How I Made Affiliate Marketing Work

It was 2007, I was 15 years old, I was broke, and I didn't have a job.

The first thing that came to mind was to hop on my computer and search Google for "How to make money online".

Who knew a few years later I would find myself making money through affiliate marketing and list building.

So, how did I do it?

I spent thousands of dollars on clickbank products, jvzoo products, and wsos. I tried a lot of different methods and business models, but one concept stood out to me and made the most sense. The idea of promoting an already established product/service to an audience who are already interested in the solutions being provided in the product/service made perfect sense.

If somebody wants to learn how to ride a bike and you put a best-selling "how to ride a bicycle" book in front of them, there is a very high chance that he/she will at the very least be interested in buying that book.

Knowing this I decided I would go in a niche that I knew all too well (the basketball skill development niche).

At the time I was playing basketball for my high school and I had years of experience playing the sport. I checked Clickbank.com to see if there were any basketball skill development products I could promote as an affiliate.

I saw the Jump Manual and another product called Elite Offense Program.

I decided I would promote those two products as an affiliate.

During the time I also noticed that a lot of experienced marketers were always talking about the importance of building a list.

However I didn't have any funds for a domain, hosting, and an autoresponder.

So, I decided to create a review blog using the free blogger.com platform and at the end of my reviews I would have a call-to-action to check out the reviewed products.

After creating my review blog, I knew that I would need traffic. At the time I had two options that I knew I could tap into right away and start getting some traffic. Article marketing, and video marketing (which were both free ways to get traffic).

I would simply create a a PowerPoint screen-capture video giving away free advice and tips on how to solve a specific problem in my niche, and then I would create a written version of the video. Lastly, I would upload the video to YouTube and distribute the article to multiple article directories and document sharing sites.

Every day I would pump out at least 1 video and 1 article a day. I remember one day I did 8 articles in one day. There was another day when I did 3 videos in 1 day. Keep in mind I was at school for 8 hours a day.

Eventually I started making sales (I'm not 100% sure how long it took but it was no longer than a month or so before I saw my first sale).

Of course once I saw my first sale I was hooked. I took some of the funds I made as well as some of my birthday money and I invested in a domain, hosting, autoresponder, and necessary plugins to help me setup my squeeze page and other necessary landing pages.

From that point on I began sending traffic to my squeeze page instead of the review blog. I setup a 7 day email series in my autoresponder (Getresponse), and built that 7 day email series to over 50 automated emails promoting a variety of products.

I soon began to create my own products and the rest was history.....

Affiliate marketing is definitely a great way to get started in the game of online marketing, and if you're committed to doing whatever is necessary to be successful you will make it work.

Nowadays, things are obviously a little different and it is actually easier to get your site setup now, but success will only come to you if you take action and have faith that the results will come as long as you focus, seek proper guidance when needed, and never give up.

Hope this inspires you to stop making excuses and just make online marketing work for you.