Beating the Recession With Affiliate Marketing

A recession is now inevitable. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently predicted that the current recession in the United States will last for at least the whole of 2009. It is of global proportions and it will not discriminate and thus will affect each and every single market. Moody's stated that China is in for its most serious economic downturn in two decades and trade figures have been described as just awfully dreadful. All is far from well in the Euro region, already said to be plunging headlong into recession, with the UK economy being the fastest to contract. Developing countries will also feel the crunch with growth predicted to slow to an abysmal 4.5% for the pre-developed. Shades of the Great Depression seem to be colouring the present global economic crisis so the big question of how to safeguard our financial well-being is springing into everyone's mind.

For this I offer a simple straight-forward answer. Start one or many low investment, high return businesses! Cynical readers will be tossing around expletives at this statement as it is common knowledge to everybody that doing this will ensure profitability, even in the worst of downturns. It is the method of what businesses we should be starting that is this article's concern. My advice is, start an affiliate business! It possesses low initial investment and at the same time maintains high yield characteristics that I believe we should all take note of.

The cost inherent in setting up an affiliate program is fairly paltry. Simple things like hosting, domain name registration, and pay-per-click advertising, are all fairly inexpensive. Compared to traditional physical commerce, affiliate marketing offers a host of benefits with the most useful characteristic being never having to ever stock up on the wares that you are marketing! It also does not require having any physical office, storage or operations space. This translates into never having to pay rent or a mortgage installment! Estimates put US spending on affiliate marketing channels at $2.1 billion dollars for 2008. In terms of your audience however, you are not just marketing to the US. You are marketing to the entire world!

If you have diligently marketed your affiliate products, you stand to make ludicrous sums of money. Since low operating costs are coupled with opportunities to generate extremely high returns, affiliate marketing is the ideal way to generate more income during economic slumps!

5 Steps to Create Income Online

Do you want to create income online with an autopilot system? You don't need to be a professional in website design and you don't need to be an expert in your market. With the help of affiliate marketing, you are able to generate a 4 figure online income by just spending a few hours into it everyday.

Many people thought that create income online is something difficult and complicated. In fact, it is not. Many people are generating money from the internet these days, especially with the existence of affiliate marketing, more and more people are making money from the comfort of their home.

Now, here are the 5 steps how you can create income online using affiliate marketing...

1. Start by targeting a hungry crowd. This is the same as looking for a profitable market. Remember, it is the people in the market that are going to buy from you, therefore, do your market research correctly.

2. Find the problems in your market; solve the problems by providing an affiliate product. For example, if you are in golf market, there are a lot of people who want to learn how to play better golf and so you can promote affiliate products to fulfill their needs.

3. Build a squeeze page. A squeeze page is a simple one-page website that you use to capture visitors' emails and names so that you can contact with them anytime. Use an auto-responder to do this. Outsource this if you don't have any idea about it. It is not complicated and it can be done within 5 minutes. Building your own list of subscribers is a very important task to create income online.

4. Build trust and relationship with the people in your market by providing what they are looking for. Nobody is going to buy from you if they don't know you and if they don't trust you. Thus, you must build relationship with them and promote them at the same time. Use your auto-responder to send automated emails to them.

5. Drive targeted traffic to your squeeze page. Traffic generation is all about taking action. As long as you take the necessary action, traffic will come. Use article marketing, forum marketing, social networking and more to generate traffic to your squeeze page.

This is how you can create income online by using affiliate marketing. Once the system has been set up, it will be in autopilot mode. All you need to do is to drive traffic and improve the conversion of your business.

Make Money Promoting Affiliate Programs

As an affiliate marketer, you make money by promoting affiliate program. But there are so many programs out there and how do you choose the right program to make money with?

First, don't be tempted by the high commission. Often merchants will need to jack up their selling price in order to pay you. Your prospects are unlikely to pay for high end product which then makes it hard for you to make money with affiliate marketing.

What you need to do then?

When you are selling digital product, the minimum commission you should consider is 25%. There are plenty of affiliate programs with that kind of commission on the internet and if you can increase your conversion rate, you can discuss with the merchant to raise your commission.

When you want to make money with affiliate programs, you need to join affiliate marketing programs that supply lots of marketing tools like articles, auto responder emails, banner and other marketing materials. You can then go straight to build your online business without developing the marketing tools.

However, you need to take into consideration that you are not the only one promoting the program. It is wise that you use the merchants write up as reference and generate your own written marketing materials. You can still continue to use the graphics supplied by the merchant because it is not easy to change the graphics and you certainly don't want to waste time on that.

In order to make money with affiliate program, you must understand the program thoroughly. Read the FAQ and make sure you got all your questions answered. You can always email the merchant if their FAQ is not helpful.

If the merchant never answer you, it might means that they are not serious about making money with you. Then it is better that you move on and look for another affiliate marketing program.

If you want to maximize the profit from the affiliate program, you should check the terms. Not every merchant is going to pay you monthly. Some of them will only issue your check when your commission has reached the minimum pay commission and some of them are going to deduct part of your earning as processing fee. You can't blame the merchant for not paying you accordingly because you forgot to read the terms.