The ABC's Of Affiliate Marketing
Do you understand affiliate marketing? Many internet marketers do and
many more join programs as an affiliate and never make any money. They would
have to be classified as people who do not understand what it is. Let's run
through the ABC's of affiliate marketing and what you must have to make
money doing it.
Affiliate marketing is a way for merchants to sell their products. As an
affiliate you get paid to sell stuff for them. Mostly it is done online, but
you could use the internet to complement your offline sales as well. The
products that are sold include advertising clicks, leads, physical products,
information products, services, memberships, and almost anything a person
would want to buy. Companies will let you sign up as an affiliate to sell
their products. When you make a sale you earn a commission. It could be a
set rate or a percentage as explained in the affiliate agreement.
We are talking about being able to make some pretty serious money. There are
people who earn 6 figure income and quit their jobs just by selling other
people's products. This can be done via a blog, email marketing, your
website, newsletters, business cards, classified and solo ads, and so on.
Driving traffic to a blog or website is the most common. One problem many
people make is that they use the company provided replicated website and try
to make sales using it. The problem with that is your site looks just like
several thousand other affiliates. It is to your advantage to get your own
website or blog and use it whenever you can.
Many times a person decides to become an affiliate, but they do not know
what to sell. This is understandable as there are millions of products to
choose from. My advice is to start with a product or niche market that you
enjoy or know something about. The most successful affiliates brand
themselves as experts on what they sell. You can do that too and it is going
to be easier to become an expert on something you already are familiar with.
Along those same lines the best affiliate marketers own the products they
sell. Think how much more convincing it is to sell something you can give a
first hand testimonial on.
Here is another basic step that many affiliate miss. Get your own domain
name. Many affiliate urls are long and bulky and do not look professional.
You can buy a domain name for one year for about $10. When you pick one try
and get some of the keywords your product is about in the name. If you are
selling baseball bats choose something like best-baseball-bats-around or
something like that. The dot com version of a domain name is still the best
way to go if you can, but if you want a certain word and it is available in
dot net, dot biz, or others then go ahead and buy it.
Hosting for your website or blog is the next step in getting ready to make
money as an affiliate. This is not an area to save a few pennies. Your
income depends on your website being live and ready when someone wants to
see it. Hosting that is down a lot is bad for your business. Take your time
and get a few references here. Do it right one time and your business will
thank you later. Do you know how to build a website? Most people do not and
for that reason you may want to hire someone to do it for you. Another
popular thing is to start a blog and use it as your website. This is great
because they are easy to set up and all you have to do is be able to type
and click on buttons to create a web page with your blog post.
Blogger.com can be hosted by Google for
you, or a good platform kike WordPress can be hosted by you and set up for
less than $50 by a quality blog builder.
Getting traffic to your site is the last step and you will want to research
as many free or nearly free advertising methods you can. This would include
blogging, article writing, social networking, and others.
This is the ABC's of affiliate marketing. It will take some time to put what
you learn into practice, but the key is to get started and learn as you go.
