subject: Make Money With Affiliate Marketing In Today's World [print this page] In today's world with everyone that is somebody and something, they are starting websites and blogs. With these blogs and websites, people have the ability to make money with affiliate marketing. Now you may or may not know much about affiliate marketing so I will touch on a few basics and then a few more advanced topics in this article.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing id a marketing practice in which a business rewards affiliates for each visitor or customer obtained by the affiliates marketing efforts. An example would be: Reward sites that reward users with cash or gifts for performing a specific task.
In affiliate marketing there are four key players that allow a successful transaction to occur: the merchant, the network, the publisher (you and I as affiliates) and the customer. Since the introduction of affiliate marketing in 1994 and the abundance to make money, and a lot of it; there have been additions to the key players. Additions like management agencies, super affiliates, and third party vendors.
How to really market
With an online presence it has become really quite easy to make money in affiliate marketing. If you are considering or already are an online internet marketer, much of what an internet marketer already does is much the same. As an internet marketer you use such tools as article marketing (which this is a good example), email marketing, Pay per Click, blogging and other organic material. In affiliate marketing people often forget one secret ingredient, to drive traffic from one site to another.
What are the risks?
Affiliate marketing is one of the safest ways to make money online because there is practically no scamming or fraud. I have known many individuals that rely totally on their affiliate marketing to produce their 5 figure months. Let me break it down for you so you really understand this awesome opportunity.
It all starts with a successful company that has a product or service to offer. Many companies now are relying on you and I to become affiliates because there is no cost or risk for them, it's also more advertising for them. If a company has a stellar product and puts it on their website and tries to promote it, that means one company and one website with that one product. This company has to work very hard to get traffic to their website; they could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote with little or no return. When you become an affiliate marketer, you then need to have a website or a blog that you can help promote this product. Once a customer or lead is generated; depending on the company; a commission is paid. Consider if as a company you had 150,000 people selling your products; that would be awesome, right?
Are there differences?
This is a very good question that many people do not do their due diligence and investigate before you sign up as an affiliate. I will cover two different options here because the third one was really diminished due to unethical behaviors.
Cost Per Lead - this means for every lead that you generate through your site to the merchant, you obtain a commission.. A lead is considered any personal information that they may submit for the purpose to solicit goods or services.
Here is a good example: Let's say a company is offering a three disk DVD affiliate marketing course for a retail price of 249.99 and after costs they stand to make a profit of 149.99. Based on sales and history they know that they historically sell 6 courses out of every 10 people that look at them. With this knowledge, the merchant knows that they can offer their affiliates a "lead" commission of 20.00.
The affiliate really likes this opportunity because all he or she has to do produce leads not sell. So if an affiliate produces 100 leads a month, they just banked 2000.00. As you can see the merchant really wins because they stand to sell 60 courses just through this one affiliate.
Cost per Sale - with cost per sale it is exactly as it sounds. As an affiliate marketer, for every sale that they make they obtain a commission from the merchant. With this option being used 80 percent of the time in the affiliate marketing industry it can be quite lucrative. In cost per sale, you as an affiliate could generate 100 leads and make zero commissions or but sell two products and make a lot more money.
With cost per sale you could become affiliates with some very high end merchant. With these high end merchants there is normally an introduction fee, but if you are a good marketer you will see the rewards beyond your wildest dreams.
Common mistakes made...
Ah, got you. You thought I was going to let the cat out of the bag and go into what common mistakes that affiliate marketers make. I will go into this in much depth in my next articles called Affiliate Marketers and their Common Mistakes.
