Beginner's Guide To Affiliate Marketing

Signing Up
Sign up at with the affiliate network that has the products you wish to promote. You might want to go ahead and sign up at all three. There’s no charge to do so.
Once you are approved at Clickbank and Paydotcom, you choose the particular products you wish to promote. Whenever you choose a product, you’re given a special code that identifies you. This code is attached to the link that leads to the product page. This is your affiliate link.
Example of an affiliate link: http://product.com/user/4532. You may have seen affiliate links in your web browser’s address page before. Since this link is an example and not a real one, it doesn’t work.
One of the first thing you’ll probably want to do as an affiliate marketer is to find a way to hide that code. Unfortunately, there are people who will change it or delete it, thereby cheating you out of a commission. There are several free and paid methods. We’ll cover them late.
Find 2 or 3 products for the top 2 or 3 ideas on your list. Bookmark the site(s) featuring them. You might even want to print out a copy of the site for reference later when you get into keyword selection.
Checklist:
Sign up for an affiliate account.
Choose 1 to 3 products.
Copy and paste your affiliate link into notepad for later use.
Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing

What is pay per click affiliate marketing? It is the use of pay per click ads to sell products and/or services. When website owners and affiliate marketers use pay per click marketing, they write keyword based ads.
Once the ads are written, placement is decided by bid amount. There is no charge for ad placement until someone clicks on the ad. The key to success in pay per click is creating an eye-catching ad containing specific, focused keywords and monitoring ad cost.
When someone surfs the net and clicks on the ad, the cost is equal to the bid amount that has been set. For instance, if the bid is .$05 on the keyword hypnotherapist, a nickel will be deducted from the pay per click account every time someone clicks on the ad featuring the word hypnotherapist.
Keywords

Success in any type of affiliate marketing advertising revolves around keywords. Keywords are especially important in pay per click. The cost of the ad is determined by the bid.
Keywords are the words that people type into the search bar when they’re looking for something online. Example: People looking for a Norah Jones CD will either type “Norah Jones CD” or the title of the CD into the search bar.
The key to selling a Norah Jones CD would be in using the keywords “Norah Jones CD” and not the generic terms “music” or “CD.” Keywords must be as specific and focused as possible.
In order to compile a good keyword list, you’ll need to make use of a keyword research tool. Here are a few of the three popular ones:
Good Keywords a free downloadable software
Google Adwords Keyword Tool free online tool
SEOBook Keyword Tool free online tool
Wordtracker subscription but offers a free trial.
123Promotion free online tool featuring Overture & Wordtracker
When you type one of the words from your list into the search box on a keyword tool, the tool will tell you how many people searched that word or phrase recently. You’ll also see all the ways they searched for it.
Example: Go to the SEOBook Keyword Tool and type in the word music.
The results show that millions of searches have been done for the word music. Music is much too broad a keyword. It must be narrowed down. How do you know how many searches make a good place to start?
Some successful affiliate marketers say that 15,000 searches are enough. Many affiliate marketing professionals recommend using keywords that have somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 searches per month.
If you look on down the returned music search list, you’ll see the number of searches for each phrase. You can choose one search term that has 30,000 to 50,000 searches or you can combine several keywords and add the total searches for each until the total adds up to 30,000 to 50,000 searches.
Now, let’s try typing the word music into the Google Adword Tool. We can choose to run an exact match, a broad match or a phrase match. Google will give us an idea of how often a phrase is being searched and how much competition there is for that keyword.
Type your product keywords into one of the keyword search tools. If you are an experienced spreadsheet user, copy and paste the results into a spreadsheet. Use more than one of the keyword tools. Keep adding to your list of potential keywords. Note the keyword or phrase (you can search phrases as well as individual words) that gets the most results for each product.
Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing Budget

Keyword Budget is an important part of pay per click marketing. Bid too much and you’ll go broke, possibly even without sales to show for it. Bid too low and you’ll never get clicks which mean you won’t get visitors. No visitors mean no sales.
The best way to set a keyword budget is to take sales figures and costs and do some calculations. However, if you’ve never sold anything before, there are no sales figures to plug into the formulas.
For the rest of the keyword and ad exercises, we’re going to use a Clickbank tattoo provider who pays $23.32 per sale and states that the product has a conversion rate of 100. This means that it takes 100 visitors to sell one item.
Let’s find out what a visitor is worth.
Visitor Value
Here’s what we know:
The Clickbank Merchant we signed with pays $23.32 per sale.
It takes 100 visitors to get one sale.
Visitor Value = commission amount divided by the number of visitors.
$23.32 ÷ 100 = $.23
So each visitor is worth 23 cents.
This is important to know because you don’t want to pay more for a click than that click (visitor) is worth.
Our click cost limit is 23 cents, preferably less.
Many people lose money on pay per click affiliate marketing because they do not keep up with how much they’re spending on ad campaigns and because they fail to check the return on investment for ads.
In our case, we know that spending more than 23 cents per visitor will mean losing money instead of making money. It’s very important, especially for the first few days of a new ad campaign, to pay close attention to the clicks and results.
Many marketers agree that after an ad has received 200 page views, you have enough information to do something. If there have been no sales, either the ad isn’t focused and well written or there just isn’t any market for the product. If you aren’t monitoring the ad information regularly, you won’t know when you’ve reached 200 views.
Let’s see what we can do with a Tattoo pay per click affiliate marketing campaign.
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