How To Make Money From Home

Affiliate marketing is when you sign up to promote other people’s products (or services) for a share of the sale in the form of commissions.  As an affiliate marketer, you usually don’t need any special training or start-up funding.

Your tasks as an affiliate marketer will be to drum up traffic to the product owner’s pitch page, allowing them to convert the prospect into a buyer.  The more targeted you are with your traffic promotions, the higher your conversion rate will be.

There are many things you can promote as an affiliate. On Amazon, for instance, you can promote anything tangible (and a few digital download to boot).  If you want to be in the paintball niche, you can include links using your Amazon associate (affiliate) ID to sell specific paintball guns, paintballs, and attire.

You can go to sites like ClickBank or PayDotCom and get a unique affiliate ID to promote an endless supply of information products.  They house everything from acne to organic gardening.

You can even become an affiliate promoting actions.  There are many Internet marketers who focus their business on getting a steady stream of traffic to take an action, such as filling out a survey online.

With affiliate marketing, you don’t have to worry about developing ideas and creating products.  You don’t have to deal with customer service follow-ups or continually process more products for the marketplace.

Your job is often made easier by product owners who care so much about their own success, that they provide a toolbox to help you with yours!  The toolbox usually includes readymade emails, web reviews, and banner ads you can use with your own link embedded in them for instant plug-n-play success.

Most Internet marketers will eventually blur the lines of product owner and affiliate marketer.  Product owners continually use their list of buyers to promote affiliate items, and affiliates often build such a good reputation in a niche that they’re urged to come out with a product of their own.

How much can an affiliate marketer earn? There are no limits. You can market multiple niches and work as much or as little as you want to generate targeted traffic through your links.  Super affiliates earn six figures or more, but even a beginner affiliate can earn enough to pay the bills each month – with some change to spare!

Here’s another phrase you’ll grow sick of: The gold is in the list.  You might get weary of hearing it, but it’s smacking you in the face for a reason – it’s the truth!  First of all, let’s answer the question, “What is a list?”

A list in Internet marketing terms is a database of contact information for your prospects.  So if you have a product or promote products about gardening and I sign up for your list, I’m a prospect that you can market to repeatedly until I unsubscribe.

So why is building a list so important?  Let’s say you start off as an affiliate marketer.  You find a niche you truly enjoy and you start working what you’ve learned into some traffic for your affiliate links.

Over a period of 30 days, you funnel 5,000 prospects from the World Wide Web who are interested in your niche straight through your affiliate link to the product owner’s site. 

They even buy – yea! You’ve made a 50% commission with a 2% conversion rate.  That means 2 out of every 100 people you sent bought the product, and your share was $26.00 (as an example).  You earned a cool $2,600 this month – good for you!

But you’re leaving money on the table.  Those 100 people who bought from your 5,000 clicks?  They’re now on the product owner’s list, not yours. So what he’s going to do is send them more offers over the coming weeks.

After all, they are proven buyers.  Over the next 30 days, those buyers fork over some more money for products that complement the original one they bought.  That money goes to the product owner, not you – because you passed on building a list the first time around.

A better way to build an Internet marketing business is to start with a list from day one. Before you let a single person slip through your link without capturing their name and email address, have your system set up to build a list.

You can have unlimited lists for different niches using a simple tool like Aweber, which costs $19.95 a month.  Every day you can log in and see how many people have signed up, and you can create automated messages to send out to help convert your list into more sales.

Why should the product owner get to cash in on that person again and again when you’re the one who brought him the customer in the first place?  Stake claim to each prospect and leverage your relationship with him for future sales and commissions.

If you haven’t yet heard this phrase, information overload, you will soon – because it happens to the majority of new Internet marketers at some time or another.  Information overload is when you simply have too much to learn – so much that you feel overwhelmed, frustrated, and more confused than before you had help.

It happens easily with this industry because there are so many options you have – an endless array of opportunity.  You can be a product owner and an affiliate at the same time. 

You can use article marketing, social marketing, or pay per click campaigns.  You’re new, you may not know much about any of the above, and suddenly you’re thrust into an environment where everyone’s opinions differ and you don’t know where to start!

The first thing to do is calm down and take some of the pressure off of yourself. All of this information you need to digest isn’t going anywhere.  It’s going to be here tonight, next week, and a year from now.

Don’t invest in a guide about Google AdWords, another about Squidoo, and one about Private Label Rights all at the same time.  There’s an old saying, “How do you eat an elephant?” Answer: One bite at a time.

Internet marketing is your elephant and you have to choose whether you want to eat the ear, the foot, or the tail section first. It doesn’t matter if you start out learning about social marketing before you know the ropes of article marketing.

The point is that you’re educating yourself and putting that knowledge to work for you.  As long as you read the social marketing guide and apply that insight to a method of making money, you’re on the road to success!

Some things won’t make sense to learn before others. If you know you have no money to start with, then don’t buy (or even download for free) a guide about pay per click marketing.  Start with something you can do.

You don’t want a guide to everything all at once. You want to invest in small, bite-sized chunks of information that you can digest and utilize before moving on. Want to start with a free blog? Get a blog guide. Launch a blog.

Then move on to whatever interests you next, such as product creation or selling on eBay – whatever floats your boat.  The key is to not get stymied by having too much information and too many choices at once.

The short answer is, “No.”  You can effectively launch an Internet marketing career without a single dime.  All you need is a computer and an Internet connection, which does cost money, but we’re assuming you have those two components already.

Many a marketer has gotten his or her start as an affiliate marketer.  Aside from shuffling around in your attic to find something you can sell for a profit on eBay, affiliate marketing is your best bet for a zero-dollar start-up business in the Internet marketing industry.

All you need is a free ID that you can get on PayDotCom, Amazon, Commission Junction, LinkShare, or ClickBank (to name a few), and the ability to learn about free traffic sites and you can begin generating an affiliate income without investing a penny of your own money.

That said, it’s best if you save a few dollars here and there to invest in some tools that are going to make your Internet marketing efforts a whole lot easier.  For instance, you could sit around and brainstorm for five days to get a list of keywords – or, pay for a one-day subscription to WordTracker and harvest thousands of keywords in less than an hour.

You could also use nothing but web 2.0 social sites that are free, such as MySpace or Squidoo, to host your content and affiliate links.  Or, you could pony up the $9.95 one-time fee for a domain name and $6.95 a month for hosting and have your own business presence on the ‘net.

You can also spend days and weeks searching for information about how to do a task that will help you make money as an Internet marketer – such as how to master pay per click advertising. 

Or, you can invest in a step-by-step guide t shorten your learning curve.  What most marketers suggest is to take a look at your budget and see what you have to invest.  If you have to start out with nothing, go for it – but set aside a few of your profits to pour back into your online efforts. 

Everything you’ll invest in is built to ease your workload and hasten the procedures, so your income will increase faster and with less input from you as you learn to wield these tools in your favor.

A lot of non-marketers think of marketers as nothing but spammers.  It’s easy to understand why. We all get mountains of spam emails o a daily basis – regardless of whether or not we gave out the email address. 

But unless you want to be prosecuted and condemned for sending spam emails out, you’ll want to take precautions to be careful about who you email and why.  Spam is defined as unsolicited email messages that are sent out to the masses.

True Internet marketers don’t mess with spam because it hurts their credibility, risks their accounts, and doesn’t convert as well as targeted, welcomed email does.  You can have your ISP ban you for sending spam, and you can lose your autoresponder account, too.

It’s far better to use an opt-in form where people willingly enter their first name and email address.  In fact, it’s best to utilize the double opt in option most autoresponders provide.

A single opt in is when you just let the person enter their information once.  But what’s to stop one person from going around entering another person’s contact information for unethical reasons?

You want a double opt in to protect yourself.  Here’s how it works:

The user lands on your website and sees an opt in box, asking for their first name and email address.  They enter it (usually in exchange for a free download or the promise of information at a later date).

Then the autoresponder tool automatically sends out a verification email.  The end user gets the email alerting them that they’ve signed up to be on your list, but it asks them to verify their subscription by clicking on a link in the email.

This means if someone goes to your site and signs someone else up, that person will get a notification and have the option to decline if they weren’t the ones who really opted into the list.

Make sure you abide by permission marketing standards.  These people trust you enough to hand over important details, so don’t sell their contact information or abuse it in any way.  If you respect the people on your list, it will grow and you’ll have a readymade list of prospects that can help you earn more money on both a short and long-term timeframe.

There’s no PhD you can strive for to be in the Internet marketing industry. You have to learn as you go – on your own – soaking up information along the way.  The first thing you need to know is what it means to be an Internet marketer, because it isn’t always clear to everyone.

Let’s start with what Internet marketing is not.  It’s not being a con artist. It’s not being a spam king.  It doesn’t just mean selling on eBay or having your own website and products.

In reality, Internet marketers can pick and choose from a whole host of options available to help them make money.  Your opportunities are virtually endless, and include one or more of the following: 

• Selling digital downloads (information products like eBooks)
• Promoting other people’s products for a commission (affiliate marketing)
• Selling on eBay or other auction sites
• Running a membership site
• Selling your online services (writing, graphics, etc.)
• Owning a website that sells dropshipped or wholesale items

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Being a newcomer to Internet marketing, you might be worried that you don’t have anything to sell.  That’s okay – most people don’t start out with anything, and you never have t stock a tangible inventory if you don’t want to.

Internet marketing creates no gender or age boundaries for you.  There are teenagers who have launched multi-million dollar companies as budding Internet marketers whose ideas sprung to life and catapulted them to instant success.

You don’t have to do anything unethical or shady to succeed at Internet marketing, and in fact, launching a respectable business with a solid reputation is the secret ingredient that will allow you to hatch an empire on the ‘net to fulfill all of your dreams and those of your family.