Today TaxMama wants to talk to you about Affiliate Marketing. Yesterday, I was interviewed by Lisa Picarille for her Geekcast.fm broadcast and the Performance Marketing Association website. You may not be familiar with this entire universe of opportunities to make some decent money. Let me tell you about it.
Dear Family,
Can you imagine loving what you do – and making a living at it? You can put links on your website from merchants who pay you a commission. There are some very major merchants involved, like the WSJ, American Express, Target, etc. When someone clicks on your link, or uses your link to make their purchase you get a commission. So how do you go about creating an affiliate income generating business? Bear in mind, there are people who earn over $10,000 per month doing this.
1) Know your passion – or your top two passions.
a. Identify what you love to do, read about, play with, and the people with whom you’d like to spend your time for the next few years.
b. It can be an intellectual discipline, sports, politics, cooking, flying, spelunking…whatever. Just narrow it down to one or two things.
2) Set up your first website, a .com, to test your ideas and to attract like-minded folks.
a. You can do it for free, using Twitter, Facebook, OfficeLive, Blogger, YouTube or a variety of decent services. Don’t use them all at first. Just test it one site. [Note: all of these sites were initiated for me by www.KiltedChaos.com ]
b. Or you can jump right in with a paid site, that guaranteed to teach you how to monetize your passion – Ken Evoy’s Site Build-it.
3) Put together a business plan (chapter 2 of Small Business Taxes Made Easy)
a. Set up your advisory team to help guide you.
b. Revisit your Plan every month or two to stay on track.
c. Set up your business, bank account, etc.
4) Decide what you want to do, and what you want to outsource.
a. You should start trying to do everything yourself – just to learn about websites and affiliate marketing from experts. Play with the simple technology, like the kids do.
b. Once you know what you totally do not want to do – find the right people to do it for you.
5) Join affiliate networks, programs and vendors who have their own programs.
a. Commission Junction, LinkShare, OneNetworkDirect, ClickBank and others. And remember to support the community – join PMA.
b. Subscribe to key publications, like Associate Programs.com, Affiliate Tip Weekly,
c. Decide which products you want to focus on – and it may be just one product (meet Blake Warrington – who went from broke to rich with ONE product.) . Or it could be many products, like Kim Rowley.
6) Market the heck out of your first website using blogs, tweets, newsletters, and teleseminars and radio interviews. Don’t forget ebooks – especially viral ebooks.
Don’t expect to become rich overnight. Or even to find your niche overnight. Be persistent and keep writing your blogs, tweets and newsletters. Keep learning. Within 6 months, you will start earning significant sums of money. Within 1-2 years, you’ll be able to live on it. Within 2-4 years, you’ll be able to live well!
Did you pay attention? This article is full of links, most of which are affiliate links. Links that pay me a commission. And I didn’t even have time to put in all potential links. See…that’s how you incorporate affiliate marketing into anything you do.
Write about something you love, and you will find that most vendors and resources these days will pay you affiliate commissions if you join their programs. Sometimes, if you ask a particular store or site, they will make a special deal with you.
And Remember, you can find answers to all kinds of questions about how to make a living and other tax issues, free. Where? Where else? At www.TaxMama.com.
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