subject: It Really Is Possible To Make Money As An Affiliate Marketer [print this page] What is Affiliate Marketing? What is Affiliate Marketing?
A popular method of promoting web businesses is affiliate marketing. An affiliate marketer is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder's fees for the introduction of new clients to a business.
Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.
From the merchant's viewpoint, the best thing about affiliate marketing is that no payment is due until a sale is made. Some e-commerce vendors use third party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates and some e-commerce sites run their own affiliate programs.
Many businesses owe much of their growth and success to this marketing technique.
Definition
According to The World's Glossary of Internet Terms, Affiliate Marketer is defined as: "A business relationship with a merchant or other service provider who allows you to link to that business. When a visitor clicks on the link at your site and subsequently makes a purchase from the merchant, you receive a commission based on the amount of the sale, a referral fee or a pay for click fee."
This is a simple, straight-forward agreement between a merchant and a marketing partner.
Budding aff marketers run into a problem when they try to reverse the success process. Instead of starting at the beginning, they try to start at the end. Making money is the end of the process.
The beginning of the process is education and there are several steps in between. To many people who are just getting started in aff marketing, fail to take the steps necessary to get to the end of the process and actually make money.
Step #1: Educate yourself. This is the key, opening the door of opportunity. It's also the common thread connecting successful affiliate marketers. Education lays the foundation, the building blocks to success.
Start by gathering the best information you can find about aff marketing and absorbing it.
Step #2: Turn that information into usable knowledge. Even the best information remains kind of worthless, however, until after you discover how to use it, how to make it serve your purpose.
Step #3: Start applying the knowledge, take action, start building your affiliate business. Will you make mistakes even though you've invested all that time educating yourself? Yes, you most likely will make mistakes.
Step #4: Test and tweak, test and tweak. This one never ends. And it's often the dividing line between succeeding and failing. Attention to small details often returns big rewards.
Following these steps will define you as a successful affiliate marketer.
