If you are a beginning affiliate marketer or internet marketer outsourcing is probably not something that should be on your radar at this point for the most part.  Someone who is just starting out should be creating their own content and putting up their own websites and publishing their own blog posts.

The biggest reason for this is to get a really good feel for what each of these processes takes.  You want to know how long something takes and what the basic steps involved in finishing it are or you will never be able to properly price or explain these things to an outsourcer.

There are some exceptions to this.  If you have a very specific vision for a website that you just cannot create on your own or you need some sort of a technical plugin or piece of software created and you just don’t have the skills then it may be your best option to pay someone to create this for you.  Especially if you do have a budget to get started and you do have experience in hiring people.

But essentially, in this article, I am talking about outsourcing things like content creation and link creation.  When will this be something that you should look into.

In my opinion, a good time to start outsourcing content creation and link creation is when you have a steady income – no matter what that steady income is.  When you are bringing in $100 a month or $1000 a month each month, go ahead and take a percentage of that and use it to start outsourcing your content creation or your new website creation or whatever takes the most work for you and whatever makes the most sense to be outsourced in your business.

There are some affiliates that have gotten to the point where they outsource everything and they are just the guy or gal behind the scenes orchestrating all the moving pieces and envisioning the final product.  These are truly super affiliates in that they have built a true business that they do not have  to work in.  They just run it.

This is a business that is truly worth a lot of money because all the pieces are in place an anyone could pick up the business and continue to make money with it without having to do all the work.

This is the kind of thing that you do want to strive for, and if you can take a portion of your profits from the beginning and start learning how to find good outsourcers and how to incorporate outsourcers into your business the faster your business will grow.

So Where Can You Find Good Outsourcers?
Elance and guru.com are great places to look for outsources.  Once you find someone who is good and can finish products to your specifications you may want to try to develop a private relationship with him or her.  This isn’t necessary, but it may work well for your business.

You may also want to ask around in an internet marketing forum and see who comes highly recommended and for what reasons.  Some of these forums may also have a ‘for hire’ section where you can find people advertising their services.  At a forum it is easy to check around and see what other members think of these people so this is a good option.

So let’s talk about other ways that you can get more traffic and hopefully more sales. One way that you can probably easily get more organic search engine traffic very quickly is to write on a trending topic. Pick a topic that is in the news right now and related to your subject matter somehow.

Write a blog post or a website on this topic and get some visitors to it – either by sending out a mailing to your list or utilizing some sort of a mastermind group to get people to come and check out your post. There are a lot of these on Facebook – you just need to find one that you fit in with.  Search for mastermind group or check out the Empowered Tribe (search in Facebook for empowered tribe).  Once some people go to your new page and maybe leave a comment or share it on Facebook Google will take notice and come over to see it and see if they want to index it.

Write on a truly trending topic – Google probably will not have a lot of pages in the index about this subject already and therefore it will send traffic to just about anyone who puts a page up.  If you pick a good topic then it may have a lot of searches for it already and Google could feasibly start sending you hundreds of visits a day within a few hours.

Another way to get more traffic is to do some article marketing. A great way to use article marketing is to write a fantastic resource on a subject that is related to your website, put it up on your website, and then put it up on ease ezinearticles and any other article directories that you like to use. When people choose your article and put it on their website then you automatically get easy links and possibly traffic via your resource box.

This becomes even more powerful if you can find online magazines that need a lot of content and have a lot of readers. Find them and contact them directly and tell them you have articles for syndication. They just need to keep your resource box intact. Once you have a list of online magazines or online content creators who are willing to publish your articles and who have traffic to send you then you have a source of traffic that can become even more powerful than Google.

Continue to look for new people to publish your syndicated content and continue to send your list out new content that they can use. People who publish syndicated content really like it to be long and excellent. Long means between 1000 and 1500 words.  If you are having a hard time finding people to publish your content, maybe ask some people exactly what they’re looking for and tweak your content accordingly.

Use these two methods to get more traffic to your website soon and do more of what works. More traffic doesn’t always mean more sales, but it frequently does. And sales are what we are looking for.

Conversion rates will vary widely based on what you are selling or what kind of traffic you’re getting or what market you are in but none of that matters. 

When you are trying to increase your conversion rates you really are only in competition with yourself. It does not matter what the average industry conversion rate is if there is really a way to measure such a thing.

There is always a way to improve your page and there is always a way to improve your approach. Many marketers like to do something called split testing where they will put up two different versions of the same page and send half their traffic to each version. Then they like to test which page made the most sales.

This can be really hard when you are an affiliate because you don’t always get access to all the statistics that tell you exactly where a sale came from.

There are some ways for you to test your content without split testing though. Let’s talk about those. So if you know that you get a certain amount of visits to your website each day and a certain amount of sales from your website each day you can make one change and monitor your sales for a month to see if it makes any difference. Examples of the kind of changes you may want to make are

1) Change the picture or the positioning of the picture on your sales page

2) Change your call to action.  Instead of saying “buy it here now” try saying something like “click here to see it now”.  

3) Change some of the elements of your sales page like how many times you link to the product or how high on the page you link to the product.

4) Increase the number of funnels to your sales page or add some funnels in to your sales page. What I mean by this is if you are currently linking to your sales page at the bottom of each other page on your website, then maybe start linking to your sales page at the top and bottom of each other page on your website. If you are not currently linking to your sales page from each of your other webpages then start.

Only change one thing at a time and continue monitoring your sales numbers and conversion rates to see what is working and what is not. Don’t be afraid to change something back that just didn’t work. Make a note of it and move on.  Getting more sales from the traffic that you already have is a very worthwhile marketing tactic to pursue. Every increase in conversion rate means you are a little bit better of a marketer and you can take that knowledge and apply it to every other project you start.

If you do not already have a statistics program up on your website then now is the time. Most free sites and revenue share sites will offer statistics so you just need to figure out how to access them if that is what you are using.

The most important thing about a statistics account is knowing the keywords that people are coming in to your website from. Google analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/ is a free statistics program that offers this. StatCounter http://statcounter.com/ is another good one.

Learning how to use whatever statistics program you choose is important.   There are many metrics that you can use to improve the way your website interacts with its visitors, but right now we will just talk about the keywords that people used to come in to each individual page.

If you have a sales page this is a good one the focus on. Going to the statistics information for this page and see where people are coming from. Are there any keywords that you had not considered? Are there any keywords that are on a different but related topic? Are there any topics – indicated by the keywords –  that you should be covering but aren’t?

Make some new pages for these different but related topics and any topics that you should be covering but aren’t. Use your statistics as a tool to know what people are really searching for.  You don’t have to pay $56 a month for a keyword tool in the beginning. You can do is dig into your own statistics and see what you should be writing about next.

Are people searching for products and winding up at your website even though you don’t sell or promote them? This is actually a really good indication that this particular product is underrepresented on the Internet. If you are getting traffic for a product you don’t even sell then maybe you should consider creating a page about this product and selling it. If there were already a bunch of good pages on this product they would be getting that traffic not you.

Also, looking at your statistics you can easily see what Google and the other search engines think your pages are about. If that does not match what they’re actually about, then maybe they need some rewriting or tweaking.

Regardless of exactly how you use the statistical information about how people are coming into your website the information is very valuable. You will want to print out and keep copies of this information as your site grows so you can keep track of how your website is evolving.

If you lose traffic on a certain keyword this is something to be aware of and possibly something to take action on – especially if it is a buying keyword.

So just realize that your website statistics are gold and treat them as such. Basically, you can use this information to find out what your visitors are truly wanting and really searching for and then give it to them.

You want a list of people who are interested in the market that you are in. You want to send them great information periodically, like once a week so they don’t forget who you are and so they like and appreciate you.

Then, when you have something amazing to recommend to them many of them will buy it – and you did very little work. An e-mail list is an asset that can grow and evolve and make you a lot of money. I heard someone say recently that it only takes a list of 500 people to send you $8.36 a month and you will make $50,000 a year.

Obviously that is a simplified version of how an e-mail list really works, but it should open your eyes to the potential of e-mail marketing. A list of 500 people is very simple to get. $8.36 is nothing to most people. If you have a list of people who really want to know the information that you have and you create or recommend stellar products to them you have to make money – and no one can ever take your e-mail list away from you. Even Google.

So how do you start an e-mail marketing list? One way to do it is to create a product to give away in exchange for people signing up for your list. The product should be relevant to what your list will be about. For example, if you are promoting cameras, you might want to give away a short report that you have created or have had created for you that gives digital photography tips.

Anyone who signed up for this list will be interested in digital photography and perhaps will be interested in buying any other reports you create or will possibly be in the market to buy a new digital camera when you recommend one in one of your e-mail messages.

If you want to get started with an e-mail list a great way to do this is to sign up for some e-mail lists that already exist on the Internet. Find a website or a blogger that you want to follow and sign up for their e-mail marketing list.

Pay attention to their messages. How often do they send messages? What do their messages say? Do any of them make you want to buy anything? Do you think you want to do things the same way that they do them or do their methods turn you off and you want to do things completely different? No matter what you will learn something about what you want your list to be like.

Aweber https://www.aweber.com/ is a trusted e-mail marketing service provider. They charge one dollar for your first month and then you will have to pay based on the number of subscribers that you have after that.

There are some free e-mail marketing service providers but normally they send out their own ads with your e-mail messages and sometimes they only free up to a certain amount of subscribers.

However you decide to do it, getting started with e-mail marketing earlier rather than later is a good idea. If you can learn how to make money with e-mail marketing then you are set on the Internet.  There is a good reason why people say “the money is in the list”.

When you are creating a website or a group of webpages that all have one main purpose you will be focusing on certain keywords. You want to know exactly what people are searching for before you start creating pages. This is what I mean by a keyword. A keyword or a keyword phrase is what people type into the search engine when they are looking for something.

You, as an affiliate, want to attract people who are at the end of their buying cycle. You will get the most sales and commissions if the keywords that you are focusing on in your site are keywords that people who already have their wallet out are searching for.

Let’s take a very specific example. Let’s talk about digital cameras.  Someone who types in Google “digital camera review” may seem like they are ready to buy, but in fact they probably are nowhere near buying a camera today. That is a very broad keyword and the person has not even picked out which two or three digital cameras they may be considering.  They are just toying with the idea of buying a camera at this point. Digital camera review is a browsing keyword.

Someone who types in “cheapest digital camera” is probably closer to buying a camera than the person in the previous example. This person knows what is important to them. Price. And that’s it. Cheapest digital camera is a buying keyword, but we can do better.

Someone who types in “cheapest Canon powershot” literally has their credit card in hand and is ready to buy if they can find a price that they think is cheaper than anything else they can find on or off-line.

The difference between a buying and a browsing keyword is extremely important when you want to sell things. Browsing keywords can still serve a purpose and can still be very valuable. If you are trying to attract people to sign up for an e-mail list that you are maintaining or if you are wanting to prove yourself to be an expert in your field or if you are looking for an opportunity to create some linkbait then browsing keywords are wonderful for these things.

If however, you are creating a page that has the purpose of showing someone where to go to make their purchase so that you can get a commission then buying keywords are imperative.

You can occasionally and accidentally make sales on pages with browsing keywords. You can consistently and frequently make sales from pages with buying keywords. I like to consistently and frequently make sales.

Knowing the difference between a browsing keyword and a buying keyword can be the difference between $100 a month site and $1000 a month site.

Pre-selling, if done correctly can increase conversions astronomically.

Consider these three scenarios:

1) If you were on my list and I were to send you an e-mail saying “check this out” and giving you a link. How likely do you think you would be to check it out? Not very likely probably. I know that I’m busy and if I had no reason to click on a link in my e-mail I am just going to delete the e-mail instead.

2) if I were to send you an e-mail about a product that you had no interest in or desire to buy and I were to give you a hard sell on it.  I told you all the great things about this product and why you should buy it NOW NOW NOW!  Like an infomercial.  Ha.  Again, I would probably just delete the e-mail if it were me. How about you?

3) if I were to send you an e-mail and you already knew me and trusted me and thought that I had your best interests at heart – and if I said in this e-mail “wow, I have been using this new product and it has been so great. This is what it has done for me and these are the reasons that I love it and I think maybe it can help you to. Check it out here. And then I put a link in there.

Would you click on that link? Yeah, you might.

Scenario number one is not anything. It’s spam. Scenario number two is selling – that’s not your job. Scenario number three is pre-selling and when it’s done right it works wonderfully. Not everyone is going to buy because not everybody is going to be interested – but the people who are interested will be more likely to click on your links if you use scenario number three and getting them to click on the link with a positive opinion of the product already in their head is 95% of the battle.

Pre-selling always involves getting the person who is reading the information to think about how this product will benefit them. Pre-selling also involves a friendly and conversational tone, like you were talking to a friend.

Even if you are creating a page to promote a physical product like gardening gloves or a swimsuit, you want to pre-sell – not sell. You want to talk about how wonderful this swimsuit is and how beautiful it looks on women. You want to be open and engaging and have a bit of a conversation in your page content.

Let’s look at this page
http://www.squidoo.com/bubble-chair-circle-and-ball-chairs-buy-stylish-round-furniture-online

That is a squidoo page where the sole purpose is to recommend bubble chairs in the hopes that someone will buy one.  See how light and friendly the words are?  This is pre-selling.

So always remember, it is your job as an affiliate to pre-sell – not to sell.  Give information – give lots of pictures – be friendly – and include lots of links so that your visitors can get over to the site and start buying whenever they want to.

Basically when somebody in affiliate marketing wants to scale something up that means they want to take something that is working and do it on a wider and broader scale so that more people see it and it works in more ways. Usually what they mean by working is something that is making sales. A good way to scale sales in internet marketing is to find affiliates.

Say you have a sales page about an e-book that sells well. You’ve done split testing and you know what works and what doesn’t and what your conversion rate is. Now, you find affiliates that send traffic to this sales page, and depending on what kind of a reach they have, they can double or triple or quadruple your current traffic, hopefully increasing your sales by just as much.  That is scaling up your sales with affiliates.

But what if you are the affiliate?  What are some ways that you can scale up your efforts?  The absolute biggest one for anyone who is creating content online is to repurpose that content.

You take your content that you have created for one reason, and you use it for several other reasons and in several other ways.

Here are some examples.  Let’s talk about an informational article that you created for your website.

Use 1) put it on your website.

Use 2) make an autoresponder message out of it and put it in your email list

Use 3) release it for syndicated content (with a research box linking back to your website) at ezinearticles and other article marketing websites and with private website owners

Use 4) Put it together with a few other very good articles you have written on the same topic and create a short report for sale or to give away.  If you give it away you could use it to entice people to sign up to your list.  You could also give other people rights to give it away as long as they keep the links back to your site intact.  Say something in the report like “If you are reading this report you have full rights to give it away as long as you do not sell it and as long as you leave it exactly as it is.”

Use 5) make the article into a video and put it up on youtube and the other video sites.  Use a slightly different title and description that still applies to the article each time.

Use 6) Make the article into a pdf document and put it up on pdf sharing sites like scribd.com

Use 7) take ideas from each paragraph of the article and rewrite and expand on it and create a page with this expanded topic at squidoo and or any other revenue sharing website.  Link these pages back to your original page for traffic and backlinks.

Use 8) Make the article into a podcast – make a recording out of it and put it up on podcast websites.  Talk about and link back to your website.

Can you see how repurposing your content will increase your reach across the internet exponentially, but not take near as much time as creating brand new content?  This is truly working smarter, not harder and should pay off in increased traffic and sales.

If you are part of an affiliate marketing or an Internet marketing forum, be sure to make a post telling everyone about your first sale if it is allowed.  Your first affiliate marketing sale really is a big deal and it should be celebrated.

Why is your first sale such a big deal? Because affiliate marketing is so unlike off-line business and it really does take a special understanding of the way people buy online in order to be able to make it work.

All of this is such new technology and it changes all the time so anyone who figures it out really is special. Affiliate marketing is not for the lazy, weak, or for people who can’t focus.

Now that you have made your first sale, now what? Do you just sit back and wait for another one? No! Absolutely not – now is the time to step up your efforts.  Now is the time to look very closely at the sale you made and where it came from or where you think it came from if you’re not sure and figure out how to do more of that.

Obviously something that you did worked and if you can do it again and again and in more places or on more websites you will be in a better position tomorrow to make even more sales.

Some affiliate programs let you track your links so that you can figure out exactly where your sales came from. This may be a good time to get into your affiliate program’s documentation and figure out if you can track your links if you aren’t already.

Hopefully the excitement from your first sale will motivate you to double your efforts. It takes a wide net and a lot of work to make sales online. But the 80/20 principle does apply here. 80% of your results will calm from 20% of your efforts – so always be watching your sales to see what you believe that 20% is.

If your first sale came from a specific page on your website, then perhaps you can put up another page like that that just takes a slightly different angle. Or perhaps you should start trying to get more links to that page or send more traffic to that page. Where exactly is that page ranking in Google? Is there any way for you to get it to rank higher?  These are the kinds of questions you want to ask yourself once you have gotten that first sale and hence proven to yourself that what you are doing is working.

The more you can do things that work over and over, the more sales you are going to get. Here’s to many more sales – and soon!

In fact, your free webpages can bring in money that will help you grow your business and then can serve as assets by providing places for you to put links to your own websites, once you create them.

So let’s talk about all the places to get started for free. Actually, there is no way we could talk about every place there is to get started for free because the list is huge and growing every day. But we can talk about some of the better places to get started for free.

Starting a free blog would be a great idea. Blogger.com really is a great place to do this: 1) Google owns blogger and Google really does like blogger blogs. 2) when you start a blog at blogger.com there aren’t any restrictions on you – for example if you started a blog at WordPress.org there would be a reception that you could not place commercial links on it. Blogger doesn’t do that to you. You can do anything that is legal on your blogger blogs.

The other great thing about starting a free blog is you are building your knowledge base. The more blogging platforms you use, the easier you will be able to figure out all the buttons on any new ones you try. Plus you will begin to understand blogs and the purpose of them better with every blog post you create.

Another wonderful place to get started is that meduim. Medium is a revenue share website that makes it very easy to create single webpages about a single topic. Medium also makes it very easy to link to Amazon and link to eBay and even if you happen to be in a state where you cannot be an Amazon associate you can use medium’s website in order to make commissions from Amazon sales.

One more thing that is really fantastic about medium is their community. Medium has a forum and some Facebook groups dedicated to them where other people who are creating pages on medium hang out. They will come to your lenses and check them out and give them social likes and shares if you go to their lenses and check them out and give them social likes and shares. This is very valuable.

Hubpages used to be a great place to create webpages like medium but these days Google doesn’t send them that much traffic so unless that changes I would stay away from them.

Xomba.com  is another revenue share website.  If you sign up with Google AdSense, and you give xomba your Google AdSense code they will automatically rotate AdSense views between your AdSense code and they are AdSense code. This is how they share revenue. There are many sites that do it this way.

Many people have gotten their affiliate marketing start on epinions.com.  Write reviews and epinions pays you.  Easy!

So far all we’ve talked about are content sites – let’s throw a few video revenue share websites in here. The most popular one is YouTube of course but in order for you to be able to put ads on your videos they have to get tens of thousands of views before YouTube will invite you into the program. Let’s go for something easier.

http://www.expotv.com/ expotv.com is a new and interesting concepts where you can get paid for making video reviews of products.

Honestly there are many revenue share websites out there. You could type revenue share website into Google and be busy for hours. Longtime affiliate marketers will tell you that revenue share websites are not worth it because they can take down your pages at any time for any reason and honestly this is true, but it happens a lot less often than people warning you it about this would think.

If a revenue share website is shying away from a certain topic or saying your pages are in violation of something, most likely they are doing it to stay in Google’s good graces. And if this is the reason, then you should pay attention, because you want to be in Google’s good graces too.

Regardless of the risks of revenue share websites, they are still a great place to get started and to learn the ropes and basics of affiliate marketing. As soon as you have made some money, nothing would be smarter than going out and starting your own website. But if you don’t have any money to start with then starting a free blog or starting with a revenue share website is a brilliant way to go.