Sweet Money Online

The financial recession has left many short of money to support their livelihood. It has thus become necessary to find alternative ways of getting any extra income stream regardless of how small an amount so long as it supplements their earnings.

Here is a way one can make some quick bucks either part time or full time.

Affiliate Marketing

This is one area where one can make a huge income stream. With affiliate marketing, one can make well over $2000- $10,000 each month with very minimal efforts. If one knows where to go and what to do, it is a sure way of making some extra income while doing other things too.

However, poor marketing methods and lack of knowledge on what to do makes this a very hard online earning platform.
Poor planning and lack of a good guide also makes this area very trick and a such, most people claim that it is impossible to make sales.

So, how can one prepare for affiliate marketing?

a) Research on what's hot and selling
Clearly, most people find a product first and then start looking for an audience to sell to. WRONG MOVE! First find a market. What is it that people want? Note that people buy what they want and not what they need! You may start by targeting a certain age-group, or sex or profession and so on. Find out what most have in common as a want. We call this a niche.

b) Find a product.
Now that you have in mind something that a certain group of people may want. Go in to different product marketplaces and get a related product. Market places include ClickBank, PayDotCom, Amazon, eBay, Commission Junction, click2sell among others. In there, you will be able to find some products related to your niche.

c) Research on keywords
Here is where most aspiring affiliate marketers get turned off. Looking for keywords that your target group uses when trying to find the kind of product you have selected is very important. There are so many tools online that can help with this task. However, you can avoid the trouble by doing any of the following two things:
- Putting yourself in the shoes of the prospective buyer. What would you search for in a search engine if you wanted that product. Put these different ideas down as possible keywords. You may also ask yourself questions like, what is it that these people in your target niche talk about? What are their main weaknesses? which sites do they visit regularly online? These questions will give you ideas on possible keywords.
- Use a keyword spying tool example keywordspy.com These tools allow you to see who else is in your target niche, what they are selling, which keywords they are using, how much money they are spending on advertising, where they are getting the products, among other useful insights. This cuts you a great deal of head-ache trying to figure out what to use as your keywords.

d) Decide on marketing method
Based on your budget, you now decide on what marketing methods to use to get the highest returns. Just a few suggestions, you may use pay per click advertising. This is quite tricky but using the keyword spy tools, you have an edge over others. The best ppc program I would recommend is Google AdWords (adwords.google.com)

Another method of marketing, which has very good results, is use of ezines. Specifically, use of solo-ads. A good place to start is DOE (Directory of Ezines) by Charlie Page. Membership is currently $197 so hurry and get in. Ezine traffic is very affiliate marketing friendly and one can be able to get super-targeted leads from ezines with a related niche.

e) Create a list of prospects
When they say, the money is in the list, it is partially true. It is good to invest in a good auto responder that captures the email of your prospects and also follows up your prospects for you. My recommendation is Aweber auto responder. Remember, not many people buy the first time they see a product. So an auto responder comes in hardy.

f) Protect yourself from affiliate commission thieves.
When you get your affiliate product links to use for promotion purposes, its always good to either shorten them or change them completely, what we may call some kind of encryption.
You may use bit.ly to shorten and track your links. You may also go to GoDaddy.com and buy a domain. Then forward it to your affiliate link and remember to mask it.

g) You are done!
Yes, if you can be able to do these basic things, affiliate commissions will start flowing in to your bank account.

You may want to learn more about these methods in details. Check out the affiliate marketing section of http://dataentry247.net for more. If you have tried marketing with very poor success, you may also want to check out http://AmMyBoss.com

John is an affiliate marketer with 4 years of experience in internet marketing. He is also a professional high school teacher and an entrepreneur.