Affiliate marketing is basically the sharing of revenue between on line merchants or advertisers and on line salespeople. Performance levels dictate compensation and pay which is assessed by the number of clicks on links, registrations and sales made.
The merchants or advertisers are known as affiliate merchants whereas the sales people are referred to as affiliates.
The opportunity to make a lot of money is one of the main benefits of affiliate marketing. The advertising process can be automated and payment is made for clicks, registrations and sales.
It has to be said that there is a level of risk with fraud but if you carry out your research thoroughly it will not be long before you are on top of it all and know exactly what you are doing.
Affiliate marketing has been a significant contributory factor to the success of many on line companies, one of which is the household name of Amazon.com. Amazon.com was one of the pioneers of affiliate marketing and now boasts thousands of excellent working relationships of this kind.
As far as making money is concerned, affiliate marketing is, without doubt, in a league of its own. You are your own boss, you take total control and responsibility for your website and there are no issues about having anyone looking over your shoulder.
Affiliate marketing also presents you with the option to endorse the products you know about and have a passion for by allowing you to add links and banners about them on your own website. Every time a product you are representing sells you will receive a cash award.
You have the choice of sticking with just one merchant or going with as many as you like and with affiliate marketing becoming more and more well liked on the Internet, if you have always wanted to be a part of this kind of business, now is surely the time to take that step.
21 Comments
2ask.ws
October 8, 2008excellent post reed. You always deliver the best
2ask.wss last blog post..Directory Submission Advantages.
Eric Alexander
October 8, 2008Hi Reed,
One receives upteen emails promising websites, hosting, free content, SEO and tons of money! It all comes with an initial cost or recurring cost. You have to join blindly hoping that you wont be taken for a ride. I have found that most of them do not provide any email or phone contact. So there is no one to answer your questions. Some of them do provide an email address but we will rarely get a response, but the emails will keep on coming.
So, as it is so complicated out there, I have decided to play it safe by making my own website and sticking to reputed companies like Google, Amazon and Clickbank.
Ajayi Flora
October 8, 2008Hello floren,how is the family? baby in particular,doing fine too? Thanks for the latest , its also very good ,i want to get some things fixed first,its about opening a paypal account and possibly having a usa or uk bank account for non residents. If i have to take the payments or profits they must be lodged somewhere, if you have an idea of how to go about this request, which i know, you very much know ,pls send me detailed info.thanks and best regads.
Mieke Janssens
October 8, 2008Good post, Reed.
Maybe a good tip: be careful to promote products you haven’t bought/used yourself.
You don’t want to attach your name to a crappy product or promote for a merchant that doesn’t deliver.
Mieke Janssenss last blog post..This Is NOT A Giveaway Event (but comes with all the benefits)
Clayton
October 8, 2008Hey!
Reed
Great tips here in this post. Plus i would like to comment about the reader that you have attached to your blog. I love it!
There is a saying about; read it I will forget it. Read it and hear it, and I will not for get it!!!
To our success!
Clayton
Peter
October 8, 2008Hallo Reed,
nice Blog short and filled with information but
a really big problem is the receiving of the respective commission for your sponsoring. It is nice to them but you must be aware there is someone who wants to take your earnings into his pocket and you stay alone and without anything you have to camouflage all your data and place this on your ad. You should have this also in mind. Maybe this free Software might help http://TinyURL.com
regards
Peter
PV Reymond
October 8, 2008Hi Reed,
You explained very well what affiliate marketing is.
I agree, you can make a lot of money promoting affiliate products, but make sure that they have a high quality because you don’t want to lose your reputation promoting useless products.
Thanks,
^PV Reymond
http://www.pvreymond.com
Bruno Auger
October 8, 2008Great post Reed
Not every product is worth promoting. I gues you need to be selective and choose a quality product or products to promote.
I wouldn’t promote any product I didn’t at least buy myself.
Bruno Augers last blog post..How to Make your Blog a Success
Timothy Millar
October 8, 2008Hey Reed,
Nice post, Very informative,Watch out for the thieves though, I am working on a system to cure that problem. I posted some info on my blog for people to get educated on this subject
and the software is on the way. Now get back to that wonderful child of yours! Tim
Timothy Millars last blog post..Blogging for Traffic?
Charles
October 8, 2008Hi, good posts.
any information on how to open a papal account outside of US, To open and hoist a secure website with limited or very little computer knowledge on my side?
John Dovaston
October 8, 2008Thank you for your knowledgeable views on affiliate marketing.
I would like to see your comments on affiliate veres resell rites selling, as it seems to me affiliate marketers rely on customer support by the product owner, but as a reseller you are responsible for the customer support of someone elses product, which is very important in deciding the way to go.
admin
October 8, 2008@2ask thank you
@Eric it’s nice to work with the bigger companies although be careful. You can have problems with them too.
@Ajai sorry I don’t know how to do that, maybe you can ask paypal?
@Mieke your credibility is so important, great tip.
@Clayton glad you enjoy it
@Peter it’s good to shorten your links; good point.
@PV great point
@Bruno that is a good way to go.
@Tim thank you
@Charles unfortunately I don’t know how to do that, try contacting paypal.
@John the advantage of resale rights it you can keep 100% but what you really need to think about is. 1. will those people be joining your list so you can sell them more stuff 2. which page makes you more money per visitor?
@topwebbusiness thanks for the trackback
David Braybrooke
October 9, 2008‘The opportunity to make a lot of money is one of the main benefits of affiliate marketing.’ Agreed Reed! (Hey, that rhymes! 🙂 But it is not a fait accompli (foregone conclusion).
In some niches, the affiliate market is undeniably over-saturated with sellers and some products on sale are so ‘scarily’ ubiquitous (available everywhere) that it is hard to make a buck from them!
I studied affiliate marketing under the best ‘gurus’ in the world; I asked them for personal tips, suggestions and recommendations and made copious notes and wrote countless essays.
It was only when I got my ‘hands dirty’ and actually put what I had learned about marketing in to practice that I discovered how challenging this whole game can really be!
Graduating as a ‘Master of traffic generation’ I thought that my gold mine had been opened! And this wasn’t ‘junk’ traffic, but highly targeted visitors from many sources.
I had Ezine Article readers, many of the curious Digg crowd (thanks Kevin Rose!), email and forum signature ‘clickers’, Entrecard exponents, some purchased ‘lazer-targeted traffic’, PPC crowds and other website owners who were ‘ploughing’ the same niche/s that I was!
As for sales numbers? Forget about it baby! Really slow and poor returns. Clickbank was waiting for the ‘5 credit card’ sign-ups and sat on checks.
I’m no dummy; I am quite sharp with writing adcopy and my sales’ pages were neat looking and appealing. So, where did I go wrong?
Firstly, with Google Adwords, where I was inclined to concentrate a lot of my attention on, my self-created ads that I were using were so ‘out-of-the-box’, exciting sounding, intriguing and seductive (at times) that hoardes of curious people were clicking on them just to see what the destination would be! That’s all well and good too and my sales’/destination pages were shimmering three-ringed circuses of marketing ‘punch’!
Problem was, so many just came along for the ride and wanted a bit of ‘cheap entertainment’; they had no intention of buying anything and were just ‘smitten’ with my showmanship qualities!
Word-of-mouth meant that my visitor numbers climbed and climbed; at one stage, my site’s Alexa ranking even shocked me! Nice one!
But no real dollars were pouring in to the Savings Account. A small fiscal trickle, that was it!
Make no mistake, there is an art to marketing, whatever arena you choose to operate in! You need to be, not only sharp and on the mark, but have influential connections and a happy and growing list of clientele.
Just in closing, I once marketed some adult type products that had a bit of a humorous spin to them – it was just a one-off! My zippy title line read: “NOTICE: Sexual Harassment On This Site Will Not Be Reported. However, You Will Be ‘Scored’!”
Humor and sex – a team made in Heaven you might think? Well, not exactly but I didn’t want for interest level shown!
Great article Reed, thanks for your marketing wisdom!
Regards,
Dave.
David Braybrookes last blog post..? Selling Madonna! ?
Jussi Koiranen
October 9, 2008This summer and fall has been really cool! I’ve started making more than just pennies online, now I’m making dollars 🙂 One great contributor to that rising success has definitely been information and learning. Internet Marketing definitely has it’s own quarks. I think this blog of Reeds has been a huge contributor to my growing success. Like in any business learning the business is pretty important.
But what even Affiliate Marketing comes down to is recommending and promoting! So remember to do both. What I kinda forgot was that promotion part and now I’m working to fix that part. Having a good conversion rate isn’t enough if you don’t have traffic.
Richard
October 9, 2008Hi Reed, yet another informative post.
You touched on the problem of fraud which seems to have struck a chord with a couple of your readers, and I’d suggest every affiliate link should be cloaked to prevent commissions being stolen (a subject I covered on my own blog at http://www.moneymaker4u.com/wordpress).
Hope the family are well.
Lynda Mekalick
October 9, 2008Hi Reed – and family,
Great post as usual.Thanks.
Theft of commissions!Yeah – a huge one for us all.Fortunately,I note that some of the product owners have wised up to this and now use methods whereby your affiliate id doesn’t show up in anyone’s browser.That usually stymies the thieves!More and more product owners are doing this now,as it creates a win/win situation,and better trust between owner and affiliate.
Cheers
Lynda
TeasasTips
October 10, 2008@Lynda…I came into affiliate marketing late, and have found it to be more lucrative than anything I’ve ever done to make money online. However, I was unaware of this type of theft until I read several blogs (Reed’s included). And I noticed Lynda that my affiliate programs, cloak the links as well.
TeasasTipss last blog post..Effectively Using Yahoo To Get Website Visitors
admin
October 12, 2008@David for your ads are you putting in negative qualifiers such as -free and putting a price in the ad body?
@Jussi awesome, congrats on your success. I look forward to watching you add a few zero’s to those checks you are cashing
@Richard thanks for linking to that article
@Lynda it is very good that some affiliate programs are now doing that.
@Teases I’m glad you cloak your links now.
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