What is Affiliate Marketing?

 

Affiliate marketing basically means selling other people’s products for a commission online. Affiliate marketing is similar to offline sales where sales people earn a commission for selling a product; the difference is that all selling is conducted online.

As an affiliate marketer you will research and find products to promote on your website. Each time you make a sale through your affiliate link you will earn a portion of that sale. The commissions can vary from as low as 7% to a generous 50%.

The sales are tracked through your unique affiliate ID which is assigned to you at the time you sign up for a specific affiliate program. Your unique affiliate ID is tracked and each time a sale is made through your link it is recorded. A good affiliate program will give you plenty of tools for promoting their products as well as a comprehensive member’s area where you can track your affiliate sales and commissions.

Affiliate marketing is a good way to get started online. You can be set up and ready to go within a few days and there is no need to spend any time creating your own products or purchasing inventory. You are simply promoting other people’s products, which means the vendor is actually responsible for order fulfilment, customer service and anything else related to the sale – you simply refer the sale to them and get paid for doing so.

For example if you have a love of cooking, you can create a website around cooking related topics and include tips, recipes, and reviews of all your favorite cooking gadgets. You can then find affiliate programs online and promote some of those products on your website. You can find programs by doing a search under your chosen topic such as “cooking” and adding the words “affiliate program” to that term.
You can also find affiliate programs at places like CJ.com.

Although affiliate marketing is an easy way to get started online, there is a little more to it than just throwing up a few links and banners and waiting for the affiliate check to arrive. A good affiliate marketer knows it takes time and effort to make sales.

A good way to do this is by providing quality information on your website and only linking to affiliate products where appropriate. Another good tip is to review the products you promote so that you can accurately describe all the features – good and bad. Your customers will appreciate honest feedback and will be more likely to buy from you if you give them good quality information and honest reviews.

Wealthy Affiliate is one of the best place to learn the in’s and out’s of affiliate marketing, it covers all the different types of marketing and if you have questions or need advice you will find all the help you need in the forum. Take A look Here for youself. 

How To Choose The Right Affiliate Programs

 

There are a lot of affiliate programs out there to choose from. It’s often difficult to know which are the best programs to promote. Here are a few tips to help you find the best affiliate programs:

Life-time cookies – A really good affiliate program will offer life-time cookies. Unfortunately, some shopping cart systems don’t allow the vendors this feature, which isn’t so great for you – the affiliate. A life-time cookie means that you will get paid for referring a customer who makes a purchase through your affiliate link even if they buy at any point in the future.

When looking for a good program, try to lookout for those which offer life-time cookies or at least a minimum of a year. Remember sometimes it takes customers months before actually making a purchase.

Training and Customer Service – A good program will provide training tools and resources for their affiliates. Ideally, they should have a member’s area where you can log in and grab promotional materials, your links and check your stats and commissions.

Good communication is also important. If you email an affiliate program with a question and don’t hear back from them or hear back from them 2 weeks later, what will it be like if you ever have an issue with payments or other important question? A good affiliate program will respond to your questions in a timely manner. By the same token, a good affiliate will make sure they read all the provided materials provided on the website before contacting the program.

Sales Pages that Convert – Before promoting a specific product, have a look at their sales page. Does it look like it will convert into sales? If a sales page is sloppy, has grammar and spelling mistakes, or just looks unprofessional, you may not make too many sales – no matter how good the product is.

Now that you know some of the things you should look for in a good program, here are a few things you should be careful of!

Advertisements and Google Adsense – If you’re promoting an ebook and sending customers to a sales page, be weary of sales pages with Google ads or other types of advertisement on the sales page. If you’re working hard to send traffic to that page, it’s not fair that your traffic will be used to make someone else money through ads (without you getting paid anything in return).

If you see a sales page with ads on the page, I say stay away. You work hard as an affiliate and you don’t want to waste your traffic.

High Sales Minimum – Watch out for programs who ask you to sell a certain amount before being paid. For example if the commissions on a $20 eBook are 10% (that’s $2 per sale) and they ask you to accumulate a minimum of $200 dollars in commissions before they send you payment, that’s a whole lot of books you need to sell before getting paid – 100 books to be exact.

Some of these programs operate on the basis that affiliates will usually not make that many sales and they’ll never need to pay out. It’s unfortunate but this does happen, so always check payment terms before promoting a program.