5 easily executed tips for new online affiliate marketers

It may sound to the newcomer like it's too good to be true, but you really can make money by selling other people's products. There are a lot of positive advantages to selling other people's products. The first one is that you don't have to create your own. You don't have to set up a way to get the product to the customers. You don't need to acquire a merchant account or pay the fees. The owner of the products does all these things for you. All you do is promote the product and make money online.

The way to get started with affiliate marketing, is to sign up on someone's site for their affiliate program. There are hundreds of thousands of them out there. It's a way for you to begin promoting other people's products for a commission on your sales. The site will generate a unique ID that identifies you as the originator of the advertisement that the customer buys from, and then you get the commission from that sale. All you do is promote your product and your affiliate link.

Here are five tips to help you make money online with affiliate marketing:

(1). Find a good product or service to sell. This should be a good product, and you should have some firsthand knowledge about it. It should have a professional 'air' about it, and be presented in a professional way on a quality professional web site. My secret in the early years was promoting only the things that I wished I could afford at the time, research is your friend. Research the product like you only get one chance and you want to make the best possible choice. Put yourself in the consumer seat even though you are actually the seller.

(2). After you settle on your product or service, then sign up for the affiliate program and get your affiliate links. Create yourself a web site (many programs will provide you with your own site that's ready to go), and start promoting. If you create your own site, get a good domain name and good hosting for it. I suggest this route unless you are going with Craigslist or some other heavily trafficked place. I usually come up with a killer Tagline also, something nice and attention grabbing. I buy a great picture and put the tagline on it and promote, promote, promote the site and the tagline image.

Domain names can be had for around $8 a year now. And your hosting cost can be as low as $8 as well. Some are higher, some are discounted lower, but the $8 range is an average figure. So you can see it doesn't involve a whole lot of money for you to get started.

(3). Once you get started creating your site, make sure you add some great content related to your product. There's more to getting 'buying' customers than just posting your affiliate links. You need to hold the customer's interest, and give them good information that will persuade them to purchase your product. As for content, starting out I would hire people $5 ez to write content and then I would go over it and paraphrase some and create some to make sure my article was different and more personalized and honest than any other person they may have sold the piece to. That worked until I became good enough at copy to make my own. 

Pro Note: The big secret on writing is to write what you would want to read about what you were thinking about buying.

 (4). Optimize your site for the search engines. This is known as 'SEO' optimization. It's a process that involves modifying your page content with meta-tags and meta-information to improve your rankings on the search engines. Search engines are the main ways that people access sites on the internet. So if you can stay high in the page rankings for your product, you'll have more success with your sales. Here is a decent and cheap suite of tools that actually indirectly teach as you watch them automatically do what needs doing. SEO ELITE

(5). Article writing is another thing that shouldn't be overlooked. If you can write some good articles to promote your product, then you have a powerful and effective weapon at your disposal. This is one of the best ways to get traffic to your site. A site without traffic is a store without customers, and doomed to fail. Write interesting articles related to your product, that will entertain and inform your readers. Submit these articles to the many directories and forums that deal with your subject.

So as you can see, creating your own products to make money online isn't necessary. There are plenty of products and services to promote if you can get good at affiliate marketing. It takes time, and it takes dedication, but you can do it if you'll stay the course and learn the ropes.