive pricing for .com domains, and they currently give you a complimentary year of WhoIsGuard to protect your personal information in the domain name registry.

 

The other domain vendor I utilize is GoDaddy. I typically only use this vendor if I am trying to buy or sell a domain on GoDaddy Auctions. I have heard some great testimonials as well as some not so great experiences. I have not had any issues thus far with this vendor, but your mileage may vary.

 

Now that we have figured out our niche, we need to secure a descriptive domain name. If you have chosen to utilize Long Tail Pro, you have the option to see whether the exact match domain names are available for the popular top level domain extensions. If not, the domain vendors all provide a search engine to look for available domains.

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Step 4: Establish a hosting provider

When starting out, shared hosting provides the most beneficial balance of feature and economy. The two major players in the shared hosting space are HostGator and Bluehost. Both of these providers are provide excellent service for a reasonable price. I am currently hosting this site with HostGator. If choose to follow suit and use HostGator, you can use the following HostGator discount code for 25% of you initial hosting bill: affauto25off.

 

Wait a minute, why would you want to pay for hosting when there are free services like Blogger and WordPress.com? In a a word flexibility. Using a shared hosting service and setting up your own WordPress installation gives you the flexibility to install whichever plug-ins or themes that you want. This flexibility gives you the ability you need to differentiate your site and content for maximum visibility. This flexibility is what drove me to use WordPress and sign up with HostGator.

 

If your budget will not afford the luxury of the self hosted WordPress route, my recommendation using the free service route is to sign up with Google’s Blogger service. there are 3 factors that drive this recommendation including:

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• Adding a custom domain www.mycustomblognname.com instead of using mycustomblognname.blogspot.com (This add-on does cost about $10 a year).
• One free Google Apps account for the blog admin. You can get your email account yourname@.mycustomblognname.com setup and accessed with the familiar gmail interface.
• Integration with Google+ for visibility and authority ranking

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If you need to wait on the flexibility the self hosted WordPress brings, you can transition later as your business grows. There are templates available for your Blogger site to ease the transition. If you are transitioning in the future check back here on www.affiliateautopilots.com for a guide on the transition.

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We set out to become an affiliate and get started online. We are over half way there.

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Step 5: Establish a mailing list provider

You know the saying, “The money’s in the list.” This is the first fail safe if the traffic to your site(s) disappear. If you have an engaged audience in your list, you can continue engaging with them through your list while you are working on returning your traffic to your site(s).

 

When it comes to mailing list providers, there is Aweber, and then there is everybody else. Aweberhas been in the mail provider business helping marketers reach their audiences for 15 years. They’ve been around long enough to know what works, and know what you need.

 

Since this is a blog about affiliate marketing, the great part about Aweber is there affiliate program. This affiliate program provides a generous 30% recurring commission. Let me repeat RECURRING COMMISION, so you make a sale this month and the 30% commission continues as long as that user is paying Aweber subscriber.

 

If your budget doesn’t afford you the opportunity to start off with Aweber,  MailChimp provides similar services economically for users with small mail lists. In fact until your list grows above  2000 addresses and you don’t need autoresponder service, your mail list service is free through MailChimp.

Now that we have a hosting provider and mail service provider, we are ready to begin setting up the site to promote a product or e-commerce solution. Stay with me here, we are almost there…

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Step 6: Setup your site

If you’ve decided to start out on Blogger, there is a nice selection of themes available to get you up and running.

If you’ve decided to dive into the WordPress world, Scott Blanchard has created a great plug-in called ClickBump. This plug-in helps you optimize your site for greater search engine availability, as well as setting up your site with some default pages like your earnings disclaimer and your contact us page.

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Step 7: Write your excellent content

Well, as the saying goes, “Content is King.” This is where you can distinguish yourself from the crowd. Creating a great community around your affiliate site begins with writing great content. Writing detailed thourough posts and pages will solidify the value you are providing your readers, and help to build trust in your brand. Make sure that there is plenty of value in your posts in addition to your product introductions.

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Well at this point you should know enough to be dangerous. Watching way to many cartoons as a kid taught me “Knowing is half the battle.” The other half is taking action, let me know in the comments if you are going to jump in and become an affiliate today.