This is the first of eight articles that cover making money online. Is it really possible to make money online? Sure it is. The most important elements are belief and understanding. It’s not rocket science. All you have to do is understand how things fit together. So, to kick off the series we’ll start by talking about making money online using affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is essentially the process of promoting someone else’s products or services in exchange for a commission on the final sale. It really is a new spin on the traditional form of selling that has been around for ages. The new part of the process though is that technology has made it possible to track a single sale back to the person who made the referral.
Imagine that you could get a nickel for all the times you recommended a restaurant, a movie, or a car to one of your friends. You’d be rich right, if not at least a little better off financially than you are today. Well, online it’s possible for you to get a commission on referrals you make to someone.
Now, I’d like to tell you that the process is as simple as just telling your buddy to go see the new James Bond movie, or telling them to order the steak at your favorite steak house, but there’s a little more to it than that. Just as you build up trust with your friend through small daily interactions, so do you build trust with your online audience. It’s only once you have that trust that you can turn it into referrals that make commissions.
But don’t fear the process of building a site, publishing content, and gaining trust. It isn’t rocket science. A lot of people have done it and so can you. All you have to do is be willing to believe that you can do it and then actually spend the time doing it.
Here are five things you can do to get started.
- Pick a topic to write about – choose a topic you are passionate about so that you’ll have the strength to continue writing about the topic even when things get tough.
- Start a blog – start capturing your thoughts so that you can share them with others. Blogs are the replacement for traditional sources of publishing. Writing on a blog makes your words available to millions of people all around the world. That’s a big audience and if you only capture one percent, that’s still a lot of people.
- Write about what you know – every one knows something and has something they can share with others. If the information you publish helps someone else solve a problem or save time by short cutting a process then all the better. If you don’t know how to do something, then interview someone who does. Expert interviews are the best way to learn something new while creating content for your website at the same time.
- Identify products and services you want to promote – be sure to promote products and services that you truly find valuable or think your audience will find valuable. Promoting something just for the sake of promoting it won’t get you anything.
- Be consistent and seek to add value for your readers – Stephen Covey say we should seek first to understand and then be understood. Take the same perspective with your readers. If they find value in what you share with them, they will want to know more about you and what you have to say. This will lead to more sales and better conversions. So, make everything about them and then they will reward you.
The rest is rinse repeat with a few tips and tricks picked up here and there along the way. What’s really important to remember is that you can do it. You already do it for free offline. The only difference is that online you can get paid to do what you already do.
If you’re stuck on how to choose a topic, then take the plunge and enroll in a course that teaches you step by step how to become an affiliate marketer. It will be well worth the money. In most cases, all you need is one idea to make the course worth the admission fee. Of course, you can always join the other members of Open Source Marketer who are getting the information they need to succeed with affiliate marketing.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at selling products and services directly off of your website. Sometimes that means having a physical inventory, and sometime it means having a digital library of products to offer. What you sell is really up to you, but then we’ll talk about all that tomorrow.
Dig it, grove it, own it,
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
Do what YOU want and get PAID for it!