As I have already suggested, being a successful affiliate marketer is synonymous with being a successful business person. And, as with any other business, in order to be a successful affiliate marketer you need to spend some money on your business. Now, I know that you will probably have read or seen many books and special reports that will tell you that you do not need to spend money to be an affiliate marketer. That is absolutely correct. If you just want to be an affiliate marketer, like everyone else, then do not spend any money.
However, you already know that 19 out of every 20 affiliate marketers will fail, and by choosing not to spend any money you are giving yourself an awfully good chance of becoming one of the ones who never make it. You must take this business extremely seriously, and accept that any serious business, online or in the real world, needs some investment in order to stand any chance of achieving success. So, going right back to the stage of creating your business plan, you must build a sensible budget into that plan. Of course, it does not make sense to spend a lot of money when you first launch your affiliate marketing career, but there are some basic requirements that you must put in place. By the way, on the subject of budgets, once you do start seeing some earnings from your affiliate marketing efforts come through the door, you should allocate as high a percentage of those earnings as you can afford for reinvestment back into your business.
Do not fall into the trap of spending all your affiliate earnings without any reinvestment into the business as this will only guarantee that you never really move away from first base. But, returning to your initial situation, the first two things that I would recommend you should spend a little money on is your own domain name and a web hosting account where the web pages that you build will be hosted. You will then need to get yourself an autoresponder account, as this is perhaps the most critical tool that you need for building your own online business. Because of the importance, I would recommend that you consider using a paid option for your autoresponder account, although it is possible to set up a free account if money is a critical issue for you. In terms of registering a domain name, there are plenty of places where you can get a domain name for less than $10 per year.
Try Godaddy as they always have the Lowest Prices. Now, in terms of the name that you choose for your website, the accepted wisdom would generally be that you should register a domain that is as similar to the name of the affiliate product that you want to promote as possible. In a perfect world, this would make extremely good sense. Unfortunately, however, the world is not perfect, and nor, I assume, do you have money that you simply wish to throw away!
You know that I am recommending that you should promote new Clickbank or PayDotCom products because this has proved to be the most profitable method of affiliate marketing for me. Nevertheless, I have already pointed out that not every new product will be as successful as you would like it to be. If, therefore, every time you decide to promote a new product you register another brand new domain name, you could very quickly find yourself spending a lot of money on domain name registrations, even though it costs less than $10 per time. It is also a fact that, whilst there are a few affiliate products that are almost always popular, the vast majority tend to sell well only for a relatively short period of time. So, once again, if you choose to register a brand new domain for every new affiliate product, you could find many of those names become entirely redundant in a very short period of time. At the risk of beginning to sound like a broken gramophone record, let me emphasize again that your affiliate marketing efforts should be principally focused not just on making money, but also on building your business at the same time. Your business should be a long-term venture, and thus a crucial part of your business building strategy should be to create and popularize your own brand name and image. Indeed, your brand image should focus on your name in order to make you as widely known as possible in affiliate and internet marketing circles. So, rather than creating dozens or even hundreds of new domains for every new product, you should start off with one domain in your own name.
This will allow you to start making your name known to people in the business, and building your own brand in this way will, in turn, help to accelerate the effectiveness of your business building strategy. If possible, you should try to register the .com version of your name as the majority of people who use the internet still think in terms of .com domain names, rather than in terms of .net, .biz or .org. Now, of course, if your name is relatively common, this may not be so easy. I think, for example, if you try to register John Smith.com, you may be disappointed! In this situation, one increasingly popular option is to register a .name domain as this tells people what the URL is about, and (at least at the moment) .name URLs are still generally available even when the other popular ones have been taken. The next thing you need to look at is your web hosting account, and once again you should be looking to set this up for less than $10, but note that is a monthly commitment.
Take a look at Webhostingpad for your domain hosting. I use Webhostingpad servers myself for some time, and have never had any major problems with them so if you are looking for cheap but efficient hosting, they would be my #1 pick. Finally, when you are focusing your affiliate marketing efforts both on making money and building your business, you must have an autoresponder in place. As suggested, if you can afford a paid service like Aweber, you’ll definitely be doing yourself a favor. Failing that, there is a free autoresponder that can do a reasonable job for you at ResponseBot, but, as I have suggested, if you can afford either of the paid services you should go for it, as that will definitely help you to build your business way quicker than using a free service.