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Since there are so many money making opportunities online and each with it's own learning curve I figured I would do some research what it takes to be an online marketer. While my knowledge is still limited I have compiled a nice 10 page guide on what everyone seems to be talking about on online marketing. I will just go over the basics here in this article of what I've found.

The first thing people want to know is "How do I start an online business"? The quickest and least expensive way is affiliate programs. Affiliate programs are setup like traditional business offering referral incentives to it's customers. Affiliates earn commissions for referring customers to merchants and purchase a product or sign up for a service.

The next thing people want to know after knowing "what", is which one? While this will vary from person to person because of the different types of hobbies or as marketer are calling it "niches". In short pick a program that is highly related to something you know a lot about. You will have more luck offering a fishing pole to someone if you have a great fishing story to share about the pole, instead of offering a fishing pole and saying I hear it's a great pole go ahead and try it.

After the would be marketer has joined their affiliate program how do they promote it? Promoting something requires exposure for the product or service. Long term exposure is created by having your own website and blog. A simple search on the Internet will provide you with these two tools and just to cut back on time on your sake use 110mb and weebly. 110mb is free web hosting and weebly is free blog hosting. You could use blogger or some other already setup service but this is just for practice and learning the ropes. They are both free and easy to setup once you visit their sites.

For your blog start with a front page that explains what the site is about in the example above you would use fishing. In you blog you would be able to start telling fish stories, best fishing spots, best equipment to use and in your blogs content you would want to link some keywords to your affiliate links. This will provide valuable content for your future visitors. After you have a few blog posts setup and your affiliate links in place you will be able to go to the next step and from the research, the next step is being able to build a list.

Why is a list so important? A list is just a "list" of email addresses you collect by having people them "opt-in" to something like a newsletter or training course through email. The reason for having a list goes back to exposure. The more exposure you get the visitors you get. You can market to your list directly or remind them about your blog and invite them to come back to see what's been added since their initial visit. Remember your affiliate links are hidden in your blogs, so you will want new and repeat traffic.

We will use 110mb to host our page with our opt-in box. The page with our opt-in box will need to be created in a way to provide enough information to be of value for the visitor, it will also need to be setup in a way that uses keywords that the search engines and people visiting find relevant to what they are looking for. This step is know as SEO or search engine optimization. While there are varying opinions on whether it's necessary it never hurts to try all the techniques out there to get free higher rankings in search engines. You will have to perform a search on Google to find tips on creating landing pages and SEO techniques once you get to this step.

Your opt-in box will need to come from somewhere and if you don't know how to program to build your own you will want to use an autoresponder. While this article is about learning for free I wouldn't recommend using free autoresponders for your actual business. One reason is two of the autoresponders I have tried, freeautobot and autoresponders4all seem to have website issues. Freeautobot has had a history of disappearing for a few hours to a few days without word from admin. Autoresponders4all wouldn't even let me sign up for an account just says check back later. The others out there either attach banner ads to each email sent or severely limit the number of opt-ins your are allowed for free. Still for learning purposes you can use freeautobot when the site is working. This will at least give you a start on adding the form to the site, entering in the autoresponses and testing it yourself.

This brings us to exposure. Getting your name or business out there is the most time consuming things to do. And have also found out it can be costly if you go about it the wrong way. While paid traffic is less time consuming and once mastered can be very cost effective in getting targeted traffic. Again we want to get exposure for free. There are different places to post your ad for free. This would include free classifieds, traffic, banner and link exchanges, blog commenting, forum participation and article marketing.

Once you have used all the techniques in this article there are still more techniques to use to be a successful affiliate marketer. This should at least get someone started enough to feel confident to start paying for the services needed to give a professional appearance. You can learn more by visiting my blog and see how to use certain techniques as I learn from more research.

Josh Smith
Get the complete report at http://www.everythingaffiliate.ws
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// posted by pet-adoption82524 @ 12:02 PM