While there are many types of businesses you can start, affiliate marketing is definitely one of the best. It can give you an extremely large income and all you have to do is learn some new skills.
Basics of Affiliate Marketing Explained
Affiliate marketing may be defined as: “Selling products of other people on the internet”
The basic concept of affiliate marketing is to sell the products of other companies on a commission basis, on the internet. The affiliate marketer receives a sales commission on every sale, from the merchant.
Affiliate Program: Key Features
Here are the Key Features of an affiliate program:
- An affiliate program is NOT really a “program”; It’s more of a business arrangement.
- Companies use these revenue sharing arrangements to pay commissions to website owners for sending customers or “leads” to them.
- If the visitor buys a product or service, or fills out a form, you (website owner) will be paid a commission
- You can be paid per sale, per lead or per click
- Affiliate programs are also known as associate, reseller, commission, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale or pay-for-performance programs
- Two-tier affiliate program rewards you for signing up sub-affiliates (someone who joins a two-tier affiliate program after being referred to it by another affiliate). As well as earning commissions on your sales, you will earn commissions on their sales as well
- Is a Two-tier affiliate program similar to MLM? If your state/country has legal restrictions around MLM, you may want to read this to know more
How to Become an Affiliate
You need to follow these simple and easy steps to start earning as an affiliate marketer.
1. First of all you need to search a market which you think is the best to start with. Health, sports, clothing, computers, etc. are examples of some hot market areas for an affiliate marketer.
2. Register with some suitable affiliate program. Choose product(s) to sell. These products are called affiliate products.
3. For every product, you will receive a specific affiliate link. Now you need to promote your affiliate link to get more and more sales. The success of affiliate marketing depends on this step.
4. Finally, after selling the product, you will receive the affiliate commissions from the merchant.
How to Choose an Affiliate Product
Before choosing any product or market, the basic thing you should always remember is that you must have a complete knowledge about the demand and worth of the product. You should choose a product which has a big demand plus it is also more profitable. There are some products which are very demanding but they do not give a healthy profit. Some products carry both the qualities and are ideal for you to start with.
Promote Your Affiliate Link
After choosing the products, you will receive your affiliate links for each product. You can use many ways to promote your affiliate link. The most popular methods are websites, newsletters, emails, blogs, classified directories etc. You can use all these methods of promotion, at the same time, for best results. There are many other tools and methods to do this. The key point is how to drive the traffic that is really interested in what you are offering. If interested and serious, people will visit your website etc, thus being greater chances of sales.
When a visitor clicks on your affiliate link, visits the merchant’s website and makes a purchase, you will receive your commission. So the number of sales directly depends on how many people see your affiliate link and visit the merchant website.
How Payments are Made to Affiliate Marketers?
There are different ways of paying the commissions. You can get the commissions through checks (to any country of the world). If you have an online account, then you can be paid through PAYPAL as well. International wire transfer procedure is also used for this purpose. Different merchants offer different ways to transfer money. Usually commissions are paid on the start of every month after verifications.
What is the Benefit of Being a Merchant?
Merchants, who want to sell products, have two options. The can sell their product on their own or choose to have affiliate marketers. The affiliate marketers will do a promotion of the products and sell the products for the merchant. If merchant chooses to sell the product through the affiliate marketers, it takes less effort and cost to promote the products. Now it becomes the duty of the affiliate marketers to promote the products. Greater are the number of affiliates, greater are the sales for the merchant.
Types Of Online Affiliate Marketing
Online affiliate marketing is a term that is used for online revenue sharing scheme that involves advertising and selling.
So when an affiliate joins any online merchant, any of the following systems might be used by the merchant to make the payment to the affiliate.
Affiliate marketing programs has never been as popular before as it is today. Why? There can be a number of reasons. The most probable reason, however, could be the fact that the benefits of affiliate marketing have become clearer to a lot of people now than they were before.
Today, both the merchants and the affiliates can see clearly that affiliate marketing can work for both of them. The merchant sees affiliate marketing today as the chance to advertise their products at a lower cost. The affiliates, on the other hand, sees affiliate marketing as an easy way of earning profits online by doing what they like most, and that is by creating websites.
Just as the popularity of affiliate marketing has shifted into greater heights, so has the people’s outlook about it changed. No longer is affiliate marketing considered today as an alternative method for the merchant to advertise his products, or as a source of additional income for the affiliates. For merchants and affiliates alike, affiliate marketing is now considered as a main source of profits and revenues.
So the question now is what type of affiliate marketing will work best for you? Are all affiliate marketing programs the same? Are the benefits the same? Or are there affiliate marketing programs that work better than the others?
There are actually different types or classes of affiliate marketing, and the number of types will depend on how one will classify them. The most basic affiliate marketing programs, however, falls under two categories: pay-per-click (PPC), and pay-per-performance (PPP).
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is the most popular type of affiliate marketing for affiliates with small websites, and probably the easiest way for them to earn money. In this affiliate marketing type, the merchant pays his affiliate whenever a visitor is referred to his site, that is whenever someone clicks through the merchant’s banner or text ads. The affiliate gets paid a certain amount even if the visitor he referred does not purchase anything from the merchant’s site. However, typical fees for PPC affiliate programs are small, usually not exceeding a dollar for every click.
Pay Per Performance (PPP)
PPP affiliate marketing is the most popular among merchant and is also the most lucrative type for the affiliates. In this type of affiliate program, the merchant only pays the affiliate whenever his referral translates into an action that is whenever the visitor he has referred actually buys something from the merchant’s site or when the visitor becomes a lead. This means a lot of savings for the merchant. On the other hand, it becomes the most lucrative type for the dedicated affiliate, for commissions in PPP affiliate marketing usually comes in the range of 15% to 20% of the actual product sales.
Pay-per-performance affiliate marketing can be further classified into two popular types: pay-per-sales (PPS) and pay-per-lead (PPL).
Pay Per Sale (PPS)
In a pay-per-sale type of affiliate marketing, the merchants pay the affiliate a certain fee whenever the visitor he has referred to the merchant’s site actually buys something from the merchant’s site. Affiliates are often paid on commission basis, although other merchants would opt to pay a fixed fee. But no matter what the basis of the fee is, it is generally higher than the fee paid to affiliates in a pay-per-click affiliate program.
Pay Per Lead (PPL)
The pay-per-lead type of affiliate marketing is a slight variation of the PPS type and is often used by insurance and finance companies and other companies who rely on leads for their company to grow. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever the visitor he referred to the merchant’s site fills up an application form or any similar form related to the business of the company. Compensation for this type of affiliate marketing is based on a fixed fee whose rates approximate that of the fixed fee in the PPS type.
Aside from these three specific types of affiliate marketing, a lot of other affiliate marketing types exist. If the classification is based on the depth of the affiliate network, it can be classified as single-tier, two-tier, and multi-tier affiliate marketing. There is also another type of affiliate marketing that pays the affiliate each time the customer he has referred purchases something from the merchant’s site.
Single-Tier, Two-Tier, and Multi-Tier Affiliate Marketing
These types of affiliate marketing are based on the different levels or tiers in the affiliate network by which payments are made. In a single-tier affiliate marketing program, the affiliates are only paid based on the direct sales or traffic he has referred to the merchant. All the previously mentioned affiliate marketing types (i.e. PPS PPL, and PPC) fall under the single-tier classification.
In two-tier affiliate marketing programs, the affiliate is not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he refers to the merchant’s site, but also on every traffic or sales referred by various other affiliates who joined the affiliate program through his recommendation. Multi-tier affiliate marketing works the same way, although the affiliate gets additional commission for a wider number of affiliates in different tiers in the affiliate network.
Residual Income Affiliate Marketing
In residual income affiliate marketing, the affiliate gets paid not only once for every customer he has referred to the merchant’s site. Rather, the affiliate is also paid whenever the customer he has referred returns to the site and purchase another product. Compensation for such type of affiliate marketing is based on either sales percentage commission or fixed fee basis.
The different affiliate marketing types would virtually work differently for merchants and affiliates alike, and each would generally have their own list of benefits. Which type of affiliate marketing will work best for you? It is not really for me to tell. Rather, it is for you to choose which type of affiliate marketing program will suit your needs and characteristics best.
Become an Affiliate & Run an Online Business
You need to become an affiliate for a good company and start selling their products to earn commissions. For this you don’t need to have your own product but actually you are just promoting someone else’s product to get paid.
However, it should be made very clear that this does not mean you don’t have to work at all and by becoming an affiliate you can start getting money by merely sitting at home. After all, you need to promote the products through your web site or newsletter.
Get a Web Site
To have a web site you don’t need to be a web expert. Without knowing any web language you can create a web site which will be your virtual office. No need to have HTML knowledge as you can directly configure your site and choose different background colors for your web site. They even provide very useful tools like page hit counter to have a record of the number of visitors visiting your site.
Since free web site services almost always require you to show the advertisements of the company hosting your site, once you start earning money, it is often a good idea to pay a web hosting company to serve your web site.
Research Affiliate Companies
Don’t expect high returns from day one. Every business takes some time to establish and to earn profits. However, if you have spent time initially to set up your business right then it will have the potential to provide good returns over time.
Do some research before you choose the right product to promote, that interests you and has good demand in the market. It is important to choose a product of your interest because you will be in a better position to convince people to buy the product if you have proper knowledge and interest regarding the product.
Affiliate programs are not only related to products but also involve information sharing or offering some advice. Like advice on a successful marriage, painting, learning a new language, woodworking, gardening, etc. You can offer your advice free of cost and use affiliate-marketing programs to earn money. Some of the sites where you can become an affiliate are www.amazon.com and www.clickbank.com. Once you choose a product from these web sites and promote those products then you can earn up to a very high commission on every product sold.
Promote Your Business
The success of an affiliate marketing business is promotion. If your site can draw people’s attention and then direct them to the affiliate company’s web site then your earning potential is limitless.
To be successful it helps to spend time doing initial research to choose the right affiliate program that can give you maximum profits. Then you will need to follow through with a good marketing plan. While choosing the affiliate program, give thought to the process you’ll be following to promote the sales of the product. Since you would be more involved in the pre-sales, your web site should have good content regarding the product.
If the conversion rate of the prospects to actual buyers is high from your site then you can consider yourself a good affiliate. Initial time spent on deciding the right product to promote is key to fetching good dividends later on.
4 Affiliate Marketing Tips: Simple But Effective
To help you build your business as quickly as possible and avoid the potential pitfalls, I’ve compiled a list of some affiliate marketing tips:
- While I know you’re probably anxious to get your website set up and get started, you’d be better off taking a little time first to learn how to do it properly.
There are many places online where you can learn every thing you need to know about affiliate marketing. You’re best bet would be to invest a little time and money into an internet marketing course. Learn how to do it, then implement what you’ve learned.
Even though it may seem like you’re having to wait before you set up your business and start making money, in the long run you’ll be saving yourself some time if you learn how to do it first, before jumping in.
- Don’t get sidetracked with all the ridiculous promises online. You will probably get dozens of emails every day promising you that you can make money in no time and with no effort.
It’s not true and if you spend all of your time jumping from one ‘sure thing’ to another you’ll never make any money.
Don’t fall victim to the hype. Just build your business nice and steady and tune out all the other noise.
- Until you know how to do it properly, steer clear of using Pay Per Click.
The search engines are constantly changing the rules when it comes to PPC. There really is a very steep learning curve and you can waste hundreds or even thousands of dollars if you don’t know what you’re doing.
There are people on line who make a living doing nothing but keeping up with all the PPC changes and teaching other people how to use PPC techniques. Make some money first, then take some of that money and invest it in a PPC course before you jump in.
- Build a list using an autoresponder. Up to 98% of the people who visit your site won’t buy anything and they won’t be back.
You can get a bigger share of this traffic by having a form that they can sign up for. if you have their email-id, you can build trust and rapport with them over a period of time.
You’ll get more than one chance to convert them into paying customers.
To Conclude
Affiliate marketing and Paid advertising can be a profitable venture, but you need a good understanding of how it all works together. You need to learn how to minimize your ad costs and increase sales conversions, and this takes time & experience.
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