Affiliate marketing sounds good: sell goods and services created by other people and get a commission when a sale is made.
But can you really make money with affiliate marketing?
Like most things on the internet, the answer is “probably yes” but you need to have things in place to be able to stand the highest chance of earning some extra cash.
And let’s start with that – how much money are you hoping to make?
Latest figures show that around one in every 4 new websites use WordPress.
That’s an impresssive number (last time I checked it was “only” one in 6).
So why is WordPress so popular?
And should you use it?
Long term planning is an essential part of internet marketing.
But it’s often overlooked.
It’s easy to do something for short term gain that wrecks your business later on.
That’s especially the case with the bigger players like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Amazon.
They’re at the forefront of most things and they have to put things into place to fight that – often retrospectively.
Review sites are everywhere.
Done correctly, they’re a good way to get affiliate sales whilst providing a useful service.
Normally the process is along these lines:
It’s often hard to know how effective your internet marketing is or even if it’s working at all.
Things take so long to take effect.
Sometimes it’s like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings and eventually causes extreme weather conditions – you get a blip in your traffic or even a constant increase.
And other times it’s as though you’d done nothing at all and have just wasted your time.
How can you check the effectiveness of your internet marketing?
Or is it like the quote from John Wanamaker “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
If you’re stuck for ideas for your website content – whether that’s written, video or any other content – then here are some ways to get ideas fast.
Because, let’s face it, we’ve all stared at a blank screen or sheet of paper, scratching our heads, wondering what to write.
Writer’s block can be very real.
But websites aren’t forgiving of those pauses.
So how do you come up with ideas without too much brain ache?
Done for you packages are supposed to be just that – almost everything done for you.
But they also tend to assume you know lots of things.
I recently had an email from a subscriber who’d bought a supposedly “done for you” package but was definitely lacking.
“I download it on to my Desktop and Unzip it. But how do all the contents go together?”
He’d already got hosting and a domain name. It was the “other” stuff that didn’t make sense.
At its heart, internet marketing is simple: connect potential buyers to potential products that earn you money.
But how can you join the dots and make that happen?
When I was younger, marketing was much easier (but much more expensive). Here in the UK, we had one TV channel with commercials so if an advertiser wanted to reach a customer on TV, there was only one place to go. No videos or computer games competing. And no sign of the internet.
Things have changed – advertising (which is essentially what internet marketing is) has fragmented tremendously.
Which has made it cheaper to reach people – rather than spending thousands on a commercial, you can spend a few cents or dollars per click or you can produce “free” content like this and hope the search engines will send visitors.
Internet marketing has too much available information.
In the same way as we’ve grown from a handful of TV channels to seemingly one channel per person in the world (I know it’s not quite that many but if you count all the YouTube channels it’s probably getting scarily close), internet marketing has more sources of information than any sane person can cope with.
It’s easy to stray in internet marketing. There are so many people offering shortcuts that seem to be foolproof – or at least you do your best to convince yourself that’s the case.
But if you don’t do the right thing, that can come back to bite you and your business.