What is affiliate marketing?

August 3, 2007

Many people still wondering “how can many people earn money online?” some people think, like many of my friends,that this is just a myth and is not true. But this is wrong. Some people (few) made millions of dollars, like my friend Anthony.

Affiliate marketing is another way, to earn money over the net. But if you search over the net, many people tells you that is an easy make money scheme and that is not true. Affiliate marketing is not easy but if you get it to work you can make thousands per month. Ok, Ok, let’s continue what is affiliate marketing? I took it from Wikipedia:

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses (merchants/advertisers) in which an affiliate (publisher) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.

Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies and in-house affiliate managers, specialized 3rd party vendors and various types of affiliates/publishers who utilize a number of different methods to advertise the products and services of their merchant/advertiser partners.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates are using the same methods as most of the merchants themselves do. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, email marketing and to some degree display advertising.

Affiliate marketing – using one site to drive traffic to another – is the stepchild of online marketing. While search engines, e-mail and RSS capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing, despite lineage that goes back almost to the beginning of online retailing, carries a much lower profile. Yet affiliates continue to play a fundamental role in e-retailers’ marketing strategies.

So affiliate marketing, you advertise other products and you get comission with every sale, lead (signup), per impression or per click. You may ask, which one of them I will go? Per click? per sale?… The easiest method is per click but is not worth believe me. You can get $0.01 per click so you will need 100 people clicking everyday to get $1 and that is really a waste of your time.

I will go per sale which is more difficult but is worth you can get comissions from $25 to $150 per sale. Sometimes, companies give you percentage per sale, but I prefer a flat comission.

What I need to make money with affiliate marketing?

You have 2 options to promote affiliate marketing, but also you can work with both of them. The first option, is having a website. In my opinion, this is one of the most difficult options, but also it has many pro’s. If you success with your site, you first will pay much less (I will explain why). With a website you will need to pay for your domain name, and your hosting. When I mean success with your site, I mean that you will get a lot of loyal visitors, good ranking, good search engine optimization. This will take time.

Option 2, you will not need any website. You can promote your affiliate links via, pay per click advertising companies, like Google adwords, MSN adcenter, Yahoo!, etc.. This you will need money to make money. This option also you need some background how these ppc programs works. If you are starting affiliate marketing I will not recommend with option 2 because soon you will loose more money in ppc than earning. So first start your website, and start reading about affiliate marketing there are many good tutorials and books about it (The truth you will not need books, but it will help as a begginner).

Now you still thinking, that affiliate marketing does not work? It work, but is not easy. You always have to keep in mind that you need to test, test & test. Even if is working with you, test that may be can be better. This month ( 3 August, 2007) have made $176 USD. Last month made around $800, and I can tell you that I am still a newbie in Affiliate marketing option 2 (with ppc, testing with adwords at the moment, after that will test MSN adcenter and Yahoo!, then other smaller companies, like adbrite, miva, etc..).

Hope you enjoyed it, I will write some tips about affiliate marketing just keep in touch!, if you liked it, please strumble it, suscribe to etalkmoney RSS and if you have any opinion or question please comment.

Posted in Make Money Online