Affiliate Marketing 101 - How To Start Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing, by it's very nature, can be accomplished in any niche that sells products or services online. As such, when you start affiliate marketing your first task has got to be deciding which niche or sub-niche to tackle first.

Now before you get confused, a niche is just any topic - popular ones include pets, travel, music, games, business, etc. These can then be broken down into sub-niches; computer games, board games and adult games, for instance, are all sub-niches relevant to the games niche. Similarly cruises, driving tours, scuba trips and air holidays would all be sub-niches of the travel niche.

When people first set out to start affiliate marketing, the first affiliate information they usually run into is about the online marketing niche - this is only natural since these tend to be promoted by the super-affiliates, so they're better at getting the word out than say a dog groomer would be. But the truth is that unless one has a very strong background in marketing or is hiring a mentor to get them started right, the much bigger niches will most likely be more profitable and less competitive.

But then how should you decide? First, what are your own personal interests and work experience? If you choose a topic you're already knowledgeable in or one you're truly passionate about, it will be much easier to persevere through those tougher initial stages of niche affiliate marketing. Do you love horses? Boating? Golfing or skiing? Start by choosing 2 or 3 things you like, make a note of them and then start checking to see if they're popular and profitable online.

Start at the search engines - when you put your topic in and look at the results, are there many paid ads that come up with or beside the listings? If so, chances are people are making money in that niche. Next, check the article directories for that same term - are people writing and submitting articles about your topic? Again, if so, they're probably looking to capture targeted traffic they already know is looking for information on your niche.

Next, go to the big affiliate directories like ClickBank and LinkShare - do they offer a variety of products and services that are targeted at people interested in your topic? If so, that's another plus. But don't just assume - actually check to see. Niches as tight as learning to play piano by ear can have profitable results online, so don't feel you have to aim for the huge niches - in fact the bigger your niche, the better it is to target specific sub-niches within it instead of trying to compete for the top category.

If all three expert sources - the search engines, the article directories and the affiliate directories - all show promising results, chances are you've picked a good niche or sub-niche to start niche affiliate marketing in. Follow the common procedures used to start affiliate marketing and work to learn your craft! And remember, no matter how good a marketer you are, or how passionate your are about a topic, you're not going to succeed every time out of the gate.

But that's one of the many benefits of being a niche affiliate marketer - since you're not tied to any one product or merchant, you're free to move on to other products, sub-niches or entire niches when any attempt doesn't pan out!

When you start affiliate marketing, one of your first tasks has to be setting up your first affiliate blog. Using a blog as your affiliate marketing web site will benefit you in many ways - ease of installation, automatic notification to the search engines each time you post and a number of other automated benefits that you don't have with a static site.

There are a lot of salespages for various traffic tools that claim you don't need an affiliate marketing web site, but the truth is you want one permanent place in each niche you enter that can be your hub - a place where you can build your following within that niche's community with the intent of drawing people back time and again.

Your affiliate marketing web site needs to be updated and kept current, and this is very easy on a blog - banners and buttons can be replaced site-wide in seconds just by making a single change in your control panel. And it's much easier to blog about each of your affiliate offers in one place than to have any number of static sites that must be changed each time an offer closes or a new offer launches that you want to promote.

Further, if you're just learning to drive targeted prospects to affiliate links, you have to start over from scratch with each new promotion. This stops you from deriving the long-term benefits provided by article marketing, social bookmarking, podcasting and video distribution, just to name a few promotional techniques. By having a blog set up in that niche as your affiliate marketing web site, your articles, podcasts, videos, social bookmarks, viral e-books, etc, will continue to drive traffic to your site for years to come, not only exposing them to your current offers, but giving you the opportunity to entice them to join your opt-in list.

A quick glance at the most common WordPress themes being used today will show you how perfectly set up they are to be used as your affiliate marketing web site - a larger column of text, perfect for product reviews or information relevant to your niche, and a narrower column or two of links and buttons - perfect for your affiliate links and graphics. So much so, in fact, that's it's rare to find an affiliate program these days that doesn't provide ready-made buttons measuring 125x125 pixels, the standard size for ads in blog sidebars.

And then there are the numerous Web 2.0 sites, whole communities in themselves, like Twitter, LinkedIn, MyBlogLog, Technorati, etc, each of which gives you a simple way to tie your blog to your pages on their sites - meaning you could potentially get your information and your links in front of a huge targeted market you wouldn't have time to chase otherwise. Even FaceBook, the current top-ranked traffic behemoth online, has an automated way to tie in your blog posts. Once you're a little more advanced and adding podcasts and videos, you open up the doors to marketplaces like iTunes and YouTube as well.

So right now, as you start affiliate marketing, make one of your very first steps setting up a WordPress blog as your initial affiliate marketing web site - visit a few of the best-known super-affiliate blogs for ideas, and research the techniques and strategies used on these blogs. That way you can make your blog a first-class affiliate marketing web site right from the start!

If you're on track to start affiliate marketing correctly, you know you need to build an optin list right from the start. Even just a bit of research into optin list building will show you that offering a free incentive through a squeeze page system is the route to go. So now yo need to write that frist free report, the free PDF that you'll be offering to get those targeted marketing leads.

You have to plan carefully when writing a free affiliate marketing report to make sure you accomplish three different tasks with it. First, you have to be sure it's of interest to the exact same people who would be most likely to purchase the products you'll be promoting in that niche - this is the only way to ensure you get only targeted marketing leads.

Second, you have to make sure the issues you're covering in the report are of sufficiently important concern to that target market that they'll decide to opt-in to download the report. That may not seem that hard, but people are much more hesitant to offer up their e-mail address and their permission to market to them than they were just a few years ago. Too much spam and junkmail has gone through their inboxes already; they don't usually make the decision to invite you in that lightly any more.

Your third task may turn out to be the hardest of all, depending on your skillset and knowledge. You need to write the report well enough that you brand yourself as an expert in the subject and the overall niche, a trustable expert who's word they should take when it comes to decide on which products they'll consider buying. So not only do you need to be accurate in your writing, you need to go beyond what they already know, to bring them answers and solutions they don't already have. Only by overdelivering in your free report will they believe you can be of further help to them, that you have advice worth following or at least considering on an ongoing basis.

So when writing your first free report for affiliate marketing, plan what you'll cover and then see if your planned document will stand the test of all 3 criteria. If so, go ahead and write your report, then double check to see that the finished product does the best you can do in all 3 areas. If your original plan or the finished product fail any of those three tests, revise your plan til you've got all 3 covered then go back to writing your first free report for affiliate marketing - being sure it's the best short report on the subject you can create.

A great deal of your success making money affiliate marketing will be dependant on the size of your optin list, the rapport you build with them from Day One, and how well you've targeted affiliate marketing leads. With all that riding at first on writing your first free report for affiliate marketing, don't scrimp or cut corners - put your best affiliate marketing foot forward right from the outset!