Thursday, October 7, 2010

Making money through an online affiliate business

 

af_marketing

An online affiliate business is one of the easiest ways to start your own business online. All you need to do is to send visitors (potential customers) to a merchant’s web site that you are representing. If the potential new customer makes a purchase or completes an action such as joining a mailing list for example, the merchant pays you a commission. It is that easy.

Put very simply, that is the essence of the affiliate concept. You can build a business very quickly with minimal cost and risk. You don’t need to worry about the selling process because that is handled by the merchant so all you need to do is refer as many new customers as possible. So what is the best way to do that?

There is a proven series of steps for building an online affiliate business. They are content, traffic, pre-sell and convert.

Content

I think it is fair to say that the internet is the biggest source of information in the world. You can find pretty much any kind of information you need. The key is information. Individuals use the internet to find information about a topic they are interested in.

So the first step towards building a successful online affiliate business is by having a website and publishing good content that is relevant to the product you are trying to sell.

Select a topic that you love and that is also easy to make from. Research the web for profitable topics and for reliable and reputable affiliate programs.

Once you have selected your content the  create good, relevant content which is geared to direct the interest of your reader towards the product you are trying to sell.

Traffic

Traffic is one of the most difficult topics to address when trying to build an online business. Many people think that all you need to do is to create a website and the crowds will come. That is not true. It takes time, commitment, persistency and knowledge.

You need to build pages that attract traffic  by ranking well on search engines and that have as many links as possible. You need links from other websites into your pages in order to increase your rank in search engines therefore increasing your chances of attracting goo traffic.

Pre-sell

Prepare the visitors of your site with valuable content that establishes credibility and that gets them curious about learning more about the product you are trying to sell. You need to be credible yourself, if your visitors already trust you it is easier to get them to buy something you recommend.

Convert

Converting actually means cashing in the money.

I think that the hardest step in this process is attracting traffic to your site. If you website is new it can take time to generate a good amount of daily page views that have the potential to convert.

The key is to get started, do something today about starting your online business and learn as you go. Try it you will only know if it works if you give it a go.

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