Affiliate marketing how-to for entrepreneurs

Learning how to be an effective affiliate marketer on one of the top affiliate marketing networks, like PeerFly, is a great skill to have for entrepreneurs and anyone looking to start up their own business.

Affiliate marketers need all the skills required to drive sales and revenue that traditional or online business must have. The only difference is that starting up your own business takes a lot of work, whereas starting an affiliate marketing campaign is really easy.

The marketing skills you learn from working in affiliate marketing will help you to succeed in your own business when it comes time to market and promote your own products or services. It won't teach you how to manage a supply chain, but it will teach you how to increase your sales and drive a positive cash flow (obviously something that is critical for any startup).

Affiliate marketing definition

Let's get a quick definition and explanation of affiliate marketing so we're all reading off the same page:

In other words, companies outsource their marketing efforts to people like you and me. In return we get a commission for sending customers to purchase their products. Every time someone we send makes a purchase, we get a cut of that sale. The seller gets more sales and we get paid.

With that out of the way, let's get started...

1. Affiliate marketing 101: Pick a niche

One of the great benefits of affiliate marketing is that you can pick and choose the type of product or service you want to market. If you're thinking of starting your own business, it makes sense to choose similar products or services to market since the work you do in identifying target markets, social networks, media, and so on, will be transferable to your own startup.

The first thing any new affiliate marketer must do is pick a niche. A niche is basically a definable segment of a greater market. For example, as an individual, you might not want to tackle the entire electronics market because your message will be diluted across all the different segments - tvs, pcs, cameras, phones, and so on.

Remember that marketing online requires you to create focused content that is relevant to a target audience. The more focused your content, the more likely you are to build authority in that niche and appear higher up in search results as a result.

If you're unfamiliar with Internet marketing, then here are some must have resources and posts for you:

• Internet marketing with WordPress
• How to create a webpage for SEO & Internet marketing
• On-site SEO vs. off-site SEO

Basically, it comes down to picking a niche you are interested in, know something about, and can build up a useful body of content over time.

2. Affiliate marketing 101: Plan your campaign

With your niche selected, you now need to work out how best to get the right marketing message across to the right people with the least amount of effort and cost. Fortunately, the Internet has gotten to the point where it is very easy to create new marketing webpages. What counts is your own creativity in creating content (discussed in the following section) and spreading the message.

Effectively what you are looking for is a web platform that allows you to create SEO optimized landing pages that are specifically designed with Internet marketing best practices built in. Naturally you will also need your marketing web pages to be socially integrated so that any content you create can be spread socially through networks like Facebook, twitter, StumbleUpon, or LinkedIn.

The best way to create affiliate marketing web pages is by using design-a-webpage.com, which is tailored specifically to provide affiliate marketers with an instant web page publisher that can help to drive traffic and conversions.

design-a-webpage.com has a one week free trial that you can use to create your first few affiliate web pages.

Here are a few examples of products being promoted using affiliate marketing techniques on :

• Drupal 7
• Internet marketing with WordPress
• Kalahari Dream

Each of these pages includes an affiliate link to Amazon.com. Any time someone reads these pages and decides to click through to Amazon to make a purchase, the affiliate marketer gets their cut.

Part of planning your affiliate campaign is also deciding which businesses you want to partner with. There are tonnes of different affiliate marketing schemes available. Not all of them are reliable, so approach with caution. The world's most popular affiliate scheme is run by Amazon, and you can sign up with them at their associates page.

3. Affiliate marketing 101: Create content

In order to really start driving traffic through to your affiliate marketing pages you need to create content that is focused, relevant and engaging. Simply copying and pasting sales information from one site to another is actually worse than useless. Google will notice that you aren't providing any original content and will immediately penalize your site. No one will visit it and you will have wasted time and effort.

Instead, find an angle that interests readers. People want to be entertained and informed without feeling like they're being pitched every second of every day. If you can find a way to get people to trust you, you can get them to make purchases through you. Building trust is something you will need to do in your own business, so it makes sense to practice the technique first.

If you haven't had much experience creating marketing content, check out this list for more info:

• How to drive server crashing traffic
• Master Internet marketing
• Write exciting, popular & viral content in 4 easy steps

4. Affiliate marketing 101: Promote, analyze & refine

Once you have worked out the details of how to create your content and publish it online, your job splits into three disciplines:

• creating more and more marketing content
• finding new and creative ways to spread the word
• analyzing traffic and conversion rates of that content

Currently one of the best ways to spread content is via social networks. If your content has something of value (let's say you created a page comparing the values of all the best televisions on the market) and this gets picked up and spread around one or more of the social networks (for argument's sake, let's say Digg), then it it quite likely that your marketing page will experience a massive surge in traffic.

The more traffic you can drive to your page, the more likely it is that a certain fraction of those visitors will click through and make a purchase (a conversion). By analyzing how well your marketing web pages convert, you can start to work out how to improve them:

more traffic + a higher conversion rate = more revenue

Be careful not to become spammy or self promotional. Many social networks are acutely alert to people wanting to advertise directly. Make sure you offer content of real value. It could be a funny video clip, a podcast, a blog post, a landing page... anything - so long as it is interesting.

better content => greater trust and authority => higher conversion

If you haven't had much experience with SEO, social media and analytics, check out these posts to learn more:

• Startup SEO, social marketing & traffic building checklist
• The 5 most important tools and resources for small business startups
• Using analytics to enhance your website

Best of luck with your affiliate marketing efforts. If you'd like to share any successes or lessons you have, post a comment or drop me an email.