Affiliate Marketing In The Philippines: How To Become A Successful Filipino Affiliate

I discovered affiliate marketing in early 2009. During that time, I just recently left my job at a call center company. If you are familiar with the employment opportunities in the Philippines, then you know that call center companies are among the top employers in the country. Most college graduates apply at call centers before they start looking for jobs relevant to their college degrees. A lot of them stay in call centers for good. Well, as for me, I got tired and sick of the call center setup after about five or six months. So I quit. Don't get me wrong. The pay was decent not to mention the perks and benefits but I just didn't see myself doing the thing in the long-term. So I decided to hand over my resignation letter and go look for a job that is relevant to what I studied in college which is accounting and marketing. I've always wanted to become an entrepreneur that's why I took these courses.

To cut the story short, I left my call center job and went looking for a job preferably as an accountant or marketer. Several resume submissions later, nothing seemed to be happening. Nobody seemed to be interested in hiring me. One Sunday evening, while watching a late night television news program, a segment in the show went into detail about the growing number of Filipinos working as freelancers on the internet. Obviously, that gave me an idea so the next thing I did was fire up my laptop and started searching for more information about online freelancing. Since I'm an accountant-marketer, I went looking for ways on how I can get jobs related to these professions. However, it was disappointing because there wasn't much that I can find.

I thought about the so-called thousands of Filipino workers earning their incomes online. What are they doing? What industries are they in? So I searched for blogs and forums that discuss online jobs in the Philippines. That's where I discovered that majority of Filipino online freelancers work as writers, editors, proofreaders, graphic designers, and virtual assistants. So looking at the choices, I ran with writing because, well, I love writing. I enjoy doing it. I'm going to be a freelance writer, I told myself. So I signed up with a few online job directories like Freelancer, Elance and Odesk. It was hard at first looking for work but once you've established some sort of reputation, getting work becomes easier and easier. So I wrote dozens after dozens of articles for clients from all over the world.

Among the most common topics that clients ask me to write are about online marketing, making money online, doing businesses online, etc. This was where I got introduced to the idea of affiliate marketing. In doing research for my writing assignments, I kept learning more about these different ways on how to earn an income from the internet. The one that interested me the most is affiliate marketing. The business model for affiliate marketing is just very interesting. You can earn money promoting the products and services of other people. You don't even need your own website to do so. So one day, I decided to strike out and give affiliate marketing a try. The rest they say is history. I now earn three figures (and sometimes four figures) in affiliate income every month. The payments arrive through checks or go into my Paypal account at the end of every month.

I'm not saying that affiliate marketing is making me rich. I'm far from being rich to be honest. But I've found ways on how to consistently generate substantial income through it. It has now become my main source of income. I'm also not claiming that I'm an expert in this thing. What I'm going to show to you in this article are the strategies that I used and found to be effective.

If you have experience in offline sales which are commission-based, the business model is very similar to affiliate marketing. The biggest difference is that in affiliate marketing, everything is based and performed on the internet. The premise is simple. You sign up with an affiliate company then promote their products or services online. If someone purchased a product or service through you, then you get credited for the sale and you receive an affiliate commission for your efforts. Your only responsibility is to promote the products. The affiliate company will handle inventory keeping, customer billing and product shipping. There are literally thousands of affiliate programs out there. That is not an exaggeration. The biggest of these, however, are Amazon, Commission Junction and Clickbank. Now, just because these are the largest affiliate companies doesn't mean they are the ones you should be signing up with. Which company you decide to sign up with will depend on a lot of factors. These will be discussed later on.

1. Startup costs are very minimal. In fact, you can start for free with nothing to invest except your time and efforts. It's free to sign up with 99% of affiliate programs out there. The only time you will get to spend some monetary investment is when you decide to get your own affiliate website, spend on advertising, or outsource certain things like article writing, search engine optimization, etc.
2. The sky is the limit when it comes to your earning potential. There's no ceiling to how much you can earn in this business. $100 a month. $3000 a month. A million a month. It all depends on how hard and smart you work. However, just because the income potential is unlimited, you can target unreasonable goals. It's highly recommended that you start with achievable income goals.
3. You don't need your own website to start making money. In most online business opportunities, you need a website or a blog in order to earn something. This isn't the case in affiliate marketing. You can promote affiliate products in social networking sites, forums, blogging communities, directories and other web 2.0 sites. You don't own these sites but if someone purchases a product through an affiliate link you dropped in any of these sites, you still get credit and get paid for the commission.
4. You have a lot of options. This is one of the best things about affiliate marketing. You can sign up with a dozen companies if you want to. There's so many opportunities where you can generate commissions. You can even promote products from all of these companies in the same website or blog.

1. Knowledge on the basic internet marketing strategies. You should know search engine optimization, social media marketing, article marketing, forum marketing and content marketing. If you are not familiar with these marketing strategies, it's recommended that you read up on them first. There are tons of free articles and resources online that cover these.
2. A bank account and a Paypal account. Most affiliate companies either pay by check or through Paypal. You won't be able to receive your commissions if you don't have a bank account or a Paypal account. Signing up with Paypal is easy and free. Also, for you to be able to withdraw your Paypal funds, you must connect it with a bank account or credit/debit card.
3. A website or a blog. Although it is possible to make money from affiliate marketing without a website, you will earn more if you have your own site. So get one. If you can't get your own domain, you can use free site and blog providers like Blogger, Wordpress, Livejournal, Tumblr, Weebly, etc. You are going to use these sites in building your affiliate marketing business.

For the remainder of this guide, I am going to use Amazon as an example. I'm going to show you the ways on how I make money by promoting Amazon products. These ways aren't exclusive to Amazon. You can also use them on other companies like Commission Junction and Clickbank.

A niche website is a site that specifically targets a particular niche. A website that sells Aeron chairs in Australia for example is a niche site. It sells just one product to a small target market. Building a niche website is a very good marketing strategy given the very tough competition online. You can't target general markets because chances are there are already hundreds if not thousands of websites who have established themselves in the market. That said, it's best that you look for a less competitive niche market then target it by building a site for it.

In order to find a profitable niche, just go to Amazon and browse through products in the site. Just keep browsing until an idea comes to you. If you come across a product that you think you can build a niche site around, start doing some research about it immediately. Search in Google for the product to see the level of competition you'll be up against. If the search results yield irrelevant pages or pages hosted in less than reputable sites, then it's maybe worth a shot. What you should do next is go to Google and fire up its keyword suggestion tool. Use the tool to look for keywords and phrases that are relevant to the product you are planning to promote.

With the keywords in your hands, start creating keyword-optimized content for your niche website. The type of content you write depends on the nature of the product you are promoting. You can write product reviews, informative articles, tutorials, guides, tips, etc. that are relevant to the affiliate product.

In order to make money from your niche website, you should learn how to use your affiliate links in your content. Amazon offers a lot of tools, link builders and widgets that you can use on your website. Just log into your Amazon Associates account and play around with the tools to find the ones that best suit your website.

Besides optimizing your website content for the search engines, you should also promote your content using other techniques like social media marketing and forum marketing. Take the time to sign up with social networking sites and relevant forums where you can promote your website in front of an interested audience.

A revenue-sharing site is a community-based website wherein content writers get a share from the revenues that their articles generate. As of today, the sites that I use to promote Amazon products are Squidoo, HubPages, Seekyt and Wizzley. These sites allow you to drop your own affiliate links in the articles that you publish in them. I once used Zujava and had a little success with it but the site stopped allowing writers to place their own affiliate links in the bodies of their articles. You can still earn through Amazon in Zujava through the site's built-in Amazon modules. However, you are going to share your earnings with Zujava.

Using revenue-sharing sites to promote Amazon products is pretty simple. You merely create articles, drop one or two of your affiliate links in the articles, then publish them in revenue-sharing sites. It's that simple. I highly recommend that you use Squidoo and HubPages. These two are the highest-ranked revenue-sharing sites today so they are more visible in the search engines which means it's much easier for them to get traffic.

These are the two ways that I use to generate income through affiliate marketing in the Philippines. So far, they are working very well for me. I'm currently using other techniques but they aren't generating as much results as the ones that I discussed above that's why I didn't include them here. I'll probably add them here once I get results from them.

So that's it. That's how I do affiliate marketing here in the Philippines. If you have any questions or recommendations, please feel free to leave them at the comments section below. I'll try to respond to them. Thanks a lot.