First off, I would like to say I am new here to Digitalpoint, but I have been around the block. It appears that a lot of sites that once "catered" to affiliate marketers have closed their doors to affiliates. I have seen this with a few sites that used to be known as the best platforms for affiliate marketing. So, how does one make a living these days? which are the best sites to "fish from?"
Back in 2006-2008, believe it or not, I made a living on free screensaver downloads. I don't think that site exists anymore. They were one of the advertisers on cj.com. I promoted them via AdWords and was making an EASY $5000-8000 a month. But then, of course, that bubble burst. I completely agree with drewtoby. After the fiasco with free screensavers, I switched to free sign ups for dating sites. Was still making up to $2000 a month just on that. Then AdWords screwed everybody over with certain requirements for landing pages and I decided not to mess with all that stuff anymore. Free signup gigs can be very profitable, if you have a busy website or a quality landing page that meets the requirements of AdWords and/or AdCenter.
I think that it is important to note that in order for one to be successful or make lots of money from affiliate marketing, you need to first have a decently size list. For me, that number is around 500. Only then can you sell to your own subscribers. Of course if you have a active blog, then that would be better, because you can just place a banner in your blog and make money whenever your traffic clicks on the ad. But to me, the most important thing is to list build first before you attempt affiliate marketing. Because with your own list, you are in control and that's important.
When you say "list" I assume you are talking about mailing lists? and how would I go about building my list?, one thing I think I should mention is I would like to avoid anything having to do with spamming.
Yup you can call it mailing list. But a more personal note, i prefer to call it a subscribers list and there's a good reason for that too. By calling it mailing list, you treat your list as people who can potentially earn you money, but with that mentality, it would be really hard to obtain a huge list that are responsive. Thus i call my list a subscribers list. A list of people who have voluntarily chose to enter my list and actually choose to trust what i am telling them. Of course i choose not to sell them things every single day. But these are the people that believe in the value i can provide for them. And of course i have to constantly provide valuable information to them. Now on to how to build a list. Hmmm that is a question many people tend to ask when they are starting out. So my suggestion is to choose a niche and set up a website like a squeeze page. then using this website and squeeze page, you would need to constantly drive traffic to your website. This is the basic rule that we Internet Marketers follow. Now your squeeze page would need to have a opt-in box for people to enter in their email in exchange for something that you would give them. The most frequent opt-in gift is e-books, because it can be easily distributed to your subscribers. So it is like an exchange. Something free in exchange for their email. Okay, of course there are many more steps so i will go simply. 1) Have a website 2) Set up a squeeze page 3) Have an e-book to give away in exchange for their email 4) Set up a getresponse/aweber account to manage your emails 5) Give constant value to your subscribers. 6) Constantly drive traffic to your website. Cheers. But there are really too many details to say. My best suggestion is get a guru to be your mentor. That's how i started out.
I make my affiliate income these days from the following: Affiliate links in my ebooks Affiliate reviews on my blogs Banner ads on my blogs And I build traffic to those through seo and from my mailing lists that get sent to the reviews at a certain point in my Aweber follow up sequence. I do the best with recurring affiliate links in my ebooks though and still earn from ebooks that were sold on Clickbank back in 2008. My main affiliate companies I work with are Clickbank and Amazon Associates though there are a few others that I am a fan of. There is so much choice on these two though that you don't really need to go elsewhere.
This question is a free-for-all ... My website is about the Brazilian Portuguese language. I currently offer free video lessons. So, that would be my exchange for an email. But my problem is, I am afraid to scare people away if I ask for their email. But should I just go ahead and require site registration for those who want my free videos lessons?
danmaster, with a gig like yours, you should feel free to ask people for their email addresses. How else are you going to stay in touch with them or they with you? You should also utilize skype as much as you can.
When it comes to affiliate marketing then you should become affiliate of any reliable site, which has good brand image, for example Amazon, ClickBank, CommissionJunction. And you know that when you don't bring "green" you won't be paid so you have to make sales, leads etc. You may need help of search engines too, to promote your affiliate products because visitors from search engines are targeted visitors I would say.
Of course that is the whole point. To get them on your mailing list and then sell them more of your lessons. I am actually sort of in the niche. I used to own a Portuguese expat blog and still have lessons that I sell on Amazon that I kept the rights to when I sold the site. Its a brilliant market to be in and great fun and my 11 year old is now jumping into it as he is a British Expat that has perfect Portuguese.