Aside from a few technical difficulties and mistakes in setting up your website these days it is pretty easy using WordPress or some other blog software to get a website setup in an hour or two.  Graphics can be difficult if you don’t know Photoshop or some other graphics program, but a trip to fiverr or e-lance can solve that challenge in a hurry.  If you decide to go the html route you may be taking a bit longer or need the services of a webmaster to help you understand how to use, read and install the code.  Indeed there are still many types of things you can do with basic html that will drive you insane inside the dashboard of WordPress.

It is also fairly easy to find and get affiliated with many different types of products.  In most cases there is no direct cost involved in being an affiliate. Some internet programs require that you become a member of the membership or company, which means that as a paid member of that group you get rights to get a commission for selling their products. This is typical for many membership systems that teach people how to make money with their system.  The biggest reason that these groups are appealing is that there is usually a nice commission up front and then a monthly commission for every month that the new subscriber remains a member.

There are several other types of “continuity” that are available to the general internet population that do not charge a membership fee.  For instance web hosting and other services will pay a commission for every month that the subscriber remains a member.  Indeed this can be lucrative, if you had 100 high end subscribers a month at Hostgator you could receive a 50% commission of $12 per subscriber or $1200 per month. When you think about the fact that most people who set up websites plan to do it for a least a year, that could be a nice residual paycheck.

You have certainly heard of Clickbank by now and you know that they pay between 50 and 75 percent commissions on their associates products.  Your temptation may be to look at the Clickbank Marlketplace and choose a new internet marketing product that has a very high affiliate return and a high gravity score, which means that it is selling very well at the moment. You may even be tempted to buy a domain name and set up for business as an affiliate marketer for that product.  If you are brand new to this environment without a list or some serious knowledge of how to use PPC marketing I would counsel you to think again.

The siren song of instant riches by simply putting up a website with a fancy sales letter and making hand over fist retirement income is a fantasy.  This is where the big boys play and they have a serious advantage over a new affiliate.  For one thing, the product has been privately announced months before it actually launched on Clickbank.

By the time that it actually launches there will already be 2 to 20 Google pages worth of websites covering every major keyword relating to the name of the product as in productname.net, productname.org, productname.info.  Then changing into productnamereview.com, prodictnamebonus.com etcetera until those have all been taken.  Depending on the commission involved and the internet popularity of the author; some programs will sell for up to $2000  and that will bring out the sharks in a hurry.

Secondly, on launch day another group of marketers launches a major PPC campaign and sweeps in and gathers up another percentage of buyers.  Meanwhile everyone on all the lists of every major internet marketer gets their inbox flooded with bonus offers of “I’ll give you this or that if you buy it through my link.”  You will know who is on the affiliate list when every email from the gurus of the marketing world show up in your inbox with the same canned email copy.  The bottom line is that the high commission items are going to bring out a lot of competition.

Mr. new affiliate with $$$ signs in your eyes ***Don’t be that guy!*** you will wind up a year later with an orphan website carrying a funny name that nobody visits anymore which cannot be used for anything else.  Ask me how I know sometime.

Here is a better scenario for you to follow.  Look at the Clickbank Marketplace and find a product that is something that you can get excited and enthusiastic about.  Is the sales page something that convinces you, do you think that it does a good job of convincing others?  You want something that will pay you a decent commission.  You will want something in the $20-$30 range, which means it is selling for $50 to $75 or even up to $100.  Don’t worry about the gravity score which tells you how many affiliates has sold at least one product in the previous 10 days or something like that.

Now go to your keyword source (Google adwords keywords tool) and do a thorough look to find out if there is reasonable search traffic for phrases describing the problem that this product addresses.  You are looking for phrases that get at least 500 to 1000 searches a month or slightly more. When you have determined that there is sufficient traffic, check the Google trends for the main keywords and make sure that it has been upward or steady for at least a couple of years.  If that is the case, you may have a good candidate for affiliation.

Now go back to Clickbank and check the product once again this time you want to see the affiliate website of the product this is usually listed in the Marketplace description.  When you find it, go there and look around for what it has to offer.  Are there more than just banners?  You want to see articles, emails, maybe even keyword files and free reports for you to use to market the product.  The more complete the affiliate website with helpful information the more you can trust that the seller is really interested in helping his/her affiliates to sell their product.

If you can satisfy all of the above criteria and find that it is still an exciting product; then you are a good candidate for affiliating with it.  Remember you will be writing articles, and emails  and populating social websites with bits of knowledge about this product for a while to get your sales funnel built to drive traffic in their direction.  Count the cost and be prepared to ***Be that Guy!***

Michael Brown