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One day back in February of 2005 I decided that I had had enough of my day job. Nagging know-nothing bosses getting on my case and adding new duties to my job description every day. Sound familiar? Well I decided that I had had enough and it was time that I tried to break free of the rat race and see if there was some way I could make money doing something else, something I could do from home without having to report to a boss. I've been on the internet regularly since 1995 (my first year of college) but had never considered trying to make money online before. Still I went home that day and started searching on Google to see what I could find about "making money from home."
The first opportunity I found was something called Dropshipping. Dropshipping is basically where you setup an ECommerce store and sell products that someone else delivers, theoretically they deliver at wholesale price and you can mark up as much as you want for your profit. I bought an EBook on dropshipping and I decided from reading it that it wasn't really for me. Too much interaction with customers for my taste, and it seemed overly complicated. That being said, I know a lot of people are making a lot of money with doing this. If you are curious about it - find out more with this EBook. (this is a different, more updated one than I got back in February 2005.)
This EBook made an offhand, somewhat dismissive, mention of something called affiliate marketing which at that time I had never heard of but it immediately got my interest. No need to deal with customers, no need to have my own website. Affiliate marketing is basically advertising other people's products and earning a commission on the sales. I did some research (read: Google searches.) to find some good Affiliate Programs and I was amazed to find out that almost every company and sales website in the world has an affiliate program and that it's a huge billion dollar business. I signed up for a few programs and started advertising using Google AdWords (see the banner on the left!) Google let me start out with only $5 in my account. Within a few days I was making money just by putting up ads on AdWords. It's a remarkable feeling seeing the money come in from this. A far bigger rush than getting my old biweekly paycheck. By that summer I was making over $5000 a month, I quit my day job and I've been a full time online marketer ever since.
Now I want to get to why you're reading this page. How do you get started with affiliate marketing? The first thing you need to do is sign up with some affiliate programs. I suggest the programs on my site because I know they work as they've worked for me. I've signed up for more than 250 affiliate programs (at the minimum.) and very few of them have been successful for me. So that's why I think it will save you a lot of effort and time by getting started with my recommended affiliate programs. You also need to sign up with Google AdWords and YahooSearch Marketing. (see the banners on the left.) as these are the biggest and the best of the PPC (that's pay per click) programs. You then place ads with your special affiliate link. When internet surfers click on your ad, you can get a commission if that surfer buys the product.
I do not want to mislead you, this is not as easy as it may sound. There is a lot of competition and it's getting worse every day. Also more and more restrictions on what you can do are being placed by both the search engines (Google/Yahoo) and by many of the companies' affiliate programs. Many search terms you cannot bid for on Google because they are trademark protected. Some terms you cannot bid on because of their content (some adult oriented search words.) Some companies do not let their affiliates link directly to their site or bid on any of their brand name keywords.
It is still possible to make money using just pay per click and linking directly to affiliate programs if you do it right and sign up to the right affiliate programs. The most important key for success in doing this is running your Google AdWords campaign as well as possible. Get this EBook now and it'll give you an upper hand on most of your competition. The amount of money you'll save by running your campaign correctly will easily pay for the price of the book. I made a good living doing just this for almost a year before I decided to start branching out into building my own websites.
When you get your own domain names and build your own websites you gain an advantage over your competition. Once you have your own website you can then do pay per click advertising to your own site rather than competing against a lot of other people to send traffic to same site. Google will only allow a url to show up one time in the paid listings so if another affiliate is already there you won't be able to compete unless you outbid him. Getting into this kind of bidding war is not a good way to make money.
Traffic means visitors to your website. If you don't have visitors then you can't make any sales! I've already gone over using Adwords (and Yahoo) pay per click to buy traffic but there are other ways to gain traffic for free. When the search engines think your site is very relevent to the search term then it'll show up in the natural listings. Those are the unpaid "organic" results. This is the best type of traffic you can get because people are most trustworthy of these unpaid results. Trying to get your sites in these unpaid results is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
A conversion is when the site visitor buys a product through your site. Obviously the higher conversion rate the better, the more conversions, the more money you make. These terms traffic and conversion are part of the basic fabric of the internet marketing world so make yourself familiar with them if you are not already.
There's a lot more to learn. Please use the navigation bar to navigate this site and find more advanced information. If you are a beginner I definitly recommend getting started by joining some of the affiliate programs and joining Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing (which are easy to get to using the banners on the left!) Keep this site bookmarked and once you've got the basics down come back and learn more and take it to the next level.
email : affiliatehow2@yahoo.com
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