Affiliate marketing is a system by which you sell other peoples’ product or services, and you receive compensation for your effort.
Affiliate marketing has exploded since it arrived on the scene barely two decades ago.
Businesses love this marketing model because it requires little marketing cost on their part. They basically get other people to find and bring in the customers for them, while the businesses then focus on closing the sales.
As an affiliate marketer, your job is primarily to connect the consumers with the products or services. The key is to find the right product and connect it with the right audience.
You don’t have to develop or manufacture the product. You don’t keep any inventory. You don’t even deal with collecting payment or packaging or shipping. All you do is identify what the audience wants and connect it with the best fit product or service.
Affiliate marketers are compensated in a number of ways. The majority of affiliate programs use revenue sharing or cost per sale. This is the case where you are paid a percentage of the sales that you brought in.
Others use cost per action or cost per click, like when the visitors you sent through your affiliate link perform certain actions such as fill out a form or provide their email address.
Affiliate marketing is also called performance marketing because you’re rewarded according to your performance.
If you don’t perform, you don’t get paid.
Most affiliate programs and affiliate networks offer free participation when you fill out the required forms and get approval.
They’ll sometimes want to know how you plan to drive traffic to their products, for example, whether you have a website or you plan to use a mailing list or social media network.
A good starting point for affiliate marketing is to build a website, a blog or forum on a topic you know and care about. You provide your visitors with valuable and quality content.
People search the Internet mainly for information and as they’re finding that information, some will click on your affiliate link which will take them to another page where additional information will be given to them to convince them to buy.
Use your website or blog to convert your knowledge into content and content will turn into income.
Be sure to build a professional-looking website. It’s also better to focus on a niche that is not too big and not too narrow. Think of balance that is based on your expertise or knowledge, time availability, and technical competency.
But more important than the look and feel of your website is the quality of your content. Give people content that is worth their time visiting your website.
Many experts suggest that theme-based websites are best. For example, cooking exotic dishes with tasty recipes. This places you in a good position to promote to various businesses that sell cookbooks, kitchenware and healthy foods that go into preparation of the dishes.
Sewing unique fashions is another good idea if that’s your talent, which opens up to promotion of fabric and clothing products.
The theme based list is endless. Be creative and draw from your own talents, expertise, interests, hobbies, and training.
Affiliate marketing is rarely a get rich quick scheme. But it’s a good part-time gig; plus it requires very little start-up resources. With proper planning, learning and a little work you could develop a respectable income.
Speaking of learning, there are quite a number of training programs out there that purport to teach you about affiliate marketing.
After reviewing several of them, we have decided to endorse only two of them here.
These are among the very best we’ve found, with the most comprehensive and effective training, especially for a beginner affiliate marketer.
They all have proven track records of successful affiliate marketers under their belt, and all have excellent support services, which might come handy if you happen to get stuck on the way.
SBI (SiteSell):
SBI is one of the oldest and respected internet marketing educational programs, with thousands of successful and happy users.
Founded by Ken Evoy, a physician-turned-internet marketing mogul, SBI is more than a training program.
It’s a comprehensive all-in-one package of training programs, tools and software and support.
The step-by-step videos and written guides help you every step of the way, guiding you through the research and set up of your website, to generating income with the site.
In my mind, the biggest advantage of SBI is the inclusion in your membership of a suite of extensive collection of software and tools you will need to build your money making affiliate website – from keyword research to web hosting to SEO, traffic and monetization analyses.
The software and tools are so comprehensive that you will not need to buy any other software.
This is such a great deal, especially for a beginner. This packaging saves you a lot of money and enormous amount of time that you will otherwise spend researching which software to use for what.
Click here to learn more about SBI.
AffiloBlueprint (Affilorama):
AffiloBlueprint is a comprehensive step-by-step affiliate marketing building system developed by Mark Ling, a very successful 15-year internet marketing veteran.
Mark teaches you how to build a profitable website using the system he’s perfected over the years. The steps include market research and keywords, content creation, website building, traffic and monetization.
Included is a custom-made WordPress premium theme specifically designed for building high-performing affiliate websites.
With several thousand students and alumni across 4 continents, Affiloblueprint has consistently remained at the top of affiliate training programs for over six years.
Click to see why those students and alumni rave about AffiloBlueprint.
Conclusion
Irrespective of which training program you use, a couple of things are important to note:
First, you must START, and second, you must FOLLOW THROUGH.
Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme.
But if you do the work, using any of the proven training programs recommended above as your guide, you have the potential to make decent money as an affiliate marketer.
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