The secret to how to be a successful marketer revolves around a sound marketing strategy. The first thing you need to do is to pinpoint who your target audience is for the products or services you will be promoting. Thorough research is needed to find out which segment of the population will have a demand for your products or services, and if they are likely to purchase them from you. With this information at your fingertips, you will be better able to streamline your advertising efforts to your advantage.

You will also need to create a marketing plan that includes drawing up a budget. This will allow you to see how much money you actually have to put out for your advertising. More often than not, if you do not have this kind of money to invest, you can still find the ways and means of creating an effective Internet marketing strategy without spending a cent.

Bringing the targeted traffic to your site is the goal you need to reach with your Internet marketing strategy. One of the ways to do this is to make sure your website link reaches the right people. You can either exchange links with other similar websites, write articles about your niche and submit them to article directories, join forums and groups on the Internet that have particular interest in your sub-market where you can post comments or information containing your linked signature, or make use of social networking sites to gather valuable followers.

While all these methods involve patience and time-consuming hard work, you will be bringing more traffic to your site. More traffic, especially targeted traffic, is beneficial to bringing your Internet marketing business to the forefront of awareness.

The commissions vary on different products, but are generally acceptable and not much lower than what other affiliate networks have to offer. Not to mention there are a lot of products for which there are no other advertisers.

It’s easy to get started: just register, pick a few of the various advertising methods, implement them and wait. That’s the basic version. If you want to go advanced and make some serious money, you have to start learning how to increase the traffic, improve the click through rate and conversion of your site.

Here are 5 basic tips that will help you get on the right track with making money from Amazon Associates affiliate program:

1.       Pick a good topic. This point is valid only if you are starting a new blog (you can’t change the topic of an already established site without hurting your popularity, reputation and rankings). You need to do a little research and pick a moderately popular niche (so you won’t have too many competitors) for which there are enough products with good commissions on Amazon for you to experiment with. For example, a blog about making money online will never convert as well for Amazon as a blog about books or printers.

2.       Implement early. Don’t wait until your blog is popular enough – start inserting links and experimenting with banners from the first post. This way you’ll already have advertising in place for when your articles get to the top of search engines or on Digg and similar social networks. And most importantly, you will learn what works and converts well on your site and how to improve it.

3.       Pick quality products. Obviously, you’ve got to pick the best products for your readers. And I don’t mean from the whole niche and for your site, but for separate posts, too. If you insert links to the best cheap laser printer on a post titled “Best cheap laser printers of 2009” and links to the best printers for an office on “The best printers for your office”, you will get a much higher conversion rate than if you just inserted random links to printers on Amazon in all your articles. This is a part of what they call “laser targeting”, which, as you can see, does not apply only to paid search.

4.       Don’t overhype. Hyping up a product, whether it’s good or bad, is never a good choice, because if and when the reader orders it based on your recommendation or link and sees that it is not what you said it will be, he will lose faith in you. That’s the worst thing that can happen. You’ve got to always consider the interests of the reader first, and if you review something, say it as it is, don’t try to make it seem better. Besides, that’s what point 3 is all about, you’ll never need to overhype a good product.

5.       Be transparent with your readers. I’m talking about disclosing the fact that all your links are affiliate links (and they should be). Most people are afraid that their readers will be angry at the fact that the author is making money on them. But that’s not true, because a) your links do not affect the price a customer pays in any way and b) If your content is good and you are giving out truthful and useful information and tips, you are providing value to your readers, and most of them will be happy that they helped you somehow in return. Of course, there will be the occasional “I’m not going to buy through your link…” people, but they’re the exception and should not bother you much. Just say “OK, you’re free to choose” and forget about it.

These tips would actually apply to most affiliate networks, so don’t limit your implementation just to Amazon Associates. Good luck!

Photo by RichSeattle

1. Get domain and hosting
Buying a domain name is first thing to do when you starting new website. Domain name has to be short as possible, easy to remember and has to include your main keyword. Let’s say we want to make website about swimming pools. Perfect domain would be swimmingpools.com, but I’m sure it isn’t available anymore. You can try with something like planetswimmingpools.com or swimmingpoolsworld.com (i haven’t checked if those domains are available). I have all of my domains registered at DynaDot.com.

Second thing you need is hosting. For start it would be enough to own shared hosting. It means there are many sites on one server. It is not really good, but for site with less than 500 unique visitors it is enough. If your site gets big, you can still move it on VPS or dedicated server. I host my site at Hostgator. They have great support, but I hear they ban you if you have too much traffic – that’s means you have to move your site before it is too big.

2. CMS – Content Management Systems
In good old days we code every single page in HTML and than upload it on server, but it starts to be to complicated when you have many pages of content. I’m glad someone invented CMS. This is script, which allows you to manage your website in your browser. It is much easier to add and edit articles, links…

My favourit CMS is 19pages.com. It is very small, you don’t even need a database. It is simple to use – just download it from offical website and than follow the instructions in read me file.

3. Design
Your visitors have to like you website. Content is important, but you also need quality outfit of your website. It is easier to download free template from sites, like MantisaTemplates.com and than modify it. I really don’t like to deal with design. That’s why I pay $20 to my friend and he makes design for me. Don’t forget to add code from statistic software in you HTML code(I suggest Google Analytics)

4. Content
This is the most important step in website building. Content is king. For start you need at least 10 unique articles, about 500 words long. If you have skills to write articles, just do it, otherwise you can find somebody on freelancing sites and webmasters forum to do it for you. I pay $5-$10 for 500 words long article, don’t forget to check, if article is really unique.

I really suggest you not to copy articles from article directories. I have already written about it here.

5. Link Building
Link building is my favourit step in website building. Link building is endless process. There are few methods how to do it:

• Directory submition – I always start building links with directory submition. It is free and it is easy. Read something more about directory submition in post from my archive and find best directories to submite on my list of directories.
• Article Marketing – Just rewrite you articles to make them unique and submit them in article directories.
• Link Exchange – I find people to exchange link on webmaster forums. Try to get realted links, even if they have lower PR.
• Link Buying – Link buying is the only way to get good SERP for competitive keywords, but be carefull. I suggest you to use TNX.net – buy links with different PR and different anchor text.
• Social Bookmarking – Submit your articles on websites like Digg.com – to get better result you can ask for few diggs on webmaster forums – but be carefull – it is ‘illegal’.

6. Start earning money
Your site is done, you have built few links and you can see first visitors from search engines. Now you want to make few bucks.

• Google AdSense – It is really easy to use – you just need to install code and you can see ads on your website. You get paid everytime you visitor click on ad. You will probably make about $4 for every 1000 impressions of your website(depends on niche and CTR).
• CJ.com – CJ is network of affiliate programs. In this system you can find products realted to your site and than add some ads in your website. You earn some money everytime someone(reffered by you) buys something from seller.
• Text-Link-Ads – TLA is link building network, which allows webmasters to sell and buy links. There are few other services, but I think TLA is the best online.
• Kontera – Kontera is great ad network, because Kontera In-Text Ads don’t need any special place on your site. There are just few underlined links in your content and when visitor click on this link, you get some money.

7. Keep your site updated
Google and other SE don’t like dead websites. If you want to get good traffic from search engines you’ll need to add new content every few weeks. To make updating easier you can add news system on your website and search major news networks for news in your niche. When you find something interesting, just rewrite this news and publish it on your site.

Also you shouldn’t forget that you shouldn’t stop building links. Are you bored at the moment? Submit your site in few directories.

To earn as much as you can from your site, test different ad networks and ad placment on your website.

And the most important thing – keep reading my blog to find out new link and traffic methods – subscribe to my RSS.