So you wanna be an affiliate marketer? Let's get started.

To become an affiliate marketer you need to send customers to online stores and they need to buy something.

You need a way to attract customers, specifically customers that want to buy stuff.

This is usually done with a website that you own and content on your site that attracts buyers.

Note: You can also pay for visitors to go to an online store and hope your commission is higher than the price you spent to send the customer, but we are going to talk about getting your visitors for free, or by attracting them to your site.

Get Yourself A Website

DO NOT USE WORDPRESS, unless you are 100% positive you can program and deal with solutions to the following:

Wordpress FAIL #1 - Wordpress core code gets hacked all the time (plugins too), you must immediately update when a vulnerability is found or your paycheck is vulnerable to hackers

Wordpress FAIL #2 - Wordpress is slow. Caching and many other tricks are recommended for a modestly popular site.

Wordpress FAIL #3 - Wordpress is a target for spammers and hackers. If you use wordpress, spammers will hunt you down and load you with their spam links and try as hard as possible to do it.

If you are making 0$ per month then go for wordpress. If you are paying your mortgage with a wordpress site and you don't know you got hacked, and a spammer is secretly serving up spam links or serving maleware to google visitors without you knowing, and google then labels your site as "this site might harm your computer" and your traffic goes away, you will wish you had payed better attention why to stay away from wordpress. (I've been through this pain.)

If you really want to go with wordpress consider using a managed wordpress host like WP Engine. They solve hacking and scaling problems for you.



Almost ANYTHING is better than wordpress for a basic site, even hand typed html pages are better than wordpress for speed and security. Remember you are making a site that earns you money, not a site about your dog's breakfast.

If you do want to manage wordpress yourself then you can get a basic host like Hostgator and move to WP Engine later. (use the coupon affiliatemarketer at checkout to save a bunch of money)

GET BUYERS TO YOUR SITE

You want to attract people that want to buy stuff. You want to attract people that want to buy stuff. You want to attract people who want to buy stuff. Get the point?

People looking at cat pictures "might" buy something but that is not their INTENT. Someone that is looking for a coupon or review or comparing products probably INTENDS to buy something.

You will make a site that does 2 things.

1. Create link bait for people that want to buy stuff

- Example content: "best of products", "aggregate reviews", "product or niche infographics", "comparison content", "deals content", etc

- study this idea of link bait all day long Link Bait


2. Promote your link bait site to every blogger in your niche

- Hunt down every blogger in your niche, email them "hey you like topic X, I write about the top 10 coupons in topic X every week, I thought you might like it" don't ask for a link, if your stuff is good enough they will link to it and send their visitors

That's it.

There are 10034070490 ways to make money online, I just described one way to do it.

To review: I have the most success if I:

1. Don't use wordpress and get hacked or spammed. If you do then get a managed wordpress host.

2. Ask myself before I make any site: a. Can I make linkbait for for buyers in this niche? b. Are their bloggers to promote my linkbait content to?


Affiliate Marketers send buyers to online stores. That is your job.

Good luck in your travels,
Mark