So we have heard about Affiliate marketing a lot and how it helps internet users to make money, but what is affiliate marketing actually? How does it work? Where does the money come from? How much can one earn? How tough is it? How is it done? Are there any criteria to become an affiliate marketer? And most importantly, can I make money too?
Patience people...I will try to address all these questions and more. Let’s start at the beginning...
Affiliate marketing, quite simply, is a way of making money online, where, as a publisher you are rewarded for helping a business promote its product(s) or service(s). These businesses want you as an affiliate marketer in closing a sale and they will reward you for each customer or visitor (differs from program to program) brought in by your own marketing effort. So the merchant will pay you for your referrals that generate a sale (Cost per Sale or CPS) or perform an action like sign-up, subscription, completion of a survey, etc (Cost per Action or CPA). It has different variations, but more or less its your marketing initiatives and your own network building (referrals) efforts that the concept is reliant upon.
Another spin to the concept of affiliate marketing is that the ‘merchant’ pays commission to its affiliates for sales and/or visitors (So that is where the money comes from). Commissions can either be direct commission as part of each sale or even multi-tier commissions for your referral network (similar to Multi Level Marketing or MLM of the real world). No...this is not selling, in the sense that you don’t have to ‘sell’ a product in the traditional sense of the term. Here you don’t knock on doors, but you knock on computers. Pre-selling is more like it. Publishers like you promote the merchants’ product/service by posting links to the Advertiser’s site on your own websites or blogs or through banner ads, text ads, e-mail campaigns, or any other media. You can also spread the word within your friends, family, colleagues, etc. and increase referrals. J
How much can one earn? There are loads of money to be made waiting for you to tap the right opportunity and with the right approach. There is no limit to how much you can earn....from Zero to Thousands! Technically, all sales / activities are tracked through unique links that affiliates are provided with and which they have to use to promote the affiliate program. So don’t you worry. No one else will enjoy the fruits for your efforts.
Is it tough? Well...depends on a lot of factors like the working model of the affiliate program, on the product/service, on your efforts. In general, multi-level marketing based affiliate programs are easier for beginners to start earning money (because they typically different methods and modes of earning money where you can earn either/both through your own actions and/or through referrals) than trying to earn direct sales commissions. Its not very tough if you get the hang of it and put in some effort.
Promotion can be organic (with the people you know or your existing network) or inorganic (with an audience that you don’t know personally or outside your existing network). There are various ways of promoting through each of these two methods. For organic promotion you can use word of mouth, involve some friends who in turn refer their own friends and so on, use your facebook/twitter/orkut/... friend lists, your mail contact list, etc. For inorganic it can be by planting the link in different places on the web like discussion boards and forums, writing articles, advertising, etc.
As to who can be an ‘Affiliate Marketer’...answer is ANYONE...and yes! That includes YOU too. You just need to be comfortable with internet basics. Spend some time on the internet regularly. Build a good friends/followers network on social networking sites. Discuss with friends and like minded people you come in contact with. With persistence you can make it work and earn money with affiliate marketing.
For demonstration purpose I have created two affiliate marketing instances with one of the more popular Affiliate marketing programs, Clickbank (we will discuss more about Clickbank later). You can click on the links and see what an actual affiliate program works. The products are packages/material on affiliate marketing.
** Note: These are actual affiliate links. Going ahead with the purchase of the items is solely the viewers' wish and is not mandatory in context of this blog post. Intention of this blog post is not to promote the individual products but to demonstrate the concept of the topic.
We will be discussing more on affiliate marketing in subsequent posts when we discuss on related concepts, tips, do’s and don’ts of affiliate marketing, etc. and as when start working on actual individual affiliate programs. I will review quite a few of them...some pure affiliate programs and some hybrid. If you have any questions please feel free to comment and discuss. Also feel free to discuss on others’ questions also and share your thoughts. I will also try my best to address your queries.
( I believe that you now have a good idea about Affiliate marketing after reading through this post. But if you still want info on Affiliate marketing and the different types of affiliate websites check out the article on Wikipedia by clicking here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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