What do I need? I’ve just been asked this by a friend so thought id try and cover it and I’ve also been asked at work be people on how to get a better understand of what I do, both being non affiliates and their understanding is basically that you send someone through a link and then if they buy you get commission. Well that’s what it is really! So here goes…
Some people learn by hearing or reading – I don’t. So If your looking for a list of books and courses to go on im afraid you’ve come up short. I learn by doing, if you fail fine, learn from where you went wrong and go again. Stop trying to learn, get doing!
So my first piece of advise as to what you need is a bit of spare time, see if you can put aside 3 or 4 hours a week and make sure you stick to it.
The next thing you need is a basic understanding of the internet, well enough understanding to get a website live. In most cases this can be registering a domain name and getting some cheap shared hosting a .co.uk domain is in the region of £6 for 2 years and some cheap hosting is going to set you back possible £30 a year (I ran my first site off a geocities free hosting account without a real domain). With CMS (content management packages) being freely available now online you can easily get set up with a site in a day or two and then all you have to do is spend the 4 hours a week researching and writing content.
Lots of people have different approaches to building new sites but my advice would always to be go hell for leather putting content together. A few weeks later when you have a handful of content rich articles & other bits of content then think about the layout of it all and whether the template fits. A lot of people, myself included can spend so long messing and tinkering with templates that they don’t get enough done. In the time I spend making a template work someone who just cracks on with it could easily have done 3 weeks worth of unique content building.
So make sure you pick something your half interested in! Remember your going to be spending 4 hours a week writing about it so if you really hate it your going to make the whole experience boring – affiliate marketing should be fun! Have fun building your site, even if it doesn’t make a fortune which the chances are it wont you still had fun building it. And more importantly you’ll have picked up ideas for your second site.
Notice how I haven’t mentioned adverts yet? That’s because if your thinking about them from stage 1 your going to get too obsessed with them and turn it into ‘just another portal’ linking to too many advertisers with not enough content. Build the site then look for advertisers that might fit.
Online, content really is king.
