Affiliate Marketing Basics

The online Affiliate marketing process consists of very definite building blocks each of which have to be addressed correctly for the process to hang together successfully. It is a sequence of events that have to be done in a structured way.

The Affiliate marketing process has as its foundation a website and what is done with the website forms the building blocks. The process has three distinct sections - planning, building and marketing the website.

Planning a website includes determining the feasibility of a theme, topic, subject in terms of both market size, keyword popularity, income generating potential etc.

Building a website includes domain naming and hosting, keyword research, web content,web design, autoresponders, and submitting to the search engines.

Marketing the website includes driving traffic to the website and tracking the results.

There are many affiliate marketing tools and solutions that offer help in performing some of the essential tasks of the affiliate marketing process quicker and more efficiently than could be achieved manually. A tool usually covers one building block whereas a solution tends to either cover the whole affiliate marketing process or multiple building blocks thereof. With both tools and solutions, some are software packages which you download to your PC, others are online resources.

If your intention is to do it all in-house you will be using tools. Each building block is discussed with the relevant tools in the Do it yourself section of the menu.

For those who don't wish to tackle it all alone there are some fine solutions available that provide all or parts of the process. See the Solutions section of the menu. Don't expect Solutions to do the work for you! Most are wizards or guides which replace the high tech components of the affiliate marketing process with simpler easy to understand alternatives. If you are not computer savvy use a solution - its much easier!!