When first starting out a lot of us struggle to learn affiliate marketing. So here is a simple affiliate training tip that you can use that will get you started with no money. Now the thing you need to understand is that you can not build a business without spending some money. So you can use this strategy to get started but you need to start and spend money on your business.
Here is what you need to do to get started:
Step 1:
Make yourself a list of products that you might be interested in selling. If you can't think of a product, go to a clearinghouse like
Clickbank,
PayDotCom, or some other place that has products for sale. Look around and find a product that your niche market will be interested in.
Once you have a few selected, go to the
Google Keyword Tool. Search for keywords like “Product name + Discount” or “product name + promo” or things like that. When people are searching for something with the word discount in the search string, this means they're a buyer. They have already made the decision to buy, and now they're looking for the best deal they can find. So you're going to need to find between 3 and 5 products that you can sell at a discount.
Step 2:
Find the contact information for the merchant and ask them for an exclusive discount code. But don't just send a an email that says you'd like a discount code. Give them a little information. Let them know what it is you have in mind. Let them know that you're going to target people who are searching for their product with a discount attached.
You'll probably get some product owners who say no. Don't let that discourage you. Just thank them for their time and move on. Don't get mad and send them some sort of negative reply. Stay positive and thank them and maybe let them know you hope to do business with them in the future.
Step 3:
Next you're going to create your ad for your discount offer. If you already have a website or blog, you can put it on there. But I'm going to discuss this from the standpoint of doing this for free.
Go to
UsFreeAds.com. You can use their free version to place your ad. Your ad doesn't need to be very fancy or have much information. Just provide them the details of the discount and how they can collect the discount. What I mean is the discount could be connected to the link they click. If that's the case just tell them to click the link to get the discount. There might be a place on the product owners website where they need to enter a special code to get the discount. If that's the case tell them what the code is, and where they need to enter it.
Step 4:
This is actually an extension of step3. You've found 3 to 5 products that you want to market and the owners have provided you with a discount. Now you need to do a couple of things with your ad. I mentioned that it does not need a lot of information. You're not trying to sell here. The people searching for your product name with a discount have already made the buying decision. All you need to do is try to make your ad title attractive and optimize your page to get as much traffic as you can.
You make your title attractive with something like "Limited Offer - Exclusive [Product Name] Discount Code" or "Exclusive Discount - [Product Name] Limited Offer." Then use normal on page optimization to try and get your ad to rank high in the search engines.
Step 5:
Now you need to drive traffic to your offer. You've created an attractive title and optimized your page to try and rank well in the search engines. Don't stop there and just hope that people will find your offer and buy through your link. Be proactive and get your offer out in front of people in your niche market. A couple of free traffic methods to do this would be forums and article marketing.
Conduct a search of the niche that you're in for "[Niche Market] forum." This will bring you a list of forums in your market to start marketing to. Go to the forums and look for forums that are active. Look for forums that have a lot of activity. I could try and say look for one that has thousands of members and hundreds of posts a day. But the largest forum in your target market might only have a few hundred members and a dozen posts a day on the forum. Just look around and make notes of how active a forum is. Once you find the most active, read the forum rules and see if they allow you to have a signature (sig) file.
This is the area below each post where a member can put information about themselves or other resources the other members might be interested in. Read the sig file rules and make sure they allow you to market with them or use affiliate links. If they do not, move on. Whatever you do, DO NOT go in and start trying to marketing your discount. Get involved in discussions and provide value to the forum. People will come to respect you and pay attention to your sig file links.
If they think you're there just to make a buck, they are not going to pay attention to you. You might actually even get banned from the forum.
The other method I mentioned is article marketing. This is a great method of getting free traffic. Just do a search for "article directory" and you will find several. The biggest is probably
EzineArticles. Write articles for your niche that provide some value. At the end of the articles is an area called the author resource box. This is where the author can place information about themselves.
You're not looking to really build your name and become recognized as an expert. So you're name can be left out. Use the keywords you're targeting "[Product Name] Discount" in the author resource box. Use this area as a small ad with a quick call to action for your product discount. When you put your link in the resource box, use the keywords as your link. This will help with getting your ad to show up in search engines. Get 20 or 30 articles posted and this will start getting you some decent traffic.
If you want to keep increasing your traffic to these offers, write some more articles. Once you start making money, if you don't want to write articles, you can start and hire someone to write the articles for you.
That's it. Now just continue driving traffic to your offers and you'll be making money pretty soon.
Do you have any other ideas on how to drive free traffic that you want to share? Just leave a comment below to share with everyone.
