How to Master Affiliate Marketing

By Joseph Martin

You can MASTER affiliate marketing.

There’s no Internet business like the affiliate marketing business. Affiliate marketers are everywhere and come in all business sizes, from the part-time novice working from his dining room table to massive media sites like Mashable and eHow, both of whom employ the use of affiliate links and ads to monetize their audiences.

In this detailed guide, seasoned affiliate marketer Joseph Martin of Website X Network walks new marketers and would-be affiliates through the ins and outs of starting a successful affiliate marketing business. Use this book to avoid the pitfalls that catch most novices unawares, and to expedite the process of making your affiliate site profitable. This book will teach you how to:
* Choose the most profitable niche for your site
* Find the right products at the right price and from the right merchants
* Build a mobile-responsive affiliate site from the ground up
* Get buyers to your site using free resources like social media and online directories
* Help the search engines find and rank your web pages
* Set up and protect your home-based business

The performance marketing industry is growing, not shrinking and there is room for high-performing affiliates in just about every niche. If you have been on the fence about whether there is still money to be made in performance marketing, consider this book your official invitation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Martin
• Release date: Oct 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996932936

Book preview

How to Master

AFFILIATE MARKETING

Grow an online business that consistently makes money, even when you’re not there.

By Joseph Martin

How to Master Affiliate Marketing

By Joseph Martin

Copyright © 2015 by Joseph Martin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

Website X Network

22540 Manor St.

St. Clair Shores

Michigan 48081

www.websitexnetwork.com

[e-mail]

Special thanks to Sorilbran Stone of Five-Talent Strategy House of Atlanta for her thoughtful contributions to the chapter, Building a High-Impact Affiliate Website.

DISCLAIMER

I and my team have made every effort to ensure the information I provide for you in this book is true and accurate. As an affiliate, I can share with you some or even all of the strategies I have used to start and grow my affiliate businesses, but I cannot promise you that the strategies I provide for you in this book will deliver the results you want or even the results I believe you can achieve.

Unfortunately, I can’t make any promises with regard to your earning ability. There are far too many variables to weigh in this business, and these variables directly prohibit me from telling you what you can earn, or even how to earn more. We must consider your level of experience, depth of understanding, willingness to invest the time and money needed to launch and manage your affiliate business, and your commitment to this business. Even with all of those factors in play, there are still technical and creative aspects of your affiliate business over which I have no control. Therefore, I cannot guarantee that by applying my methods to your affiliate business, you will earn what I’ve earned.

This book is designed to teach you what I’ve done and to expose you to techniques and strategies that have worked for me and for my colleagues. At its very best, you will find that this book is a useful reference book.

I, my team, nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for errors, omissions, or contradictory interpretation of the content or ideas contained in this book. While I have taken steps to express my preferences, doing so, in no way, should be perceived as a snub against any professionals, companies, brands or programs that I did not recommend. I have made every attempt to be fair, but also to be honest.

I, my team, and my company do not assume any liability to any party for loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether these errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. I and my team have made every effort to make this book the best we can. Nevertheless, we make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of the contents of this book.

You can feel free to apply the ideas contained in this book with the full understanding that by doing so, you take full responsibility for your actions, earnings, and outcomes.

INTRODUCTION

By far, one of the most useful skills I ever learned was affiliate marketing. You would never know it to look at me, but for nearly a decade now I have worked as an Internet marketer, sniffing out an entire catalog of lucrative niches that my partner and I have been able to turn into a profitable business.

In my pre-affiliate days, I was a suit; I held a series of executive positions in sales and marketing with General Electric, Nortel Networks, Bell Atlantic, and Hewlett Packard. And I was darned-good at what I did. Crain’s Detroit and the Sales and Marketing Executives of Detroit hailed me as one of the Top Sales and Marketing Executives in my area. In other words, I know my stuff.

In 2006, I made the fateful decision to leave the corporate world for more freedom. I wanted my own business, but I didn’t want to be chained to a brick and mortar shop all the time. I wanted customers, but I wanted to be more hands-off when it came to selling and order fulfillment. I needed a magical sort of business from which I could profit without having to do a whole lot of work around the clock. I was looking for that business model - one that I didn’t really think existed - when I first learned about affiliate marketing.

I started Website X Network, a Metro Detroit-based tech firm that provides business support, development, and project management for digital publishers. Our core services include website design, search engine optimization, list management and content marketing for website owners who are looking to launch or grow their publishing business.

Whenever my clients find out that I am an Internet marketer, they ask me a barrage of questions about what I do, how I do it, how much I earn and how much time it took me to start making any money.

By and large, one of the key questions people want answered is whether affiliate marketing is a scam. Most folks have no idea what affiliate marketing is. Many non-affiliates wonder how you can possibly make money getting people to click blue links.

I decided to write this book for my curious clients and anyone else out there who is interested in, or maybe even intrigued with the idea of affiliate marketing but who don’t know where to start.

How to Master Affiliate Marketing is a step-by-step handbook that I created (with a little help) to give you a concise overview of how I’ve made money in this business for the past decade. This book will teach you:

How to setup a home-based affiliate business, even if you have to bootstrap it

How to find the most profitable untapped niches to enter

How to choose the right affiliate programs and products with the highest payouts

How to get your website found online for FREE without having to shell out big bucks for paid ads

The eight ways affiliates earn money (plus four more easy ways to monetize just about any website)

How to run your affiliate business and make money without having to fear the FTC

The great thing about this book is it’s going to expedite your learning process. You’re going to skip over the problems that got me stuck when I first started and I’m going to give you the solutions to the riddles that trip up many would-be affiliates. Best of all, you will be able to confidently start your affiliate business without fear and uncertainty because I’m laying out your plan right here, in black and white.

I also included a Resources section which lists the best websites, forums, books, and leaders in the Internet marketing game. As I explained in the Disclaimer, I cannot make any claims as to how much you will earn. What I can tell you is that this book contains strategies that work.

Without any further delay, let’s get right into it.

HERE IS THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR YOU TO KNOW ABOUT SUCCEEDING AS AN AFFILIATE MARKETER

In every endeavor, irrespective of the discipline or industry, there will be those who create for themselves massive success, and there will be those who spend years looking for massive success, as if it is a solitary thing that exists in one location. If you plan to succeed in this business, there is only one thing you actually need to know, a single technique you must consistently apply and that is this: Take massive action.

There is no magic to any of this. There’s no super product, no super design for your website, no super headline that will get a million clicks and make you rich overnight. While there are hacks and methods for streamlining your processes, there are no shortcuts. If you want to make money as an affiliate, you have to learn this business inside and out and you will do so through trial and error.

Testing and assessing are the two pillars upon which the science of marketing is built. It takes time, focus, energy and strategy to weed through a pool of ideas and separate the good ones from the successful ones. So if you picked up this book in hopes of finding that one magic cure-all buried somewhere in these 200+ pages, you will be sorely disappointed.

My goal with this book is to shorten your learning curve and provide you with enough information that you feel absolutely comfortable getting started as an affiliate marketer. The strategies, techniques and insights contained in this book have been gathered from my own experiences and from the experiences of other thought leaders in the Internet marketing space. So read this book cover to cover and keep it on-hand as your reference manual. Then grab hold of more information as it becomes available and stay on top of new developments in this space: Learn the lingo, tinker around with new technology, and explore new marketing methods. Then make your move.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter even one bit how much information I share with you or how many pages you read if you never get around to actually applying what you learn.

So that’s the secret sauce: Do it, and do it now.

Table of Contents

What is Affiliate Marketing?

The Profitable Future of Affiliate Marketing

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

How Do Affiliate Marketers Make Money?

Is Affiliate Marketing Right For You?

Setting Up Your Affiliate Business

How to Organize a Home-Based Business

Finding Your Niche

Choosing the Best Affiliate Products

Building a High-Impact Affiliate Website

Monetizing Your Affiliate Site

Doing Good Business and Staying Out of Trouble

Final Words

Resources

References

WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?

This book is about affiliate marketing, so let’s start by answering the most obvious question you must have: What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which advertisers (also called merchants, companies, or brands) advertise the products and services they have to sell by soliciting the help of savvy, entrepreneurial - dare I add - well-connected publishers (also known as affiliates, bloggers, and marketers).

If your goal is to earn money by selling other people’s products as an affiliate marketer, you are a publisher; you promote products and services for the advertiser, whether you do so in a status update on social media or by creating and publishing a blog, forum, mobile app, or other online property. When your efforts are successful, you earn a pre-determined payment in accordance with the agreement you have with the advertiser.

You play an important role in your advertiser’s ultimate success. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to successfully leverage your reputation, skills, marketing expertise, relationships, email list, readership, and your own network to promote products that help your target audience to reach their goals.

That said, when you choose advertisers with which to partner, they will probably be advertisers who sell products that interest your readers, subscribers and network.

Affiliate Marketing in the Offline World

Despite the noise being made in the online world about the ever-growing affiliate marketing industry, affiliate marketing is actually nothing new. Offline companies frequently recruit sales and marketing professionals just like you to sell their goods and services, and pay a commission on each sale.

You can probably name a hundred professions right off the top of your head where this model has worked for years: Real estate, direct sales, network marketing, auto brokering. Even your friend’s $50 gift card that she received by referring you to her cable company follows the same general rules as affiliate marketing. Throw in a click button and a URL, and substitute the word publisher for sales and marketing professionals and the model remains fundamentally the same.

The online affiliate marketing industry is about as old as the Internet itself. Long before we were calling it affiliate marketing, revenue-sharing programs existed between online retailers and publishers. You may be surprised to find that the system of tracking affiliate sales is actually patented by William. J. Tobin. Tobin is the guy responsible for modern-day affiliate marketing.

In 1994, Tobin created an affiliate program to promote his e-commerce business, PC Flowers & Gifts. Within a year, he had 2,600 affiliates and was generating more than $6 million in annual sales.

Reviews for How to Master Affiliate Marketing

[Julian Ortiz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book to start your affiliate marketing business! It's concise, yet containing all the information you need to kickstart your new business. A great read!