Five Easy Steps to Get Your Affiliate Site Up and Selling

To a newcomer to the affiliate sales system, getting an affiliate site up and running quickly is a daunting prospect. However, by following a simple five step plan, what first appears a single difficult task can be broken up into more manageable segments.

1 - Finding a Product

The first step is finding a product that will sell. A high quality product is important because it avoids refunds, but more important at this step is locating certain features in the sales page that improve higher conversion rates.

Good sales copy and reasonably professional graphics are two basic components to look for, but there are a few more advanced elements that vastly improve conversion rates. One time offers, exit agents, and auto responders all offer powerful incentives for visitors to either buy now or come back later.

2 - Researching Keywords

Once you've got a good product selected, some research needs to be done into what sort of keywords people are looking for. Even just plugging phrases into a free system like Google's Keyword Tool will give you a better idea what sort of advertising you should be looking into. If you use a more elaborate tool that gives more detailed information, remember that the size of the market important, not just the cost per click.

3 - Organizing Advertising

Now you're ready to set up your advertising. Since you've taken the time to get a good idea what people are looking for and a product they'll want to buy, this step should be a breeze. For now, you can just set your affiliate id link as the destination of your ad and let the product's sales page do the actual conversion. You just need a snappy ad that will draw people's attention and get them to click, and hopefully the owner of the product will be able to do the rest.

This is sometimes considered the last step, and it can serve well enough if you're only interested in getting people from the ad to the product's sales pitch. However, generating more organic traffic isn't terribly difficult if you're willing to go a few steps further.

4 - Create a Landing Page

This step is sometimes considered optional, though I recommend performing it whenever possible. A good landing page doesn't need to be incredibly complex or large to improve traffic.

While you can organize your advertising so all clicks move through to the product's sales page, this doesn't offer the same Google ranking advantages genuine content brings in. Even if you don't have a lot of experience with marketing or web design, there are a number of software solutions available that let novices create decent websites with little to no knowledge of html.

Be sure to remember to redirect those ads you set up in stage three to your landing page. It doesn't do you any good if it's just sitting there with no visitors.

5 - Tracking Sales

Strictly speaking, this step is more follow up than getting sales up and running, but it has been proven to drastically increase income over the long run. Tracking is important because it not only saves money now, but also helps the affiliate learn. Checking what works and what doesn't with split tests and minor tweaks could help avoid both major and minor mistakes that could cost an affiliate a huge amount of money over time.

Following these five easy steps turns a difficult process into a handful of simple tasks. If you stick with it, and learn from your mistakes by tracking what works and what doesn't, you should be making money in no time.