Link Master

You generally want to choose one thing at a time and make your site specific to that one thing. A lot depends on what your interests are. Take Weight Loss for example. You would want to pick a specific program or technique for losing weight, instead of having a list of five different programs for visitors to choose from.

You wouldn’t look as professional promoting five different programs for the same thing, now would you. But then again, would if you chose something like Golf. Now your main topic of your site would be about golf, but there are many things you could incorporate into a site like that which would relate to your main topic. Here are some examples – techniques for putting, your swing, you’re driving. You would also have products like bags, clubs, and accessories of all sorts of things. But your focus should remain on the topic of golf and not the accessories of the game of golf unless your website was focusing on a specific brand of golf bag, clubs, shoes or whatever.

As you can see that first question is not the easiest thing to answer, which is why I said to write down some things about what your interest are. The main thing is to have your main focus on one topic. Whether you can compliment that topic with many other accessories, or not doesn’t really matter because your main topic is your Bull’s-Eye, the accessories are just the outer rings of the target.

If You Want Targeted Traffic

If you want targeted traffic to your site whatever you decide it will be about you have to have one specific topic that is your center focus and will target the traffic you want to get to your site. Does that make sense to you? Everything else is just related to your topic.

That brings us back to our main question, where do you start? How do you choose what Affiliate Program to join, or what topic you should choose from. Or what product it is you would like to promote.

Choose Something You Are Interested In.

You should choose something that you are interested in, something that you know something about, or if you don’t know are willing to research. Something you have a passion about, or that you think is fun and won’t mind spending the time needed to get it all together and working for you. Only you can make that determination, but try to come up with a list of topics so you have a number of items that interest you to choose from.

Choose One Topic To Start With.

From your list you want to only choose one topic to start with. You want to do a little research to see if it is something that is marketable and is going to make you money. You also want to see what kind of competition you may face in your chosen topic. Don’t let any of that scare you, you might have to be a little more creative in the way you market your Idea, or drill down into a less competitive part of that same market, but it is something you will want to know before you invest to much time in an area that is to competitive for you.

Affiliate Marketing has a number of topics that are very competitive and I mentioned two of them at the start of this article, weight loss, and golf. Now that doesn’t mean that you can not break into these markets, but doing so with the broad terms weight loss, and golf would be quite hard to do. You would have to drill down into those markets with your keyword research and find less competitive terms or brand names to base your promotions on.

We will get into keyword research, competition and how to figure it all out later, but you can do a quick check to see if your topic, or idea is something that you might be able to market just by doing a search on your topic and seeing if there are any ads on the results page. Then put your topic in quotes and look to see how many competing pages is shown on the results page.

Results

Results 1 – 10 of about 308,000,000 for “golf”. 308 Million competing pages for the term golf in quotes. As you can see it is a very competitive search term. But it is also a very broad term. This is what I received for “golf swing tips” in quotes. Results 1 – 10 of about 155,000 for “golf swing tips”. Still competitive at 155 thousand pages, but a far cry from 308 Million don’t you think?

Drilling Down In Competitive Markets

I hope from my example above that you see how drilling down into a competitive market you can still compete. Also I hope it gave you an idea on how to look at competition for your chosen topic and get an idea on choosing the right keywords to focus on. It is a pretty basic example, but it does give you a quick idea of your topic’s marketability and competition.

Next up is question number two so I better be getting to work.

Affiliate Marketing! What is it and why should you care? If you are looking to Make Money Online and are not really sure how, then Affiliate Marketing is a great place to start and I will give you a few reasons in a moment. But first lets explain just what Affiliate Marketing is for those of you who might not know.

Affiliate Marketing is basically finding a product that is produced by someone else and promoting that product. When you make a sale, you earn a commission for that sale. You sign up with a Merchant and they give you a unique ID to use in your promotions. When you make a sale, your ID lets the Merchant know that you made the sale. The Merchant then pays you a commission, or percentage of that sale.

There are Affiliate Programs for just about any product you could ever imagine, so finding a product that you would like to promote is not very hard. That is one of the reasons why Affiliate Marketing is such a great way to get started Making Money Online.

Here are some other reasons that Affiliate Marketing is a great way to get started.

•  You don’t need to create your own product. If your just starting out this is a big step and one that can cost quite a bit of money, plus it usually takes quite a bit of time as well.

•  Signing up is almost always free. So it is a low cost way to get started. I say low cost because you should still get a Domain Name and Hosting for your own site. Which are both pretty cheap these days and easy to do.

•  The Merchant is responsible for customer service, not you. The merchant deals with the customer’s questions concerning the product.

•  The Merchant creates all your promotional tools for you. All of the banner’s, emails, solo ads for ezines, signatures for forums, website, videos, etc. is all done for you.

•  You have a choice of just about any product you can think of to choose from. Choose something that you like, something that you know something about and do a little research to see if it is something that is profitable, and your on your way.

That brings me to my next topic about Affiliate Marketing. With all of the Affiliate Programs and products to choose from, how do you know where to start and with what product to start with?

Two questions that are asked the most are:

Where do I start?

And

What do I do next?

Those are two questions I will try to answer for you, but are too large of a scope to do it in this article. They are articles in themselves and ones I will make sure I get to you, but in this article I wanted to explain what Affiliate Marketing is and why it is a great place to start to Make Money Online.

There are a few things you should ask yourself before you get started

There are a few things you should ask yourself before you get started in finding that right Affiliate program and maybe even write them down. They are going to help you with that first question I mentioned above.

•  What are you interested in? music, games, sports, writing, photography, etc.

•  What do I know about the things I listed above? What I don’t know I can research on the Internet.

•  Can I write about what I know about these things? What I don’t know I can research on the Internet.

•  Of the things I listed, what other products compliment these things?

Examples: Music – mp3 downloads, instruments, sheet music, books etc.

Photography – cameras, equipment, software, software tutorials, books, techniques, etc.

If you already have an offline business

If you already have an offline business and have been thinking of making a website for that business ask yourself what products would compliment your business website.

Everybody is an expert at something

Everybody is an expert at something, or even many things. We all have knowledge accumulated over our lives, work experiences, travels, or handed down from our parents and grandparents. You know a lot more then you think you do and the best way to get that out is to put a piece of paper in front of you with pen in hand and let it come out.

I need to get started on answering those two questions for you so for now make some notes for next time.