Affiliate Marketing

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.

The complete affiliate marketing handbook

Superman Affiliate

** 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/Affiliate_marketing)

Paid to Read, Paid to Surf

Paid to Read / Receive programs are similar to Paid to Click programs. Paid to receive mails and paid to receive sms’s are again ultimately advertisements delivered through different media to the end customer. PTR websites act as the go-between to make this happen.

In this kind of programs you will have to register your email ID and/or cellphone number with the website and they will then start sending you the mails and sms’s. In case of paid to receive / read mails programs, you have to click on the links provided in the mails that you receive from these PTR websites. Some programs deliver the links / ads to your mail inbox, some require you to log in to your account on their website where they provide an inbox, and you have to do the needful from this inbox within the PTR website login. Some of these programs even ask whether they can send you surveys by mail (for which you get paid more to respond), what are your interest areas, etc. to customize their response as per your preferences. Similarly Paid to read / Receive sms’s programs are also customized as per your preferences by incorporating your responses during sign up like – whether you are willing to receive voice calls for surveys / promotional offers, what time period of the day you want to receive sms’s, what are your interest areas, etc.

PTR programs pay anywhere between 25 paise to Re. 1 per mail / sms (basic). Apart from that there are some Paid to Subscribe offers that come along where you have to subscribe to the advertisers’ offerings and you will be paid more than a basic mail / sms. That will depend whether you want to go ahead and subscribe or not. As a thumb rule, the basic amount is anyways credited, to your account when you click on the link. Also allow you to take up affiliate memberships and bring in referrals. They will pay you for the activities of your referral members.

We will look into some of the websites that have sound PTR programs. So keep visiting.

Paid to surf: Since we are into discussing a similar topic, let’s look into Paid to Surf programs also.

Pay to Surf websites pay you for spending time on the internet and run a computer program as you do so. This computer program can be in the form of a plug-in to your web browser, a toolbar, or a software that runs in the background. Advertisers' banner ads are then displayed while the member was browsing the web. Since the computer program tracks websites that the user visits, the pay to surf company is able to deliver targeted ads for their advertisers. Advertisers pay the pay to surf company a small amount (typically US$0.50) for every hour of a member's surfing.

Members are usually given a minimum requirement on the amount of time per day / week / month for which they would be paid to surf. Typically it would vary from 20 hours to 75 hours per month. Also, again pay-to-surf companies pay their members for each new user referred to the company (typically US$0.05 - US$0.10 per recruit). Thus, it is profitable for a member to garner as many referrals as possible.

I have spent some time doing some knowledge gathering about PTS programs. I have some reservations with these models of online money earning methods though and I have not yet tried out PTS programs. But I intend to do some more research on this and check out some renowned ones in some time. I will keep you posted.

Paid To Click (PTC)

Paid to Click is an online business model that works by getting online traffic from people who want to work from home and earn money on the internet. Paid to Click programs are ones in which you have to click on links or banners on the site (these links are mostly ads), then view the sites that pop up with each banner clicked. Everytime you click on these links or banners, you get paid a certain amount of money depending on the website you are on. There might be a countdown timer which you will have to wait out before closing the window.In addition, most PTC websites offer a commission to its members for signing up new members (similar to many affiliate programs online, which we will be discussing in future posts). This is called a 'referral'. Referrals help you multiply your earnings from PTC programs. Its an easy way to earn money on the internet if you spend spend some time on the internet regularly anyways.

Paid to Click websites thus, basically deliver advertisements to consumers, the advertiser pays for displaying ads on the PTC website, and a part of this payment goes to the viewer when he views the advertisement.

Some websites pay you less than a cent, some pay you more. Some have lots of ads and links that you can click, some have fewer. Some of these websites offer more ads and links to paid members than to free members. To become a paid member you have to pay some money and 'upgrade'.

But there have been online scams too in the guise of PTC programs. Some websites vanish after making money from ads, upgrades and direct referral sales. Some websites simply go down owing to unsustainable business models. We need to be careful and steer clear of these PTC websites.As a thumb rule therefore, I prefer free PTC websites. As you use the program for some time you will get more idea about the website and then can decide whether to upgrade or not. We will shortly be reviewing a few of the Paid to Click websites.