Teaching Affiliate Marketing

to a bunch of newbies?

[anallawalla]

I have encouraged a bunch of mostly retired or semi-retired people in my PC user group to try their hand at AM and am looking for perspectives on how you would go about it (one meeting per month plus some online contact). This is all volunteer activity. Here are some topics I have considered, but in no particular order:

• What is AM (and Marketing in general)?
  
• Different ways to do AM, e.g. content sites, data-fed sites, discussion sites, PPC to merchant site (any others?)
  
• Aff networks
  
• AM focussed forums
  
• Ad networks to complement a content site, e.g. AdSense
  
• What to avoid, e.g. scraping, stealing content, clicking own AdSense ads, etc
  
• Keeping track of one's growing Aff relationships and stats
  
• How to build a simple HTML site
  
• On-page SEO
  
• Off-page SEO
  
• Sharing one's own experiences
  
• Guest speakers
  

Your suggestions, please.

[vibgyor79]

- Various types of affiliate programs (pay per sale/lead/click, 2-tier)
- How to choose an affiliate program?
- Why one should not use a tom-tom to tell the world if you happen to find that niche affiliate program.

[jcoronella]

That's a great concept. If they are begginners to the web, you probably need to start with just

- building a link ( <a> tag )

- Starting a PPC campaign
- signing up for aff. network
- signing up for adwords (Get a bunch of free coupons if you can)
- choosing keywords
- writing ad copy
- creating link in ad network
- creating link in adwords
- tracking stats.

From there, you could go into building their sites. I would imagine this is a course in itself. I have recently started my sister on aff. marketing, and found that she was overwhelmed until I showed her PPC marketing. It is easy to start and harder to profit, but I would guess that Google would give you vouchers if you told them you had a bunch of new customers for them.

[hunderdown]

You've got about two year's worth of topics already... Even for fairly web-savvy people, there's a steep learning curve.

[anallawalla]

Thanks for the great suggestions. Yes, I see the additional hurdle for people with no web authoring skills. Depending on numbers, I will suggest that they form small groups with complementary skill sets and work on a joint project, share costs, share revenue, take risks inherent in such groups.

While I was getting them interested in forming such a SIG, I offered some members a pre-built site that they could customise, but not one took me up. I will be sharing my experiences from the early days of banner ads when I was lucky to make a few cents in total, and how that scepticism cost me 3-4 years of subsequent learning and unknown earnings.

[anallawalla]

Also remembered:

• Shared vs dedicated hosting
  
• Choosing domain names