What is affiliate marketing? In short, you advertise a product or service to the visitors of your website. Every time they purchase the service or product, the merchant will pay you a commission. The advantage for merchant is that he makes more sales than he could do on his own. You, as an affiliate marketer have the advantage of earning money without having to worry about product creation, inventory etc.
If you have already created a website earlier, you can just put a links to the merchant's site, or a banner ad or even a review of the product or service. But you could also design a new site from scratch especially to promote one product. As long as you would receive more money from commissions than it costs to create or run your website, you're doing fine.
How do you get paid?
This depends mainly on the merchant. Some merchants choose to use an existing billing and marketing solution such as Clickbank or Commission Junction. Other merchants choose to completely build their own affiliate program. Anyway, in almost every case, a special type of software will be used to assign a special link to each affiliate. The affiliate marketer has to use when he promotes the product because that's how this software can track the sales of every marketer. The commissions are periodically paid by the merchant. Some still pay by sending a check, others use PayPal for payment or another system.
How to choose products or services to promote
The two factors that have the most influence on your income are:
1. the size of the commission you earn
2. how well the product or service you promote, sells
I don't have to tell you that the selection of which program you will promote is vital and that you need to devote a lot of attention to it.
You can compare this choice to picking stocks to invest in. One of the basic rules in investing in the stock market is that you should always entirely comprehend what the company is doing. It's important that you are familiar with the products or service. Ideally, you have personally used the product or service yourself and you can be a living testimonial of the quality of the company's products. Besides, how are you going to write a review anyway? It will also ease the task of writing ads or emails to your list.
What also helps in the selection process is to limit yourself to only products that you are not embarrassed to promote. You're already promoting to your friends and relatives if you've gone to a really good restaurant or if you've seen a really cool movie. You do even if the owner doesn't pay you a commission. So why should you promote products that you'll feel comfortable recommending to your family and friends if they would ask you about it? Remember there are more products sold online than you have time to promote.
Another interesting factor is if the programs offers tools to ease the life of their affiliates when they are promoting. What we mean by that are things like banners, text links, and of course graphics, in short: things that you can directly put on your web site. Off course you're not obliged to use them; you can also model your own to it.
But I guess you will look the most to the commission rates, won't you? After all, that's why we're in business. I would advice you to look for a minimum commission rate of 50%. This is certainly possible with products in digital format such as E-books for instance. Last but not least, pick programs or services that pay commission on multiple levels if it's possible. This is also known as multi-tier. This means that if one of your website visitors purchases the product through your link and this visitor is so pleased with the product that he decides to become an affiliate himself, you still get a commission of the sales that he now makes a sale. In the beginning it won't change a lot, but believe me, in the long term, it surely make a huge difference. - 15275
If you have already created a website earlier, you can just put a links to the merchant's site, or a banner ad or even a review of the product or service. But you could also design a new site from scratch especially to promote one product. As long as you would receive more money from commissions than it costs to create or run your website, you're doing fine.
How do you get paid?
This depends mainly on the merchant. Some merchants choose to use an existing billing and marketing solution such as Clickbank or Commission Junction. Other merchants choose to completely build their own affiliate program. Anyway, in almost every case, a special type of software will be used to assign a special link to each affiliate. The affiliate marketer has to use when he promotes the product because that's how this software can track the sales of every marketer. The commissions are periodically paid by the merchant. Some still pay by sending a check, others use PayPal for payment or another system.
How to choose products or services to promote
The two factors that have the most influence on your income are:
1. the size of the commission you earn
2. how well the product or service you promote, sells
I don't have to tell you that the selection of which program you will promote is vital and that you need to devote a lot of attention to it.
You can compare this choice to picking stocks to invest in. One of the basic rules in investing in the stock market is that you should always entirely comprehend what the company is doing. It's important that you are familiar with the products or service. Ideally, you have personally used the product or service yourself and you can be a living testimonial of the quality of the company's products. Besides, how are you going to write a review anyway? It will also ease the task of writing ads or emails to your list.
What also helps in the selection process is to limit yourself to only products that you are not embarrassed to promote. You're already promoting to your friends and relatives if you've gone to a really good restaurant or if you've seen a really cool movie. You do even if the owner doesn't pay you a commission. So why should you promote products that you'll feel comfortable recommending to your family and friends if they would ask you about it? Remember there are more products sold online than you have time to promote.
Another interesting factor is if the programs offers tools to ease the life of their affiliates when they are promoting. What we mean by that are things like banners, text links, and of course graphics, in short: things that you can directly put on your web site. Off course you're not obliged to use them; you can also model your own to it.
But I guess you will look the most to the commission rates, won't you? After all, that's why we're in business. I would advice you to look for a minimum commission rate of 50%. This is certainly possible with products in digital format such as E-books for instance. Last but not least, pick programs or services that pay commission on multiple levels if it's possible. This is also known as multi-tier. This means that if one of your website visitors purchases the product through your link and this visitor is so pleased with the product that he decides to become an affiliate himself, you still get a commission of the sales that he now makes a sale. In the beginning it won't change a lot, but believe me, in the long term, it surely make a huge difference. - 15275
About the Author:
Fact: 90% of all affiliates never make money. Are you fed up with working hard and earning nothing? Visit my blog and Download Affiliate Marketing Pitfalls to Avoid and don't be another sucker any more! It's FREE so what are you still waiting for?
