Affiliate Marketing FAQ For Beginners

As a new affiliate marketer I assume you have many questions about this business so in this article, I'm trying to answer the questions you may have in order for you to understand this business and see if it's something you might enjoy working in!
Question: What is Affiliate Marketing?
Answer: Affiliate marketing consists of selling products online and earning a commission when doing so. In very simple terms, affiliate marketing involves using the internet to present a product to an audience looking for something. Most of the time, people make a search on a search engine like Google. An affiliate marketer can then create content that will appear in the search results and be found by these people to help them find what they are looking for. If a purchase is made through a link that you own (your affiliate link), you earn a commission. (The free getting started course offered at the bottom of this article will teach you how to get started for free!)
Question: Can anyone make money on the Internet?
Answer: Yes, yes, YES! Because you have what it takes to succeed online. You don't have to be a techie person, you don't need a marketing degree, and you don't have to very smart (well you may actually be smarter than the big guys in the industry). Think about this...
If you spent as much time working on your affiliate marketing business as you did in your day job, you would be very successful! If you are willing to do what it takes, work consistently and set some clear goals for yourself, you will be surprised as to what you can achieve in this business.
Question: I don't have my own product to sell. Is that OK?
Answer: I don't own any products either. Instead I earn affiliate commissions.
As an "affiliate marketer" you promote other people's products in exchange for a commissions. When you earn a sale for the merchant, you earn money. These merchants/companies give you "affiliate links" that track your visitors and automatically give you a commission if your visitor buys a product.
Some affiliate networks (like ClickBank) pay 75% on most of the products, so if you sell let say an ebook that is $40, you get a $30 cut. Pretty cool right?
There are tens of thousands affiliate programs out there in every imaginable market, the affiliate marketing opportunities really are unlimited. Affiliate marketing definitely isn't saturated!
Affiliate commissions add up really quickly when you see that you only need to get 4-5 customers out of a billion people online each day to purchase a product through your affiliate link. If an average sale is around $35, you can see that without a lot of work you will be easily making $175 per day every day.
Question: Can you guarantee that I will be successful? If not, what can I do to improve my chances?
Answer: No, I can't guarantee that for the simple reason that I can't know if you will work hard at it and be consistent in your efforts. Still, what I can tell you is that if you work at this business and treat it as such, you will be successful.
The online business world is an open door to everyone. You have the same opportunity as me. If you're committed and understand the potential of this business and your own potential as an affiliate marketer, sales will come your way and you'll reach the financial freedom you're seeking. That's a certainty.

Affiliate Marketing - Profitable Niche Marketing

Experienced affiliate marketers know that the way to make money is to find a profitable niche market and then exploit it. If you cannot find such a market as an affiliate marketer then you are going to struggle to earn income, and income is the lifeblood of your business. Finding the right market will generate for you a steady stream of income and if you do not do your research and find a niche market then you will not become a successful affiliate marketer. Now you understand the importance of finding your market, the steps below will help you to identify niche markets that will generate incomes for you.
Identify a market that you have an interest in and if possible one in which you are knowledgeable. You are looking initially for a broad category such as self improvement, sports, health and fitness. Once you have identified your category you now need to drill down into this market to identify your niche.
Explore what smaller component markets are available within your market. By components i mean look for more focused areas of interest within the market. For example, for golf you may identify a specific niche within this market such as golf trolleys or golf clothing. You could even break the component down further into electric golf trolleys or golf waterproof clothing.
Once you have identified your specific niche you then need to find an affiliate product to promote. The easiest way to do this is to visit a company such as Clickbank, check out their marketplace for your niche, select a good fit product, sing up as an affiliate and get marketing.
Now that you have identified your niche and the product you are going to promote you now need to identify what your target buyers look like. Take golfers for example. If your focus is electric trolleys then the chances are that your target buyer will be over 45 and a member of a golf club. If your niche is golfing waterproofs then you you need to identify who your target is and when they are likely to buy. For waterproofs you are marketing to a global golf market however different parts of the world will be looking to buy different types of waterproofs at different times of the year. In winter golfers look for heavy duty waterproofs, in summer they look for lightweight waterproofs. You are now beginning to clearly identify your niche and your target buyers.
You now need to identify which of your niche markets is likely to be the most profitable and therefore the one you want to promote and invest your time in. The easiest way to do this is to use the Google search engine. Come up with some keywords that you think your target buyers may use to find the products within the niche. Take the keywords and enter them into google, remember to enclose your keywords within quotations. Check the search results returned. What you are looking for are keywords which return 10,000 pages. You then need to check for paid ads in these pages. If you find these then you have identified your first niche market with hot buyers but little competing marketers.
Now that you have done this for one niche market and proven it to be successful you can use these same steps to identify other hot niche markets. The more profitable niche markets you can identify the more products you can promote and the more revenue you can generate.

How to Advertise on Google AdWords

Like in any business, you must able to reach out for your market and this involves any way possible to connect with them. And with today's advancing technology, business owners saw a great opportunity to effectively promote their goods.
Online marketing has been the center of business conversations in recent years, it is where a company gets established on the World Wide Web to gain popularity among their market not just in a specific demographic but also around the world. With this, they have more chances to earn a very rewarding income.
There are two ways to play in this online playground for business owners: the organic marketing and paid advertising. Organic marketing such as SEO is when you optimize your content to rank higher on top search engines while the paid advertising is the faster approach to be visible on such search engine result pages.
For paid advertising, Google AdWords has a more widely used pay-per-click (PPC) tool. It is an ad spot that usually comes in a text format that is visible on the right side of search result pages.
Because it is a PPC advertisement, you must be specific on your goal in Google AdWords. Here, you can choose your target market by identifying the location where your text ads will appear. You can also specify the time of the day where you want your ad to appear and also the duration to save money.
In AdWords, you must bid on the keywords to be included in your ad text. What makes Google AdWords interesting is that is has a sophisticated way of calculating the value of an ad where the rank is based on the popularity of it rather than the amount of bid, giving an equal opportunity in the competition for small-time players.
Normally, highly popular keywords are being bid on by large companies, meaning more money is involved. What you can do is have good keyword research on other keyword sets with the same efficiency yet with less competition so you can have a lesser bidding amount.
Once you have the keywords, it is time to work on the text ads as it is important to attract the people's attention so you can easily lure them to click the ad and check out your site. Make sure that you create a text ad that is short and witty to easily catch their attention by stirring their curiosity.
At the same time, your keywords must also be related to the nature of your business and is straight-to-the-point to hit the right targeted market. It is important to hit the right people here as you will be wasting not just effort but also money on having unsolicited clicks, remember that you are paying for the clicks made on your site.
Now you can start with your Google AdWords campaign. Enjoy!

Make Money With AdSense

I know many of you want to make money with AdSense. And I also know that many of you have been making miserable money out of AdSense, even though you have reasonable amount of traffic to your site. Each day your AdSense is merely earning you "pennies and dimes", so to speak.
Here is one very important tip for those who want to make money with Google AdSense. Select your niches wisely.
Your content is excellent, the website is well designed and the ads are positioned in spots that are known to convert well, yet the amount per click is disappointingly low, right?
So, what is the problem? Simple. You are targeting the wrong market. You see the price per click of AdSense varies. Some advertisers pay a lot of money in some niches, whereas in some other niches, you can only get one cent per click. So it's very important to know what kind of money is spent on any given niche before you decide to target it.
For instance, the student loan niche is known to be an extremely high paying niche. So are niches like the credit card, weigh loss and debt consolidation. They are all high paying niches as well. Find out which are the high paying niches.
That is the reason why you need to pick your niche correctly if you want to make money with AdSense. Choosing the right niche can make a vast difference in your earnings.
So, how do you know which are high paying niches? Use the free PPC analysis tool SPYFU. It can provide estimates on what people are currently paying per click for keywords and phrases. It doesn't tell you how much you'll be getting per click on your adverts per se. But it provides you the estimates of cost per click paid by advertisers. Or you can use Google AdWords Keyword Tool to find out the estimated average cost per click.
The next time before you start a site to make money with Google AdSense, do your homework. Look for only profitable niches and you are on the way to riches!