What Is Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people's (or company's) products. You find a product you like, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.
Affiliate marketing can provide you with a steady flow of income. What you can earn depends on how successful you are in converting your audience into buyers and service subscribers. It is cost-effective and you can work from any place in the world.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Although affiliate marketing doesn’t require a fortune and years of experience to get started, you shouldn’t expect great results overnight. It is very competitive and you need to spend some time choosing products, making sure that they meet market needs, learning how to promote them, and how to measure their success.
Create a Website Or Blog
To be an affiliate marketer, you must have a site on which to place links to the products or services you recommend. There are many inexpensive website services such as Smartweb and Hostgator. It's also easy to set up a free blog through services such as Google's Blogger blog network.
Decide Your Product Niche
Affiliate marketers help companies and entrepreneurs sell everything from jewelry and cell phones to website services and how-to e-books. Choose an area you're familiar with or one you're enthusiastic about learning. You'll be more likely to do the work and less likely to get bored before the money starts rolling in.
Your Affiliate Site content
There are two main approaches or business models to choose from when setting up an affiliate marketing site:
- Resource Sites These sites are focused on offering lots of how-to articles and posts and then providing affiliate links or banner ads to click for more details. Frequently adding fresh related content is vital because it gives people a reason to return to your site--and click some of your money-making links.
- Review Sites You've tried the products in your niche, now you write them up and rate them to help your site visitors decide what to buy. For each product you review, you provide a link or banner ad that clicks through for sales on your merchant partner's site. Less frequent content updates are necessary--just tweak your site about once a week to let the search engines know your site's still alive, and always try to build links.
Find Affiliate programs to promote
Once you have a category of products selected, you need to choose affiliate programs. You can either sign up for affiliate networks or choose independent programs run by the merchants. Don’t choose advertisers based solely on the highest commission. There are a couple of important factors like,
- Is this program free to join and do you have to be a customer?
- Does the merchant look reliable? You don’t want to promote a business that probably won’t be on the market in a couple of months.
- Think about the payout. Do you prefer high one-time commission or do you prefer making money on each payment your customers make? When you promote SaaS products, a lifetime recurring commission may seem to be much more attractive in the long term. Do similar brands offer similar percentages? As mentioned before, don’t fall for a very high commission and get–rich–quick promise.
