Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business ppt

Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.


Affiliate
Marketing:
The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive
Way to Start an Internet Business


by Rosalind Gardner


Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.





Table of Contents

What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work? 3

15 Reasons to Become an Affiliate Marketer 3

How Much Will it Cost to Start? 5

6 Steps to Quick-Start Your Affiliate Business 6

Quickly & Easily find High Demand Topics 6

Find High-Profit Potential Products & Services 6

Cheap Sources of Site Content 8

The Fastest Way to Build Your WebSite 10

Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs 11

Get Oodles of Traffic Today! 11

How Much Money Can You Make? 13

Resources 14


Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.

What is Affiliate Marketing and How Does it Work?

Affiliate marketing is a Partnership or Joint Venture with an online merchant to
sell their products and/or services in exchange for remuneration.

Your affiliate link is coded with a special ID which is unique to you. When a sale is
made through your special link, the merchant credits that sale to you.

Then you just wait for the check to arrive! ☺





15 Reasons to Become an Affiliate Marketer

There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own home-based Internet
business


1. No Production Costs - The cost to develop and produce a new product is
prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With
affiliate programs, production costs aren't an issue. The product has been
developed and proven - all on the merchant's nickel.

2. Low Cost Set-Up - Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting
a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have
a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is
all the equipment you may need.

3. No Fees for Joining or Licenses to Buy - I often compare doing business as
an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in the real world. The biggest
difference is that the distributor must often pay for a license to distribute
products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on the other
hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by
the affiliate's ability to promote his web site.

4. Choose From Thousands of Products and Services - What isn't sold online?

That list must be shorter than the one describing all that IS sold online. There
are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under
the sun. That makes it easy to find products related to your current or planned
web site.

5. No Sales Experience Needed - When I started my affiliate business, I had
absolutely no sales experience. That wasn’t a problem, however. The
companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their
sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day.

Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
6. No Employees - The largest expense of most businesses is employee salaries.
Although there might be times when you need or want someone to work for
you as an affiliate, it's doubtful you'll ever have to worry about hiring full or
part-time employees. When you have a project you want to hire out, it is easy
to find specialists in every computer-related field who can work for you from
the comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for the project, and never have
to worry about ongoing employee-related benefits and deductions.

7. No Expensive Merchant Accounts Needed - Setting up a merchant account
for any business is a time-consuming and costly business. It's even more
tedious for Internet businesses. However, merchant accounts aren’t a concern
when you're an affiliate. The merchant bears that cost and handles all
processing of payments. You never have to lose sleep over potential
chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account when you’re an affiliate.

8. No Inventory to Carry - Even if you live in a small one-bedroom apartment,
as an affiliate you can sell large items without storage concerns.

9. No Order-Processing - Forget the problems associated with collecting and
storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The merchant does all
that!

10. No Product Shipping - The cost and hassle to prepare and ship products to
customers worldwide could be staggering. Affiliates never have to worry about
packaging supplies or postal rates.

11. No Customer Service Concerns - Do you hate the prospect of dealing with
nasty people or customer complaints? Don't worry about it! The merchant
handles the snivelers.

12. Make Money While You Sleep - What other business allows you as a sole
proprietor to keep your doors open and keep making money even when you
take breaks or after you go home for the night?

13. The World at Your Doorstep - The Internet is the world's largest
marketplace. You can drive more visitors to your online store in a day, than
many small-town merchants see in in a year.

14. Minimal Risk - The product you chose isn't making money? Dump it. Take
down your links and promote another! It's that easy. There are no long-term
contracts binding you to products that don't sell.

15. High Income Potential - If you have a job, your salary or hourly wage is
probably pre-determined. Maybe there's not much, other than working
overtime, that you can do to increase your income. With your own affiliate
business on the Internet your income potential is limited only by your desire,

effort and imagination.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
How Much Will it Cost to Start?

Unlike building a new brick and mortar business in Downtown Anywhere, the things
you’ll need to start a business on the Internet are CHEAP.

Here’s a list of the basic tools you’ll need to become an affiliate marketer.

• Desk
• Chair
• Computer
• Internet Connection
• Email
• Text Editor

You probably already have all those things, right?

Even if you don’t have the desk and chair, you can always throw the laptop on your
bed and work from there.

Here are some basic expenses…


Register Domain
Hosting
Web Site Template
$ 8.95/year

$ 8.95/month
$10.00 - $50.00 (once)


With start-up costs this low, I don’t know why anyone would consider starting a
business anywhere other than on the Internet!!



















Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
6 Steps to Quick-Start Your Affiliate Business

In this section I discuss the 6 steps you will take to quickly, easily and
inexpensively get started in your affiliate marketing business.


Quickly & Easily find High Demand Topics

The topic you choose should both interest you and have high consumer demand.

You already know what interests you, but how do you find out whether a topic has
high demand?

Well, the first place I check is a free tool call the Overture Search Term
Suggestion Tool. It is located at:

/>

At Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, you simply enter a term related to your site
and it will show you:
• Related searches that include your term
• How many times that term was searched in the previous month

So, let’s assume for a moment that you are a mortgage and insurance broker
who suspects that insurance might be a good service to sell online.

To find out how many people are looking for insurance online, I typed in the word
‘insurance’ and discovered that the keyword ‘insurance’ had been searched for
971,914 times at Overture and its search partners in just one month!

That’s almost a million people! Wow!

As I consider any term that receives 50,000 or more searches in a month a subject
with good demand and potentially viable, insurance looks like it might just be a
winning topic for an affiliate web site.

Find High-Profit Potential Products & Services

Once you’ve determined that your topic is in high demand, you need to find out
now is whether there are merchants selling related products and services online,
AND how much commission they pay.

For that, I go first to Commission Junction.

Commission Junction is an ‘affiliate network’ that puts merchants and affiliates
together. They refer to merchants as ‘advertisers’ and the affiliates are called
‘publishers’.
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.

To see all the merchants with products and services at Commission Junction, you’ll
need to set up a free account.

To do that, go to Commission Junction
, then click on ‘Solutions’ near the top right-
hand portion of the page, then go to the left side of the Solutions page and click on
‘CJ Marketplace’.

At the very bottom of that page and you’ll find a link for the application process.
Where it asks you to supply a URL, just enter yahoo.com or geocities.com if you
don’t already have a web site.

Once your account is set up and you’ve logged into the Commission Junction
interface, click on ‘Get Links’, and select ‘Advertisers’ in the drop-down box beside
the word ‘Search’ near the top of the page. Next, type in the word ‘insurance’.

My search came up with 51 merchants. Your results may be more or less
depending on whether merchants have been added to, or dropped from the
network.

In choosing merchants, you want to select those with the highest EPC ratings
and commissions.

What is an EPC Rating?

3-month EPC: 3-month EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows how well an
advertiser converts Web site visitors into commissions, over a three-month period.

7-day EPC: 7-day EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows the average commissions
paid to publishers for every 100 clicks, over the past seven days. Use this number
to see the most recent EPC trend for advertisers.

So how well did our insurance merchants do?

Zurich insurance had a 7-day EPC rating of $250.88. That means that affiliates are
earning an average 250.88 for every 100 visitors they send to Zurich Insurance.

Wow!

Now what about those commission rates?

Well, at the Good Sam Club, if the customer completes a form and becomes a
member, Good Sam will pay you $5.00. That’s JUST to fill out a form.

And if they purchase an Emergency Road Service package, you’ll get paid $15.00.

Not bad!


You can find even MORE merchants at the following affiliate networks:

 Linkshare


Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
 BeFree


 Clickbank




Cheap Sources of Site Content

Because we want to leave the selling job up to the merchant, an affiliate’s job is to
‘pre-sell’ their merchants’ products.

To pre-sell, you need site content.

Content consists of articles and endorsements that explains how your visitors
problems can be solved by using the products you promote. In most cases,
webmasters write their own endorsements for the products they promote.

However, if you aren’t inclined to write product endorsements, you can:


 Find Free Content
 Use Merchants’ Ad Copy
 Pay for Content

I like looking for free content first.

Staying with our ‘insurance’ topic, I searched Google
for the terms “Free Articles”+
“Insurance” and found the following articles listed at legalwhiz.com:

• “How to Save on Title Insurance Costs”
• “Understanding the Terms of Your New Loan”
• “Common Sense Mortgage Tips!”

In many cases, the author will allow you to use his work on your site if you include
credit to the author and a link back to his site.

This is even MORE effective when the author has an affiliate program and you can
make money from that link.

To get approval to use the article, you’d simply email the author a request, and
they will usually be very happy to have you use their articles on your site.

Another way to get free content is to use what the merchant makes available to
their affiliates.

For example, here is an email promotion that Corey Rudl gives his affiliates to
promote his very popular ‘Insiders Secrets to Internet Marketing’ course.


Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Dear Friend,
This e-mail is extremely urgent so please read the
entire thing I would feel terrible if you missed
out on this because you did not get my e-mail in
time.
I just got an e-mail from Corey Rudl and he said
there were only 150 copies left of the new version of
his best-selling Internet marketing course, The
Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the
Internet, that includes the $952 in FREE bonuses!
Chances are, as you read this, a lot of those 150
copies are already gone.
Just to recap my last e-mail, Corey Rudl is literally
"the" guru of Internet marketing he's grown his
online businesses to over $7.6 million in online
sales last year and he gets over 1.8 million visitors
to his web sites every month!
And in the new version of his best selling course he
is going to show everything from step-by-step

instructions you can use to start your very own
Internet business in as little as 48 hours to how to
build a top-selling web site for less than $100!
No matter how small your budget is, Corey shows you
the cheapest ways to build a web site that sells!
He is going to show you where to find hot products
(in 20 minutes or LESS!) that you can start selling
TODAY! These in-demand products will sell like hot
cakes, no matter what your experience!
Corey will even reveal his personal rolodex with 100s
of FREE and cheap online tools, resources, and
software that you can use to automate your web site
(and save yourself at least 35 hours every week)!
And if that's not enough, he is going to even reveal,
for the first time, some of his most advanced
strategies like how to get #1 rankings in the search
engines and get tons of free traffic from the "Big
Guys" like Google and his secret to writing sales
copy that increases sales by 400% (or MORE)!
Like I said before, I know these strategies are going
to make my business tons of extra money in 2004 and
as my subscriber I want to make sure you experience
the same rewards, so go to
Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.

if the page is still there, this means you made
it in time and he still has some copies of his course
with the additional $952 worth of FREE bonuses!

So please hurry! And if you have any questions, just
let me know.
All the best
YOUR NAME HERE

As you can see, that copy is written in the first-person, so it looks like it is coming
directly from you. Use merchant copy judiciously however, as your credibility will
take a beating if your subscribers and visitors have seen the exact same copy in
other newsletters and on other affiliate sites.

Lastly, you can have articles written for you, sometimes very inexpensively.

To find ghost writers on the ‘net, check out some of these sites:

• Guru.com

• FreelanceWriters.com

• Elance.com


Once you have organized your content, it’s time to start putting you’re your site
together.



The Fastest Way to Build Your WebSite

There are 3 steps to quickly build your website. They are:

1. Register a Domain
2. Domain Hosting
3. Buy Template


Domain registration is painless, and CHEAP. Go to Godaddy.com
where it will
cost you 8.95/year for each domain. You can get them even cheaper when you
register for more than one year.

Here are two good, yet inexpensive, hosting services that I recommend.

• GoDaddy.com
- $8.95/mo.
• HostRocket
- $9.95/mo.

Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
The quickest way to build a website is to buy a template. Here is a list of some of
the best template sites I’ve found to date:

o 4Templates.com

o BigWebmaster.com

o BoxedArt.com

o DollarTemplates.com

My personal favorite is BoxedArt.com. You can download as many templates as you
want from Boxed Art, all for only $49.96 for six months access.

Once you’ve placed your content in your template and sent it to your web host, it’s
time to join affiliate programs.


Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs


Go back to Commission Junction or the site where you found products you want to
promote and sign up for the merchants’ affiliate programs.

The reason you build your site before joining the programs, is to have a site
to show the merchant. This demonstrates that you are indeed serious about selling
their product, and will almost guarantee your acceptance into their program.


Get Oodles of Traffic Today!

After placing merchant links on your site, it’s time to let the world know about your
site.

Although I discuss ‘29 Ways to Market Your Site’ in the Super Affiliate
Handbook, my favorite way to bring visitors to my sites is by using cheap Pay-
Per-Click search engine advertising.

The primary benefit of PPC’s is that you can drive targeted traffic to your

site quickly, instead of waiting months for the search engines to list your site… if
they ever do.

Just a few of these include:

• Google.com

• Overture.com

• Enhance Interactive

• Findwhat.com

• Kanoodle.com



Pay-per-clicks allow you to bid on terms or keywords that are relevant to your site.

Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
In our insurance site example, the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool
produced a list that included terms like:


car insurance
insurance
health insurance
life insurance

home insurance
affordable health insurance
travel insurance
renters insurance
insurance quote
car insurance quote
insurance lead


You should be able to find and bid on HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of terms in any
category you choose. The more keywords you list your site under, the more
exposure your site will get.

I HIGHLY recommend that you use PPC’s to advertise your site. I get returns of 2,
3, 4, and sometimes even FIVE dollars for every dollar I spend advertising my site.

So, let’s summarize again the steps that it takes to build an affiliate site…


 Find a HUGE Market
 Find Products & Services
 Collect/Create Web Content
 Build Site
 Market Site
 and… Enjoy the BIG Kachings!

Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
How Much Money Can You Make?

Here are some examples of successful affiliate marketers… Remember, these are
ordinary people, just like you and me.

Cashring is the affiliate program for the I Want U online dating service. Their top
affiliate earns an astounding 5000 per month, each and every month, and JUST
from that one program! I’ve also heard that the top iFriends affiliate earns over
$80,000 per month. My guess is that figure is LOW by a long shot, as iFriends
pays up to $70 per free signup to their program, which is an adult web chat
service.

Matt Haller is a young man who signed up for my Net Profits Coach newsletter,
bought Ken Evoy’s Site Build it! ecommerce package and then started an affiliate

site promoting hip hop items. Six months after he started, he sent me an email
thanking me for helping to change his life. Why? Because he was already earning
10 grand per month!

Deborah Casey is another student of mine, a 53 year old disabled lady living in
Seattle. Within eight months of starting her affiliate business she was making 8
grand a month, and she’s now up to $15,000 per month!

Jim Cockrum is an affiliate of mine who sells my ebook, the Super Affiliate
Handbook. One day, every time I checked stats for my book sales, I was floored by
how many orders Jim was generating. In a little under 24 hours, he’d made
$1000 just by sending out an endorsement to his mailing list.

Oh ya, and yours truly, Rosalind Gardner… THAT’s why I wrote the “The Super
Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People’s
Stuff Online”. I wanted EVERYONE who was interested in making money online to
know what possibilities exist for people with no experience. Because, I had
absolutely no business background, no selling experience and actually some
disdain for sales people as a group, I’m proof positive that ANYONE can earn
money as an affiliate.

Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
Resources

Get the Internet business tricks and tools that I use in my business everyday at:
/>

Here’s the full list of goodies:


• Advertising (PPC)

• Affiliate Marketing

• Auctions

• Audio

• AutoResponders / Ezines / Mailing Lists

• Consultants

• Copywriting

• Credit Card Processing

• Domain Registration & Hosting

• Dropshipping

• Ebooks

• Ecommerce/Credit Card Processing

• Education

• Freebies

• Forums

• Graphics

• Income Opportunies & Products to Sell

• Joint Venturing

• Research Tools

• Surveys: Get Paid for Your Opinion

• Traffic Generation

• Web Site Design & Packages

• Writing





















Affiliate Marketing: The Fast, Easy and Inexpensive Way to Start an Internet Business
© 2004 Webvista, Inc – All Rights Reserved
Unauthorized Duplication is Strictly Prohibited.
About the Author

Rosalind Gardner has created numerous autopilot businesses selling as

an affiliate for other people. In fact, Rosalind often makes more as an
affiliate than the business owners she sells for.

In 2002, Rosalind generated over $436,797 in commissions selling
other people's stuff online, and in both 2003 and 2004, she has
earned MUCH more than that! She sells everything from dating services
to watches to webmaster tools!


As a speaker, author and consultant, Rosalind is recognized around the world as a leading
authority in both Internet and Affiliate marketing. Her work appears in a score of online
and offline venues, including:


• The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling
Other People's Stuff Online – Rosalind’s runaway best-selling ebook, which has
been #1 in Clickbank’s B2B category since its publication.

• Net Profits Coach Newsletter [NPC]
– Her very popular free weekly ezine.

• Affiliate Business Blueprint
– Co-authored with Jim Edwards, the ABB includes 5
hours of tele-seminar recordings and transcripts, in which Jim and Rosalind reveal
ALL their secrets and grill each other to squeeze every last drop of affiliate
marketing information from each other.

• Revenue Magazine
- The first magazine devoted to affiliate marketing. Rosalind’s
success was featured in the premier issue, in an article entitled ‘Five Who Thrive’.

• Secrets to Their Success
– Rosalind’s incredible success story is featured on
Corey Rudl’s popular ‘Secrets to Their Success’ site.


Rosalind shares the tools that she uses in her Internet business everyday at:
/>

She lives with her family in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada.

Her online business affords her a healthy and active lifestyle that includes running, yoga
and fine beer.