July 25, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Free Training, Guides, Modules by MatthewDC

Making sales is what it is all about. Without sales, theres no money, and without money, what’s the point? So let’s talk about how we can go about making affiliate sales and start making some money. There are several business models you can use in this industry. Some of which are free and some of which will cost you money. How much money depends on how much you are willing to spend. There are a LOT of options so we will start with one of the cheapest.

Web Pages

Everyone knows what a web page is right? By setting up a web page, you can include your affiliate link within the site somewhere, and when someone clicks it and goes and buys a guide, you make money. There are several types of websites we use for this purpose and for training purposes, I will refer to them as either landing pages, or mini sites. Let me explain the two :

Landing Pages – These are basically one page websites that offer up a review, comparison, or testimonial, trying to get the visitor interested in buying the guide that you are promoting. You sprinkle your affiliate link throughout the landing page and entice them to click it. In the WoW Niche, review sites seem to work the best. If you buy a copy of a guide, create an honest review of the product and post it on a blog or a website, people will read it, see that you like the guide, and if they trust you, go on to buy it. You can use many free sites to create landing pages and we will go into each of them a little bit more in the more advanced section. Here are some of my favorites:

Mini-Sites – These are going to be more like a traditional website. On a minisite, you would offer up a little more content and several pages on different aspects of your topic. You might even offer up some free guides to help build trust and build a relationship with your visitors. This makes them more inclined to believe your reviews and go on to buy the products you recommend. These types of sites require a little more work in creating content and the various pages, but many believe they make sales at a higher rate than a simple landing page. These types of multi page sites also tend to get more favorable reactions from Google as they consider you more of an authority if you have a large amount of content on your subject.

Setting up an actual site like this, requires several things that will cost you.You will need web hosting (like hostgator), you will probably want a logo (20DollarBanners), and you will need to generate content or hire someone to do it for you (Elance). Also, if you don’t know HTML or CSS, you can use a free template, but it might be hard for you to update. If that is the case, you might need someone to build the site for you (Also Elance). That is why many people use simple free landing pages for their first affiliate sites.

The other major option for making sales is to use Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, which we will cover in a later module. PPC is a more advanced technique and can end up costing you large sums of money if you are not fully prepared. If you think you are ready to learn more about PPC now, you can view our PPC and Adwords 101 training.

I highly recommend that everyone start by creating a free squidoo lens in a review style format. This is the path our modules will follow. The reason for this is that I want you to get more comfortable with the concepts we will be using. Later on, once we have set up a squidoo lens, done some marketing, and a made our first couple sales, then we will start looking at a mini-site.

Our next module is Module 6 : Your First Website – Squidoo Basics