This is designed to be a how-to tutorial in generic terms, not a checklist of what will make you a lot of money. You won’t be given any magic beans, systems, guaranteed methods, e-books, or any other scammy pitches.  You will be expected to work your ass off doing niche research, adding datafeeds to your website(s), and promoting the site in various forms.  If you don’t have a penny to your name and need to get some cash flow going so you can break into the more cash flow intensive (and more profitable) forms of Internet Marketing, then read this (a few times), borrow some cash from someone, and get busy.  (You will need about $200 in hosting/WFReview software/domains to actually start, unless of course you bribe us with something like girls, brownies, or beer!  If you follow instructions though, you’ll get that $200 back before it’s missed. Beg/borrow/steal to get it, just get it.)

This tutorial is free, if you paid for it, get your money back.

FACT: You will NEVER make a dime buying products that tell you how to make a dime. If you don’t grasp this or embrace it, stop now, you’ll never be successful online.  You have to take some time to think of a niche you want to earn with, then GET OUT and DO IT!   Better to have TRIED and failed 1,000 times than to never have tried all.  Don’t buy e-Books, don’t buy coaching  (unless it’s a hardcore technique that’s gotten rave industry reviews from authority marketers, more on that later) and MOST CERTAINLY don’t think that Internet marketing as a full time job or an 8-5.  If you want a full-time income from IM, you’ll have to grind it out HARD for a few months/quarters until sites start ranking and collectively increase in revenue.  This tutorial is meant to help you get to that point: Where you work for yourself and make a good living doing what you love.

Where the hell do I start? The first step is where most people (myself included at one point) really struggle.  I want to do amazing sites that will rake in the dough, but I have no idea where to start and what I should be doing (and not doing!)

STEP 1: Decide what you want to sell/promote

This is one of the most difficult decisions for a newbie because you have no idea the grand scope of the industry, what networks offer what offers, or what kind of history different offers have.  You need to be able to make money without spending money on traffic, so you need to pick a very SPECIFIC niche that you want to create a site for.  ‘Electronics’ is waaay too vague. ‘Televisions’ is waaay to vague, ‘HDTVs’ is waaay too vague.  You need to find the lowest common denominator in a niche.  For example:

• Television remote controls
• Camcorder batteries
• Wedding night lingerie for tall/short women
• Bamboo ceiling fans
• Keyboards for the disabled
• Computers for Preschoolers
• Etc.

Don’t try to create a ‘one stop shop’ for every aspect of your niche when you’re starting out, you’ll never drive any sort of quality TARGETED traffic.  It’s the targeted traffic that makes you money, not the massive collection of meagerly linked products on your web page.  The people who are your ‘targeted traffic’ are looking for one thing and one thing only, and they usually have their credit cards out ready to buy.  Design your site to accommodate these people, and allow them to easily find exactly what it is they’re looking for.

Before you start crying because the million dollar idea you thought you had was just crushed, don’t think that you can’t do what you originally came here to do.  Start a “project idea” document in Word and keep track of your ideas. Once you gain experience and have some coin, you can try the higher risk ideas out. For now though, you’re a broke little monkey and need to concentrate on providing very specific products that are going to be easily found by people looking for exactly what you are selling.

We’re going to pick on products for Mac users: specifically, replacement memory.  This is what our entire site will be featuring, nothing but memory for Macs.  40,000 pieces of dirty, sexy, memory for Macs.  The site is http://www.macmemorystore.com and they are a merchant on shareasale.com.  At the time of this writing, their 7-day EPC (earnings per click) was $166.00 and the 30 day was $62.69.  This means they’re getting sales and the dollar amounts of those sales are relatively high.  DO NOT ASSUME THAT BECAUSE A HIGH EPC EXISTS, YOU WILL PROFIT.  You need to TEST TEST TEST every single offer yourself.

Why is this a good idea?  First, if you are going to want to earn a commission off of a product you sell online, you NEED to be signed up with an affiliate network.  These networks are the middleman between the merchant (the guy offering the product) and the affiliate (You, the person wanting to sell the product for a commission.) and are fairly easy to get signed up with.  You should apply to the affiliate network and get accepted before going to step 2.  Most people choose to apply to affiliate networks because they find an offer that they want to promote and it happens to be on a specific network.  Look at www.offers202.com for a good list of offers and networks.

The network I am going to use for this site is Shareasale.com.  It has a huge supply of merchants with datafeeds.  (Datafeeds are downloadable files that have most of the product information from the merchant.  The parts of the information such as Product_Name, Description, Image_URL, Price, etc. are all in a delimited format, which allows you to import into WFReview or Excel.)

All I have to do is download the datafeed then import the feed as posts into WFReview. It’s a little more involved than that obviously, with adding headers and filtering out any products you do NOT want in your site, but for the most part, it works very well, is very fast, and gets results.  Plus this Mac Memory Store feed has acceptable descriptions and default product images so my posts end up look really good!

Click here to apply to www.shareasale.com / www.commissionjunction.com / www.linkshare.com / www.EWAnetwork.com

NEXT:  Tutorial: Getting started with WFReview Part 2

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