What is Affiliate Marketing?
An affiliate marketer is someone who connects a customer (someone wanting to make a purchase online) to a merchant (someone who has the product the customer wants to buy). Simple enough? So, how does it work?
You know how, when a salesman goes around promoting a product, he maybe allowed a certain percentage of the proceeds from the sale to keep as an incentive? Well, this is exactly how affiliate marketing works. There are companies online that offer you upto 75% of their sales as commissions for helping them get a sale. There are many companies online that have affiliate programs. If you want to find these, just do a search saying “Company or industry name+affiliate”, and you will find some that appeal to you. Signup is usually free, and they also have all kinds of tools to help you do a better job, the affiliate. When you sign up, the merchant usually gives you a unique affiliate ID, and any banners, promotional products you get from them will have this ID embedded in them.
So, after you have found the product you want to promote, you need to start advertising – in a way that you have a chance to catch some potential customers. Obviously, on the internet you are not actually face-to-face with your customer as you would be in a door-to-door promotion campaign. You have to attract customers to your product. To do this, you need to have a blog, a website, ad or some other way to attract customers or catch their attention long enough so you can tell them that what you have to offer is what they need. If you learn to do this well, it means you have enough people coming by your website to check things out. This movement of people coming to your website is called ‘traffic’.
There are different ways to generate traffic – meaning lots of visitors who come to check out your site: free and paid methods. Free advertising often consists of writing articles or reviews of a product, and then guiding traffic to either an affiliate link, or to a landing page on your
Once you have the traffic coming to your site, it's not enough! You need to ensure that the majority of them are not just ‘window shoppers’. You need to have ‘conversions’ – which is simply a word that means traffic that becomes customers!
When you get conversions, that means your merchant now pays you commissions. And that means cash!
By the way, remember that unique affiliate ID you got from your merchant? All the links, banners, etc. connecting the traffic to your ‘product’ will have your unique affiliate ID. In fact, that unique affiliate ID is something you need with you, because keeping that ID safely is also one of the best ideas to make money online. That way, when the customer goes and buys the product from your merchant, the merchant will know that you were the salesperson because of this ID, and he will reward you with the commission.
Successful affiliate marketers are able to make 6-7 digit incomes from well-thought out strategies. One very successful affiliate marketing program is Tissa Godavitarne's Acme-People-Search. Signing up is free, and they have a free forum as well as webinars several times a week, which are great learning tools. If you would like to understand how this program works, click here for a simple and comprehensive review of Acme-People-Search.
Hope that helps explain the affiliate marketing principle quite simply. Affiliate marketing can be quite successful.Of course, that's an art in itself, and we hope to expound on that more shortly. Stay connected here for more updates.
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