Diary of an Internet Marketing Newbie - How I Went From Zero to Nearly $400 a Day in 3 Months

Affiliate internet marketing is very simple. It's a revenue-sharing venture between a website owner and a business owner. The website owner will place advertisements on his or her website to either help sell the merchant's products or to send potential customers to the merchant's website. The website owner receives a share of the profits.

You don't actually have to mail any products or really deal with the buyer at all. You are simply a middleman. You can find affiliate programs for just about any product. I personally like to promote online electronic products because the commission is often 75% of the sale. You heard right! You can make more than the merchant!

Put simply, you find a product, sign up for the affiliate program, build a small and very simple website, do a little promoting to drive traffic to your site, and watch the money roll in. Literally!

You can do it no matter what your level of expertise is, even if you have NO IDEA how to build websites. I didn't have the first clue about it. In fact, I had previously paid over $300 to have a website built for me for another business.

Now I can build websites on my own easily with no previous knowledge!

First, there are a couple of completely free ways to go about this. The easiest is www.weebly.com which will allow you to make a simple website. There are tutorials to help you. I started with this one and it was easy to learn.

Next, you can download Kompozer at www.kompozer.com and with a bit of studying you can build a website using this program. It's free and does a good job, but it does take some effort to learn.

What I have been using though is Site Rubix over at Wealthy Affilate University.

Site Rubix is EASY. You can build a website faster than you can snap your fingers. Almost! Here's what it has to offer:

Build a site with absolutely no HTML skills. Drag and Drop your site to look how you want it.

Pump out huge campaigns in a fraction of the time it would have taken through a traditional website builder.

Send your website files to your web host right within Site Rubix. This means you can instantly make your websites "Go Live" without having to download FTP programs or other software.

Ability to focus your attention on marketing and building your business rather than trudging through the process of learning HTML code.

Get paid to develop professional looking websites for other people.

Duplicate existing pages and full sites with a click of the button/=.

Add video, images, instant screenshots, or content in seconds.

Ability to customize your site in terms of banners and images and let the system worry about resizing, rendering, and making things look great!

Upload your own images and banners so that you can reuse them on many different sites. Site Rubix allows you to view, organize and manage your "media" in a very well laid out interface... and it looks great too!

Goodbye Photoshop, Snagit, and other screenshot programs. Site Rubix allows you to instantly grab a screenshot of any website with the click of a button in less than a second, add it to your media page, and use the screenshot over and over again!

And much more (there really is too much to list).

Okay this sounds like I'm just here to get you to go check out Site Rubix, I know, but that really isn't the case. I honestly love this program and it's really been a lifesaver for me. Once I figured out the basics of affiliate marketing, I was able to use Site Rubix to build awesome websites in easily under an hour each, depending on how much fiddling I do with it.

And the great news is it's FREE to all members of Wealthy Affilate University.

If it wasn't for Wealthy Affilate University I would not be where I am today. No doubt about that.

Because of the friendly people in the forum who were happy to share their knowledge, I'd still be stumbling around trying to figure out what do to do get started. Either that or I'd be researching things to death as I normally do, and never taking any action.

If you are the type of person who needs step-by-step help and basically almost hand holding to get started in internet marketing (I did too so don't feel bad), you absolutely cannot go wrong by joining this great group of people.

I'm not going to list all the great benefits but I will tell you the forum itself is worth its weight in gold. It really is. The people there are GREAT. They are constantly making videos to help with learning things, and they answer all the newbie questions, even the dumb ones!

Anyway, like I said, I'm not going to list all the things you get there but you should check it out.

Wealthy Affilate University.

By the way, I have to also say there are a lot of free internet marketing communities and I've learned from those too, but I needed the hand-holding at Wealthy Affiliate until I truly understood it all. Now I just stay there for the people and the great tools they give you with your membership.

1. Choose a product to promote. In my case it was a Clickbank product from www.clickbank.com.

2. Do some quick research on keywords online using free tools like the free Keyword Discovery tool or the free Wordtracker tool. The free Google Keyword Tool works very well too. Find keyword phrases that have at least 20 or more searches per day and under about 50,000 results in Google when you type the phrase in quotes. You can also use allintitle. Search for your phrase in Google like this:

allintitle:"your keyword phrase"

Keep that result under 1000.

3. Next, build a simple website using Site Rubix at Wealthy Affilate University. And I mean SIMPLE. Just a main page and then the contact, Privacy Policy, Disclaimer. You can go here to build your privacy policy and disclaimer for free. Very simple too.

4. Create and submit a site map to Google. You can go here to create your site map. Follow the step-by-step instructions.

5. Create a free blogger blog at www.blogger.com and create one at www.wordpress.com. Write 3 posts and post them at both blogs. In each post use one of your keyword phrases with a link back to your site. This will give you some help with page ranking.

6. Now, create a free account at www.ezinearticles.com and start writing articles using your keywords. Wright at least 1 GOOD quality article per day. Don't write junk! This is important. Look on Ezinearticles and you'll see a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes. Make your articles stand out with high quality. Now, this doesn't mean you need to win a literary prize for your articles but just make them interesting and informative. You can get all the information you need online OR you can go to the library and check out books on your niche, then use the books to write your articles. And don't go crazy with your keywords. Just put them in the title, first paragraph, last paragraph, and in the resource box. This is the most important thing. Be SURE To link back to your website in the resource box. Remember that Ezinearticles does not allow direct affiliate linking so you must link to your website.

That's it! Keep writing at least 1 article per day. Rinse and repeat. I had to try about 3 different products from Clickbank before I found one that brought in sales. But guess what? Even my other products are now, several months later, starting to also bring in sales.

It really works! Just follow the steps.

And here it is!

Don't give up!

When I first started, I read that 95% of people who try Internet Marketing fail. Not because they can't do it, but because they simply give up.

ANYONE can do this. Anyone! I promise you. If I could do it anyone can! I knew nothing about it, not even what it was, and had no idea how to build a website. It takes a lot of work, yes, but you can be successful at this. If you're not afraid of work, you can be the same as me, posting about your great success at Internet Affiliate Marketing!