Affiliate marketing is one of the few legitimate ways to make money off the internet. You don't need your own product to get started and there are many free ways to promote your affiliate program. Some people think that affiliate marketing is all about throwing a bunch of banners on a web page and hoping that somebody clicks on your banner and buys what you're offering. While this is one way to promote affiliate programs, the best affiliate marketers on the internet normally concentrate on one product at a time.
The website that you refer your visitors to is often called a "landing page". A landing page is very important because it's there to convince your visitors to buy the product or service you're trying to promote. The landing page can either be a website you host or can be your actual affiliate link. Most professional affiliate marketers prefer to use their own hosted landing page rather than referring them directly to their affiliate link because it helps them sell the customer before actually trying to make the sale. Your landing page should always concentrate on the product you're trying to promote and should not give your visitors lots of other options or places to click. One mistake that some people make is including adsense on their landing page. Unless your landing page is designed to bring your customers back, I would recommend you keep away from the adsense ads and concentrate on one product.
There are two ways to promote your landing page - free ways and paid ways. Many people like to stick with free methods because any sales they make using those free methods is 100% profit. The most common free ways to promote affiliate programs is through SEO, writing articles with their affiliate links, adding affiliate links in their signatures, posting videos on YouTube, and using free classified ads. The main problem I see with using free methods is that there is no system to it. You may get a few sales but it's much harder to scale your campaign to generate more sales and takes a lot more work. Many professional affiliate marketers prefer to use paid advertising through PPC networks such as Adwords. The whole concept behind PPC is to earn more money than what you're investing into it. When using PPC I would recommend you go for an average of 1 sale for every 100 visitors to your landing page with a 100% return on investment. So basically, if you were promoting a program that paid $16.00 per sale, you would want to spend $.08 a click on advertising. This technique is commonly used in mail order and has turned many people into millionaires! Even if you don't get a 100% return on investment, I'm sure many of you will settle for a 50% or even 20% return on investment which can be very nice earnings! If you spent $1,000 a day in advertising and received a 20% return on investment, you would be earning $200 a day for doing virtually nothing. If you do the math, $200 a day is $1400 a week which is more than most people in this world make!
When choosing a product to promote, I would recommend you choose a product that you can market to anyone or has a very large niche! A common program that people like to promote is ringtones because anyone can signup for this program. This also makes it easier to scale your campaign because anyone can signup for the program and ringtones is currently a hot service/product. If you choose a product that can only be marketed to a small niche, you're limited by who you can market that product to. The niche you choose may also be very competitive which will cost you more per click and may not give you a decent ROI. If you choose to work with niche products, you will have to work with several different products to scale your earnings which will cost you a lot more money and trial error.
Prior to starting any PPC campaign, you will need to test out your product to make sure it's worth your time. Most professionals will invest about $60 into it which isn't a large investment and can save you a lot of money. Considering you have a convincing landing page and a desirable product, you should be able to determine your return on investment after you spend your first $60. If you don't make any sales chances are you need to choose a better affiliate program to promote or your landing page needs to be changed.
