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When a newcomer tries to make money online, they often are told affiliate marketing is easy, you do not need to have your own website nor creating a product to sell online! Well to me, it is half true. Yes 10 years ago, perhaps affiliate marketer doesn’t need a website to promote the merchants product, but today, if you are planning to use pay per click or PPC advertising and promote your affiliate programs, I can tell you definitely will get a hard time. Why?
1.) According to Google Adword policies, there only can be one keyword bids per website. E,g your merchant site is xyz.com and they are selling a weight loss program for instance. If they have placed their bids using the keyword weight loss program, then you can’t bid it using the name of their websites.
2.) Some may argue to use a free affiliate cloaker such as TinyURL, ViralURL to “change” the name of the websites and advertise the programs using PPC but by doing that, you are not building your own prospects database. So is a website really needed to successfully promote any affiliate products?
There are short and long answer, in short, I would say a “yes’ , ‘no”. A “no” is because building a website definitely increases your chance of success when promoting affiliate program, but we do NOT for sure, if it worths our time and energy on promoting until we test it with marketing data. Once we confirmed this program generate a descent sales and commissions, then we can start to concentrate in building a website.
Why a ‘yes’ then? It depends on the program “buzz”. If many people start talking about it before the official product launch, it is more likely that we can generate lots of sales on the market, so by building a website, it helps to separate yourself to other marketers which hence gives your more benefits around it.
So back to my question “is affiliate marketing really that easy?” Well when it compares to creating your own products or services, it definitely a yes but if you compare it to a person that have little computer knowledge and funds and tries to make some money using the Internet, then I would say it NOT that easy after all. However, there are some good programs on the Internet that provides easy step by step guide and help you to set up the your first affiliate promotion pretty easily without you to know the in depth technical know how which doesn’t stop a total newbie to earn their first buck off the Internet. Such a program does exists but you have to do your research and find which ones suits your need.
Later in this affiliate marketing series post, I will talk about how to choose a profitable click bank products, so stay tuned!