If you’re looking to get out of your 9-5 job or even just make a little extra money to supplement your income, the Internet is the place that most people turn to in order to find something can do on the side from home. One of the most popular ways to make money is through affiliate marketing .

If you are just beginning to search for ways to make money with affiliate marketing, you might be overwhelmed with the amount of information that is available on the Internet, but on the big scheme of things, affiliate marketing is a fairly easy concept to grasp and begin to implement. In fact, you can start making sales fairly quickly, but turning it into a full time income is where it becomes a bigger deal and needs some advanced techniques and experience.

Here’s a the basic 3 things that makes affiliate marketing work:

Find a niche:
Think all the niches are taken and over saturated? Not even close!  As long as you think beyond real estate, dating, poker, and all the other mass niches that have ridiculously strong competition, you will do great. For instance you may find something like “how to kill cockroaches” and build a campaign strictly around that. You’d be surprised what you can make from a micro niche like that if you do the right research.

Find a product or service
Believe it or not, the choice relies heavily on your original niche research, because you should have learned about what your customer really wants.

Traffic
In order to make money you need to make sales. In order to make sales you need visitors (a.k.a. traffic). It’s extremely important to focus on the quality of visitors and not the quantity. If you could have 1000 visitors that weren’t very targeted and you made 3 sales or have 50 extremely targeted customers and make 15 sales, which would you prefer?

Many people start out focusing on the number of visits as opposed to what matters and that’s who those visitors are.

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Affiliate marketing can be very profitable and one of the powerful tools that can take you to the next level is having an opt-in mailing list with hundreds or even thousands of subscribers. When you create a mailing list, it is called an opt-in list because the visitors choose to be included in the mailings, meaning they have given you permission to send them emails periodically.

With the ever-changing spam laws, it comes down to the provider to use their mailing list wisely, and in an appropriate manner that doesn’t cross the spam line. This is why it’s important to create an opt-in form for your mailing list subscribers. You can then be assured that you are complying with the Anti-Spam laws since they entered their own name and email and submitted the info, requesting email from you (in the form of a newsletter, etc.).

Although it will make you feel powerful, knowing that you can reach numerous people at the click of one button, instantly, it’s important to realize that it is an extension of your business and you must treat your subscribers (potential customers) with respect. You can’t send repeat sales pitches without any valuable free info in return, and it’s not wise to send a sales pitch for a product or service that does not fit the audience.  You will only lose subscribers that way.

Giving away free, but valuable, information relevant to your niche is the best way to gain trust with your subscribers. You can do this by loading a series of short email courses into an autoresponder that you’re using to manage your list, like Aweber, Or you can give away ebooks or short reports in a downloadable pdf. With a little work up front, and consistent marketing, you can gain a very large list in a specific niche in no time. If used wisely, it can end up being a passive cash cow.

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