This is one weird aspect of online marketing. At first it sounds really easy to understand, but it’s more than the simple fact that you represent a company to sells their product and get a comission on every sales. You have to do an important job in what is called the marketing part, which is ads creation and website(s) promotion.
Your best tool for this job will be Google Adwords. It will allow you to get targeted visitors directly to your website (or affiliate landing page). Those visitors who you’ll have attracted will then go to the merchant website (or be already there) and do a purchase on which you’ll get a percentage or a fixed amount of money.
To start out, I’ll ask you to look for products you’d like to sell and you know that are pretty much in demand. Don’t go for those super rare objects no one knows about and cost like 5$, that’s not worth it. Maybe you can do something similar but if the object is worth 1 500$, many publishers are okay with paying over 500$ in Adwords advertising to get one single 1,500$ sale. This is up to you and your budget, but for an Adword beginner, I would like to get some result in a near future.
When you have products that you think you’d actually buy online (electronic, ebooks, music, etc), think about what specific aspects of it you are looking for. What are the required features? How much should it cost? Think about how the website should present the product. Should it have screenshots?, examples?, other people testimonials?, etc? Don’t do it in a professional manner but a personal one, this way your visitors will feel better connection between you and the product.
I tend to be the kind of guy that don’t want to test softwares if their GUI (general user interface) doesn’t look good. To me, the program might do a really good job, but if it’s not showing the results in a good looking way, I’m not sold. If you think about it for a second, would you buy something you don’t even have an idea what it looks like? I guess the question answer itself.
With all the brainstorming done, let’s get thing done. Start writing your page content, layout, etc. When you’re writing your ads on Adword, think about what would make you select an ad over another. Don’t give useless information and don’t try to oversell, you’re just going to throw some cash at Google. A general rule is to have the benefit and a feature of your sold item gives to the buyer. If you can, try to make it a bit humorous so it get catched out of the batch.
Yet, even though we’ve done a good job so far, the big part comes now. After everything is set up, you’ll want to track your results and get the most information you can get. This way, you’ll analyse your logs, check out what work, what doesn’t and you’ll cut what doesn’t. This way you’ll save money you’ll be able to spend to make even MORE money!
Make sure you keep your landing page updated regularly, try to get new stuff on it (but don’t overcharge it). If you can, provide additional webpages we’re you’ll provide other informations about the same niche.
You should be done for now. If you’re confident enough about what you’ve set up, you’ll want to wait for 3-5 days before going back to check what has been working so far and start doing some cut. Then keep your business rolling and EARN!
