When starting out online, most people do not have any of their own products to offer for sale.
The Guru’s answer is ‘that’s not a problem – just promote affiliate products and keep half (or more) of the sales price for your own profit’.

Like all easy answers there are plenty of catches for the unwary ‘newbie’ marketer.
So to help you avoid some of these pitfalls – and keep more of your hard earned sales cash, here are a few pointers of things to avoid:

The Listbuilder
Visitors you send to an affiliate offer are valuable – and they are YOUR visitors.
Listbuilders typically have to pay 50cents to $1 for every new person they get to sign up to their list.
So if the first thing your visitors see is an opt-in for the affiliate offer – not only have you just ‘given’ your affiliate partner $0.75, but they have been distracted from the one reason you sent them there = to buy something.

I know, you will be given a very plausibily explanation that people don’t buy on the first or second visit and need to be contacted 5 or 6 times before they buy.

That may well be true – but the point is, your visitors are your prospects and giving them to somebody else really is throwing $ away. Even Google would give you some money for each visitor with their Adsense program.

Poor Converting Offers

The affiliate offers you choose need to convert your visitors into buyers – and then cash for you.
Unfortunately there are many barriers preventing prospects from becoming buyers.

Firstly, any offer needs to provide proven value. If you don’t know anything about the product or service you hope to sell – how could you convince your family and friends to buy it? So only promote products or services you really believe offer excellent value.

Then the landing page you send targetted visitors to needs to convert into sales.
Rates at which your prospects are converted into buyers is a fundamental factor determining how much money you can and will make.
I know from painful experience that many affiliate offers need to be sent more than 1000 and some as many as 10,000 targetted visitors to make just a single sale.

While others may reward you with a sale from just 10 visitors or less!
Such a big difference that you ignore this problem at your peril.

Landing Page Targetting Relevance

Intimately related to conversion rates, landing page relevance is an essential ingredient for success.

If you want to sell Christmas Costumes and you have a site with individual pages of information about Father Christmas Costumes, Elf Costumes and Fairy Costumes for example. You better make sure that when one of your visitors clicks on your site for more information about a particular Fairy Costume, they are taken to a page where they can see and buy the costume of their choice.

Sending them to a page where they then have to search for what they are interested in is one of the quickest ways to get them to move on.

Suggestions

When starting out to create a business online, money is usually tight.
But avoiding spending a little wisely can be even more expensive in the long run.

My suggestion is to start off by setting up a campaign to send a trial number of visitors to any chosen affiliate offer.

It really doesn’t matter whether you decide to use SEO or Google AdWords and target keywords or Banner Ads or Social Media and target demographics. Once you have sent 100 or 200 visitors to an offer you will get a pretty good idea how many sales (if any) you are likely to get by scaling up your traffic.

But doing something and testing the results is far better carrying on regardless.

My preference is to use Google Adwords but only pay a low price for traffic. This might take a week instead of 10 minutes but cost 20cents a click instead of $2.
I have tried other methods such as PPV banner ads but find that starting cold, my clicks cost far more than if I had bought them from Google.