How to Get Started in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing, also known as performance marketing, is a legitimate way to make money online through an affiliate relationship with retailers. The Performance Marketing Association defines affiliate marketing as advertising programs through which retailers pay you when a consumer on your website completes a specific action, such as downloading an eBook, purchasing a product or filling out a lead capture form. Before you start out in affiliate marketing, learn the basics to set a solid foundation for what could become a very lucrative business.

Instructions

1

Create a website that looks professional. Customers will not purchase anything from you if your site does not look reputable, so make sure that you pay attention to all of the details, including photos, spelling, use of color and ease of navigation. Some affiliates, such as eBay.com, will not take you on as an affiliate unless and until they approve of your website, so professionalism here is of the utmost importance. If you do not have the resources to build a website, look to article-writing sites that will allow you to post stand-alone articles that sell affiliate products in exchange for a share of the profits.

2

Populate your website with content that is relevant to the products you plan on selling, with the goal of making your site an authority on the subject. Professional affiliate marketer Kharim Tomlinson calls content the "life blood" of your website, and recommends that you make it your highest priority. Hire a freelance writer to create the content if your writing skills are not up to snuff. Make sure you have a good mix of content that educates and content that sells the products.

3

Use on-page and off-page search optimization to gain traffic. In the affiliate marketing game, traffic is money, and the best way to get significant traffic is to rank highly in the search engines. Learn specifically about keyword research, selection and use, how to gain backlinks to your site, how to structure a page of content properly and how to use social marketing effectively.

4

Join affiliate companies such as CommissionJunction.com, ShareASale.com and LinkShare.com. These companies act as a third party between the affiliate marketers and the retailers. If you want to sell Spiegel products on your site, for instance, you would first join LinkShare.com and apply to become a Spiegal affiliate through the site. Check back with the sites often, as new retailers enter the affiliate game frequently.

5

Populate your site with ads. Use relevant advertisements, and try to give your readers options with a good mix of products and prices. Be sure to check your site often to make sure all of the products are current, or learn how to use datafeeds to automatically populate your website with up-to-date products and ads.

6

Open a Paypal.com account. While some retailers will mail paper checks or pay through direct deposit into your bank account, many of them prefer to make payments through Paypal. If you do not have an account there, you could find yourself with no way to receive payment.