how to make money with affiliate marketing?

[Amazingarm788]

[kb62591]

Start a blog, write using great keywords, link to the blog like crazy and pray for the best.

It is not as easy as the stupid gurus make it out to be.

[Rick Frazier]

There are lots of different ways to make money online, and affiliate marketing is a large area that attracts lots of people every day.
With affiliate marketing, you get paid for sending targeted traffic (leads) to the sales page of the product owner. There are "free" and "paid" methods to do this.

However, there are a lot of different ways to accomplish this, and you can find hundreds of programs or training systems out there to help you along the way.

Most of the ads that are currently used make it sound like you can be a millionaire overnight without any effort on your part. Just buy the program and everything happens on autopilot. Unfortunately this is just NOT true. Many of the ads are very misleading, and some border on being flat out dishonest. Watch out for any ad that promises easy money, fast money, or everything for free. Also avoid products with "secret", or "hidden" or "black hat" tricks, especially if they don't tell you what the product is about. Blind ads, where you cannot tell what the product really is (they will often have a bunch of bullets telling what it is not...) will just suck money from your wallet and leave you dissatisfied. Also avoid most of the ones that claim to make money using social media (facebook, twitter, etc). as the majority are just spamming the various pages and groups.

Fewer than 5% of the people that try affiliate marketing actually succeed and make any significant money. Most of them don't make it because they buy the product, then don't follow it for one reason or another, usually because it takes a lot of personal effort or is harder than they thought. Others get discouraged because it takes a much longer time to start seeing results than the ad claimed.

If you do want to make money online, affiliate marketing can work, but you have to be willing to put in the effort it takes to get started. You will likely need to spend some money on a domain name, plus a web site with a blogging engine like wordpress, and an autoresponder to send out your newsletter emails. Initially this will cost you about a hundred dollars, and about thirty dollars a month ongoing cost. Your cost will increase as you get a large number of subscribers, but your profits will offset the additional costs. The traffic everyone calls "free" will cost you in personal time, unless you buy paid traffic. For a newbie, the quickest way to an empty wallet is to buy paid traffic right off the bat. You will be spending a LOT of time writing. You will need to write posts for your blog, email messages, and probably articles for the article directories. This will take you at least a couple of hours a day for the next month or so to become established. Once established, you will be able to get away with less writing, but it will never go away. If you have the cash, you can get others to do much of the writing for you (it's called outsourcing), but you have to tell them exactly what you want, so will need to do it yourself awhile first.

If you do get involved with affiliate marketing, make sure you know about the product(s) you are recommending. Often all you see are reviews that are a few of the bullet points from the advertisement, because the affiliate has never seen the actual product. This leads to additional dissatisfaction with the products, and can get you a poor reputation if you recommended a product that didn't deliver on the advertising promises.

None of this is particularly difficult, but it does take quite a bit of effort. I'm not selling anything here, but will be posting more information about Honest Marketing in the future.

[Fred Romulous]

There are lots of ways to make money with affiliate marketing... probably even more ways to lose it.

One popular tactic for you to consider would be to target seasonal buying. Halloween is around the corner, so you can bet plenty of people are out there setting up their lenses, hub pages, and blogs to promote whatever the popular Halloween fads are this season.

Here's a quick step-by-step:

Step 1: Do some keyword research to find the popular costumes (are people looking for Michael Jackson costumes, plus size Peanuts costumes, etc?)

Step 2: Figure out the specific costumes you want to promote, and setup a blog, a lens, a hub page, etc

Step 3: Find a costume merchant with an affiliate program. There are a bunch listed with Commission Junction (note: give yourself time to get approved, and note that it helps a little if you already have a site you can show them)

Step 4: Add the affiliate links in appropriate places

Step 5: Drive traffic and link like crazy

Step 6: Now you can pray

[Alex]

You got some surprisingly good answers here already but If I were to advice you I would say that the key to it all is knowledge and the key to knowledge is google.

Most people think they can use google but they don't, else they would never ask anything.

For instance after a while searching google on your topic you will soon find forums stuffed full of people into internet marketing and so forth

[Preston Tiger]

http://tiny.cc/znlhx

Sign up there, get the link, and place the link on your blog/webpage.