Affiliate Marketing Education Site

2009-04-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

Clear, Written Instructions. Not Promo – Get Started with At-Home (“affiliate”), On-Line Marketing.

To the New or Aspiring Affiliate Marketer,

This blog and the instructional web site at http://www.pbralich.com provides detailed, clearly organized and well-written instructions to get you started with Affiliate Marketing, including links to enough sites and software to get you up and running with your own affiliate companies, the know-how to market them and the ability to receive and collect your commissions.

This process will take 50-100 hours of your time and an investment in software and registrations of about $250.00 (not to this site or email) over a few weeks. You can begin under $100.00. This is not for the beginner or someone with a casual interest. If you want to get involved in this form of at-home, on-line work and have the time, money and background to do so, read on.

What you will do:
Find on-line companies who want you to promote them to search engine sites, ad sites, article sites, web sites, blogs, email bulk lists, and so on, using articles and ads that you write or develop for them for which you will be paid a commission for every sale you generate. Web sites and blogs are more advanced at this stage and somewhat distracting, so they will be discussed in a later email. In addition, these pages include instructions on how to get paid and how to track your work and earnings. If you do this correctly, you can earn enough to move into the more expensive and time demanding world of web sites and blogging.

No spamming is taught in these pages.

Skills you need to have already:
These instructions are for intermediate level computer users who can also write and have some experience with marketing or at least have a sense of it.

Equipment you need to have and to have had experience with.
If you have the following hardware, software and accounts, you are ready to start. If you are missing any of them (which is unlikely, if you have this email), you need to save this email and fill those gaps first. In short, what you need to start is a standard computer set up.

Hardware: A computer, an Internet Connection (dial-up is workable but quite clumsy) and a phone (useful but not crucial).

Software: An Office Suite such as Microsoft Office, a Web Browser, and Email Software.

Accounts: An email account and an Internet access account.

Time and Money: You will need several new pieces of software, a lot of registrations, a second or even third email account, about $250.00 for various unavoidable fees for software and accounts (not to this blog or website) and about 50 – 100 hours to go through the process of getting set up and signing up with the software and sites. You do not need to spend that amount of time and money up front. You can begin slowly and see if this is really something you want and can do.

The following list is just to give you an overview of what is required.

New Hardware: None.

New Software: A form filler, an automatic search engine submitter, an automatic ad site submitter, an automatic article submitter, an opt-in, email bulk list submitter (opt-in is not spam). A link cloaker, an email composer, and some blogging software (this last one is not entirely crucial in the early stages).

Accounts: Pay and promotion accounts, an extra email account, accounts with opt-in, bulk mail, email lists (also called “safelists”).

All of the above are described below and links are provided to all the relevant sites and recommended software. There are many, many more out there, but the sites and software recommend here are reputable, inexpensive and effective. This one email will be sufficient to get you up and running with all you need to begin finding and promoting companies and getting paid for it through commissions. For example, the only fees the author receives for this email is from commissions from the software you purchase when you use the links contained herein, which is precisely the same manner in which you will make money as well. So please, do use the links below to purchase for the sake of this instructional email (and future ones like it) and for the sake of your future commissions.

I will be posting more advanced instructional posts in the near future on more advanced and other features of affiliate marketing such as building, maintaining, tracking and bringing traffic to your affiliate sites, web blogging, banner ads, Link Cloakers, backlisting and more. However, this is all presented in a step wise fashion in four lessons. Each later lesson presupposing the completion of the registration, set up and promotional experiences described in the earlier lessons.
In addition to the instructions provided here, the end of this email you will also receive some useful samples:

1. Table of 7ready-to-go companies.
2. A Sample Formatted email.
3. A Sample Plain email.
4. A Template to Organize your Promotion writing.

What Exactly is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is essentially an intermediate level internet marketing strategy. It is more sophisticated than filling in forms and survey’s and less sophisticated than web sites, blogs and a few other things. It is called “affiliate marketing” and basically involves work from home marketers who make a commission (50-70%) selling client products on-line, mostly software. Once you are effectively working in this arena, you can step up to the more advanced stage which will include web sites, blogs, banner ads, cloaked links, widgets and so forth. Affiliate marketing can be used to finance the more expensive advanced levels of internet marketing such as web sites and blogging which do not offer as simple a return on investment. Once you have this completed, watch for my emails on websites and blogging or go to my web site at http://www.pbralich.com.

The area of affiliate marketing involves companies looking for independent marketers to maintain and expand their web presence as well as their sales. You probably know this already, but the target companies need as many clicks to their sites as they can get, and they also need as many web posts as possible to generate those clicks in order to bring their site as close to the first page of search engine searches as possible.

For this reason, they are happy to have as many affiliate marketers as they can posting these articles for them because it brings up both their click through rates and their sales, at no risk. They only pay when they get sales. The affiliates may significantly increase their click rate, but the affiliate only gets paid if the customer buys through the link the affiliate provided. The affiliate link is similar to the web site link, but it includes information about the marketer and the company that will handle the commission. For example, http://www.amazon.com is a standard link, and affiliated link would look something for Amazon would look something like this: https://paydot.com/YOURNAME/. They are actually slightly more complicated, but this gives you the idea. It is easy for them because they have already figured the cost of the commission into their cost structure, and affiliates are easier to maintain and more abundant than employed, in-house marketers. However, if the customer does not use your link, or if he uses it, exists the company and then goes back in again with the standard web address, you will not get paid. This is a known and tolerated risk. However, as an affiliate, you should use the affiliate links (like mine below) as a measure of loyalty to the field. It is a bit like service personnel being good tippers.

Before you begin, you need to know that getting started with this is quite aggravating – lots of registrations, a fair amount of spam and lots of waiting for website registrations to go through and so on. Some of the submission processes are tedious as well, but others are quite fast once you are registered and set up. What I recommend in these pages may take up to several weeks, especially if you are working a standard job elsewhere, and I am hoping that this email can get you started with affiliate marketing as quickly as possible. If you follow the steps, you may actually be able to start experimenting with your own ads for companies in just a few days. Though, unless you are really lucky or really insightful the first ones may not pay that much.

To begin, you will definitely need one more free email account (e.g. free accounts like gmail, hotmail, or yahoo) because the best place to do this sort of marketing for beginners who do not want to spend too much is through opt-in, email lists which generate lots of email for your client companies as well as for you. I am deleting several hundred emails a day. I suspect it will be quite a bit less for you, but just in case, be sure and use that new email account anytime you are asked for a “list email” rather than a contact email. You will use this account solely for the “list email” of the companies you post with. If necessary you can just delete the entire account and start over again. The contact name is where the list administrators will contact you for site related business. The “list email” is for posting and receiving posts.

Here is a step by step guide just to give you an overview of the task at hand. Recommended sites are listed later in this email:

Go to http://www.pbralich.com for the rest of the first lesson. This site asks for no fees but does make commissions if you order the recommended software from the links provided there. Please, if you appreciate the lesson, order only through those links. You will want the same courtesy once you are up and running.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Phil Bralich, Ph.D.
pbralich.com

Affiliate Marketing Information Site and Blog

Affiliate Marketing Education Site