Affiliate Marketing is a revenue sharing project between a marketer and an online merchant. The marketer will market the merchant’s product and send potential traffic to the merchant’s website, and get paid a commission only when someone buys the product.

If you are new to internet marketing, I will advise you to start off with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing has a lot of benefits. You do not need to handle customers emails, create products, write salespage, etc.

Do not get me wrong - although affiliate marketing has its benefits, being a product owner has its benefits too! In fact, if you want to make serious money online (I mean in 5 to 6 figure monthly income), you need to have your own products. The steps to create your own products I shall leave it to another post.

Affiliate marketing is also a great way for you to master the most important thing in online marketing - which is to drive traffic.

As an affiliate marketer, you will be drilled in traffic generation, because in order to get commission, you need to drive lots of targeted traffic to the merchant’s site. If you are in affiliate marketing long enough, you should be a master of traffic generation.

In this post, I will share with you the steps that I always take when I wish to market a new affiliate product:

1. Market Research. If you want to enjoy success with affiliate marketing, you need to spend some time doing market research. First of all, you need to choose a profitable market. Unless you are a niche expert, I will advise you to go for those popular markets online. (such as forex, weight loss, dating, sexuality, etc) Yes, these markets are highly competitive, but they are big enough for you to make some serious money from it. After you have chosen the market to enter, you can now go to Clickbank and select a product to promote.
2. Product Selection. Go to The Marketplace on Clickbank and select the market that you wish to enter. Then sort the results by “Popularity”. The first 10 products that Clickbank returned are usually hot sellers. These mean that those products can sell and you should visit the salespage of each product. Look at each of the salespage and ask yourself if you are in need of the product, will you be enticed by the salespage and buy it? Also, I will advise you to promote a product that offers at least $25 commission for each sale. This is because the effort that you spend promoting a high ticket item and a low ticket item is almost the same. So why not promote something that gives you a higher commission per sale?
3. Test out the product. After you have chosen an affiliate product to promote, it is time to test out the product. You can create a page or site and drive traffic to it. Many affiliate marketers create a squidoo page or a blogspot page to drive traffic to. However, I will advise you to create your own site so that you can differentiate yourself from other affiliate marketers. Create your own website and drive traffic using articles, squidoo lens and other channels to it. You do not need to be a programmer to get your website up. There are templates available and you can create your own professional site in a day. Personally, I prefer to use either a “Conduit Site” or a mini review site to test out a product.  Conduit or mini review site enables you to quickly find out how well the product sells in the market so that you can ditch it if it is a loser.
   
4. Market the product intensively. If you are making money with the product that you are promoting, you should consider marketing the product more intensively. You can further expand your site to make it an authority site in the market, by adding more content and web 2.0 elements to it. By now, you should start building your list. A list in a profitable market is an asset to you. Therefore, once you have determined that the product can sell in a particular market, you should start building your list. The earlier you build, the more money you will make in the near future.
5. Create your own product. I have mentioned earlier that in order for you to make 5 to 6 figure income consistently, you need to have your own products. With a solid product, you will have tons of affiliates that market your product for free… and you only pay them when they make a sale. If you have identify a winner in a market, you should become your own competition or create your own competition (or both). Re-name the product, change it a little, add in what your competitors do not have, become your own competition and potentially double your income. And do not forget that as an affiliate in the market, you already your own lists and sites with traffic to begin with. When you launch your own product, what you need to is to leverage on your assets and keep all the money that you make. And not forgetting the backend sales that you will make with your own product too.
   

Affiliate marketing is the single best marketing strategy ever available on the Internet. You basically have zero risk as a merchant. So once you have identify a winner, create your own product and start recruiting affiliates to sell for you instead!

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