Starting an affiliate marketing business is a pretty simple idea. If you can find customers and point them towards products which are suitable for their interests, you will make a commission on each sale, sign up or lead you can produce.
I have already discussed a strategy for building an affiliate website, based around advertising products. But there is another alternative:
Building an email list and sending out newsletters detailing affiliate offers can be very effective.
The advantages
Email affiliate marketing requires more input than the products model, so it creates a less passive income. The upside though, is that you can make more money out of each subscriber and be much more proactvie.
As a result you become a lot less dependant on search engines for traffic, you obviously need SEO to build your mailing list in the first place, but if your rankings were ever to disappear over night, you will still be able to generate an income.
Considerations for your affiliate business
The decision of which affiliate model to go with should be based on what you want to promote and what your website will be about (Yes you will still need a website for this strategy).
The email model lends itself well to promoting less tangible offers – things like competitions, e-learning courses, leads campaigns etc. You will be signing up users who are interested in a certain topic and promoting related offers to them – maybe with the odd product thrown in.
This doesn’t mean that products can’t work, but a more product based website would generally make more sense; and if you are really set on products maybe you should consider learning how to sell online, or even starting an eBay business.
Here’s the business model
Step 1: Think of a few niche ideas
This site is about making money online for instance. For your first site you should try to focus on a reasonably small niche though; here are some examples: Travel in India, Finance tips for parents, Frugal living ideas.
Step 2: Sanity check your niche
Think about what sorts of products, services or offers your audience might be interested in, and whether these things make sense for email marketing. It is worth exploring some of the biggest affiliate networks to see what sorts of offers they have to ensure that there are some offers which will work for your prospective audience.
Step 3: Keyword research
To build a mailing list you will need a website and some traffic. There are plenty of ways to build traffic, but this model is based on SEO, so we are going to need some keywords.
This website is going to be information based. You do not need to be going all out to sell – you need to build a website designed to answer visitors questions and provide help… Kinda like this site 
Rather than going into all of the details again, it is probably worth reading the post on setting up an Adsense website first.
Step 4: Get email addresses
Once you have done your keyword research and put together a decent website, and got a little traffic, you will need to start getting some email sign ups. To do this you will need to think of a reason why people should sign up. They are not going to give you their email addresses just because you ask them to.
Writing an e-book can work well, or a free 7 day course. A discount voucher might also work well…
Once you have the carrot, set up a sign up form and write a compelling heading to encourage people to sign up to your mailing list.
In terms of what mailing list solution you use – there are more options than I can cover here, but I hope to cover this more in the future. There are both self hosted options and third party solutions to consider (such as Aweber for instance).
Step 5: Optimize
Whilst you are building your site, and your mailing list, you won’t have a whole lot of affiliate emailing to do. But this is a great time to optimize your site and your sign up form.
If you can make a few minor changes to how you entice people to sign up, you can sometimes make a huge difference to how many sign ups you actually get. Make sure you try different head lines, different colours, different positions for your form etc. You should definitely try a few styles of pop up box for your form as well.
Step 6: Monetize
Once you are getting plenty of traffic and sign ups, it is time to start shifting a portion of your focus toward sending out affiliate email campaigns.
Hopefully you will already have a small list of people who are interested in your niche, so you should be able to easily find some suitable offers.
This is where you will need to go back to those affiliate networks that you looked at earlier and sign up. Once you are familiar with how they work, you can pick a couple of good offers and prepare an email out to your list.
Ongoing work
There is a lot to learn for beginners, but you will soon pick up what you are doing and get into the swing of things. Your ongoing tasks are simple enough though:
Build links and do SEO:
This is where the traffic that makes your mailing list comes from, so you should keep on doing this consistently – the bigger your list the more money you make.
Optimize sign up form:
Again, little differences in sign up rates give you a big boost in your mailing list, so keep testing and getting your sign up rate as high as possible.
Send out affiliate offers:
The bit that actually makes you money. This is worth spending some time on. Try to find the best frequency and ways to word your emails so that you get the best response and best profit each time.
Summary
Building a mailing list is a powerful money making strategy, if you treat your mailing list well (and you should), they will continue to trust your opinion and your ability to lead them to great products etc. But just in case it’s not your cup of tea, you should definitely consider reading more into other affiliate marketing strategies and online business ideas.