Affiliate marketing is a way for website owners and publishers to make some money by recommending third party products to their readers. Each time a visitor from your site performs a desired action after clicking on your affiliate link you get a commission on that sale or a fixed amount of money. Most affiliate programs will pay per sale, but sometimes they may just pay for new leads, such as when a visitor subscribes to their newsletter. The affiliate marketing business is blooming because it’s a very accessible way to generate money working from home.
What is an affiliate and how do I become one?
Anybody can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate sales program, such as Google Affiliate Program or ShareaSale, just to name a couple. Once accepted into a program you will need to individually apply to each vendor, using your niche affiliate marketing website to display their ads once accepted. In most cases you will need to ensure that your website fulfils specific terms of use before applying, so read each advertiser conditions before applying to avoid being rejected on a technicality such as not having a privacy policy on your website.
Which products should I advertise?
Keep in mind that you won’t be making any money unless your readers actually buy the products you are promoting, so for best results you should be promoting things that would be useful and interesting for your audience. For example, if you had an online marketing blog you could be recommending Wordtracker, which is a keyword research tool favoured by most online marketers. It wouldn’t make sense to promote motorcycles, even if they have a really good referral fee, because you risk alienating your audience. Try to stay away from products you wouldn’t feel comfortable buying yourself, you don’t want to lose readers and reputation because somebody was scammed by a product you recommended!
How do I learn affiliate marketing?
There are many affiliate marketing guides and tutorials, both free and commercial that can get you started. There also a plethora of forums and affiliate marketing blogs offering affiliate marketing tips and tricks for free, though nobody is going to tell you their secret gold mine in exchange for nothing. A successful affiliate marketer needs to be good at both identifying good niches and products and creating copy that encourages people to buy them. The best way to get started with affiliate marketing is probably just joining an affiliate marketing program and selecting a few products you’d be comfortable writing about. You can then create articles on Infobarrel or Hubpages with those links and see how they perform, what works and what doesn’t. This way you don’t even need to create your own website to see if you like affiliate marketing and can make money from it.
Beware of affiliate marketing scams
There are two types of affiliate marketing scams: advertisers that don’t pay and people that promise you that you’ll make hundreds per hour while sitting on the beach if you just buy their affiliate training program. If you need to pay to join an affiliate program (be it training or “marketing materials”) it’s probably a scam. Also, before joining an affiliate marketing program do a quick search for scam alerts. The affiliate marketing community is quick to out sites that don’t pay their referral fees. There is no magic way of making quick cash for no effort, and you will need to spend time creating and marketing your affiliate websites but if you select the right products to promote and create good content to do it you can make enough to sustain your work from home business.
Other sites take a more long-term approach. They aim to persuade the visitor to sign up to their email list. They do this by offering incentives, for example a free “ebook” (a short manual in pdf form). Once signed up, the searcher receives a series of emails over a period of time. This process is automated, through what is known as an auto-responder. The website owner has already set up this series of emails, some of which will be informative (to encourage the reader not to unsubscribe) and the others will be seeking to sell products which will earn the website owner commission. It is easy to set up an autoresponder via email marketing providers such as Aweber and Constant Contact.
Other website owners will rely more or as much on their content. A lot of vendors (e.g. Amazon) provide code to their affiliates that can be pasted in, and hey presto suddenly your site is showing a beautifully-formatted internet store, which looks just like it’s part of your site, but in effect it’s just a branch of the vendor which earns you commission.