How To Make Money Online From Affiliate Marketing – Part 1
Introduction To Affiliate Marketing
If you’ve spent some time on the internet, you may have heard about Affiliate Marketing and how it can help you to make money on the internet.
What is affiliate marketing ?
Affiliate marketing is the process of advertising a product for sale where the product owner is willing to pay you an affiliate commission for every sale you generate.
It sounds so easy. All you need to do is find a great product to promote, making sure the owner will pay you an affiliate commission, and you would send or direct online traffic over to that affiliate product owner’s website. When the sale is completed the product owner will pay you a commission. In other words you are a product broker or sale agent for that product owner.
Easy ? Not quite.
Affiliate marketing has evolved over the past few years into a very lucrative business for those smart marketers who get it right. But if you’re not doing it the right way, you could find it quite difficult to make enough sales to be profitable.
Let’s take a look at the basics of affiliate marketing:
Choosing an Affiliate Program
When new affiliate marketers look for an affiliate product to promote, they tend to look for the affiliate programs that pay the highest commission per sale. While high commissions per sale are great, it also means it’s harder to convince your potential customers to buy as such product will obviously cost more.
The most effective affiliate marketers choose one specific niche to begin with and diversify their products range across several differently priced products within that niche.
This way, if a customer isn’t interested in one affiliate product that is higher priced, he may be interested in a lower priced instead, so you haven’t lost a sale.
Finding Affiliate Sales Customers
The biggest challenge for any affiliate marketer is finding customers willing to buy so that you can earn your affiliate commissions.
You have so many different options available for finding new customers and the choice is literally up to you.
1) You could choose to create a pay-per-click advertising campaign to attract new buyers
2) You could build a mailing list and promote directly to the people on your list any new affiliate products you have
3) You could create a blog and write reviews that will explain to people why the product you’re recommending is a great choice.
There are many ways to promote your affiliate products and get your affiliate marketing business off to a great profitable start.
Creating Your Own Affiliate Products
Some marketers prefer to create and sell their own affiliate products rather than promoting peoples’ products. It’s quite easy to create your own down-loadable products and entice other affiliate marketers to promote them for you.
Different Affiliate Programs
By using a selection of products within the same niche, but choosing from across different affiliate program providers, not only are you offering your visitors a great choice of products to buy, but you’re also diversifying your potential affiliate income.
Here are some great affiliate program providers:
Clickbank: http://www.clickbank.com
Clickbank has more than 10,000 affiliate digital products to choose from, paying between 10%-75% of each sale in affiliate commissions. The majority of products are e-books or online courses, so if you like the ease of quick, down-loadable products, then this is for you.
Your affiliate marketing campaign sends visitors directly to the product owner’s sites and Clickbank processes the payments, acting as a third-party merchant provider as well as the affiliate manager.
Your individual affiliate links are very easy to create, so you can get started very quickly. Clickbank pay twice a month either by check or directly into your account.
Commission Junction (CJ) – http://www.commissionjunction.com
CJ is a massive affiliate program provider, offering both online digital products and real world products across almost as many niche industries as you can think of. Many programs may require approval from the affiliate product owners, but once you’re approved, the process of setting up your affiliate marketing campaign is very easy and professional.
Not only do they offer products that pay you a commission for each sale you make, you also have the option of choosing programs that pay you for each lead you refer or per click you can generate over to their site.
Payment is made on the 15th of each month once your account reaches a specified minimum.
Share-A-Sale – http://www.share-a-sale.com
Share-a-sale offers a similar affiliate platform to CJ, only on a smaller scale. Very easy to create your affiliate marketing campaigns and payment is made monthly once your account reaches a specified minimum.
ClixGalore – http://www.clixgalore.com
ClixGalore offers a variety of real world and online products to choose from. Product owners also offer affiliate marketers a choice of being paid a commission per sale or a set amount per lead or sometimes even an amount per click through on a banner ad.
Payment is made monthly once your account reached a specified minimum.
There are many more affiliate programs available on the internet. Do some simple research and choose the program that has products to suit your own affiliate marketing campaign.
In Part 2, we’ll look more closely into choosing your affiliate products online.
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