Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Presenting The Simple Affiliate System

Affiliate Marketing for Beginners header image 1

How to make Money Online in Internet Marketing; Article and Bum Marketing

January 18th, 2010 · Affiliate Marketing

We all want to know “How To Make Money on the Internet” and in the previous post I listed 6 methods

Any 1 of these ways is fine and each of them is a business model you can learn about

  1. Article and Bum Marketing
  2. Adsense on your blog or website
  3. Affiliate sales
  4. Email Marketing
  5. Product Sales including eBay
  6. Membership sites

So let’s go into some more detail then about each of thee ways of making money online – but remember all you need to master is 1 of these ways – the problem for most Newbies is that they try to learn or do all of them and get nowhere. It is very important for Newbies to remember to KISS…Keep It Superbly Simple.

If you forget to KISS you will be confused and NOT make any progress!!

Article Marketing and Bum Marketing

Let’s start with so called “Bum Marketing eh?

A better name for this is probably Newbie Marketing or Zero Cost Marketing because it is about earning money online without spending any money.

This is important for 2 reasons.

In the beginning of our career online we have low confidence and we don’t know who to trust. Let’s put it like this – if I knew with cast iron certainly that an online course or eBook costing $100 was going to work for me – meaning if I put in the time that it earns me a decent amount of money I would buy it and so would most people too.

The point is that all the salespeople online are claiming that their product/ course is the Bee’s Knees – the totally best thing ever…we come back to the question – “Who do we trust?”

The other possibility is that we may be very short of cash right now and not be able to spend anything and we must use Newbie or Zero cost marketing. And that means we do not buy a domain name or website hosting or anything else.

The focus is earning money without spending money.

We do this with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is natural and we all do it. YOU have done affiliate marketing already and in fact you may be an expert without even knowing it.

It is like this – suppose you hear that a friend has a health problem and you remember a remedy you heard about…wouldn’t you let them know? And if they bought the remedy and got better, isn’t that good? Did you help them to get well and be happy?

And suppose you got paid as well for doing all this? Would you like that?

You betcha!!

Well that is what Affiliate Marketing is all about.

All you  what you have to do is send people to great websites that sell super stuff.

That’s it.

Honest

Sorry it is not complicated!

What you want to know now is how you get paid when people you send to a website buy something, right?

So let me give you a good example

There’s a great Home Study course in email marketing written and produced by my friend Kathy Baker and me. It is called Expert List Building; let’s just call it ELB to cut down on typing eh?

You find out that a friend of yours needs a course on how to build his Email List so that he can make money by emailing his subscribers. And you see a chance to help your friend and make some money so this is what you do…

  1. The sales page of ELB http://www.expertlistbuilding.com/cbsales.html
  2. And ELB is sold by Clickbank With Clickbank you have a user name – let’s say it is newbiepro
  3. and you get an affiliate Link on this page http://expertlistbuilding.com/listbuilding/welcome-and-thanks-for-signing-up
  4. and if you put newbiepro into the link generator you get http://d3b83cjuqcudyf3d9akpxdkjvu.hop.clickbank.net/
  5. That is your Affiliate link – when a shopper clicks it they end up at our sales page and roughly 1 in 100 will buy
  6. And clickbank knows that it is YOUR affiliate link – so YOU get paid!!

So that is the process and some of the technical details too. Your job as an affiliate is to put your affiliate link in front of as many people who want to see it as possible.

Did you notice the bit about  as many people who want to see it? Only people who want to see a product will give you a chance of a sale, so you have to present your link in a way that people find interesting.

You put it in a good article or an a good Squidoo webpage or in a blogger blog

And we’ll go over the details of all this in later posts.

Let’s just sum up this Newbie Marketing Method then.

  1. find a good product that is selling well
  2. check that it has an affiliate program and join it to get your link
  3. Choose where you will be putting your article – there are lots of Articles Directories – GoArticles is the best place to start – and be very careful to use your link according to the rules of the website
  4. When published check that the link works by clicking it
  5. Let a few friends know – give them a link to your article and why not let your buddies on twitter know too. Do not just put your affiliate link in twitter – tweet about your article
  6. This method is serious enough to make a good income but takes hard work and lots of time
  7. I have tried to be as simple as possible – let me know where you want some extra detail

Next post we’ll be moving on to Adsense – is it as good as it seems or is it even better?

Alex


→ No CommentsTags: ····

How To Learn Internet Marketing

October 24th, 2009 · Learning Internet Marketing

Learning Internet Marketing is a difficult and confusing business and takes years, but why is this?  We are not learning Quantum Mechanics or Brain Surgery so why does it take so long? Here are a few reasons from my experience and maybe they can help you shorten that learning curve and get onto your “Earning Curve” a lot sooner than I did.

I walked straight into a trap when I first started learning Internet Marketing. There’s no point using names but I signed up to an expensive and badly delivered course that promised all kinds of results and support and simply did not deliver. It took a few months and a few hundred dollars before I jumped out of the course…

No time to lick wounds though I still had to learn to earn so…

I joined another course!

This one was less toxic. It actually had lots of good content and is still widely promoted today, albeit by people who have never done the course. It has a very good Affiliate program so it gets a lot of “air time”. It is called SBI and I would never advise anyone to join it.

UGH!

After that I went on by myself and had the good fortune to find some good people online and formed a Mastermind group. We talked once a week online and helped each other along.

Of course I am a compulsive learner so you may be expecting me to join another course about now…

Well you’re right, I found out that Patric Chan was putting on a Home Study course and joined it along with one of my buddies Kathy Baker, from the Mastermind group.

This course was different! This course was very good. It was jam packed with quality content…

But here’s the thing! I had done 2 crap courses – to be exact, one scam, one lousy and one superb course and I was as confused as hell!

CONFUSION is crippling; it is the single biggest barrier you have to overcome as you learn Internet Marketing.

Gradually though the fog I realised that there were several different ways of making money in Internet Marketing and that 1 of them is enough at any one time!

How to make Money Online in Internet Marketing

Any 1 of these ways is fine and each of them is a business model you can learn about

  1. Article and Bum Marketing
  2. Adsense on your blog or website
  3. Affiliate sales
  4. Email Marketing
  5. Product Sales
  6. Membership sites

That’s enough for now!

You can make a full time living using any one of these business models. You just have to concentrate on one of them and learn all you can and put a lot of effort into it for alt least 3 months before you see results.

There is no “Easy” or “EZ”!!!

Looking back at the list of business models – you may notice they are in a particular order. I reckon that the best way to start is with so called “Bum Marketing” and that as you gain experience you can move through the list.

For now it’s worth saying that you have to find a model that suits you and stick with until you make some money. That is the best way to deal with confusion because when you get results you will know what works and what does not and start to run your Internet Marketing as a business.

I’ll expand on this over the next few posts.

Until then I’d love to hear your experiences and what you learned

Alex Newell Signing off

Alex Newell Signing off

→ 4 CommentsTags: ········

Internet Marketing for Beginners

September 30th, 2009 · Affiliate Marketing

We spoke in the last post about “Passion or Profit?”, meaning should you focus on methods that make your money in niches in which you not have an interest or should you home in on your “Passions”.

Newbie On The Net was a “Passion” of mine right from the get go. The passion was fury. I had been trying to sort out Internet Marketing for some time and had learned quite a lot and earned almost nothing and I was furious at the disinformation, low quality and sheer fraud that I saw.

Fury was not enough though I had to do something about it.

So I just write a whole series of lessons and proceeded to publish them initially on a website made with Xsitepro – a truly awful website tool and after that in FrontPage. Despite FrontPage having pretty terrible and messy code the pages did well in the search engines.

I’ll skip over some of the history, truly I did not mean this to be a trip down memory lane, but here we are in the last months of 2009 and the site needs a “make over”.

This is going to take a while and may be postponed because I want to shift to another web host before I can do what I want.

After the transformation the site will still be an expression of my passion as a College teacher to tell the truth about Internet Marketing and it will be free to access.

Meanwhile you are welcome to tell me what do you want to learn? What is confusing you?

Want motivation?

Perry Marshall gave a very rousing post today which I’d encourage you to read

Want Tools?

Kim Roach published a post and a PDF too with an Aladdin’s Cave of resources and tools – just visit her blog and download it.

Over to you – there are less than 100 days left with this year!

Get going now – make the New Year, well, a NEW year, a year different and better than the past one. Only learning the right skills and using them will help you change and improve your life. Yes I would say that I am a teacher who has helped transform the lives of many students with the right techniques applied the right way.

All it takes is a decision – a decision to succeed. After that you just have to persist and that is a decision too.

Success Resources

Success and the 100 Day Challenge

Success Workshop

Alex

→ 2 CommentsTags: ··

Profit or Passion, the Super Affiliate Perspective

August 31st, 2009 · Internet Experts

Newbie Affiliate Marketers face a big challenge.

They have to work out what business model to follow, what technical issues they need to solve and need to work out which products to promote. But behind all that there is what you might think of as a philosophical  question – whether they should be guided by their love of the niche they have chosen or to look at the market research numbers and let the profit potential make the decision.

Playing into this is the movie, “Field of Dreams” which leaves a wistful echo at the back of your mind, “Build a stadium, they will come!”

I have always been doubtful of the “follow your passion” school of thought – being a Physicist at heart I just love to crunch the numbers and advise others to do the same. This is deeply unwelcome advice to many Internet beginners who view Market Research as if it is Rocket science or brain surgery!

I’m minded to start a series on Market Research for Beginners right  now but let’s just point to a recent post for now and come to the point for today.

If you are stuck with this problem right now - should I follow my passion or should I follow the money, it makes sense to listen to experienced Internet Marketers who know the answer and not just get a whole load of conflicting advice from friends and forum buddies who may not have the real success behind them that you need to give your trust to the answers you get.

So who can you trust? One of the people I trust to give sound advice is Lynn Terry, a super affiliate active in many niche markets well away from the Internet Marketing world for over 12 years. She made this short movie recently…

Listen to her perspective on this dilemma

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzhSrgrHM1U

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzhSrgrHM1U

And please leave a comment on your own

Alex

→ 1 CommentTags: ··

Web Site Hosting for Newbies

July 25th, 2009 · Hosting

What Do You Need From A Web Host When You Are Starting An Internet Business?

You have wracked your brain. After lots of hard work your website is ready. Now your web site needs a home. While building and designing your web site it sits on your computer, on the hard drive. You can test it, tweak it and see it there, but nobody else can!

For it to be visible on the World Wide Web it needs to be on a computer that is connected in technically fast, secure and stable ways onto the internet. That kind of computer is called a server, and a company that provides this service is called a Host or Web Host and the service they provide is called hosting.

Choose the wrong host and you’re in trouble!

The hosting company owns many servers that serve up web pages to the search engines or to whoever types your domain name into the address bar of their browser program or clicks on the link for your domain name.

It is crucial that your server is reliable and fully functioning nearly 100% of the time. Technical support for the server and for you the user is the single most expensive item for the host company. If they save money there the server may perform poorly or even crash and the customers are left with poor service and support

For the sake of saving a few measly dollars many intelligent webmasters / business owners make the mistake of using a cheap host. They even feel smart about this until they get burnt!

Hosting Tips for Beginners To Internet Business

1. No technology is perfect. There are likely to small problems affecting performance in all hosts. But you need a very high uptime – most hosting companies will claim 99% or 99.9% uptime some will claim 100%.

2. Sufficient room for your web site. Files take up memory space on your drive before they are copied to the server. They take up server space once you have transferred them- enough space for us is probably 2 MB

3. Decent bandwidth-remember you want thousands of people to see your site. Each time your site is seen the server has to work. Practically speaking the bandwidth is a measurement of how many people can see your web pages. Some hosts claim “Unlimited Bandwidth”, but really this is nonsense, such a claim is hype. A real number may be 2 GB per month

4. You want a company with sound finances. Lots of hosts go out of business by offering free or cheap hosting. You want a stable viable company that will be around as long as you will. Changing hosts is no joke; this is something you want to get right the first time (like marriage!)

5. You may not think that it is important in the beginning but you need a hosting plan which will allow you to host more than one website. At the beginning one website seems as daunting as a marathon race but after you have created your first website you will probably start getting ideas for your second website. Your hosting plan must allow you to grow!

6.  I have left the most important requirement for a Newbie till last!  

It is support.

We are Newbies. We are intelligent and hardworking, not dummies or idiots but we require proper support. Every Host will claim that their support is great-how would you find them saying that their support is rubbish? But if you look at the web sites of host companies you find different types of support

I list here the kinds of support provided with my comments:
• Knowledge base – fancy words for a few pages of other peoples questions. This is usually useless

• Ticket System – a way for a company to spend less on telephone support and provide you with slow, half baked answers

• Instant Chat-not much different from the ticket system. The customer support person is handling many requests at the same time, how good do you think that makes the answers you get?

• Telephone Support-now we’re talking! Sorry about the pun! There are two types of Telephone support – General Customer Support-often about Billing, general questions-non technical stuff and Technical Support.

My strongest recommendation is for you to choose a host who provide Telephone Technical Support. Some do this only in Office hours. Check what time zone they are in and that this fits your hours.

Very very few provide 24/7 Telephone Technical Support.

Now it could easily be that a host that provides good Newbie friendly customer support falls down in other ways!  Choosing a host is difficult but we got to do it! Just think about how difficult it is to find and choose a good home for your family. If you can do that you can find a good home for your web sites too!

Make sure you phone them and see how they treat you!

Notice that I used the plural, “web sites”? Congratulations on starting your internet business and publishing your first web site but nobody makes a living from one web site. A real solid business will have second and third and more income streams, although you have to start with one website and focus on it until it works. This makes your decision about web hosting even more important.

Using these hosting tips will give you solid support and help not just in starting your internet business but for years to come.

And it’s natural ask, “Alex, what host do you use?”

I have tried lots of different web hosts over the years and I use Hostmonster becuase they fit the bill – read the list above. There are a small number of hosts I could use – Godaddy is OK, so is Kiosk and Liquid Web

But the only one I reccomend and use is Hostmonster so if you are looking for a good home for your blog or web site I’d say join me and I think you’ll be very pleased, as I am.

 alex

→ 4 CommentsTags: ··

Niche Marketing for Newbies

June 25th, 2009 · Research Tools

What is Niche Marketing and is it for Newbies (Beginners)?

I am prompted to do this post because Chris Freville – a friend of mine – is bringing out a new guide for Niche Marketing and it’s important that you can decide whether this is for you or not.

Niche marketing is focussed marketing!

Suppose like me you are keen on health and you want to build a business in the health market…where do you start?

If you try to sell everything to everybody which NEVER WORKS you have to focus on one part of the health market.

Off to the Google search page you go and type health in!
:-)

I just got this from Google  Results 1 – 10 of about 1,040,000,000 for health

Yup that’s over a BILLION pages competing with you!

Hehehe – you don’t have a chance.

Instead of trying to sell ALL of health try FOCUSSING.

And to FOCUS you have to NOTICE.

NOtice that when you type H E A L T H into the search box you get a drop down menu? Well each of these entries…health article,

Google drop down menuhealth definitions, health fitness, health nutrition, health topics etc etc is a possible niche market.

And Google is telling you what it thinks are niche markets – so you have to listen!

Now le’t just choose one of these, hmm, let’s take health nutrition… and when we put that into the search box we get

Results 1 – 10 of about 29,700,000

Which is still big – too big but a lot smaller than a billion!

So let’s keep going eh?

We drill down into the market by typing health nutrition into the search box – or just by selecting it from the drop down menu.

This is what we get

health nutrition tips

So I quite like the look of heath nutrition tips so I put that in the search box… and get

Results 1 – 10 of about 13,000,000

Which is still smaller but too large to easily cope with. So we drill down again…but this time Google gives me no more clues! What a shame  – no more drop down menu – so what do we do?

To focus is to notice – OK?

So look down the page…what do you notice?

You see “Searches related to: health nutrition tips”

And a whole list of niches here too and I’ve noticed these entries on the right

related searches “fruits and vegetables nutrition” looks good to me so I put that into Google and get

Results 1 – 10 of about 2,590,000“

So we’ve drilled down and down into the market and found niches which may or may not be useful to us. This is the first step in Niche Marketing – just exploring and finding niches.

A niche is a part of a Mass Market and a niche that we enter we must assess to see if it will pay…

I’ll cover that soon but if you have no patience pop over to Chris Freville’s new Niche Marketing Guide

he is an expert in Niche Marketing and I’ll be doing a review on his new guide soon.


→ 1 CommentTags: ····

Twitter Tools

June 1st, 2009 · Affiliate Marketing

Twitter is growing at such a speed it’s hard to keep up. Not only are millions storming into Twitter but many coders are producing software tools to take advantage of the marketing ooportunity presented.

Two short examples today with more to come later…

If you don’t know what to tweet about to your followers use this app. http://twittersheep.com/

Twittersheep makes a simple tag cloud diagram of the interests of the people following you. So just take one or more of those tags and get going. ..perhaps put that tag into Google along with the word blog and catch up on what the blogosphere is saying.

What do you mean you don’t have any followers?

Twitter is awash with savvy Internet Marketers and MLM people too following dozens or hundreds of people a day with the expectation that those people will follow them in return.

This is a simple method of list building but is it any good?

A list is useless unless it is targetted on a particular topic, so how can I build a targetted list on twitter?

With Twollo that’s how!

Using Twollo you can put a serch term meaning a keyword phrase into the search box and twollo searches for a follows people who have that interest…and by people “following back” can automatically build a list.

Does that help? Yes but remember a list is only a list – you have some work to do to cultivate the people and build a relationship before you can motivate them to click, download or buy.

Alex

→ No CommentsTags: ·····

Why Giving is Good for Business

April 24th, 2009 · Joint Ventures

Internet Marketing is a creative and fast moving business.

In “real world” business we are used to the idea of the “loss leader”.

When I was a teenager I had a part time job in a small food store and Mick the owner

attracted attention and business to his store when he ordered hundreds of packets

of yummy biscuits (cookies) and sold them at cost price or even below.

There was a storm of interest in the neighbourhood and his business

got an amazimg boost.

Well done Mick!

In Internet Marketing we don’t get free biscuits ( sadly) we get  ” Giveaways”

A Giveaway event is a joint venture between the organisers and perhaps

dozens or hundreds of product sellers to get more business and the main focus is

to build your optin mailing list

The giveaway organisers create a membership site. This is a website where

you can login.

Once inside you create an account, describe your gifts and how to get them and pick up

some promotional material.

Typically there are email letters such as this…

“I dunno if it’s your birthday soon but lots of gifts are
coming your way!

I hope you like them and they help you too.

There is a major “GiveAway” starting today with lots of
good free stuff available for download.

There’s 2 from me and my business partner Kathy Baker

Here’s what’s going on…

A very bright young guy called Reed Floren just released
the internet’s most massive giveaway ever:

It’s right here http://freeimgiveaway.com/go/643

Simply sign up and get the inside scoop.

There’s

-tons of ebooks
-tons of scripts
-tons of everything you’ve ever wanted but did not want to pay for!

So where did all these goodies come from?

We teamed up with Reed Floren who has called in some favors
from a whole bunch of top online marketers and convinced
them all to give you TONS of Products at no cost to you.

It is our way of saying “thank you”!

These products are worth thousands and thousands of dollars
and have already made the owners thousands and thousands
of dollars.

We’re  really pleased to share this news with you

But…don’t hang around – this is only on for a few days

Go get it now while you can !

Just click on this link to get your free stuff

http://freeimgiveaway.com/go/643

Warmly,

Alex Newell and Kathy Baker”

Truth is that most people are lazy and the emails supplied are often just pasted into the autoresponder and the “send”  button clicked.

Their whole list gets the cookie cutter email…

(I think I have cookies on the brain!)

The email above is a real email I sent out – it is about 50% cookie and 50% original.

I don’t think that the example emails supplied by merchants and others should ever be used “as is”

they must, in my opinion be customised or written fresh

So why is giving good for business?

This is truly a win win win.

It is a win for the subscribers to the list – they get some very good gifts! It is a win for the list owners too because they get lost of publicity and traffic i.e. visitors and perhaps some commissions.

And it is also a win for the organisers – they get publicity, kudos, traffic and they’ll earn commissions too

So if you are just starting in Internet Marketing and wondering how to get your list growing

look around for some good giveaways and join in.

And then come back and share your experience here – we’ll look forward to it.

All The Best

listbuilders

→ No CommentsTags: ······················

Profits, Passion and Partnership

March 28th, 2009 · Affiliate Marketing

Beginners to Internet Business are often told to follow their Passions / hobbies / sports interests rather than just trying to chase every scheme they come across that promises to be an income “opportunity”.

That’s true as far as it goes – the next step after choosing a passion to focus on is go through a systematic market research to check whether there IS a profit to be made in this passion!

And we teach how to do this in Expert List-Building.

If the numbers are right then you have a winner because you have a niche market spending money on their passion.

I love books – I spend a fortune buying books. We’re all the same – when we are passionate about something we spend and spend…

On the Social Networking site Cagora – these groups of passionate people are grouped together in Local and Niche Markets in a way that produce some passive income for all of who sign up for the affiliate program.

http://cagora.com/launchearn/go/AlexNewell

Very soon local businesses are to be shown some of the Cagora products and sales that occur in your local group can benefit you.

But this is only so for another few days. The original deadline was 15 of March but it was pushed back to the end of March.

Have a look for yourself and if Community is something that you value or even if you just want a good affiliate program or promote this could be just right for you

http://cagora.com/launchearn/go/AlexNewell

Remember there is a deadline! After the deadline you can still join at no cost but the passive element of you getting a percentage from sales activity in your local are or niche is being removed.

There is a short video here and lots of info. Cagora is a new Community orientated site which I feel very optimistic about – see if you feel the same..

Right here http://cagora.com/launchearn/go/AlexNewell

Any questions – ask us, we’re here to help!

alex newell list building blogger

→ No CommentsTags: ······

How To Start Making Money with Affiliate Marketing

March 26th, 2009 · Affiliate Marketing, Product Reviews, Writing

We all want to know how to make money with Affiliate Programs…

How to start is the big question all beginners want answered. The first cheque you get from Clickbank or Google or whoever changes your life forever.

Even if it’s for a small amount it proves the reality of the quest.

You may have been wondering if it was possible to make money online and BAM an envelope with a cheque comes through the letterbox.

:-)

I photocopied mine and put the copy on my notice board at home…

Nice but what do you do then? Because one cheque does not mean you can pick the phone up and resign…

What you need then is a system – a step by step procedure written clearly and honestly by someone who has been there and done that!

There are 3 that I can recommend that you look at. You may feel drawn more to one than the others…and none of these is expensive

  • First off I’m going to mention the business building program written by me and Kathy Baker over the last year. Called “Expert List Building”, it starts from no online knowledge and takes a slow step by step approach to market research, buying domain names, putting your first blog and Squeeze page together and building your own opt-in listAnd then we pull out all the stops and reveal that there are 4 list building personalities and you need to follow the list building techniques we cover that are in line with your personality.

    A major reason people fail is trying to do things that are out of character for them

    See for yourself http://expertlistbuilding.com

  • Next is a system put together by Brian Johnston. Called SeoPress it starts from the beginning and gives careful advice – mostly on video about using WordPress blogs as affiliate sales pages

    Check it out here http://newbie-on-the-net.com/seopress.html

  • And then we come to a system called One Week Marketing. This is a way of starting with free web sites – in particular Squidoo and earning your first few dollars there and only then moving on to buying a domain name and hosting and a regular website. Again this is well thought out and presented and I would not mention here unless it was good quality. It’s right here so look for yourself http://www.newbie-on-the-net.com/oneweekmarketing.html


Which one is best for you?

I don’t know my friend but I do know that you will learn a lot from any of those and it may be all you need to make your first earnings online. None of them will break the bank either. Don’t let thoughts of failure stop – you fail all the project s that you do not start!

All The Best

alex newell list building blogger

→ 1 CommentTags: ····