subject: Affiliate Marketing - What Is It? And How Can You Make Money Online From It? [print this page] Affiliate marketing is just selling other peoples stuff for a commission. You refer people to a product via your affiliate link (so the sale is tracked back to you) and you earn a set commission for that sale.
Affiliate marketing is the best way for newbies and seasoned internet marketers to make money online without having their own product.
Even people making millions online with their own products, still do affiliate marketing to increase their revenue because it is very lucrative.
Two terms you may have heard in affiliate marketing are affiliates and merchants. Affiliates mean you and i who promote someone elses product. Merchant is the product owner whose product we promote.
Why promote other peoples stuff?
Imagine how long it would take to research, create and market your own product. If you know what you are doing then you can do well with your own product as many people have.
But, imagine if you are just starting out. The most important thing to consider is whether a product will sell. If you promote someone elses product all you have to do is get traffic to the offer and make the sales. The product owner has already researched and created the product along with the web site.
How do you make money online from affiliate marketing?
You can break this down into two steps costs and revenue. Your costs are just your marketing costs (traffic costs). For example, how much did you spend on Pay-Per-Click advertising, or on article writing? (if you didnt write the articles yourself).
Your revenue is just your affiliate earnings. The number of sales you made as an affiliate.
The money you make is the difference between these two costs. But is it really that simple?
It does take persistence and testing different offers and traffic generation methods to make money as an affiliate. It also helps to start off in the right way to avoid some of the trial and error.
What is the best way to get started in affiliate marketing?
There are many affiliate marketing networks that offer affiliate programs that you can join. The affiliate network acts as a middleman between the affiliates (me and you) and the merchants.
I would recommend you start with ClickBank.com. Why? They have high converting offers in many lucrative niches. They are also to work with and easy to get set up with. Just go to their site, sign up and you can get your first product to promote in as little as 5 minutes.
Clickbank is also very popular with many successful internet marketers because it is where you can make a lot of money.
What is the best way to generate traffic?
To start off with i would recommend article marketing. You can also get articles written for you if you dont want to write or dont have the time to write (do a search for article writing in Google).
Article marketing gets you free traffic to your blog (after any initial costs are covered). It does take some work but it is well worth it in the long run. You can send your traffic from articles to a blog where you can also use the same articles as content. This blog is also where you promote products as an affiliate.
