Starters Guide on Affiliate Marketing

Who Need a Website?

2010-01-06T18:52:00.002+08:00

I was trying to understand what type of people who need a website. Going through the reading materials mentioned in my earlier entry, I can simplify the motivation for people to have a website. There are two reasons; business and leisure.

People in business need to have a web presence and I give you 5 top reasons for business to have a website.

Your business product is viewable 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Comparing to brick and mortar shop, people stop looking at your product when you close the shop.
Your product can now be seen worldwide. You will have a global reach as millions of people now search product and service through web.
Website is a great tool for prospecting new customers. You can even choose your target audience through various internet marketing methods.
Startup cost for building a website is much lesser than starting a brick and mortar shop.
Business is about product, services and cost. Publishing your product or services in conventional method cost certain amount of investment. Changing the catalog will definitely affecting the publisher, printing company and the distribution team. This is translated into incurring additional cost. Changing product or service catalog can be made easily and quick therefore, reducing cost overrun for publisher, printing company and distribution team.

There are no other creative creatures on earth other than human. Ideas are abundance and it need to be captured somewhere. There are people who like to share their experience, photos, video to the world. The best way to share it is through website. This is where people use website for leisure. They share their travel experience and personal thought over the web in various kinds of ways.

Coming back to our objective to bring people to subscribe GDI web hosting service, we can now qualify type of people who wanted this type of service.

For business people, they wanted to have their company presence on the web; therefore they need a name for their business online and content to be place in the web hosting server. For corporate business they may want some features that enable them to interact with potential customer or existing customer. Whist for small business owner, they probably want a simple content to describe their product or services. Looking at this, we may have high probability that we are going to get some income from these types of people.

We cannot underestimate people who uses website for leisure. Even though lots of free website over the web available for them to grab, there may be a time where these people are concern about the name of their website and features they want to use. We can also offer options for these people but usually their drive to get a paid website is not that urgent as business people.

We have now identified type of people that need the website and to summarize:

Small business owner who wanted to put their product and services.
People who wanted to build website for leisure but wanted own domain name and additional features.

The next step is to explore on this customer behavior and build an offerings based from their behavior.

Note: Image from http://www.startupnation.com/articles/9339/1/three-s-distinguished-website.htm

Scoping Reading Material : Topic List

2010-01-04T00:36:00.003+08:00

In this entry, I will be bringing in 3 general scopes from the previous entry and list it below:

Several types of customers who in need of web hosting services
Different customer behavior on the net.
Several different kinds of features offered as selling point by web hosting service provider.

Looking at those general scopes, I create a simple two keyword to be place in Google search engine and follow through the leads until I found the reason for people to have a website and engage a web hosting service provider.

Who need a website?
Who use website.

Placing the keywords into the website, it gave me results. Following this I will carefully select relevant website that can answer what type of customer needs a website and web hosting services. I do not expect to get material that is 100% relevant but will satisfy for 60% to 80% relevancy.

I present you reading material below and will use these materials to lead me to the answer.

Click here to see the summary of my reading.

First action as an affiliate: Scoping Read Materials.

2010-01-01T17:24:00.003+08:00

We are now moving into action phase. This blog will move to answer the question on "What kind of material should I read and where can I get it?"

We are looking for reading material to achieve our objective to understand how to get customers for the GDI Web Hosting services. We will properly scope our reading materials and produce a list of reading topics.

Scoping of Reading Materials

To understand on how to get customers for the GDI Web Hosting Services, we need to produce reading topics which enable us to perform a specific search for material relating to:

Several types of customers who in need of web hosting services.
Different customer behavior on the net.
Several different kinds of features offered as selling point by web hosting service provider.
Several effective approaches used by experience affiliate marketers to attract customer to purchase the web hosting services.
Several different type of affiliate marketer which would help to understand our competitors better.
How the affiliate marketing trend does looks like from now to next five years.
Type of support groups to help us to grow and improvise the knowledge.
Risk associating to the activities, getting the customer in.
Mitigating risk associating to customer searching activities.
Type of attitude needed in order to progress throughout the process.
Entry point and exit strategy for affiliate marketing business.

I believe we have enough lists for us to build the topic for our reading material. You can expand the list if you want. Again I would like remind you that, I am using GDI as my product. You can select your own product and your list should be somewhat similar to the lists we build above. The only different would be the web hosting service statement. You can change it to your own product or services.

In our next entry, we will cover on the list of reading topics for us to work on.

Note: Image taken from Living in Peru Blog

What does affiliates do?

2009-12-31T19:54:00.004+08:00

This is where we are going to talk about us. In previous entry I intentionally did not go into details on the commissions and pay out. In this entry, we are going to touch this. Still the information shared will not drive you to sign up and pay anything. This blog is about information and experience sharing, so you can comfortably read this blog without having any thought in your mind that you have to pay for this.

Let set a scenario before we go ahead with this discussion. Let associate web hosting services with Global Domain International Inc. (GDI). Global Domain International is the merchant. We will use google.com/adsense and clickbank.com as our affiliate network.

In this scenario, we will be the affiliate and our job is to sell the web hosting services offered by GDI.

The GDI's web hosting service has several features and selling point. For a monthly fee of USD 10.00 customer will get features of web hosting service and for every customer sign up. As an affiliate you will receive USD 1.00 or 10 percent monthly from the customers who sign up through you. This information is just preliminary. I will tell you more about this but not in this entry.

So what should you do to get the customer?

First you need to read relevant materials to help you to promote the web hosting services.
Then you need to find customers who are really looking for web hosting services.
Next, you need to build your reputation among your target customers.

In short the keywords here are read, promote, find customer and build reputation. It is easy saying than doing. My approach to this is to turn those keywords into questions, find the answer for it and create actions from the answer.

Now here goes. First the questions:

What kinds of material should I read and where can I get it?
How do I manage these materials?
How many hours I need to spend in order to acquire the knowledge and skill to start promoting the web hosting services?
What are the effective methods to promote the web hosting services without spending long hours on the net?
What kind of tools that I need in order to promote the web hosting services?
Who should I associated with in order to help me promote the web hosting services?
Are there any expenses that I need to put in, in order to effectively promote the web hosting services?
How do I know that the customer is looking for web hosting services?
How do I build reputation among the targeted customers?
How do I manage these customers?

We will explore these questions in my next entry.

Note: Image above is taken from Richard Wiseman's Blog

Players in Affiliate Marketing

2009-12-31T19:22:00.006+08:00

We will start off with a product. There are millions of products out there that people want to sell to you. It can be books, electronic gadget, t-shirt or even cars. Let us use books as our product for this discussion. Amazon.com is a well known business entity who sells books online. Therefore, Amazon.com is a merchant.

I think customer definition is straight forward here. How about network and affiliate?

In relation to network, we define it as affiliate network. Affiliate network offers connection between merchant and affiliate. Such offers can be in form advertising assistance for the merchant to reach out the affiliates. It would be business opportunities for affiliates to get product and/or services from the merchant and reach out the customers.

Some examples of affiliate network are google.com/adsense and clickback.com.

There will be two outcomes from affiliates' perspective:

Customer will be buying books through the affiliate and commission will be paid accordingly.
Another outcome is the customer will convert themselves into affiliate.

All the information above, suggesting that affiliate is people like us. Yes, it is people like us.

I am also building a simple model to articulate the groups in affiliate marketing as you can see it below:

The above model shows how product and/or services reaches customer. You can see now how each groups are connected. You may realize that I did not touch in details on the commission and pay-out. We will reach to that level later. We will get our understanding right first before talking about pay out.

To go to next entry click here.

Contact Me

2009-12-31T19:06:00.002+08:00

I can be contacted through this means.

Credits

2009-12-31T19:03:00.002+08:00

I would like to thanks and credit to individual and website below who help me to build the content for sharing with you.

Individuals

Websites

Article Review

2009-12-31T18:55:00.001+08:00

Below are the lists of article reviewed by me in order to produce this blog.

Source of the content in this blog:

Article No	Article Title	Type	URL Address	Date Review	Notes












Total

Source: Fictitious data, for illustration purposes only

What is Affiliate Marketing?

2009-12-31T17:11:00.009+08:00

You are new to affiliate marketing and have been surfing the net for hours to understand it. As a newbie, exposing to enormous amount of materials would sometimes confuse you. This blog may be your answer.

We will start looking into the definition first. Browsing Wikipedia and Wisegeek have brought my understanding of Affiliate Marketing definition.

We can define affiliate marketing as a marketing effort over the net where you act as a middle man promoting a product or services for a commission.

The keywords in affiliate marketing are product, services, merchant, network, affiliate and customer. Keep that in mind as we progress toward this discussion.

We have covered the general definition of article marketing. I will touch the four group in the next entry.

Credit: Image Credit: GetItNext Blog: Technology.

About Me

2009-12-31T13:19:00.002+08:00

My name is Iskandar and I am a part time blogger. I am using this blog as journal on affiliate marketing experience with the intention to share and give a sneak peak preview on affiliate marketing world. The reason why I put up this blog is simple. I joined affiliate marketing world in November 2009 by subscribing Global Domain International Web Hosting Services (GDI). GDI offered an income opportunity for referring their web hosting service to the crowd. Starting with the supporting material provided by GDI, I did my own exploration on affiliate marketing and spends lots of hours reading materials on affiliate marketing in order to support my income generation effort.

Logging the effort in a blog is found to be an effective way for a few reasons:

Affiliate marketing experience can be tracked and share with intended audience.
Sharing the experience would definitely add values to the effort as the feedback and comment would evolve the log and generate new knowledge.
The evolution of information and knowledge from this blog will be a starting point for other productions such as webminar, ebooks, video presentation and much more.

At the end of day, this blog would be one income source and at the same time benefits other home-based income opportunity seekers.

Hope you enjoy the reading and please drop me an email at iskandarhussein@hotmail.com if you have feedback or comment or anything you want to share.

Regards

Iskandar Hussein.