Affiliate Marketing is really the easiest internet marketing method available, especially if you are new to internet marketing. Affiliate Marketing allows to generate a comfortable income online by simply promoting other people’s product.
Yes, you do not need your own product to make money online! But you do need to know how to locate profitable products to promote and target an eager crowd who is willing and able to buy the products you are promoting.
Basically, affiliate marketing refers to you being an affiliate (or marketer) of someone else’s product and you earn a commission when your promote and have successfully sold the product. You are acting very much like a middle man, except that the sales is done online.
Currently, there are many good and reliable third-party affiliate "agents" or network where they bring merchants and affiliates together. These third-party agents/ networks are popular as they greatly reduce the conflicts and disputes between merchants and affiliates with regards to the number of sales or the commissions to be paid. These are a few reliable and popular affilate agents/ networks that you can sign up and start with:
- Amazon (http://www.amazon.com) – has mainly physical products. This is a good place to start because of their branding and their wide network of merchants in there.
- Clickbank (http://www.clickbank.com) – has mainly electronic products like EBooks and softwares. This is a hot favorite with many because of its high commission payout (usually between 50% to 75%) but it is also highly competitive because of this.
- Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com) – has mainly physical products too and also a wide variety familiar merchants with them. The signing up process to be their affiliate is a little troublesome though.
After signing up as an affiliate with these agents/ networks, you may wonder how you are going to advertise the products that you are promoting. There are many ways in advertising online but we are going to focus on Pay-Per-Click marketing (or PPC as it is commonly known on the internet marketing realm).
PPC marketing is where you put up ads in search engines where these ads will appear when the keywords that you have purchased for the ads (which are relevant to the product you are promoting) are entered and search by a user. The best thing about PPC is that unlike traditional ads that you see in newspapers where you have to pay a fixed advertising cost regardless whether people read your ad or not, you only pay your advertising fees when people read and click on your ad.
We will cover more on Google AdWords and Pay-Per-Click marketing in subsequent modules. Here’s a summary of how this model works:
- How it works
- Find a product you want to promote
- Perform market research to identify potential target market
- Use pay-per-click advertising or other traffic generation methods to drive targeted visitors to your landing page or directly to merchant website
- Get paid whenever a visitor you refer makes a purchase or completes a required ‘call-to-action’
- Related Modules
- How To Setup An Amazon Associates Account
- Researching And Promoting An Amazon Product
- How To Sign Up Clickbank Account and Promote It’s Products
- How To Sign Up Commission Junction Account and Promote It’s Products
- How To Setup A New Google AdWords Account
- How To Use Google AdWords To Promote Your Website
- Using Article Marketing To Drive Traffic To Your Website
- D. Affiliate Marketing Blueprint
- G. How To Perform Direct Linking For Your Amazon AdWords Campaigns
- H. How To Determine Your Maximum CPC For AdWords
Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising To Drive Targeted Traffic – Google AdWords
Sign-up for AdWords here: http://adwords.google.com/select
How To Locate A Product To Sell
Locate A Product To Promote Via Affiliate Networks:
- ClickBank (http://www.clickbank.com)
- PayDotCom (http://www.paydotcom.com)
- ClixGalore (http://www.clixgalore.com)
- Amazon (http://www.amazon.com)
- Commission Junction (http://www.cj.com)
- LinkShare (http://www.linkshare.com)
- Performics (http://www.performics.com)