Affiliate Marketing the begginings

Hi, I've finished creating my website designed for affiliate marketing- advertising birthday gifts. I've not published it onto the internet yet, and am wondering what the next stage is? Do I publish the site and then contact companies to advertise on it? If so where would be a good place to find these companies bearing in mind the products being advertised are gift and present related?

Now keep in mind I am also new at Affiliate Marketing, but it sounds like you are working in the wrong order?

I was under the impression that you should search for a merchant with a niche and a comission that sounds profitable to you, and then build a site around that?

However, if your site is somewhat generic and can work with multiple products, it sounds like you are still A-ok. I would check on clickbank and put in a search for birthday gifts and see if you can find a good vendor.

Are you going to generate income from advertisements on your site?

In this case, it will be hard to get advertisers to spend their money if your site is brand new and has no traffic yet.

You may want to generate some substantial traffic first or better still, build a list and refer your subscribers back to your site regularly!

This way, you are ensure of constant traffic and probably can charge more for advertisments.


stephen

Once you have a website, drive traffic to it, and write good and relevant content, for example writing reviews about the product you are offering.

Affiliate Marketing Beginnings - Pick your Product Niche

As a new affiliate marketer you will need to pick products to promote. Your product choice will depend on the method you plan to use to promote your links. Different types of products will
respond to different types of promotions.
Let's look at the basic product categories and the promotion methodsmost generally suited to them. ps. Let's use AM as an abbreviation for affiliate marketing.
There are 4 basic affiliate product types: (but lots of sub-types)
Information - ebooks, reports, data, how-to's, etc.
Services - reporting, data tracking, auction listing, web hosting, etc.
.............................

home based business,home business

You will only make money from your site if it attracts visitors who are likely to be interested in the products or services that are advertised on your site. To do that you need to stick to basics:

1 Provide pages and content that are interesting and provide value to the visitors.

2 Build backlinks to your site in oredr to increase its ranking in search engines. Look at the various topics on this site - especially the sticky ones at the top which generally cover the basics.

3 Think about the keywords that visitors might use when searching for a site offering the services or products that you are offering. Optimism the content and design to maximise the SEO impact of your keywords.

4 Use webmaster tools like Google's analytics which will provide valuable information on the visitors to your website and how they found their way on to it.

When you have done that and you have traffic you should look for marketing programmes that match with your content.

I take it you are on about finding and joining affiliate programs.

Personally I would go to an affiliate programs directory so that you can find the programs your interested in. Once you have done that, go to a forums and ask about them there to see what others thing of them programs.