Here is an interesting fact;  according to comScore, from November 2010 until Christmas of the same year the US consumers spent over $32 Billion – ONLINE. A 12% increase compared to the same period of time in 2009. As an Internet Marketer you could have gotten a share of this money and still can – I’ll tell you more om that further. I am sure that recession hitting the US harder than ever played a major role in that. The things is, folks want to save money and most of the time buying online is cheaper (and more convenient) than going to your local store. More and more online retailers offer free shipping which boost their customer base, just look at the growing popularity of Amazon, their free shipping and low prices!

Not having any time to waste – another reason why consumers turn to the internet. If you’ve ever been to a shopping mall during the pre-Christmas period, you know perfectly what I am talking about. Get in the car, get to the mall, drive around the parking lot for half an hour trying to find a free spot then go inside the mall and try to make your way through thousands of crazy customers which all seem in a rush and not that nice during this shopping period. Turn on your pc, type a phrase in Google, receive your purchase by mail in a few days – it’s not only time but also a stress saver after all!

Make Money As An Affiliate

This is great news for affiliate marketers from all over the world. As most online stores pay out a 4%-10% commission per sale to their affiliates, you can rally boost your income for that period of time. So how exactly do you tap into that $32 billion spending? Unfortunately one blog post will not be enough to give all the details but WA has all the info you need.

• Do a keyword research, find out what sells
• Find a store that let’s you become an affiliate and sell that product
• Build a website
• Get traffic to the website
• Make Money
• (optional) Spend your earnings online on Christmas gifts

The system is very simple. People are already wiling to buy, their credit card in their hands – all you have to do is get in front of them and show them where they could buy what they’re looking for.  I will now go into details to explain every aspect of the list I just posted above.

Do a Keyword/Product research.

You probably already know what’s hot and in demand (Kindle, iPads, iPhones, Wii…) although you can go to eBay.com and Amazon.com and see the list of their bestsellers/hot products. Select a few products that you would potentially like to promote. Now head over to Google Keyword Tool and type in some of these phrases – you will see ho many monthly searches they get.

Find an Affiliate Program

One of my all time favorites is Amazon. They let you become their affiliate and promote EVERYTHING that is sold within Amazon. What’s awesome that once you referred a client to amazon, you will get paid a commission on whatever he buys, not only the item you originally sent him(her) to. Let’s say you referred a customer to a 300$ Canon camera but instead he bought a cam for 800$ plus the tripod and case and extra battery and a second lens for a big total of  $1379… well you get the commission for the total sale. It’s awesome!

Build a Website

I really should do a separate post on how to build a great, professional website for very cheap even if you have no web designing skills. The truth is, owning your website is very practical because you have full control over it. However, for now we will build a “free website”. I would recommend Blogger.com or Weebly.com – both are good, user friendly and completely free! Google also like blogging platforms and they own Blogger – so go ahead and start building your site with blogger. If you have your hosting, I highly suggest getting a domain name and setting up a self-hosted wordpress blog.

Get Traffic For Free

Having a website is great and all but even the best looking website in the world is completely useless when no one visits it. But could you get the traffic to your site? There are multiple ways to get people buying from your site, here are a few of them;

• Share your site on twitter, facebook, stumbleupon and other social networks you might be using.
• Create videos about the products listed on your site and upload the video to Youtube and other video services.
• Go to Yahoo answers, find questions from people who are looking for X-mas gift ideas, give them some ideas and provide a gift to your site.
• Get your site ranking high in search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) – this will give you a constant flow of visitors every single day.

Getting traffic is probably one of the hardest yet most important things to do for your website. No traffic – no money. I have written a very popular post on this blog; Dominate Google’s First Page for Free and even included a video to make things easier to understand.

Make Money

Once you have a site with affiliate promotions and once you start getting visitors to this site – you will start making money. When I first started learning the whole affiliate marketing game, I only made about $300 in the first month but the income increased every single month. Less then a year after I started I was able to go on vacation to Europe with my [ex]girlfriend, everything paid for by affiliate marketing income, this should give you an idea how profitable this can be if you stick to it. There is no magic button to riches but effort pays off.

Christmas period is great to boost your sales but people shop online every single day of the year, 24 hours a day, from all over the world. You need to understand that YOU can simply help them find what they are looking for and get paid for it – how cool is that?

Alex

p.s. this is a repost from my Extra Paycheck Blog