I remember when I first started out online. I had no clue about how to get customers and how to construct a website that would magically pull in cash from the internet. I thought then that it would be as simple as I had been lead to believe. Just click a few buttons and you will have a website, click a few more and you will have so many customers that you will wear out your shoe leather with all too frequent trips to the bank as you cash your affiliate cheques.
Just a quick note on that point. When signing up with affiliate networks, always be sure to have them pay directly to some form of online bank that you have, it saves time cashing cheques.
It is fine to accept US dollar cheques if you live in the UK as all banks will accept dollar payments, however they will charge you a fee.
Affiliate marketing is a great business once you get it right. You can shorten your learning curve and miss out most of the wasted time associated with a poor apprenticeship by following a few guidelines.
Earning money online by affiliate marketing requires three things. You need a product, you need a website and you need customers that are looking to buy what you have to sell.
It is also possible to do what is known as direct linking, in which case no website is needed, however by direct linking to the vendors website that you are promoting you lose the ability to capture the customers email address which means that you will be unable to offer similar products to that client at a later date. By setting up your own websites to capture leads, you are building the foundations to a solid, long term business.
Template websites are all that is required in order to promote most affiliate products and capture emails whilst being flexible enough to allow a newcomer to easily edit it as required.
Starting your online business by building a search engine optimised website is the right way to begin. You will avoid the cash sucking cost per click trap and attract free, organic customers to your site which is therefore 100% more profitable.
Choose profitable affiliate products by carrying out simple research and determining which ones to promote.
You will also need some website editing software, an FTP client and an auto responder package. All of these are fairly simple to use once you get the hang of it. Sign up to various CPA networks and a few article publishers also right away and your affiliate marketing business will begin on the right footing.