For the 1st part of my online business journey I will be focusing on affiliate marketing.

What’s Affiliate Marketing?

Basically it’s the promotion and marketing of other peoples products or services for a commission.

There are many places that you can go to find products to promote, including clickbank.com, commission junction, etc.

And of course there are many ways to promote these products online with both free and paid methods. Some of the paid methods include using Pay Per Click Advertising through Google, MSN and Yahoo, etc. Also you can pay to advertise in online newsletters, pay for banner advertising, etc.

What I will be focusing on for now are the free methods, article marketing, blogging, forum posting, press releases, online video, submitting to social bookmarking site and posting on social networks. If some of this makes no sense to you right now, don’t worry, we have enough time to detail each method being used.

Why Are We Doing All This, Stuff?

Basically how it works is, you want to get as much traffic to your site, to get as many people to see the offer you’re promoting. So the more traffic, the more opportunity for you to make a sale. Based on your traffic, you can also test and tweak your site and offer to get better results, which is also known as testing your conversions.

So placing all our content on these article sites, video sites, social networks and bookmarking sites allows more traffic to flow to our site/offer.

The Model I Plan on Using

Doing some research and combining some methods I found. I’ve decided to go with the one listed below. (The guy who recommended it claims he makes $20k a month from it. So worth the try right?)

Step 1: Find A Niche / Group of People You Want to Target

Step 2: Find Related Products with Affiliate Programs to Promote to That Niche / Group

Step 3: Find Out What Keywords these People are Using to Get Information and Choosing the best ones to target.

Step 4: Create Articles Based On Those Keywords

Step 5: Create A Quick Interesting Report from Related Articles targeting that Niche / Group

Step 6: Set An Email List to Capture Contacts That May Come to Our Site and Offer them The Free Report in exchange for their name and email address.

Step 7: Set up a Small 5-10 Page Site / Blog to post some of our articles on related to the Niche / Group.

Step 8: Put The Email List Capture Page on that site / blog

Step 9: Put 50 - 100 related Articles in the Email list to send out on a weekly basis. Then add the offers we found in each email in order to make a commission.

Step 10: Market the site we created using a process we will detail in another upcoming post.

That’s the model I found and thought it was very interesting and easy to do, just following the individual steps. Also the good thing about this model is that once I’ve tweaked and applied to my liking, I can then get it all resourced.

Once I make profits from this method I will be applying paid methods and also paying to outsource the article writing and marketing. Yeh writing 100 articles is not a breeze.

That’s it for now… Check back soon, hopefully I’ll have something good for you to see and learn.

- TRENDS