Getting Started with Your Home-Based Affiliate Business

At its simplest level, an affiliate business just involves getting people to click on your affiliate links so that you can collect commissions. You don’t even need a website for this but ideally you should. An affiliate link looks something like this: http://www.mywebsite.com?affId=myID, where mywebsite.com is the website of the product you’re selling (eg. amazon.com) and myID is the special affiliate id you receive when you sign up to be an affiliate. This is how the company knows you sent them the traffic so that they can pay you. Opportunity.com explains this entire system in much more detail through its video training program.

My suggestion is that you start with one product. Sign up for their affiliate program. If you’re not too tech savvy, try setting up a webpage on Squidoo which doesn’t require any programming. Put some useful content on this page – for example, find some relevant youtube videos, or make your own videos if you can. Find some articles from Ezine Articles. Write your own content if you’re knowledgeable in that field. Make sure to sprinkle your affiliate link in amongst the content. To keep the page fresh, you could pull in some blog posts from other websites automatically via RSS feeds.

Once you have the page set up (squidoo or your own website) you should try and send traffic to that page. You can do this via twitter, facebook, myspace, etc but make sure you are sending them to informative content not just an ad or sales page. It’s a more subtle but effective approach these days.

Over time you want to have your own website and blog regularly to get traffic from the search engines and have your own presence. Then the squidoo pages send traffic to your own website instead of being the central focus. But if you don’t have tech skills it will take a while for you to learn the basics, but it is well worth the effort.

Remember, the 2 key things you need are traffic (eyeballs to your pages) and an offer than converts (sells). Often times we don’t have either and usually traffic is the biggest problem since there are tons of great products out there.

For more in-depth learning of affiliate marketing for newbies, I highly recommend you sign up for Opportunity.com.