Making Money Online: Clickbank

Affiliate marketing is one of the quickest ways to earn money through the web.

This is due to the fact that, when you engage in this business as an affiliate marketer, you will not have to start from scratch in terms of creating a product and developing promotional materials. You don't need to create your own website and you don't have to shoulder fees associated with capital, storage, or shipping. The owners of the affiliate businesses are responsible for all the tedious (and expensive) work while all you need to do is promote the products and make sales.

However, like any other business venture, you can fail in affiliate marketing. To significantly lower your chances of failure and to make it big in this field, read through the tips below:

1) Find a Lucrative Niche

Among the best things about getting into affiliate marketing is that you simply have to choose from all the available programs. In order to choose the right one, you first need to find a lucrative niche and then, later on, check out the programs available within that niche.

To help you out with your efforts, you can check out websites such as Amazon and eBay. Check out the most popular products as well as the most successful sellers. Chances are, whatever niches are most popular in those websites are best to engage in.

2) Select the Right Product

Be careful when making the choice between all the available products in your chosen niche. Study the pros and cons of each product you consider and choose only those that are in high demand within your target market or those that provide solutions to common problems. If it is possible, choose affiliate products that are already established as best-sellers or already have good reviews. It may cost you more but keep in mind that the better the product that you choose, the more sales you can generate.

To help you find good products within specific niches, try checking out affiliate marketing sites such as Clickbank. Sites like that provide categorized programs and listing containing all the details you need to know to make a good decision.

3) Promote Intelligently

Once you've already chosen an affiliate marketing program to get into, you will need to promote your business intelligently. Promotion is one of the hardest things to do in this business mostly because competition is high. Study all the platforms that can help you gain as much targeted website traffic as you can and advertise your products in forums, classified, and blogs. You can also run your own email marketing campaign. Just keep in mind that the more traffic sources you have, the better for your affiliate marketing business.

There are many things you need to keep in mind to make it big in this field of business. The three steps above are those that have been tested by affiliate marketing leaders. Follow the tips and you can be among those leaders soon enough.

Affiliates make money by referring customers to their merchants. There are many companies and webmasters offer affiliate programs to promote their online sales.

When you sign up for an affiliate program, you will be given an affiliate link with an unique affiliate ID which will be used to market the product. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you make money (earn affiliate commission). Below are the steps to starting an affiliate marketing business:

Step 1 - Join an Affiliate Program
Clickbank.com is one of the best places to find an affiliate program that interests you as there are a ton of sellers looking for people to promote their e-books and info products. Before you join any affiliate programs, do a little research. Find out which products are most popular, the conversion rate of the products and visit the sellers’ websites to see whether their sales letters are convinced enough to generate sales. A conversion rate of 5% is reasonably good. This means that for every 100 visitors to the website, 5 visitors will buy.

Step 2 – Promote an affiliate program through a website
You need to have a website to promote your affiliate programs. Creating a website isn’t difficult nowadays. You can use an easy website builder to create a website with little or no technical knowledge. To learn more about how to set up a site with website builder, you can go to Google and enter the search term 'website builder' to find a site builder that is right for you.

Step 3 – Decide the Content on Your Website
As you are promoting e-books, you can write a review on each e-book with an affiliate link to the sales website of each e-book. If you do not wish to write reviews, you can create a product recommendation list on your website (e.g., ‘Top 5 SEO e-books,’ ‘Top 3 MP3 music download,’ etc.).

Step 4 – Drive Targeted traffic/visitors to Your Website
To earn affiliate commission you need to drive targeted traffic to your website. The more traffic your website gets, the more likely you’ll generate more sales. There are several ways to drive targeted traffic to your site in short period of time (2 to 5 days). Here’s how……

Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
You can get a lot of targeted traffic using PPC advertising. The two most popular and effective PPC advertising programs are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. So how PPC advertising program works? PPC advertising programs allow you to bid for top rankings on the keywords of your choice. When someone enters a search term matches your keyword in the PPC search engine and press the search button, your contextual ad will appear on the sidebar of the search result page. If the visitor clicks through your ad to your website, you’ll be charged base on your bid amount.

Article Marketing
Writing an article related to your affiliate products with a link to your website in the article’s resource box and submitting it to many article directories can bring some free targeted traffic to your site. To get more and continuous targeted traffic, you need to write more articles. Try to publish a new article every week. Doing this for a year can drive truckload of free traffic to your website.

Post Messages on Forums
Another way to get free traffic is by posting messages on community forums with a link to your site on the signature of each message posted by you. Here’s a technique I learned from an affiliate marketer.

1) Run a search on Google to find out forums and message boards that are related to your affiliate products and try to join as many forums as you can.

2) Make sure that each one of your forums profile is edited to include your website link within the signature option.

3) Spend a few hours navigating the pages of the forums. You can ask questions and post informative and helpful replies to other peoples’ questions or messages to build your status. The more people trust you, the more likely they will click your link.