If you have ever thought it would be great to start up your own online business but the only thing holding you back was having the cash to start it up, I’d like to share with you how you can do it for as little as $20, and with a little effort, turn it into a profitable success!

The easy way we do this is through Affiliate Marketing

What is affiliate marketing
You may or may not have heard of the term ‘affiliate marketing’ before, but basically it is when you advertise a product or sell for another company’s product through your website, and are rewarded in a commission for doing so.
Many major businesses, hotel accommodation and flight services in particular, have been operating this way for many years, but with the internet becoming an increasingly popular way to purchase products and services, online affiliate marketing has opened up the market so almost anyone can have a slice of the game!

To set yourself up to earn commission from internet marketing, basically you simply purchase a domain name or even set up a basic website and advertise products for companies on your website, and if someone buys through the advertisement or link on your webpage you make a commission on the sale.
This commission may be a couple of percent, or it could be up to 75% of the sale price. Either way, you are basically making money for almost doing nothing!
I say ‘almost’ because like any new business, you have to promote it or you won’t get the visitors, and without visitors you have no sales.
You would be surprised how many people I talk to that just think you set up a website and it becomes an instant money machine. Sorry, but it’s not that easy!
It does require a little bit of work and persistence at the start, which I will mention shortly.

So how does Affiliate Marketing work?
There are a number of forms of affiliate marketing. There is PPC (Pay Per Click ) where you are paid for the number of times that someone clicks on a text link that is promoted on your website. The most common example of this is Google’s Adsense /Adwords campaign.

The way this works is that the person wishing to advertise their product signs up with Google for the Adwords service, so when someone clicks on their link either on Google’s website or a website that has signed up to promote Google’s ads through their Adsense program, the person advertising pays for each click made. Google gets a share and the person advertising gets a share.
Depending on how you set up your webpage can depend on how many clicks the paid Google links receive, but done correctly it can be very profitable, and it is not uncommon to hear of people making hundreds of dollars a day just from Adsense clicks, though as I mentioned it does require the site to be well set up and also receiving plenty of traffic.

The other form of affiliate marketing is signing up for Affiliate programs that sell products or services through banner advertising or coded text links that are placed into your website, which can be tracked by the affiliate company and when someone clicks through and makes a purchase you are credited the commission for the sale. Unfortunately most instances you don’t receive payment for the click itself, so it can takes a few hundred clicks to make a sale, but the commission can also be quite rewarding and usually more profitable that Google Adsense. (Using both together can be even more rewarding!)

The products you can promote cover almost anything, from ebooks, holiday accommodation, flowers, lingerie, credit cards, gym gear, computers, adult products, ipods, web hosting…you name it!

Step 1: Sign up with Affiliate Companies
Simple sign up with one of the related affiliate companies such as:
Commission Junction
Clix Galore
Commission Monster
DGM Pro
Click Bank

There is no cost to sign up, however some require you have a website or at least a domain name, first, which is why the title of this article mentions it will cost you around $10.

Step 2: Set up a basic website
Purchase a hosting account through a reputable web hosting service such as Webcrowd, or Hostgator, which all give you a free domain name as well, for around $10 a month.

Make sure you choose your web name wisely and try if possible to relate it closely to the products you are selling.
For instance I have a couple of affiliate based websites, one is WhitsundayApartments.com.au, which selling Whitsunday Island holiday accommodation, and another is DreamLingerie.com.au, which as you guessed, sells lingerie.
I have others two, but these two are probably good examples as they both bring in quite good commissions. With Dream Lingerie, I receive 25% of everything sold through your affiliate link, and with the accommodation I receive around 8&, however usually the sales are bigger, and it’s not uncommon for someone to book a week or two accommodation at $300 a night, so if you do the math, it’s not bad pocket money for not having to do too much!

The process of setting up a website using affiliate companies is actually quite simple.
As mentioned in Step 1, sign up with the affiliates that you think work best for your domain, and then once you are approved they provide the code to cut and paste into your website which links to the banners they provide, or the text links for the products.
Place them on your website where you think works best to attract people, and then of course test that the link works.

Step 3 – Promote your website
Unless you promote your website you probably will find it a little slow attracting visitors to the website, and without the visitors you won’t make the sales (or commissions)
So, when you set up your website, make sure you download a copy of some search Engine optimisation software , such as WebCEO, which will help you optimize and submit your website to the search engines. It will take a few weeks to see your website on the search engines so while you are waiting, a great way to get people coming immediately is by setting up a Twitter account or other social networks, and search for people that may be interested in your products. Post messages almost daily if you can, and mention your products so that you begin driving traffic to your website. You will soon find this creates a snowball effect and before you know it you have hundreds of people visiting your website every day.
My best marketing tool for DreamLingerie.com.au is the Twitter account I have for the site: twitter.com/fantasylingerie. every few days I submit new products. Each month the visitor numbers are growing, and so are the sales. I probably spend around 15 minutes of my time each day on each promoting them, so it literally is easy money, allowing you to work a ‘real’ job in the day as well.

If you would like to learn more about setting up an affiliate based website to promote extra income, contact me at Devision Design

Author: Chris Bourke of Devision and Web SEO Coach