If making money as an affiliate marketer were so easy more people would do it. Although the number of people earning money in affiliate marketing is increasing there are still many people who never make a penny.

Here are 5 affiliate marketing tips to help you make money.

1. Choose the niche you want to be in carefully. It is always better to sell affiliate products to people who are currently spending money in a smaller market. This way you do not have to try to create a market and you have always got potential customers to sell to.

2. Try and start out in a niche that you have a passion for, an interest in, or an expertise on. Because you will enjoy what you are doing This will make it more fun and you will see the money come in faster.

3. Start a blog and host it yourself. Never use a free blogging platform as your blog could be canceled at any time without explanation. There are many people who have gone through this with Google’s Blogger.com blogging platform.

By hosting it yourself you can control the content going into it. You can also add new products and programs whenever you feel like it.

4. Create your own land landing pages and use those to build an opt in email marketing list. By developing a list you will make more affiliate sales in the future to people who do not want to buy today.

This is an important tip because most people do not purchase on their first website visit. If you do not have a way to get back in touch with them you are wasting that traffic.

An email marketing list is a good way to sell products at any time. When you have somebody’s name and email address you can email them whenever you have something new to offer.

Your list is also a great way to build relationships with people. This long term approach to affiliate marketing is an asset that will pay you back many times in the future.

5. Purchase the product before you try to sell it. Then create a review page to talk about the good things and bad things of your product. Use your review page as a way to pre sell your prospective customer before sending them through to your affiliate sales page.

This approach has been responsible for millions of dollars in affiliate sales. People use the Internet to research information and your review page can help them find the information they are looking for. Then when they are ready to buy they will purchase from you!

Plugins for the Wordpress platform are tons of fun and incredibly useful. You’ll find everything you need to turn your blog into something amazing that is every bit as great as you would have imagined. While there are many plugins out there that are worth your while, the five that follow are the cream of the crop.

Akismet

This plugin actually comes standard with your Wordpress installation. You will have to get a Wordpress.com API key to make it work, but after you do it’s pure bliss. This will help keep spam comments away automatically! Akismet is smart enough to put suspected spam into a separate folder, and it even learns from you as you go. You should always activate this plugin for the best results with your blog. It saves you a ton of time too!

Related Posts

Linking to different pages in your blog from every page is a great search engine optimization tactic. The problem with blogs is that it can be so hard to dig through old posts that are related and manually link them in your new post. Related posts solves that problem! This will automatically insert some relevant posts for your blog. It’s very hands-off and very effective. Both visitors and search engines love this plugin.

All in One SEO Pack

Once again, optimizing your site for the search engines is going to be one of the best ways you can make money with your blog. The higher you rank, the more traffic you recieve. The more traffic you receive, the more money you make! The All In One SEO pack makes your life easier because it allows you to specify the title, description (that will show up in the search engines), and keywords.

Wordpress Database Backup

Backing up your blog is crucial if you value your business. You never know what could happen to your server, and it would be awfully devastating to lose everything. You can easily back everything up by pressing a few simple buttons with this effective and very useful plugin.

Top Commentators

This plugin is greatly effective and it encourages a lot of interaction on your blog. It lists the people who have the most comments within your blog. They love this because they get the extra exposure. You love it because people really get into posting to try and be at the top. It also gives social proof. When people visit a blog for the first time they are more likely to stick around if there are clearly other people there who value your content. The fact that they can see others participating is a great thing.

There are an incredible number of different plugins out there that are ready for you to use. Install these essentials and you’ll be well-prepared to become the great blogger you’re going to become.