So if you have been following this blog you will have chosen your affiliate product and you now have an affiliate link that looks something like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/?ref=abcd1234
The next question is what do I do with this ugly looking domain name (URL)?
The easiest thing to do is use the raw affiliate link to drive traffic to the product sales page and collect the commissions. However in this case the simplest is definitely NOT the best.
Reasons NOT to use the Raw Affiliate Link
1. People trust direct links with normal looking URLs more than they trust an affiliate link with lots of foreign looking code.
2.The long ugly affiliate link can also drive potential customers away from your site which is exactly what you don’t want to happen.
3. If your raw affiliate link is visible then people can either chop off the code bit at the end of the affiliate link and you lose your commission or worse still they can substitute their own affiliate link for yours and once again you lose your commission for the sale!
Read more »
A quick recap on what we have covered so far…
The first post on affiliate marketing explained how affiliate programs work and that all are free affiliate programs.Then we discussed finding a niche and there were heaps of ideas from James Schramko’s video about what kinds of products you can promote on the internet. Lastly we talked about how to find a niche market product that will be profitable.
So now that you have chosen your market and you know that people are looking for solutions to their problems in your market, you need to find a specific product. After you have found the exact product that you want to promote, make sure you save your affiliate link somewhere you can find it again!
Places to Find Free Affiliate Programs
1. Clickbank
Go to the clickbank marketplace and see what comes up when you type in your chosen keyword.
There are a few things to understand about clickbank. It is a place where you can find products to promote on many, many different topics and keywords but there have to be able to be delivered digitally. This means you can’t sell physical products through clickbank.
Read more »
Just in case you are still struggling with finding a good niche to begin your internet marketing journey, I thought I’d give you a couple more places to look for ideas for niches.
Magazines
Look at the magazine covers. Magazines have a huge research budget so any story that has made it onto the fron cover of a magazine has a large potential audience. You can check out what’s hot by heading down to your local newstand or check out www.magazines.com. This website has magazines under any category you can imagine. Just browse through and look at all of the front covers.See which topics are popular and what they are publishing articles about. If a magazine has devoted several pages to an article on a particular topic then you know there are people out there who are interested in that topic.
Dummies books
If someone has taken the time to write a Dummies book about a topic then you can be sure there is a hungry market out there. Either the bookshop or Amazon.com is the place to look for Dummies books.
While you are at Amazon.com you might also want to check out the best-seller lists. The top 10 best-sellers might give you an idea of a profitable niche.
And always remember you can never be too rich, too thin or too beautiful!
Still stuck? – Ask yourself the right questions
What products do I use everyday?
What videos are popular right now?
You can check out the top 10 videos on YouTube.
What are my friends and family talking about?
What are the issues being discussed on current affair shows and morning TV? Read more »
Not only is the auto responder an internet marketing tool – it is an essential internet marketing tool for internet marketing newbies. Now that you understand how to put a website live on the internet you need to know how to build and manage your customer database.
What is an Auto Responder?
For a definition of auto responder I went to wikipedia (well actually I went to my trusty friend, Google first and then to wikipedia).
It seems that there are two separate definitions for auto responder but only one relates to internet marketing. The first definition is an email program that automatically answers email sent to it. An example is the out of office reply that you have no doubt received if you have sent an email to someone who is on vacation.
The definition of auto responder that relates to internet marketing is a software application that automatically delivers information by email.
Why do Internet Marketers Need Auto Responders?
An auto responder is a program that sends emails but it is sooooo much more as well. Most internet marketers would use a web-based auto responder service (I don’t know of any other kind really). The auto responder, as well as being a program that sends emails is a program that stores information about your customers or subscribers. It is a customer database system!
Basically, you keep all of your customer details in the one place and when you want to send them some information or let them know of a special product that you are recommending you can just write an email and send it to all of your customers or only those customers that would be interested in that information. An auto responder service allows you to manage an unlimited number of lists so you can have you customers organized into different categories and using this auto responder software you can choose to send an email message to part of your customer database or to all of your database.
There are two ways that you can send out an email message to your list. Firstly, you can send out a broadcast which means that you send out the same email on the same day to all of the members in your database that the message would be relevant to. This is useful for time sensitive information such as a discount or sale on a product or an upcoming event such as a live training or a webinar.
The second way is to set up a series of messages usually referred to as an autoresponder series. You can specify the amount of time between each message. So you can have constant communication with your customers without the need to write an email every couple of days. You can set up your autoresponder so that your customers get an email from you every couple of days and there is no limit to how many emails that you can load into the autoresponder series. You can load a years worth of emails if you like and then it is really set and forget. The advantage of using an auto responder service in this way is that no matter when someone joins your list they always start at the beginning and don’t miss out on any of your valuable information. So you may have one person in your database that is receiving message no 29 on the same day that someone else is receiving message no 5.
How Do I Get Customers for My Database?
You might be thinking now that it is very time consuming to enter all of that data into the auto responder software. If you already have an existing database of customers then you will have to transfer that data over to your auto responder service and the way to do this is to search in the help or support area of your chosen autoresponder. Read more »
If you need a little review then here is the post on how to register a domain name. Once you have a domain name you need hosting and you can get hosting here . If you need to watch a video about web hosting then here it is.
Ok now you are up to speed, I’m going talk about what to do next so that your domain name is setup on your server. This is a little bit different depending on the level of hosting that you have.
Basic Hosting Package
If you bought a basic package,you are allowed to have as many domain names as you want under the one main domain name. This is a subdomain arrangement. If you purchased hostgator hosting it would be either a baby or a business account. Just login to your c-panel (the details will be in your welcome letter ) and navigate to the add-on domain area. Simply fill in the required fields and you have now connected your domain name to your hosting. Read more »
