4 things you need for affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is really a profitable business, especially here in the Philippines. The internet era on our country is just beginning, actually we are late for a decade compare to the United States. It is the best time to start and I could say after 1 to 2 years we will be both earning around $10,000 a month or more with a consistency of 90%.

Now that you have decided to learn affiliate marketing, there are three things you need before you start. Here are they below.

• Web Hosting
• Website or Blog
• Niche / Topic
• Affiliate Program

So why would need these, I'll explain them one by one on why they are very essential to affiliate marketers.

Why do I need a website hosting?

This is the most critical must have but yet it's optional. Web hosting is used as your web space on where you would host your website or blog with the ".com" extension (e.g. www.your-website.com). Hosting is critical as it gives your freedom on what you would do on the internet, creating landing page, and can be crawled by the search engine efficiently and given a priority than those who are using a free blogs like wordpress.org and blogger.com.

If you are interest to buy a web hosting, my suggestion is to get a hosting with iPage. iPage web hosting cost only $1.99 per month and you'll also get a free domain (.com) extension, it also has a lot of freebies like $50 facebook advertisement credits, $100 google and bing/yahoo advertising credits and a site lock that is worth $250 that will help you keep the hackers away.

Another thing is that they have a website building so even if you don't know how to code, you can still create amazing and beautiful landing page, plus iPage also has a wordpress one quick install, that can set your blog in just a few clicks and under 3 minutes.

Why do I need a website or a blog for affiliate marketing?

Website and blog is essential as this would be the medium on where you can promote the products you are promoting to your prospects. You can get a free blog by using wordpress.org or blogger.com but i really suggest that you host your own blog on a web hosting and use wordpress. It is the far best being used by affiliate marketer because it is very versatile.

Free hosted wordpress and blogger can be good at first, of course it is free but once your audience grow, it'll be a problem. Transferring your website to a hosting could cause a loss especially if you already build an audience and every article now is ranked on google or bing.

Then again having a web hosting is optional, but you could use the free hosted blogs the only downside is when your audience grow and also you have no control or what so ever on your blog. I could say it's very limited but it could work on start ups.

What is niche or topic for affiliate marketing?

A niche or simply the topic would be the one you'll be promoting. I suggest that you should start a website or a blog on a topic you are comfortable with, there are many niches or topic you could pick, but it would be best that you go on the things you better understand and build an audience through it. 

For example my website about Underground Music, I am very well familiar with the topic so i created a website just for that and thus in the long run i am building an audience and started to promote products that my audience may need an example would be an e-book on how to produce a record at home and how to do a recording with a minimal setup. 

You can simply create what topic you could start but my suggestion would be stick on it till it produce results. Once you are comfortable and it is producing result, you could start and try a new niche or topic to maximize your earnings.

Note: Don't ever start a topic that is so general for example in my case Underground Music Philippines is a targeted niche, I could simply started a topic/niche about Music but it is too general and it would be hard to promote a product on a broad topic.

What is an Affiliate Program?

Affiliate program or a network as what the affiliate markets called is an advertising network on where you can products to promote, below are the affiliate networks/program i have joined with on the past few months and i am earning through them.

• Lazada Affiliate Program
• Click Bank
• Amazon Associates

Well that's all about it, on my next few post I will teach you how i earn through the following affiliate programs. Also I will be teaching strategies that have worked for me that you can replicate or improve so that you could have a better advantage to other affiliate marketers in the Philippines.