Another*sigh* Overwhelmed beginner affiliate needing guidance

The great thing is you've already taken action by making a website, so you're already light years ahead of other new marketers! Great job

If you're unhappy about making your original site too general and want to make a new one, I'd ask yourself what topics you're knowledgeable/passionate about. Write about things you're interested in and you'll be able to give advice and truly help people in that niche.

That's the main thing – to help before you sell. People need to be able to trust you and develop a relationship with you. Once you choose a new niche and make a new site, ask yourself what your budget is like.

Can you afford to spend money on ads? Can you only afford to do free promotion? Can you afford to pay for someone to do SEO on your site or do you want to learn how to do it yourself?

(Be careful with researching how to do SEO if you decide to do it yourself, as there are a lot of conflicting viewpoints about what works and you don't want to get your site sandboxed because you followed some bad advice)

If you're going with a free budget, learn how to make videos and optimize the titles, tags and description and link your site in the description. Utilize social media. Look up ways to promote your site for free.

Whether you choose to do Adsense or promote Clickbank products or affiliate offers is up to you. Just make sure you pick one method and stick with it. Don't quit until you're 100% sure that what you're doing isn't getting results.

Traffic takes a while to build up, but once you start seeing some results, you can start scaling your methods and making more sites and learning how to be more efficient as you go.

Like I said, you're already way ahead because you took action. I think you're going to do great! Keep reading and learning as much as you can

Hello Torrance. Honestly, a more important question you should ask yourself, is there a need in the marketplace for what your website has to offer? You can make money off affiliate marketing. But it is not as easy as the gurus make it seem.

If you want to succeed in A.M., then the best thing to do is find a market with a need and validate that there is an actual market for your affiliate products. This takes lots of work and studying. And testing, testing and more testing. You do this by Buying customers through paid advertisement. Not SEO. Like Facebook ads, AdWords etc. You drive this traffic to a squeeze page or pre sell page. You need to do this to see what actually sells and what works by collecting data. SEO takes to damn long.

Once you have spend money testing the market and the products then you can build a sales funnel around that target audience. You want to get it to the point where for every $1 you spend you get $2 back. Once you've done enough testing then you can scale up from there.

Hello and welcome to the Warrior Forum. It's good that you've already begun to take action because it means you're serious about this thing. A lot of people don't even do that. When it comes to your site (assuming you mean a blog), it should consist of one particular theme (niche) like weight loss, dating, toys, electronics, video games...etc. Once you've found a niche that you like and know something about, you need to figure out which products you want to promote. The affiliate networks you're associated with are going to depend on this, so you may not even use all of those networks you've registered for.

The "product review" format, where you have a site that consist of product reviews and articles on stuff going on in your niche is quite popular due to how the search engines work. Start by posting about a product that you already own and know that people are actively looking for. Once you're site begins getting some traffic, you will want to start an e-mail list. This will act as like a secondary income stream for your blog -- in addition to people finding your via the search engines.

This is just some basic stuff to get your started -- hope it's not too overwhelming. Oh, if you're going to do affiliate marketing (recommended), you shouldn't put adsense on the same pages. The reason is because it takes just as much traffic to get an adsense click as it does an affiliate sale, but adsense pays way less and drives people away from your site. You want them to stay as long as possible, which is another reason why you'll want to eventually start a list.

Joey