Affiliate marketing is an example of indirect sales. Any online company or firm can advertise on the behalf of some other company or business person and get commission in lieu of it. Beginners on the internet are attracted to affiliate marketing as an easy option to make money. However, it needs treating the same way as any other online business. In fact, as if you had your own product.

1. It’s really necessary to buy the product yourself and use it yourself in order to understand it. This enables you to speak from personal experience when you’re telling visitors about its details. The more you can personalise what you tell them, the better chance that they’ll respond to your copy or contents as a recommendation and not a direct sell. This is just as important with residual websites, like membership sites where you pay, say, monthly. This is because things can change on the site and you can keep up with changes and reflect them to your visitors and subscribers.

2. Imagine you were selling your own product. The first thing you’d need to concentrate on is growing a list of your own to do with the niche you’re in. Have a squeeze page to collect email addresses and send people there first. You can then presell them in your emails and put in links to the merchant’s site. The second thing is to see whether the merchant’s sales page is converting very well. If it isn’t then this is to your advantage as there are probably less people selling the product for that reason. Instead of a squeeze page, you can have a landing page with preselling material on it where you send people first. This page also has a sign up form on it which also redirects to the sales page.

3. To begin with stick to one product until you’re having some success with it, or, at least, one niche. People get excited about possibilities and spread themselves too thin. Especially if you’re in a number of niches and setting them all up very close together in time, it becomes burdensome to be writing content for articles and reports.