How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

In my opinion, one of the best ways to create a stable and long term income online is to develop an affiliate website, or perhaps a portfolio of affiliate websites.

In this post I’ll give a brief overview of what it takes to be successful with affiliate marketing, and the steps you need to take to build your own affiliate marketing blog or website.

Step 1: Start a Blog

First and foremost, in order to make money with affiliate marketing you need to have you own website. While you could do this by taking advantage of one of the free blogging tools out there, like wordpress.com or blogger.com, your best bet is really to buy your own domain and setup wordpress on it yourself.

This doesn’t have to be complicated. All you have to do is go to a registrat, like GoDaddy or Namecheap and purchase a domain name (usually for $5-15). Then, you’ll need to buy a hosting account from a reputable provider, and follow their instructions for “pointing” your domain to their servers. All that means is you have to copy and paste a url into a place in the registrar.

Most hosting companies have a 1-click WordPress install, which is free and by far the best way to get going.

Once you’re all setup, it’s time for step 2…

Step 2: Write Interesting Content

Now that you have your blog setup, you need to create good content for the site.

As a blogger and affiliate marketer, having a large volume of good content is going to be absolutely essential to your success.

I usually advise newbies to write a minimum of 20 posts as quickly as possible when they first start out. Don’t worry if you don’t know what to write or include in your posts, just get them done. You’ll get better as you go along, and simply getting started is hugely important at this point.

I recommend 20 because that’s a good base number which will start to establish your site as a real website, not just a simple landing page.

Then, try to produce at least 1 post every day for the next 6-12 months. If you want to be aggressive, write more. If you’re strapped for time, a bare minimum of 1-2 posts per week is essential to success.

Step 3: Build and Email LIst

As you continue to build up the content of your blog and produce more, high quality posts and informational material, you’re also going to want to get setup with a good email service provider, like Mailchimp or Aweber.

Email lists are at the cruz of how professional marketers make money online, and mastering this skill is essential to having long term success with your website.

You want to create an account where you can set up an automated line of emails, so that new subscribers get sent the same system of emails over time, regardless of when they joined your list.

That’s it! If you can master these three basics, you can rinse and repeat until you’re making your target income (and more!) every month for the life of your website!