How to Get Started as an Affiliate

Now I know I’ve been talking about a lot of advanced topics recently. I’ve had a number of readers ask : “Hey Amit, all this is great, but I’m just getting started. What you do recommend that I do?”

Now based on the amazing success that many of the students in my coaching program are having I recommend starting affiliate marketing with direct linking campaigns promoting clickbank products.

Why?

First off direct linking requires no website, that right, all you need to do is sign up for an affiliate id through clickbank and you’re good to go – it takes 2 minutes.

Building a website is probably the biggest hurdle many affiliates face when getting started in this business, that is, unless your a professional web designer! I know it was a HUGE hurdle for me, it took me weeks to learn enough html to make a simple webpage with tables that didn’t look like a 5 year old threw it together!

Needless to say, I don’t make my own sites anymore. I have people who actually know what they’re doing handle that!

Now what’s direct linking? If you don’t already know it’s where you simply put your affiliate link in the destination url of your Google Ad, taking the visitor right to the affiliate site.

How cool is that?

As long as your commission are greater than your click costs you’re making a profit.

This is by no means a long term business strategy, but it’s the FASTEST way to learn Adwords, and direct marketing, for that matter.

Here’s a few basic steps to take to get started :

1. First a relatively obscure niche in clickbank, a highly competitive niche will be difficult to break into with direct linking. Obscure little niches work great with direct linking though, as long as they has a decent sales page and a viable market.
2. Use a tool like Keycompete.com or Keywordspy.com to dig up a nice broad keyword list
3. Clean up junk keywords out of your keyword list
4. Use EfficientPPC to setup a ONE keyword per adgroups campaign, with two unique ads per adgroup
5. While you’re setting up your campaign with EfficientPPC, Setup clickbank tids for each keyword. There’s a number of ways of doing this, the easier way is to simply assign a number to each keyword and use that number as your tid (since clickbank severely limits of the tid to 8 characters you can’t use the keyword itself). This is critical to your success, you need to be able to track which keywords are actually making sales.
6. Launch your campaign on Adwords with a starting bid of 0.20. Closely monitor your campaign. (1) if you’re getting virtually zero traffic, up your bids. (2) If your getting lots of traffic ( > 500 clicks) and zero sales, you’ve probably got a dud, move on (3) If your getting traffic and consistent sales, you’ve got a winner, now you need to optimize and make it profitable!

I don’t have time to go into more detail in this post, but I’m planning a simple direct linking case study where I pick a clickbank niche and show you what I do, step by step, and how to make it profitable.

So stay tuned!