Carrying on from Affiliate Marketing Step 3a, let’s continue.

3. A Text of Webpage Editor

There are many programs that you can choose that will help you create your webpage. I use Dreamweaver but that is quite a complicated program for beginners. FrontPage is also popular. These editors are called WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) because they are relatively easy to create great looking webpages without much html knowledge.

There are many good html or WYSIWYG editors around and you may already have one on your computer. If you don’t just do a search online for free webpage editor and find one that you like.

It’s also a good idea to learn the basics of HTML (the basics are actually quite easy to learn). There are lots of wonderful free resources online for learning how to build webpages. Just do a search for “how to learn HTML” and you should find lots of them.

4. Your Website

You should now have all the tools you need to build your website. You’ll have a hosting account, a domain name and a webpage editor.

So let’s start to create our first affiliate website!

The first page that you should create will be your Squeeze Page or Opt-In Page. It’s called this because it is designed to ‘squeeze’ your customer’s information (name and email address) from them and collect their details.

To get them to hand over their details to you, you need to be prepared to offer them something valuable. I usually find offering a free report works well for this.

Your free report can be on anything related to your topic. The report doesn’t have to be long – mine are usually around 10 pages – and it doesn’t even have to be all original material. You can use PLR (Private Label Rights) articles, or buy a resell rights report.

I actually do prefer to write my own reports though – don’t worry its easy enough to do – just do a search on ezinearticles.com for 7 or 8 articles on your chosen topic and then rewrite them into your own words and put them in a report. Make sure you don’t copy what the other author has written word for word otherwise you’ll be stealing, but rewriting their ideas into your own words is absolutely fine.

Once you have a report you need to make it into a PDF file. If you have Adobe Acrobat (the full program, not just Reader) you can do this very easily. Open Office will also allow you to create PDF’s easily as well. Otherwise there are many programs online that will allow you to convert Word documents to PDF files very easily such as http://www.expresspdf.com/

So what do you do with your report once you have it? .. Stay tuned for Affiliate Marketing Part 3c ..

By now you should have a good idea of a product or two that you’d like to promote. We have looked at Step 1, and Step 2.

So now is time to set up our affiliate marketing machine on autopilot and (hopefully) watch the money come in.  I’ve decided to write this step in a few parts, so here is step 3A.

The most effective method that I have found for promoting affiliate offers is to use a simple two page website with your autoresponder.

While you can get away with using free hosting (such as a blog or squidoo lens), and also by using a free autoresponder account, if you are really serious about making money online then you need to get yourself a hosting account, a domain name and an autoresponder account.

So what do you need them all for?

1. Hosting Account

Your hosting account is where you will store your web pages that your visitors will come to. You won’t have any trouble finding a host provider – there are literally hundreds of webhosting companies online. Some are cheap, some are expensive.

I use 1&1 as my webhost. They are ok and I’ve never had a problem with them and their prices are reasonable so I’m happy.

If you are choosing a hosting company, make sure that you can add as many domains to the one account as possible (I can add unlimited domains to my host plan) that way you’ll only ever pay the one cost for hosting multiple websites.

2. A Domain Name

Having your own domain name makes things so much easier when you are affiliate marketing. For starters you have complete control over what your visitor sees and if you ever decide to chance promotions, you can easily change your website or promotion quickly.

It’s a good idea to try and get a domain name that fits with the theme of the product you will be promoting, in fact the closer the name, the better.

For example, if you wanted to promote Fat Loss 4 Idiots (again I’m only using this product as an example), you could try putting dashes in the name: fat-loss-4-idiots.com, changing a word or two: fatlossforidiots.com or even dropping a word fatlossidiots.com. (These were just off the top of my head and I have no idea if they are available or not).

I also use 1&1 for buying domains. I think each domain name costs me around $9 or something for 1 year – you only need to make one sale within that year to recoup your costs.

Ok, in the next post I’ll continue Affiliate Marketing Step 3b with more tools that you’ll need to get your webpage set up to start your affiliate marketing empire ..

In the last post: Affiliate Marketing Step 1: Finding a Product to Promote, I showed you how to find products, but now that you have found them how do you choose which is the best one to promote?

When choosing a Clickbank product I usually look at both the $/sale and the grav (gravity).

Fat Loss 4 Idiots
$/sale: $31.31 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $31.31 | %/sale: 75.0% | %refd: 87.0% | grav: 597.64

Gravity refers to how many affiliates have made at least one sale of that product in the last 30 days. So in this case, over 597 different affiliates have made at least one sale in the last month for Fat Loss 4 Idiots. So there are a lot of people promoting (and selling) this product. $/sale is how much you are going to make per sale.

For Amazon, you can look at both the top bestselling products in each category or they also have a movers & gainers section where you can see fast moving products (can be a good place to find hot products early).

If you are promoting an offer from a CPA (cost per action) network, usually the older the “open date” is the better since that indicates that other affiliates have been successful with that offer.

It’s a good idea to do a bit of research online first to see what other people are saying about the product. Be aware that you’ll find many ‘positive’ reviews from other affiliates trying to promote the product so keep searching until you find some real reviews.

A good place to find unbiased reviews is ezinearticles.com. Just do a search in their article directory (you’ll find their search box in the left hand column – scroll down a bit to find it).

If you can’t find an unbiased review then use your own judgment as to whether you think it would be a good product. If you can afford it, you might even want to purchase it yourself to check its quality.

Tip: if you can’t find a real review of the product, chances are customers can’t either – so if you are the first with an unbiased real review you have a good chance of making some sales.

Ok, so now your homework is to find a product to promote, because next post I’ll show you how to set up your web pages to start sending customers to.

Since I think one of the easiest (and quickest) ways to start making money online is affiliate marketing – promoting someone else’s product – the first thing to do is to find a product that we can earn a commission from.

So where do you start when there is so much to choose from?

There are really two main methods of finding a profitable product or niche:

1) Search for hot niches and what problems people have and find a product to solve that problem or and item that is currently a hot trend.

These buyers are usually “desperate” – they need to find a solution to their problem right away, or “passionate” – they want the latest must have item.

If you can get in early enough before everyone else starts getting the same idea, hot trends can be very profitable.

You can find hot trends by looking at Google’s Hot Trend to find what people are searching for: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends or you can just keep an eye on the marketplace and the news to see what is hot at the moment.

The other way to choose a product is:

2) Just promote what is already selling well.

This method can be a little harder because you’ll have a lot more competition, but it makes sense that if something is already selling well there must be a high demand for it and trying to get a small chunk of the large pie is better than choosing a product at random that may not sell at all.

You can find out what products are selling well at most marketplaces (most stores have a bestseller or hot products page).

Let’s look at the top three marketplaces that most people start with when affiliate marketing:

eBay: http://pulse.ebay.com (top searches on eBay)
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers (bestselling products in many categories)
ClickBank: http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm (search for high gravity)

Next post I’ll start showing you how to choose your offer from the many available in Affiliate Marketing Step 2: Choosing Your Product

First of all – Happy New Year! I hope that 2009 will be unbelievable profitable for you.

This year I wanted to do something a little different with by blog. Something that would help people make money without them having to fork out for an eBook or report that tells them the basics but doesn’t really give any concrete information on HOW to start earning that cash. So over the next few weeks and months I’m going to be writing some really informative posts that I believe will help you make money.

I don’t even want anything in return. As you can see I’ve taken the Adsense off my site (it earned me peanuts anyway) and I only have minimal advertising. I also won’t be trying to sell or promote a product to you that I haven’t used myself or don’t think is useful just so I can make a commission (yes I have been guilty of that in the past). It will be your choice to whether to use any product I recommend or not – as it should be.

So I guess we should start at the beginning then. Eventually I’d like you all to start creating your own products, but let’s keep it simple to begin with and make a start promoting other people’s products – affiliate marketing.

I think affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways for beginners to start making money online because you don’t need to worry about customer service or writing a product, all you do is connect buyer with seller and collect your commission.

It’s a pretty easy passive income if you know what you are doing. It doesn’t even take that much time if you do it right.

So, look out for my next post so we can get started straight away ..

Affiliate Marketing Step 1: Finding a Product to Promote
Affiliate Marketing Step 2: Choosing Your Product
Affiliate Marketing Step 3a: Setting Up Your Website
Affiliate Marketing Step 3b: Setting Up Your Website
Affiliate Marketing Step 3c: Setting Up Your Download Page
Affiliate Marketing Step 4: Your Autoresponder

Catch you soon,
Tracey