This is one of the most important stage in affiliate networking. It would be totally useless if you have all the knowledge in the world about affiliates but you do not own a web site. Further to that, even though if you do own a web site, it have to be interesting and content rich.

Below are the few pointers in creating your web site

1) XsitePro - One of the best Site Creation tool that i have encountered in my honourable opinion. Offers a turnkey solution whether you want to sell your own products, sell affiliate products or just want to be a “Traffic Middleman”. No knowledge of HTML required (Price : $197)

2) Plug in Profits - This offers you a dynamic affiliate website creation. They provides tutorials, user forums and even a 24 hour support. This program offers a residual income 24/7. Once setup, you can customize and get a site as the one shown on the page. (Price : $49.95)

3) Site Build It - This comes with a hefty price. They will set up an affiliate website for you, optimize it to make money. You do not need to know HTML for this script. (Price : $300)

4) Alternatively, you can try to hire a cheap web programmer at www.elance.com or www.scriptlance.com. The latter is more for php or Linux based sites. You can put up a topic or list whatsoever (example about computers or making money) and let the programmers bid for your project.

5) You will also need a domain name (www.yoursite.com). It is recommended that you obtain a top level domain buy paying a price ($8.99 - $14.99) rather than using a subdomain from a free site, something like (dogs.freesite.com). You can purchase domain names and web hosting space from GoDaddy or BlueHost.

6) Alternatively to letting other programmers create a web site for you, if you have knowledge in HTML, you can get a free template from this site FREE WEB TEMPLATES and follow the guides and instructions in various posts in this site such as Create HTML Files Using Web Page Templates. You could also do a search in the search box below and above this article for hints of how to create your own web page.

Through affiliate networking, you do not just obtain sales. If we think in every aspect of opportunity that is created through affiliates, we will come to the fact that we have tremendous power to obtain leads. Imagine that if you own a web page for free information with regards to latest computer technology. (Example of this page, however, this page is free information for almost everything) Normally other web sites would charge consumers for these information. What you could do is to require the reader to fill up a form with no obligation, in order to obtain the free information.

What could you do with the form that they have just filled in? Well, there are many companies out there that would just hunger for those leads. Talk to them for a synergy in creating a win-win situation. How do we achieve a win-win situation? Just think about it, by offering the leads to a company who sells computer products with a minimal fee. Depends on how you negotiated with the company, the fee could be by month basis or a per-lead basis. Look at the illustration below:

You : Earn profit from lead
Consumer : Happy with the information that you provided
Company : Obtained leads for calling (Selling latest computer products)

Companies that are interested in pay-per-lead could be found majorly in Commission Junction and most of the “MUST JOIN” category that I mentioned earlier. Harness the power of affiliate networking and make the most out of it. Again, be creative!

There are a few top engine searches by name. A few of these are “Traffic Secrets” and “Google Profits”. The latter, “Google Profits” is a product of ClickBank. Like I said, information selling or we would like to call it intangible products sold are the most profitable in affiliate networks.

We take the example of “Google Profits” in ClickBank. Currently, “Google Profits” is offering 67% of the commissions on profit as an affiliate. Just imagine, let say you offer 40% of the total of 67% that is offered to affiliates, do you think that people will buy from you? This is called an affiliate rebate.

CASE STUDY

The program’s worth : $100
What you earn : $67 (67%)
You offer to consumer : $26.80
You are left with : $30.40

Now, if this method will gain you an extra 40-50 consumers per month, do you think it is far more than worth it to adopt this technique? Tell the consumer that the rebate will be paid to them in 60 days and ask for a receipt after the 60th day. In this way, you are secured as you can check you ClickBank account if they have got a refund of the product or not. (Hint : Always make sure that your interest is protected). If they have not obtained a refund, you can pay them through other payment processors for example, PayPal. While all other affiliates are promoting how great the “Google Profits” is and yada yada, you are uniquely offering the consumers “Rebate $26.80 by joining Google Profits today!”

One thing to remember, not every consumer will remember to send you a receipt after 60 days. What you can imply in your rules is that you will forfeit the rebate if they do not claim from the 60th to the 70th day. Often, consumers will get more excited in the product that they purchased than the measely $26.80 that they are entitled to. This way, you could save up your 40% that you are supposed to rebate to the consumer and push the rebate to the next consumer. There will be a point in time that you could hang a banner stating “FREE CLICKBANK PRODUCT FOR THE FIRST 10 CUSTOMER”. This will drive a crazy amount of traffic to your site. You will get serious attention when you advertise in this way. Of course, state some conditions with it, for example, backlinking or bundled purchase. You can tweak it all you like, be creative.

You will not sustain a very great profit if everybody remembers to obtain the rebate from you. However, through experience, only 15-20% of the consumers remember the rebate and 80-85% of them just simply forget after the 60 days.

You would think that most of the consumers would just opt to buy from ClickBank and get a 25-75% discount on their own. You would wonder why would anybody be so foolish to obtain it from your link. Believe me, there are. The fact is that most of the people out there are out to find ways to make money from the internet and not webmasters and tech savvy users like you and me. Further to that, if you have followed the instructions as above, by offering a 100% rebate or anything more than 75%, you would have beaten their own offer from their own links.

In this section, I will cover the importance and steps of how to create a killing sales letter.

Sales letters are important to attract and to maintain the interest of the reader. Imagine that if you would have written something that is superly boring, would the reader be reading on? Remember this, a reader on the internet is never like a reader in a bookstall. Researchers have proven that readers on the internet will move on in 5 seconds if they find it boring.

Below are 6 strategies of writing an interesting sales letter. One that would keep readers on your article without clicking on the “Back” button. This is proven to be useful, not only for the affiliate products, but even for your own products.

1. Create Hope

Thousands of people search every day for “hope”. That’s right, people buy money-making ebooks, diet ebooks, how-to-gamble ebooks, and many more based purely on hope. 99% of these people will not put these ebooks into action whatsoever. But they have it in their head that if they buy a certain ebook, they will learn a secret that will change their life. And once they finish the book (if they even read it), they don’t put it into action because they ultimately find out it takes too much work. Then a month later, they’re searching on the internet for the same thing – a magic formula for success in a particular facet of life such as money, looks, health, etc. And they gobble up these ebooks like there is no tomorrow… at least the ones that have good ad copy. And the sellers of most of these ebooks rarely reveal anything you don’t already know. And they know it. But they offer their money back guarantees because they know that more than 75% of people will put the ebook on the back burner and forget to request a refund.

So, invoking HOPE is the first of 5 aspects I ALWAYS utilize to make a killer website that sells. And you can give people hope in many ways, with many different products, but I find it most effective with informational products, because somehow you can get away with practically promising the world, and then under-delivering. You are basically telling people what they want to hear. However, hope can also apply to physical products, such as a credit card for example.“Get your xyz credit card today and re-build your credit quicker”. Or how about “Order the Pentium 4 xyz computer today and do things on a computer you’ve never dreamed of.” Of course, those sentences aren’t really convincing enough to make you get the credit card or computer, but hope itself doesn’t sell things. There are 3 more things to add to the puzzle.

2. Cause a Sense of Urgency

The second aspect of a killer site that sells is giving people a sense of URGENCY. I’m sure you’ve seen products for sale that say something like “order by midnight tonight and you will receive a $20 discount”. But I guarantee if you go back to that page the next day, it says the same thing. Buyers may even consider that, but do they really want to risk the $20 discount not being there the next day? Chances are, if it’s an impulse buy, they won’t want to risk waiting and possibly missing out on the deal.

My advice is, instead of doing a “by midnight” html script that is easily spotted as a fake by most net savvy people, try making a real deadline of say the last day of the month or 2 weeks from now, and hardcode it into the site. After it passes, you can always make a new deadline. Another trick is to say only the next 100 members are being accepted, or something to that effect, and then have an image of 100 crossed out, and a number such as 82 next to it.

3. Appear as an Authority

The third aspect of a killer site that sells is to appear as an AUTHORITY. No matter what you are selling, you must appear to be an expert on the subject. As they say, appearances are everything. Why would I want to buy a gambling ebook from a guy that shows evidence that he won $200 at a card game one time? Big deal. You want the ebook from the guy that won $8 million at gambling. An advanced technique is to appear as an unbiased authority. If you can come across as someone who is trying to help, and doesn’t re- ally benefit from a sale of the products listed on your site, you are another step ahead of the game. People love to follow the advice of independent reviewers who are just giving their “honest” opinion of a product. They don’t need to know you get a commission for the sale.

4. Appear Unbiased

The fourth aspect of a killer site that sells is to appear as an unbiased 3rd party. You can review products as if you are trying to help people make informed decisions without looking like you are affiliated with them. See my sales letter below for a unique example.

5. Encourage Fear

The fifth aspect of a killer site that sells is causing FEAR. You can actually instill fear into your visitors, by making them believe that they will face problems ahead if they buy a similar product elsewhere, or if they don’t buy yours….NOW. How do you do this? How about this:“Get Rich Quick Scams Revealed……”. Then write an article about many occurrences of get rich quick fraud. But, don’t name names. Be general in what you call a scam, because you don’t want any legal trouble. Then, after your article, you could say that throughout your comprehensive research for the exposé article, you did come across a couple of money making programs that people were repeatedly happy with. You even spoke to the owners of the programs you recommend, etc. and found them to be very honest and straightforward, didn’t you?

Well, you just set the hook, now time to push them to the sites you get the highest commission for.

Lets face it, when most people think of what the internet is best known for, they think of porn and scams. Since NOBODY wants to be scammed, you play on that fear.

6. Be VERY Unusual (optional - used mainly for selling your own product)

If you are selling your own product, you may not be able to use the scam or fear aspects. But the authority and urgency aspects will still work. In addition you need to use the UNUSUAL aspect. This means telling people NOT to buy your product. That’s right, encourage them NOT to buy your product until they have tried your competitors’ products and are unsatisfied with them, as you know they will be. Go back and look at my homepage. Not to boast, but I told you several times NOT to buy this eBook unless you were sick of all the other lame programs out there. It’s the same thing when selling your product. Even if your product is not as good as your competitors’, it costs more, etc., just using the unusual approach of telling people not to buy your product will work. By convincing them that you want them to go ahead and buy other products that you KNOW will fail them, you automatically earn a sort of loyalty, because you appear that you are not just interested in a sale.

Now let’s put all 5 aspects (remember, the 6th is optional) into a small sample sales letter, which according to aspect 4 shouldn’t really even look like a sales letter. Let’s use the get rich quick subject again, as it’s a hugely popular subject on the internet (see next page).

HYIP Scams Revealed..

Read this article before you decide to join any HYIP schemes online

Todays date

Think about this. Have you ever imagined to earn millions without leaving the chair in front of your computer? This is everyone’s dream. No bosses looking over your shoulder. Never have to get stucked in the traffic jam during rush hours.

Whether it is pyramid schemes or advertisements about exponential income, we’ve all seen fantastic claims and over-the-board promises that you could never resist to believe. I can tell you all all these people are total frauds. You may have been victims of a potential scam AND worst of all, these programs normally require you to refer an ‘X’ number of people to gain an additional income. 99% of these schemes are fake.

Have you ever come across acticles on the internet pertaining to HYIP’s (High Yield Investment Programs)? “Earn 30% of your total investment per day”. “Be $1,000,000 richer in 60 days”. Does these statements sound familiar to you? I have personally been these ‘programs’ and have lost thousands in it. Thus i am telling you this through experience. It sounded good at first, until you lose your first “investment”. It is just human nature to test their luck the second time, third time… It was one day that i have lost enough, I started thinking. Am I a victim of a addictive scam? This drove me to analyze and I started to review these HYIP programs and how it worked. I tested out with one of the HYIP program that was running in a “not a very good state”. I emailed the administrator saying that i wanted to “invest” $10,000 but i was not very confident with the program. In less than 2 minutes, the administrator have replied. The amount of convincing claims that they had given to me was unbelievable. They claimed that they have proper accounts management. UNBELIEVEABLY, they even claimed that they were sponsored and backed up by the government and their site is totally legal!

I went off wondering off for other types of profits that could be gained from the internet. There are surely a legitimate and safe way to earn, if not exponentially and i stumbled across company XYZ. There are a few criterias of this particular company that convinced me enough to further my internet money making crusade here. They offer a very good support, with a logical way to gain synergy in money making between the advertisers, publishers and readers. They even offers limited time promotions (VERY attractive in fact) and so happens that there is one going on right now. If you would like to have a look at what they are offering, you could visit their site with the link below. It is running only for 3 days.

The reason that i wrote this article is to warn the people that these so called HYIPs are a total scam and they are out to gain profits from trust. I urge you, as the reader to stop thinking about the “Getting Something From Nothing” mindset. These HYIP sites are totally untrue. Please stop all your investments in these programs and revert to a more stable and legitimate income from the internet. Lastly, I wish you well, and a prosperous journey ahead.

Signed,

John Doe

Here are the link that i mentioned about:

www.xyz.com

Now, from the article of the above, we can take note that the reader would have the trust as all the 5 points are used.

Hope - Earning money from home. Gaining millions doing nothing.

Urgency - Promotion only for 3 days

Authority - I’ve been scammed before, and have tested administrators and reviewed them

Unbiased - I am trying to help other people not to be trapped in the HYIP scams

Fear - HYIP scams revealed.. Do not join any of the HYIP programs. 99% of them are scams

You have just harnessed the power of creating a killer sales letter. Now, with this knowledge, you can start writing letters and promoting affiliate sites that will be your potential Cash Cow.

There are plenty affiliate networks out there for you to join. Have you pondered the power of affiliate networks and the connection with making money from the internet? If you have joined one before, perhaps you would have already known. What affiliate programs would you join? How to bring enough traffic in order to cash in the profits from affiliate programs? More importantly, how do you promote your affiliate programs?

Do you already have an affiliate site that people come and buy something? Finding the top affiliate program seems to be easy. While some companies have their own in-house affiliate program, others have theirs run by a major affiliate network. Below are some of the top affiliate sites that you would want to join:

MUST JOIN
Clickbank - Offers digital products, often products that require downloading
Commission Junction - One of the largest internet properties in the world would be here. Top affiliate companies offering products from computers to credit cards
BeFree - Owned by Commission Junction. Offering the near to the same products with it
LinkShare - Top companies offering their programs to be sold here

MAYBE JOIN
Performics - Top companies, decent and large companies here
WebSponsors - A “boutique” network website that offers FREE programs too!
ShareSale - Intermediate and so-so affiliate programs
ClickxChange - A large group of small companies that offers products including foreign pharmacies

JOIN WHEN BORED
ClixGalore - This affiliate program is multi-tiered. Includes even companies who offer vacation packages
FineClicks - Small subsidiary of the large site of ShareSale.com
AffiliateFuel - Restrictions of publishers being top level domain and have a minimum of 2000 unique visitors a day. Just a medium site
FastClick - This site is thoroughly screened and quality controlled. However it is still a small site
DarkBlue - DOES NOT CHARGE ANY FEES. This is a medium site

Currently the top affiliate site is Clickbank.com. It offers a structure called EPC (Earnings Per Click). EPC determines which products sells the best and you can save your time by siphoning the best product to sell. In Clickbank’s terms, this is called “Gravity”.

Selling information on the internet is the best and fastest way to get rich. Although there are many various ways where you can make a killing sale on physical products on the net, selling information still provides the shortest period of time and the most convenient way of converting profits. This is due to the nature of the internet and with the help of search engines.

When you have joined any of the affiliate network site as mentioned above, it is time to write a killing sales letter to drive customers in. This will be plugged into the website that you will be creating that is in the later part of this category. (Alternatively you can jump to Create HTML files using web page templates

Get the Internet business tricks and tools that I use in my business everyday at:

NetProfitsToday.com/resources/

Here’s the full list of goodies:

• Advertising (PPC)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Auctions
• Audio
• AutoResponders / Ezines / Mailing Lists
• Consultants
• Copywriting
• Credit Card Processing
• Domain Registration & Hosting
• Dropshipping
• Ebooks
• Ecommerce/Credit Card Processing
• Education
• Freebies
• Forums
• Graphics
• Income Opportunies & Products to Sell
• Joint Venturing
• Research Tools
• Surveys: Get Paid for Your Opinion
• Traffic Generation
• Web Site Design & Packages
• Writing

Here are some examples of successful affiliate marketers… Remember, these are ordinary people, just like you and me.

Cashring is the affiliate program for the I Want U online dating service. Their top affiliate earns an astounding 5000 per month, each and every month, and JUST from that one program! I’ve also heard that the top iFriends affiliate earns over $80,000 per month. My guess is that figure is LOW by a long shot, as iFriends pays up to $70 per free signup to their program, which is an adult web chat service.

Matt Haller is a young man who signed up for my Net Profits Coach newsletter, bought Ken Evoy’s Site Build it! ecommerce package and then started an affiliate site promoting hip hop items. Six months after he started, he sent me an email thanking me for helping to change his life. Why? Because he was already earning 10 grand per month!

Deborah Casey is another student of mine, a 53 year old disabled lady living in Seattle. Within eight months of starting her affiliate business she was making 8 grand a month, and she’s now up to $15,000 per month!

Jim Cockrum is an affiliate of mine who sells my ebook, the Super Affiliate Handbook. One day, every time I checked stats for my book sales, I was floored by how many orders Jim was generating. In a little under 24 hours, he’d made $1000 just by sending out an endorsement to his mailing list.

Oh ya, and yours truly, Rosalind Gardner… THAT’s why I wrote the “The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online”. I wanted EVERYONE who was interested in making money online to know what possibilities exist for people with no experience. Because, I had absolutely no business background, no selling experience and actually some disdain for sales people as a group, I’m proof positive that ANYONE can earn money as an affiliate.

In this section I discuss the 6 steps you will take to quickly, easily and inexpensively get started in your affiliate marketing business.

Quickly & Easily find High Demand Topics

The topic you choose should both interest you and have high consumer demand. You already know what interests you, but how do you find out whether a topic has high demand?

Well, the first place I check is a free tool call the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool. It is located at:

inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

At Overture Search Term Suggestion tool, you simply enter a term related to your site and it will show you:

• Related searches that include your term
• How many times that term was searched in the previous month

So, let’s assume for a moment that you are a mortgage and insurance broker who suspects that insurance might be a good service to sell online.

To find out how many people are looking for insurance online, I typed in the word ‘insurance’ and discovered that the keyword ‘insurance’ had been searched for 971,914 times at Overture and its search partners in just one month!

That’s almost a million people! Wow!

As I consider any term that receives 50,000 or more searches in a month a subject with good demand and potentially viable, insurance looks like it might just be a winning topic for an affiliate web site.

Find High-Profit Potential Products & Services

Once you’ve determined that your topic is in high demand, you need to find out now is whether there are merchants selling related products and services online, AND how much commission they pay.

For that, I go first to Commission Junction.

Commission Junction is an ‘affiliate network’ that puts merchants and affiliates together. They refer to merchants as ‘advertisers’ and the affiliates are called ‘publishers’.

To see all the merchants with products and services at Commission Junction, you’ll need to set up a free account.

To do that, go to Commission Junction, then click on ‘Solutions’ near the top right- hand portion of the page, then go to the left side of the Solutions page and click on ‘CJ Marketplace’.

At the very bottom of that page and you’ll find a link for the application process. Where it asks you to supply a URL, just enter yahoo.com or geocities.com if you don’t already have a web site.

Once your account is set up and you’ve logged into the Commission Junction interface, click on ‘Get Links’, and select ‘Advertisers’ in the drop-down box beside the word ‘Search’ near the top of the page. Next, type in the word ‘insurance’.

My search came up with 51 merchants. Your results may be more or less depending on whether merchants have been added to, or dropped from the network.

In choosing merchants, you want to select those with the highest EPC ratings and commissions.

What is an EPC Rating?

3-month EPC: 3-month EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows how well an advertiser converts Web site visitors into commissions, over a three-month period.

7-day EPC: 7-day EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) shows the average commissions paid to publishers for every 100 clicks, over the past seven days. Use this number to see the most recent EPC trend for advertisers.

So how well did our insurance merchants do?

Zurich insurance had a 7-day EPC rating of $250.88. That means that affiliates are earning an average 250.88 for every 100 visitors they send to Zurich Insurance.

Wow!

Now what about those commission rates?

Well, at the Good Sam Club, if the customer completes a form and becomes a member, Good Sam will pay you $5.00. That’s JUST to fill out a form.

And if they purchase an Emergency Road Service package, you’ll get paid $15.00.

Not bad!

You can find even MORE merchants at the following affiliate networks:

„ Linkshare
linkshare.com

„ BeFree
affiliates.befree.com

„ Clickbank
clickbank.com

Cheap Sources of Site Content

Because we want to leave the selling job up to the merchant, an affiliate’s job is to ‘pre-sell’ their merchants’ products.

To pre-sell, you need site content.

Content consists of articles and endorsements that explains how your visitors problems can be solved by using the products you promote. In most cases, webmasters write their own endorsements for the products they promote.

However, if you aren’t inclined to write product endorsements, you can:

„ Find Free Content
„ Use Merchants’ Ad Copy
„ Pay for Content

I like looking for free content first.

Staying with our ‘insurance’ topic, I searched Google for the terms “Free Articles”+ “Insurance” and found the following articles listed at legalwhiz.com:

• “How to Save on Title Insurance Costs”
• “Understanding the Terms of Your New Loan”
• “Common Sense Mortgage Tips!”

In many cases, the author will allow you to use his work on your site if you include credit to the author and a link back to his site.

This is even MORE effective when the author has an affiliate program and you can make money from that link.

To get approval to use the article, you’d simply email the author a request, and they will usually be very happy to have you use their articles on your site.

Another way to get free content is to use what the merchant makes available to their affiliates.

For example, here is an email promotion that Corey Rudl gives his affiliates to promote his very popular ‘Insiders Secrets to Internet Marketing’ course.

Dear Friend,

This e-mail is extremely urgent so please read the entire thing… I would feel terrible if you missed out on this because you did not get my e-mail in time.

I just got an e-mail from Corey Rudl and he said there were only 150 copies left of the new version of his best-selling Internet marketing course, The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet, that includes the $952 in FREE bonuses!

Chances are, as you read this, a lot of those 150 copies are already gone.

Just to recap my last e-mail, Corey Rudl is literally “the” guru of Internet marketing… he’s grown his online businesses to over $7.6 million in online sales last year and he gets over 1.8 million visitors to his web sites every month!

And in the new version of his best selling course he is going to show everything from step-by-step instructions you can use to start your very own Internet business in as little as 48 hours to how to build a top-selling web site… for less than $100!

No matter how small your budget is, Corey shows you the cheapest ways to build a web site that sells!

He is going to show you where to find hot products (in 20 minutes or LESS!) that you can start selling TODAY! These in-demand products will sell like hot cakes, no matter what your experience!

Corey will even reveal his personal rolodex with 100s of FREE and cheap online tools, resources, and software that you can use to automate your web site (and save yourself at least 35 hours every week)!

And if that’s not enough, he is going to even reveal, for the first time, some of his most advanced strategies like how to get #1 rankings in the search engines and get tons of free traffic from the “Big Guys” like Google… and his secret to writing sales copy that increases sales by 400% (or MORE)!

Like I said before, I know these strategies are going to make my business tons of extra money in 2004 and as my subscriber I want to make sure you experience the same rewards, so go to…

www.marketingtips.com/t.cgi/3885

… if the page is still there, this means you made
it in time and he still has some copies of his course with the additional $952 worth of FREE bonuses!

So please hurry! And if you have any questions, just let me know.

All the best…

As you can see, that copy is written in the first-person, so it looks like it is coming directly from you. Use merchant copy judiciously however, as your credibility will take a beating if your subscribers and visitors have seen the exact same copy in other newsletters and on other affiliate sites.

Lastly, you can have articles written for you, sometimes very inexpensively.

To find ghost writers on the net, check out some of these sites:

• Guru.com
• FreelanceWriters.com
• Elance.com

Once you have organized your content, it’s time to start putting you’re your site together.

The Fastest Way to Build Your WebSite

There are 3 steps to quickly build your website. They are:

1. Register a Domain
2. Domain Hosting
3. Buy Template

Domain registration is painless, and CHEAP. Go to Godaddy.com where it will cost you 8.95/year for each domain. You can get them even cheaper when you register for more than one year.

Here are two good, yet inexpensive, hosting services that I recommend.

• GoDaddy.com - $8.95/mo.
• HostRocket - $9.95/mo.

The quickest way to build a website is to buy a template. Here is a list of some of the best template sites I’ve found to date:

o 4Templates.com
o BigWebmaster.com
o BoxedArt.com
o DollarTemplates.com

My personal favorite is BoxedArt.com. You can download as many templates as you want from Boxed Art, all for only $49.96 for six months access.

Once you’ve placed your content in your template and sent it to your web host, it’s time to join affiliate programs.

Sign-Up for Affiliate Programs

Go back to Commission Junction or the site where you found products you want to promote and sign up for the merchants’ affiliate programs.

The reason you build your site before joining the programs, is to have a site to show the merchant. This demonstrates that you are indeed serious about selling their product, and will almost guarantee your acceptance into their program.

Get Oodles of Traffic Today!

After placing merchant links on your site, it’s time to let the world know about your site.

Although I discuss ‘29 Ways to Market Your Site’ in the Super Affiliate Handbook, my favorite way to bring visitors to my sites is by using cheap Pay- Per-Click search engine advertising.

The primary benefit of PPC’s is that you can drive targeted traffic to your site quickly, instead of waiting months for the search engines to list your site… if they ever do.

Just a few of these include:

• Google.com
• Overture.com
• Enhance Interactive
• Findwhat.com
• Kanoodle.com

Pay-per-clicks allow you to bid on terms or keywords that are relevant to your site. In our insurance site example, the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool produced a list that included terms like:

car insurance
insurance
health insurance
life insurance
home insurance
affordable health insurance
travel insurance
renters insurance
insurance quote
car insurance quote
insurance lead

You should be able to find and bid on HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of terms in any category you choose. The more keywords you list your site under, the more exposure your site will get.

I HIGHLY recommend that you use PPC’s to advertise your site. I get returns of 2, 3, 4, and sometimes even FIVE dollars for every dollar I spend advertising my site.

So, let’s summarize again the steps that it takes to build an affiliate site…

„ Find a HUGE Market
„ Find Products & Services
„ Collect/Create Web Content
„ Build Site
„ Market Site
„ and… Enjoy the BIG Kachings!

Unlike building a new brick and mortar business in Downtown Anywhere, the things you’ll need to start a business on the Internet are CHEAP.

Here’s a list of the basic tools you’ll need to become an affiliate marketer.

• Desk
• Chair
• Computer
• Internet Connection
• Email
• Text Editor

You probably already have all those things, right?

Even if you don’t have the desk and chair, you can always throw the laptop on your bed and work from there.

Here are some basic expenses…

Register Domain
Hosting
Web Site Template

$ 8.95/year
$ 8.95/month
$10.00 - $50.00 (once)

With start-up costs this low, I don’t know why anyone would consider starting a business anywhere other than on the Internet!!

There are HUGE benefits to promoting affiliate programs with your own home-based Internet business…

1. No Production Costs - The cost to develop and produce a new product is prohibitive for almost anyone who wants to start a home-based business. With affiliate programs, production costs aren’t an issue. The product has been developed and proven - all on the merchant’s nickel.

2. Low Cost Set-Up - Compared with building a brick and mortar store, starting a home-based Internet business is relatively cheap. You probably already have a desk, Internet-connected computer and word-processing software, which is all the equipment you may need.

3. No Fees for Joining or Licenses to Buy - I often compare doing business as an affiliate, with distributing a line of products in the real world. The biggest difference is that the distributor must often pay for a license to distribute products within a limited geographic region. Affiliate programs, on the other hand, are usually free to join, and geographic market reach is limited only by the affiliate’s ability to promote his web site.

4. Choose From Thousands of Products and Services - What isn’t sold online? That list must be shorter than the one describing all that IS sold online. There are thousands and thousands of affiliate programs selling every product under the sun. That makes it easy to find products related to your current or planned web site.

5. No Sales Experience Needed - When I started my affiliate business, I had absolutely no sales experience. That wasn’t a problem, however. The companies I affiliated with provided excellent marketing material. Using their sales copy, I was able to get my first affiliate site up in less than a day.

6. No Employees - The largest expense of most businesses is employee salaries. Although there might be times when you need or want someone to work for you as an affiliate, it’s doubtful you’ll ever have to worry about hiring full or part-time employees. When you have a project you want to hire out, it is easy to find specialists in every computer-related field who can work for you from the comfort of THEIR own homes. You pay only for the project, and never have to worry about ongoing employee-related benefits and deductions.

7. No Expensive Merchant Accounts Needed - Setting up a merchant account for any business is a time-consuming and costly business. It’s even more tedious for Internet businesses. However, merchant accounts aren’t a concern when you’re an affiliate. The merchant bears that cost and handles all processing of payments. You never have to lose sleep over potential chargebacks, fraud or losing your merchant account when you’re an affiliate.

8. No Inventory to Carry - Even if you live in a small one-bedroom apartment, as an affiliate you can sell large items without storage concerns.

9. No Order-Processing - Forget the problems associated with collecting and storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc. The merchant does all that!

10. No Product Shipping - The cost and hassle to prepare and ship products to customers worldwide could be staggering. Affiliates never have to worry about packaging supplies or postal rates.

11. No Customer Service Concerns - Do you hate the prospect of dealing with nasty people or customer complaints? Don’t worry about it! The merchant handles the snivelers.

12. Make Money While You Sleep - What other business allows you as a sole proprietor to keep your doors open and keep making money even when you take breaks or after you go home for the night?

13. The World at Your Doorstep - The Internet is the world’s largest marketplace. You can drive more visitors to your online store in a day, than many small-town merchants see in in a year.

14. Minimal Risk - The product you chose isn’t making money? Dump it. Take down your links and promote another! It’s that easy. There are no long-term contracts binding you to products that don’t sell.

15. High Income Potential - If you have a job, your salary or hourly wage is probably pre-determined. Maybe there’s not much, other than working overtime, that you can do to increase your income. With your own affiliate business on the Internet your income potential is limited only by your desire, effort and imagination.