Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing 101 – Affiliate Marketing is the Easiest Way to Make Money Online

by Peter Nguyen · 1 comment

Affiliate Marketing has proven to be a very successful business model for most people getting started in the online business. Some top affiliate marketers are easily making 6 figures and 7 figures income a year!

There are thousands of products you can promote, from software, books, skin care products, electronics, and on and on… You have unlimited choices of products to choose from!

The advantages of being an affiliate marketer are that you don’t have to carry inventory of products, process the orders, or ship the products. You have minimal risk!

How Affiliate Marketing Works

As an affiliate, your job is to presell the products by writing a review on your website or blog and sending the visitors from your websites/blogs to the merchants’ websites.
If the visitor make a purchase through your affiliate link, you get a commission. Commission can range from 10% to 50% of the product sales price. It’s as simple as that!

Here’s how it works. When you sign up with a merchant as an affiliate, you are given a link with a unique ID code to use in your promotion (i.e. http://amazon.com?affid=34829).  You can place the link anywhere in your website/blog or in your newsletter and emails.

Your job is to drive traffic to your website/blog. When a visitor reads an article or a review on your site about the product that you are promoting and click on the link, the visitor is sent to the merchant’s site. If the visitor makes a purchase, you will be given a commission by the merchant. Commission can be anywhere from $5 – $100s.

How does the merchant know that the visitor arrives at their site through your link? There are special tracking applications that allow merchants to track where the visitors come from.

So, if a visitor is directed to a merchant’s site through your referral link, and if the visitor makes a purchase, the tracking software will be able to track that transaction and credit you with a commission accordingly.

Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a great online business gig. Here are the fabulous benefits of doing affiliate marketing:

  • You don’t have to carry inventory of products.
  • You don’t have to do order processing and shipping of products!
  • You don’t have to answer phones or handle customer complaints!
  • You can work anytime and anywhere.
  • You can earn lots of money! Some affiliate marketers earn a full time income with a few hours of work a day.

Where to find merchants

Once you decided on a theme (i.e. acne, weightloss, anti-aging, dating, dog training, electronics, etc) for your site, you can start finding products to promote. The best ways to find merchants is through affiliate networks.

Affiliate networks are companies that manage the affiliate programs for the merchants. They provide tracking statistics, marketing materials, and issue commission checks.

It is quite easy to get accepted by the affiliate networks, although some require you to have your own website/blog. Here are some popular affiliate networks you can join:

  • Clickbank.com – Clickbank.com distributes mainly digital products (ebooks, softwares, and audio/video products). You can earn lots of money promoting e-books and software products from Clickbank as the commissions are quite high.
  • www.cj.com – One of the most popular affiliate networks with all kind of products for you to promote. List of products include beauty, health, financial services, electronics, etc.
  • Shareasale.com – Another big affiliate network with all sorts of products to promote. Shareasale also has one of the best tracking technologies that provides you with great information on your marketing efforts.
  • Linkshare.com
  • Markethealth.com – Markethealth distributes mainly health and beauty related products. So if you are in the beauty and health niche, this is a good place to find products to promote.
  • Amazon.com – Amazon’s commission payout is on the low end, but you have a huge selections of products to promote.

In addition to the affiliate networks above, if you find a merchant that you like to represent, you can apply for the affiliate program directly on the merchant’s website. Just look for a link that says “affiliate program.”

How to determine which products to promote

Below are some guidelines on choosing the best merchants and products to promote:

  • Promote promotes that fit with the theme of your site. Don’t try to promote GPS systems if your site is about skin care.
  • Is the product good? You may want to do research, read reviews and blogs to find out whether the product is any good. Additionally, you may want to try the products out yourself.
  • Check out the website and sales page of the merchant. Does it look professional and trustworthy? Does it employ best e-commerce practices? Is it convincing?
  • Represent merchants that pay high commissions. 15% should be the minimum. You’re putting in the same amount of work so why would you want to represent a merchant that pays small commission?
  • Is the product commercially viable – One sign that the product has commercial viability is the number of advertisements for the product. If you see more people advertising on Google or other ad networks for the product, it means that the product is selling well or is profitable. Otherwise, people wouldn’t spend advertising money on it.

How to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing

To succeed in Affiliate marketing, follow the strategies below:

  • The product you are promoting should be related to the theme of your site.
  • Provide useful and informative content about the products. Your job is to presell rather than trying to sell. Of course if you use the products and have personal experiences with the products, you could write a more compelling reviews of the products. You can read reviews on Amazon.com for the products you are promoting and use that as reference for your own review and article.
  • Include pictures of the product.
  • Do not try lie or try to mislead your visitors. In fact, recent FTC rules prohibit anyone from using misleading testimonials or other unethical and misleading marketing ploys. FTC also states that you must disclose that you are getting compensated for products you are promoting. Although these are just guidelines from the FTC and noone knows how it is going to be enforced, it’s better for you to play it safe and stick to honest marketing strategies. You may want to include a section in your website that explains that you may be compensated financially for the products that you recommend on your website/blog.

Start Your Affiliate Marketing Blog Now

The easiest way to get started with affiliate marketing is to first create and setup your blog. Check out the Socrates wordpress theme. It’s a WordPress theme that allows you to quickly and easily setup your blog to do affiliate marketing.

Read Reviews of Socrates WordPress Theme Now!

How to Make Tons of Money Promoting Ebooks and Softwares

by Peter Nguyen · 0 comments

Do you know which products have the highest margin?

Simply, Ebooks and Softwares have the highest gross margin of any products!  The reason you can make so much money selling Ebooks and Softwares are not the cost is practically zero!

So anything that you sell is just pure profits. For this reason, promoting Ebooks and Softwares as an affiliate is a very lucrative way of making quick money online.

If you haven’t already heard of Clickbank, it’s the largest marketplace for ebooks and softwares. Here’s the outline of the steps to make money with Clickbank products:

  1. Go to Clickbank.com and sign up for an account
  2. Select a few Clickbank products from the same niche to promote
  3. Get your linking Codes
  4. Create your website around your niche
  5. Write an article related to your niche and embed the linking codes in the article.
  6. Drive traffic to your webpage
  7. Watch money rolling in to your account

Alright, let’s dive into each step above.

Step 1 – Go to clickbank.com and sign up for an account

Click the “sign up” buttom on the top and begin your sign up process. Clickbank will ask you for an account nickname. This is the code that Clickbank use to track your sales.

Step 2 – Select a few Clickbank products from the same niche to promote

Next, click on the “marketplace” link at the top and use the “advanced search” feature to look for products in your niche. You should target a niche that you are familiar with and are passionate about. It just makes your job easier and more fun promoting a niche that you are passionate about.


Clickbank marketplace products search

Searching for products in Clickbank


The Clickbank Marketplace has thousands of products for you to choose from. You can search based on the category and subcategory that you select. You can also sort search results based on sales, popularity, gravity, etc.

Before you finalize your selection, you may want to check out their webpage and read the sales letter. Does it look professional and convincing? You can also email the author and ask for a complimentary copy for you to review to make sure it’s a high quality product.

Step 3 – Get Your Linking Codes

Now that you found the product you want to promote, click on the “promote” button. Enter in your account nick name in the box and then click on “create” to create your link code.

This is the link code that you embed in your webpage article to promote the product that you selected. Whenever someone click on this link code, Clickbank tracking software knows that it is coming from you. And if that person make a purchase, you will get credited with a commission. How sweet huh?


click bank promotion button

Click Bank Promotion Button


Step 4 – Create your website around your niche

Alright, now that you have identified your niche and selected the products you want to promote, it’s time for you to build your website. You don’t need to create a fancy website. In fact, a simple website with compelling content is usually the best option. I have created a previous post which shows you the best practices of building a website.

Check out my post on building website tips

Write an article related to your niche and embed the linking codes in the article.

Once your website is designed and built, you should write a compelling article which provide useful information to your users. You can also do a comparison of different products and highlight the strengths/weaknesses of each product. You will then invite them to learn more by checking out the Ebook or software that you are promoting.

Step 5 – Drive traffic to your webpage

Now comes the most challenging part – driving traffic to your site. If you don’t have traffic to your site, you will not be able to make any money. Simple as that. Therefore, learning to drive traffic to your site is one of the most challenging aspect of online marketing.

Here are the different methods of driving traffic to your site:

  • Pay Per Click Advertising - Using pay per click advertising is the quickest method of driving traffic to your site. You can use combination of Google Adwords, Yahoo, and Bing. Google Adwords is the most popular though. If you are new to PPC, i highly suggest you to take up some training on PPC before you mess around with it. You can quickly lost a lot of money if you don’t know how to use it properly.
  • Participate in forums – There are lots of discussion forums on the web on many topics. Forum marketing has been a classic Internet marketing method for years. It definitely works. But you must be careful to not come across as a spammer. Take your time and begin by making some contributions first before you start promoting.
  • Facebook & Myspace – If you have a facebook, MySpace or any other social media accounts, you should definitely leverage it to promote your website.
  • Search Engine Optimization - By properly optimizing your site for Google and other search engines, you webpage may come up high on the search engines such as Google when someone  search for a keyword related to your niche. SEO is an important skill and you should definitely read books on it to develop your SEO skills.

Step 7 – Watch The Money Roll In

If you do a good job of implementing step 1 – step 6 above, the money will start rolling in to your Clickbank Account. I know that there are people out there making over $10K/month promoting clickbank products. It’s hard work, but it can be done!

Want a step by step blueprint?

Above are the steps that you can follow to make money with Clickbank right away. However, if you are new and need a little handholding, help is here.

You can check out the Clickbank Cash Supreme, an online training course for making money with Clickbank products.

Clickbank Cash Supreme gives you a step by step blueprint and over 15 training videos. This is a fantastic training system for beginner as well as advanced online marketer.

Click Here NOW to Check Out ClickBank Cash Supreme

To your success,

Peter N