Affiliate Marketing 1: Starting an Affiliate Marketing Business

If you’ve explored ways to make money on the Internet, you’ve probably been told that affiliate marketing is the easiest way to get started. In some ways this is true – promoting other peoples’ products means that you have none of the problems of product delivery or customer service.

But affiliate marketing is not necessarily a walk in the park. For beginners, it can be quite daunting. Selecting the right product to promote, setting up a website and getting enough visitors to visit the site, let alone click on your affiliate links and then buy the product, can be a confusing and time-consuming task.

And it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to ‘quit your day job’ based on the affiliate income from one website – unless it becomes incredibly popular.

In this series of articles, I’m going to step through the process of setting up an affiliate website. I’ll show you how to choose a product, how to make sure that a market exists for the product, how to set up a domain name and web hosting and how to create a website. Finally, we’ll look at some ways to make sure that you get enough traffic to your site to generate an income.

But first, let’s look at some reasons to consider affiliate marketing.

Low cost of entry

You can set up an affiliate website for very little money. A domain name ($6-$10 a year) and a hosting account ($5-$10 a month) are all you need to get started. We’ll be using free software to set up the actual website(s).

Passive income

Once you’ve set up your site, created a flow of traffic, and started generating affiliate commissions, your income can be completely automatic.

No employees

You can do it all yourself, at least to start off. Once you have your affiliate marketing empire in place, you might want to outsource some tasks to online freelancers. But they could be in another country, and you’ll pay them for the work they do without worrying about employee benefits and deductions.

No stock

You won’t have to worry about keeping products in stock or about shipping them to customers – the merchant handles all that.

Low risk

You are not tied to any merchant. If their product doesn’t sell, you can easily switch your efforts to marketing a different product.

Work from anywhere

You can log in to your website and your affiliate accounts from anywhere with an Internet connection. With a laptop and a wireless connection, you can work from a coffee shop in your home town or from any city in the world.

Worldwide market

With 1.6 billion people online – almost 1/4 of the world’s population (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) the world is your marketplace. You can sell Australian magazines to people in the UK, South African biltong to Canadians and Japanese cameras to Americans.

There is no other business I know of where the start-up cost is so low and the potential rewards are so great.