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.
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