What Should I Do Next to Start Making Money Online As An Affiliate

Susie decided to start a side business and was hoping to grow it to become her full-time income source.

Eventually, she wants to quit her job.

She heard about affiliate marketing and decided that it sounded like just the right opportunity for her. She found that she could work a few hours each day and by all accounts, she could make really good money.

So she did some research on Google, and on Youtube and started learning about making money from home using affiliate marketing methods.

Everything was going great until she realized that several weeks had gone by. She came to the realization as many beginners do, that all the different gurus and tutorial videos she found were pulling her in all different directions.

So she asked:

I'm overwhelmed with all this, what should I do? What should I do next to start my business and grow it?

The answer to that is simple and many people will overcomplicate it. It's a very short bullet list to work on to get results. I've narrowed down the answer to three simple steps.

If you feel like Susie, overwhelmed, a little bit lost and just kind of searching for direction on what to do next, then this is for you.

I'm overwhelmed with all this, what should I do? What should I do next to start my business and grow it?Click To Tweet

Assuming you have a product to promote...

Assuming you already picked a product or offer you want to promote, then the next few steps are your immediate tasks.

If you don't have a product to promote or an offer that you'd like to then let me know what your interests are, or what you are good at in the comments and I'll give you a few tips.

Finding out the right niche for people is one of my superpowers. But let's get on with the three tips:

I also created a video if you want to check that out:

Step 1: Create a landing page for your offer.

Keep it simple and without fluff. To start, I recommend you take the assets provided to you by the offer manager and use them. Use similar copy, similar colors and make it easy to understand.

The landing page must contain the benefits of the product, enough information about it for the viewer to become interested, and a call to action.

For your first landing page, I suggest that you ask the visitor to join an email list as the call to action. Using the email list, you will provide the reader with more information and an opportunity to buy the product.

Step 2: Create at least three emails to be sent automatically

Use your autoresponder to send at least three emails to those that subscribe via your landing page.

Each email should be captivating and engaging and ask the reader to take action. Ideally, the action is to visit the official offer page (using your affiliate link) and then let that page close the sale for you.

After you have the three emails in place, test them with a test email account of yours to make sure it's working and all your links are clickable as they should.

Set your autoresponder to send out one email each day. First, a welcome message to introduce yourself; include a short story explaining the most compelling benefits of the product.

Then the other messages should help develop and establish you as an authority and trustworthy source of information about the product, its benefits and the problems it will help solve. Think about including engaging stories, customer testimonials, use cases, case studies and similar information that will help convince the reader to buy the product.

If you need specific direction with this, look in your affiliate dashboard or contact your affiliate manager for some guidance. It is my experience that the affiliate managers will be really helpful with this.

Step 3: Send people to visit the landing page. 

This could be challenging if you're not familiar with traffic generation techniques. But you can do it if you set some time aside and focus.

Your goal is to put the landing page in front of as many people as possible. You can do this with free advertising, or with paid advertising.

I'm a big proponent of paid traffic for online businesses because it is highly targeted, easy to quantify, and generally provides better results than free traffic.

However, paying for traffic can be an overwhelming task on its own.

I suggest you try getting a little bit of free traffic first, just to double-check your landing page, your emails and to get you into the flow of things. Get free traffic for a few days, maybe up to a couple weeks.

There will be a few changes you want to make as you run these small tests. Maybe you made a typo, maybe you forgot an image, maybe you want to change the color of the background on your landing page.

With free traffic, you can easily work through those minor mistakes and other than your time, you really haven't lost much.

I would run that test for about a week, maximum 2 weeks. No more than this. After your landing page has been tested, and your emails are delivering properly, then buy some traffic.

That's it. This is a cycle and so long as you keep bringing the offer to people then some of those people will join your email list, and some will buy.

Later on, you can work on getting better, more targeted traffic, optimizing your sales copy on your landing page, improving your open and click rates from your emails and even going back to some of that sweet, sweet free traffic.

But first, revenue!

You can even develop a strategy to generate sales without spending a lot on paid traffic, but if you want to get started, and generate results quickly these are the three steps you must take.

You can even develop a strategy to generate sales without spending a lot on paid traffic, but if you want to get started, and generate results quickly these are the three steps you must take.Click To Tweet

Additional notes

Where to get traffic? You can buy traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Google, Instagram, Pinterest, and many other places. Set a budget aside to do this every week, and check your stats every day so you can make adjustments.

Make sure you keep adding new emails to your autoresponder series, and when you have ten or twenty, you should then send an email manually every day to your list.

For your landing page, I recommend that you use Leadpages or Clickfunnels, both of those links will give you a free trial to start. But if you're cheap or budget conscious, then you can use Aweber or even your WordPress website.

If you use WordPress, just make sure you use one of the page templates for your theme which remove the sidebars and footers so the reader doesn't get distracted by those. You could also use something like OptimizePress.

Conclusion

Don't let the firehose of advice on Google, Youtube or emails from gurus overwhelm you. When starting out, there are only three things you have to do to generate revenue and start growing your business.

Later on, you can learn more, you can adjust things, you can add more ingredients to the mix but if your business isn't generating revenue quickly, you'll be discouraged and possibly go broke. Complete the three tasks outlined above to start getting results as soon as possible.

These are basic cornerstone strategies to start generating revenue for your online business.

These are basic cornerstone strategies to start generating revenue with your online business.Click To Tweet

Before you get caught up on my own simple advice and start overcomplicating it, make sure that you do all this quickly. Remember that you don't need to know everything and how everything works.

I have made the big mistake of studying and learning one thing relentlessly until I became an expert at it. I studied it and reviewed it and asked questions to satisfy my fearful curiosity.

This is a mistake if you want to be an entrepreneur and it's understandable. It comes from a place of fear, fear of failure, and fear of making a mistake. I talked about failing recently, you can see that here.

You will make mistakes, and you will fail, but the important part is to fail as you're trying to do something and not just learning about it. Get started now.