Affiliate Fleet

Now that you have tracking setup you are pretty much ready to start driving traffic.  You need a few more things in place before you get started.  Depending on which of these promotion methods you choose you may or may not need a website built to put your affiliate links on.

There are ways to make money with free methods of traffic generation as well as many paid methods.  We are going to talk briefly about many of the major methods to generate traffic.  My goal is to build guides around each method so we are just going to go over them in brief in this guide to get your started.

We’ll start off with one of the best free methods of traffic generation – article marketing.  Article marketing allows you to get your links out there for free by writing unique and informative articles and submitting them to article directories.  There is a resource box that allows you to post a link as a thank you for giving the site more content – this is where you will post your affiliate link.  You’ll want to get a domain name and redirect it so it doesn’t look like an affiliate link but it is.  We’ll talk more about this in a later guide but you can get started for free learning it at http://www.bummarketingmethod.com.

Another free way to generate traffic is by targeting keywords and going after SEO or Search engine optimization.  SEO is something I’ll cover in depth at a later date – trying to get you guy’s to know all of the terms before I go in depth with any of it.

Paid traffic is my preferred way of driving traffic because it’s very easy to track(which is why we setup that tracker) and because you can make it profitable by using that tracking.  The first method is PPC or Pay Per Click marketing and this is the bread and butter of a lot of affiliates.  With PPC you bid on keywords on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing and your ad will appear in the sponsored results when those keywords are searched for.

You can also run CPV or cost per view traffic.  This is traffic that is acquired by paying adware companies – which is completely legal – it’s not SPYware but it’s ADware.  The people who have it installed got something free like a game or toolbar and knew that they would be shown ads periodically.  You can get these views for literally a penny so if you can target it properly it’s a great resource.

The final paid advertising I am going to talk about is media buying – media buying is one of the oldest ways to generate traffic.  You can either go through major networks and run on their entire list of sites or you can purchase banners on individual websites by contacting the owner.

All of these are powerful ways to generate traffic and I just wanted to take the time to introduce you to them.  For those of you that are looking for the more in depth tutorials on each keep checking back because they will be here soon!

Now that you have an introduction to what affiliate marketing is – I’m sure you’d like to know how to get started.  There’s a lot of information that you need to sift through to get started in affiliate marketing and I’m trying to do that for you in a concise to the point guide.

If you’ve had no prior experience working online or setting up websites you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.  The first thing you are going to need to setup is a webhost.  Webhosts allow you to place your websites on them and you can’t really be an affiliate marketer without one.  There are tons and tons of webhosts out there that you could choose from.

One of the first things you need to know about hosting is that unlimited space and bandwidth is a myth.  I wouldn’t go with any company offering either of those because they are just overselling space and planning that you won’t use it all.  If you do end up using too much space or bandwidth they will shut your sites down.

There’s only one host that I recommend and they offer a variety of services.  I suggest you all get hosting at Liquidweb.  Liquidweb has the best support I have ever seen and they have yet to do anything but impress me.  I personally run my servers with them and only them.  Yes – that link to Liquidweb is an affiliate link and it should be one.  As an affiliate one of the first lessons you should learn is to ALWAYS use your affiliate link.

It doesn’t cost the person buying the product anymore so there is no reason you shouldn’t be making money off it – any affiliate who is in this full time is going to give you an affiliate link if they have the chance to.  The next thing you are going to need is a domain – we are going to buy a domain to install our tracking application on(more to follow) – this domain will only be for your use so it doesn’t matter all that much.  Just grab something with the word tracking in it and your good to go.

For all domain purchases I suggest Namecheap for several reasons.  They have solid domain prices, free SSL for a year and the best of all is free private whois for a year.  You are going to want to enable private whois for all of your domains so you don’t have a million networks finding your landing pages and telling you to run their offers instead.

Now onto tracking – the most important thing in online marketing is being able to track the data you are receiving and act on it.  When you first start out with paid advertising – which isn’t the only way to get traffic – we will detail some free but much slower ways as well – but either way you will be buying data with either time or money.  You need to be able to track what is working and what isn’t working and act on it.  You may not truly understand why you need tracking just yet but just listen to me and install it – it will make your life a lot easier later.

So you have your hosting from Liquidweb and your domain from namecheap – now you need to actually download and setup your tracking.  Luckily there’s an awesome tracking suite built for affiliate marketers called Prosper202.  Even luckier – it’s free.  They do have a paid more in depth version but Prosper202 is more than enough to get going.

If you go to Prosper202’s website they will teach you exactly how to install their software.  They have a ton of documentation for you to go off of.  Just go ahead and follow their documentation and get your tracking all setup.  Play around with their interface and make sure to watch all their setup videos for the next installment of this guide when you need to pick an offer.

If you’ve landed on our site you are obviously looking for a way to make money online and you’ve likely heard of affiliate marketing.  You may or may not know that it is a way to make money online from the comfort of your own home.  If you are already a member of our network then you’ve taken the first step to becoming an affiliate – however if you’re not please go signup at http://www.affiliatefleet.com.

We’ve decided to help you as much as we can so we will be writing a lot of tutorials on our blog so make sure to keep checking back.  This first tutorial will be in several parts and will be an introduction to affiliate marketing and how you can make money with it.

Introduction To Affiliate Marketing

As an affiliate myself I’ve been asked the question “What do you do?” many times – so writing this part of the tutorial is funny to me.  I’ve tried to explain just what affiliate marketing is in so many ways yet it never seems to stick.

Affiliate marketing is an extremely simple concept really.  Companies out there run their own ads and their own marketing of course – but who wouldn’t want more sales?  Affiliates, as we are known as – are like a free sales force driving sales to you.  What we do is drive the traffic to a specific product using our own tracking links and if any of that traffic completes the action desired then we as an affiliate get paid for sending it.

There are various types of offers that you can promote.  The two most dominant are CPS and CPA.  CPS means cost per sale – you are paid when you said a qualified sale with your traffic.  CPA means cost per action – you are paid when you send a qualified lead with your traffic.  Leads can be only an email submission, a full page of contact information etc.

The advertiser knows that you sent the sale because you will be assigned a unique link to send traffic with.  You won’t send traffic directly to their homepage but you will use your own link.  You might have seen affiliate links before – they tend to be really long with a lot of numbers to tell the advertiser who sent the traffic.  These types of links aren’t clicked on very often because they look strange to most users – so we’ll teach you how to make them look like normal links.

What’s An Affiliate Network?

Affiliate Fleet is a network – we’re one example of the many networks out there.  Affiliate networks exist because there are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there that you can promote.  Almost every company is starting an affiliate program nowadays and having relationships with every company you wanted to promote would be tedious.

So this is where affiliate networks come in – they deal with the connections to the advertisers and handle paying all of their affiliates.  Affiliate networks are also able to negotiate much faster payout terms than just one affiliate trying to go directly.  In the CPA World it’s pretty easy to get on weekly payments with a quality check – something you could never do if you went directly to the merchant.  In CPS payments are typically sent out on net 15 which is still a lot faster than you could get alone.  Net 15 means you are paid 15 days after the end of the month in which you sent traffic.

Why Should I Be an Affiliate Marketer?

There’s a lot of reasons to be an affiliate – it’s up to you to find your reason.  I figured I’d explain my personal reason to you though.  Affiliate marketing allows me to be my own boss – and not have to worry about anyone telling me what to do.

Another reason I am an affiliate is simply for freedom.  I am free to work wherever and whenever I want – the more work I put into my business the more money I will make.  I make my own hours, my own salary and I decide my own income based on how much effort I put into it.  I can also work from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.  If I feel like living in Spain for a year – I can.

Affiliate marketing also allows you to have multiple streams of income coming in.  You can build sites that make you money without any work on your part after you get them where they need to be, and you can continue to build more sites.  The old sites will still make you money if you bring traffic to them properly.

What Affiliate Marketing Is Not

Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme – it is a business and much be treated as such.  As you research more and more you will find plenty of places that claim they can teach you how to get rich with affiliate marketing overnight for the low price of $1997(just an example).  Don’t buy into this hype.  At the end of this tutorial I will post a few websites both paid and free that you can use to help you learn affiliate marketing – none of them are a very high cost and none of them claim to make you a millionaire overnight.

You have to work hard in this industry – it takes time, money and dedication to get going.  You need to balance all three, if you have more money you can spend less time working but if you have less money you need more time.  Dedication needs to be there no matter what.  Most affiliate marketers fail – they give up after only trying for a few weeks or even a few months.  If you want to be truly successful you can’t be one of those people.  Never give up and you will make money – we are here to help you.  We’re going to be honest with you and help you as much as we can.  The more money you make the more money we make and there is no hiding that so jump on board and let’s get started.

Continue onto the next section of this guide as it becomes available.