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How To Make Your First Dollars Online

It is hardly a new concept, affiliate marketing, it has been around in its current form for over 10 years. The idea is very simple, the site selling some goods gives you a special link which you go out and advertise (put on your own website etc). When people click that link it tells the merchant that you sent the prospect to them. If that person then buys something you get a cut of the sale price.

By James Beckett

It is hardly a new concept, affiliate marketing, it has been around in its current form for over 10 years. The idea is very simple, the site selling some goods gives you a special link which you go out and advertise (put on your own website etc). When people click that link it tells the merchant that you sent the prospect to them. If that person then buys something you get a cut of the sale price.

The first step to making cash as an affiliate marketer online is to set up an account with a network, these give you access to a wide range of offers you can promote with just one click and all the payment are managed by the network so you can trust them. Clickbank is a payment intermediary that most ebook marketers choose to deal with for information goods. Clickbank makes it easy to set up affiliate associations and receive payments automatically.

Paydotcom.com is another network recommended network, they allow you to be paid straight to your PayPal account instead of waiting for a cheque to come every 2 weeks from Clickbank, but they do not have anywhere as many products to promote.

When you have organized an affiliate account, you can then begin looking for products to offer. The ClickBank site has a marketplace full of information products that can be sold automatically. Choose products based on how many copies have already sold (the marketplace gives you the statistics) so you know that the product and the customer service are tested and reliable and that it will sell well.

If a site makes a lot of sales but the product is poor then you do not want to associate yourself with it. People judge your site by what you recommend and advertise, so it is not worth jeopardising your sites reputation for some quick money. Take the time to search Google for what people are saying about the product and company to see if they are keeping their customers happy.

Other more mainstream sites like Amazon.com allow you to set up affiliate accounts also. You can choose products to sell depending on how useful the products are. For instance, around SuperBowl time, HD TVs will be very popular and sell well. People are buying these things all day long so you might as well make some money by being the person to refer them to the site!

The final element of making cash as an affiliate marketer is to get traffic to your affiliate page or link. Most affiliate marketers do this by creating websites that are full of articles setting their affiliate links inside those articles and other content. The subject matter draws visitors from search engines (with some additional work) who then see your offers and hopefully go through and buy things.

Affiliate marketing can be outsourced in the end. When you are making money then you can pay people to do the boring stuff that you don’t want to. This allows you to build your business quicker and make more money. To get started then I recommend you visit a relevant forum and start to read what people are saying, then buy a good product on the subject that will fill in the blanks you have about the subject and get you moving forward.

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