So many people now days are looking for quick wins to making money online. People, and maybe that includes you, hear a lot about how they (read you) can simply make a fortune promoting someone elses product… And you don’t even need your own website! Cool, right? While this is true, I still think having your own website, even if you are just promoting other people’s products off that site is so much more powerful than simply linking directly to an affiliate sites. This is for many reason, including the fact that you get to build a list or database of potential future customers in the niche market that you are promoting affiliate products for. That means, you have to me a “double-edged” sword. Why? Simply because you don’t just make money once from the sales that you receive from promoting an affiliate’s product, you have the opportunity to create a longer term business. Once you have a list in a niche, you can continue to market to these people, providing them with value, and creating more sales by upselling to other affiliate products… And possibly, down the track, your own product in that niche, where you keep 100% of the profits.
Can you see how you are potentially missing out on this, by simply linking directly to the the affiliates site?
Now… I will get off my soap box, and get to the real point of this post. You have read this far, and you think to yourself… “Yeah, Yeah Tim…” I know all that, but I just want to start making money online. “Show me the money, and tell me the secret?”.
Ok.. So, here we go - If you are still keen to try things out… get in the game so to speak, and don’t want to setup your own site. And if you are a really tight budget but still want to get started selling on the internet, then I want to share some simple secrets to helping you get started. Yes, without your own website.
First off, I would suggest picking a niche market. Micro-niche is even better, but a niche market would be a great start. Think a smaller part of a broader market. So many people miss this step, and think I know there is a massive demand for people wanting information about “weight loss”. And, yes that is completely true. But think about the competition in this broad market. It is a huge!
What if you focused instead on a smaller part or a niche within the weight loss market. There may be some competition, but your chances of success are greatly increased if you can compete without lossing your shirt in trying to get traffic – even to your affiliate site. So, may looking at something like “weight loss for celiacs” – that is people with a gluten intolerance. Smaller part of the overall market. Now, I know nothing about this market, nor whether it is even hot, I just picked it to highlight a point. If you are struggling to identify a hot niche market, try using this awesome keyword tool from Market Samurai.
Now, once you have your niche market – identify a strong affiliate product that you can promote. You can try affiliate networks like www.clickbank.com or www.paydotcom.net as places to start. You will be able to create your own affiliate link, which basically means that when someone goes to the affiliate link you have been provided, you are paid a commission based on the %commission structure set for affiliates of that product when someone buys. Simple enough right?
Now, what do you do with this affiliate link. Here is where the secrets come in.
Step 1: Register a domain name that relates to that niche market. Try use keywords in the domain name that relate to niche market. You can get cheap domain names at places like www.cheapdomainsfromscratch.com.
Step 2: Forward the domain name you have just bought using the domain manager to forward permanently through to your affiliate site URL. Remember, this is the site URL or website address that you were provided by the affiliate network to promote your affiliates site. Don’t just use the affiliates actual site, otherwise you are just going to end up sending traffic to that site without getting paid for the traffic. Turn on the cloaking in the domain manager, so that basically, when someone types in your new domain name, they won’t see that they have been redirected to your affiliate link. If you are not sure on this, contact the domain name registrar’s support and ask them to help point you the right direction. It should take about 24hours for this change to take a effect, so that when you type in your new domain name, it goes straight to your affiliate linked site.
Step 3: Traffic – now, this is where you need to get traffic going to your new domain name. Sounds simple enough – get traffic to the site, and you make money. Yes, true, but if you are tight budget, paying for Google Adwords or any other forms of online advertising may not be an option. So, how do you get traffic. Well, here are just 3 ways you can start getting traffic:
- Article Marketing: You can either write articles yourself, if you know something about the niche that you are promoting, or have someone write these for you by finding a writer with skills in the niche on www.elance.com. This will cost you a minimal amount of money and only need to be 300-500 words in length. You would then create what is called a resource box entry. This is what appears below each of the articles you have written. You should use this to promote back to your affiliate link, but instead of inserting your actually affiliate link you insert your domain name. Submit these articles to sites like www.ezinearticles.com or www.goarticles.com or even use services like www.articleautomation.com. The more targeted you can make your articles around specific keywords in that niche, the better your articles will perform. Then, there are two ways your articles are picked up. Either in the natural side or free side of Google or other search engines. Or when someone actually publishes your content in their email newsletter or ezine. Either way, the people reading your article could be clicking through to your domain name, giving you free traffic to promote sales of an affiliate product. Nice!
- Video Marketing - This works the same as article marketing, in the fact that you are trying to get free traffic, but this time it is using video content rather than text based content. So, if you can create a simple video, possibly talking about your experiences in using the particular affiliate product to solve your problems, or use pictures relating to the niche market and lines of text that you can customise from the affiliate site, to highlight the major problems in the niche and the benefits of the affiliates product in helping solve these problems, you can use services like Animoto.com to make this into a short video. ”But how is this going to help me get traffic?” Well, firstly make sure you plaster your domain name across the bottom of the video. That way when you are finished actually making the video, your domain name is across the bottom. Then, you take your video and submit it to video sydnication sites like Tubemogul. This will basically submit your video to many different video sites. If you target the video with keywords that you found to be relating to the niche, and use these in the video title and description – remember, these can’t just be weight loss for example. Then you should see your video start to rank fairly rapidly for the keywords you targeted. People search for the keywords, watch the video and then if they find the information useful, they visit the website domain on your video. Free traffic! Affiliate sales!A great system that can seriously help you get results fast, is Traffic Geyser, which allows you to submit your videos to many different video sites and social networking sites. This means that if you correctly target your keywords in the title and descriptions for the videos you are submitting, you can potentially end up with a lot of views, that converts to truck loads of people visiting your domain name and buying off your affiliate link. Cool, hey?
- Forums - Forums are online communities. There are online communities for all sorts of niche markets. Find the ones that are most actively talking about the niche market you are promoting. You can join these forums, and then start adding content / comment to forum posts, leveraging information that you collected for the articles you had written in the article marketing part of this post. Remember, you want to be adding value to the community and not just be seen to be there to sell something. After your forum posts, put a promotion back to your domain name. Because it won’t look like an affiliate site because of your domain name, people would trust it more and particularly if you have given good content, they will want to find out more. Every click you get on your domain name results in free traffic to your affiliate site. This is obviously fairly time consuming to look after, but if you have more time and limited budget, this can work well for you.
Ready to learn more about Internet Marketing? Join me LIVE in Sydney, Australia 19th-20th of September 2009, where you will actually be able to join a very unique event. One where you get to bring your laptop and work on your own online business LIVE!
But seating it limited – only 21 7 spots left, so act fast and get along to http://www.timlivenow.com for full details and to register.
