Affiliate businesses are probably the easiest to start.
Have you ever recommended a product to your friends, family members or co-workers?
Perhaps the latest gadget, jersey or gardening tool?
If you have, you understand the power of referral marketing, which is really
another name for affiliate marketing. Now imagine if you get paid for each and every referral. Imagine if you get paid a commission every time your friend buys the service or product you recommend! This is the philosophy behind affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is currently the fastest growing business model on the web.
However, it still remains a secret in many quarters. It is an "invisible business"
where lots of money is made. Companies and merchants love this model because their profit margins are extremely high; they do not have to spend any money on advertising. Their
affiliates are acting as their sales force. Now, wouldn't you want to be different from the rest of the population? Wouldn't you want to be paid for your marketing efforts? Rather than helping a big company get rich everyday through your recommendations, you can get a piece of the pie too. So, what exactly is Affiliate Marketing?
To sum it up, affiliate programs or associate programs are revenue sharing
arrangements where companies pay people commission for sending them
customers. You are paid a commission if the person buys a product or service, (Pay Per
Sale - Most Popular Option), clicks on an affiliate link (Pay Per Click - Less
popular due to fraud) or simply fills out a form (Pay Per Lead - Also Very
Popular). Basically affiliate programs are programs that enable you to sell other people's
products for a percentage of the sale.
One of the most lucrative aspects of affiliate marketing is in being able to build an
online income even without a product of your own.
While information development is an incredibly profitable market, when you are
just entering the world of online business, affiliate marketing simplifies the
process, while giving you the opportunity to gain hands-on experience without
having to deal with the multiple tasks and responsibilities associated with being
the developer or merchant. For example, as an information product developer, you're responsible for all customer support inquiries and requests, and you need to spend time updating your product, working on keeping it consistently fresh and current based on
market demand. It's your job to satisfy customers, to handle refund requests, and to consistently work to optimize conversion rates.
As an affiliate marketer, however, you never have to spend any time on the
product development, delivery or support issues, and instead, can focus on
developing profitable campaigns that jack in commission payments 24 hours a
day! Your only job is to develop highly targeted campaigns that promote high quality
products and then build powerful traffic campaigns that funnel in red-hot
prospects who are interested in purchasing the products you promote.
Then, cash your commission checks and rinse and repeat the process!
Affiliate marketing is not only incredibly simple to get involved in but it's a
very rewarding experience.
It gives you the freedom to choose as many different niche markets as you wish,
exploring countless opportunities and learning the ropes as you go. What other
way can you "earn as you learn"?
So, now that you know just a few of the reasons why so many new marketers
begin their journey into online business as affiliate marketers, let's take a closer
look at what you can do to join the ranks of successful earners!
Choosing Products To Promote:
Choosing quality products is an important part of every affiliate campaign,
because you want to make sure that you are setting up campaigns around
products that are likely to convert.
This means that you need to spend time carefully researching and evaluating
products in order to create your "affiliate swipe file".
When it comes to choosing a niche, there are two methods that will help you get
started:
1) Choose a niche that is evergreen.
2) Identify demand and profitability based on existing competition.
Take down notes of possible products and niche markets that look interesting to
you. Then, search for related forums, groups and blogs to determine what people are
looking for, how big the market is and what is currently in demand.
Then, investigate keywords to determine how much competition is in the
marketplace as well as how many searches take place each month for specific
keyword phrases relating to each niche market. If you plan to promote digital products, the best place to start looking for quality products is through ClickBank, available at http://www.Clickbank.com
ClickBank is the largest online marketplace for digital products, and you will be able
to quickly pinpoint hot sellers by browsing through their many categories.
ClickBank.com offers detailed statistics and information regarding each specific
product making it even easier to quickly evaluate the profitability of potential
campaigns. Here is what these mean:
$/sale: The amount of money you earn for each sale.
Future $: Average rebill revenue.
Total $/sale: Average total $ per sale, including all rebills.
%/sale: The percentage of the product sale price that the sale represents.
%/refd: Fraction of publisher’s total sales that are referred by affiliates.
grav: The measure of how many affiliates are promoting the product.
For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks Clickbank adds an amount between 0.1
and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.
The Gravity indicator will tell you how well a product is selling. So a gravity score
of 100 means a product is potentially selling better than one with a gravity score
of 20. When it comes to gravity assigned to any specific product, a gravity of 70 or
higher is usually a good sign that the product is still in demand, and being
actively promoted by other affiliates.
There are many other affiliate networks and marketplaces worth exploring, with
many offering a combination of both digital and physical products.
Here are a few to help you get started:
Amazon Marketplace
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
I suggest using Amazon to locate products primarily with a higher price point, as
their payout rate is set at only 4%. Personally, I use Amazon only for products
priced at $200 or higher to make up the difference in the low-end commission
offer. Still, the Amazon marketplace is a great way to monetize extra space on your
website or blog, and with their extended affiliate options, such as being able to
integrate an "astore" into your website, you're given a lot of flexibility as to how
you can develop affiliate campaigns.
Tip: You can monetize your feeder sites with Amazon modules and plugins, just
by logging into your Amazon Associates account and exploring their 'extended'
options.
Commission Junction
Otherwise known as “CJ.com”, Commission Junction has been around for many
years and is known to pay on time and provide unbeatable support.
They also feature hundreds of merchants across the board spanning thousands
of niche markets. You may require approval prior to being able to participate in select affiliate programs, as Commission Junction provides merchants the opportunity to preapprove affiliates, but the application is extremely simple and you can expect to
receive a response in a matter of few hours.
http://www.CommissionJunction.com
Share A Sale:
http://www.ShareASale.com
ShareASale.com has grown into an extensive affiliate marketplace, and since all
merchants are required to retain a cash balance of funds used to pay affiliates,
it’s a risk-free way to ensure that you are paid for all of your efforts.
Pay Dot Com:
http://www.paydotcom.com
PayDotCom is similar to ClickBank in that it only features digital products. One of
the key differences between PayDotCom and Clickbank however is that when
promoting products through PayDotCom, it's up to the merchant to pay you, and
this is done primarily through Paypal. With ClickBank, you are paid by the company itself based on their payment schedule (every two weeks for paper check or weekly via direct bank transfer).
Link Share Services:
Link Share is an ever-growing affiliate marketplace and with it comes a great
variety of lucrative and high paying affiliate opportunities.
You can create your Link Share account at http://www.LinkShare.com
Promoting Your Affiliate Links:
There are two ways to promote your affiliate links. You can choose the
slower track, which is to build a content-rich site that will attract lots of visitors,
hence making lots of sales from your affiliate links.
The other way, the fast track, is to promote these programs without even owning
a website. How do you do that? Simple, just start sending targeted traffic to your
affiliate links! You can do this a number of different ways as we explore the 2 most cost effective strategies to jump-start your campaigns.
Article Marketing:
One of the easiest ways of launching an affiliate campaign is by using article
marketing directories. With article content, you can simply submit it into the larger article directories and within hours or even minutes of being approved, can begin to see traffic flowing. In exchange for providing them with free content, you get to include some text
and links in a section at the bottom of each article called a resource box.
EzineArticles.com (http://www.ezinearticles.com) is the biggest, most popular,
highest-traffic article directory. They have tremendous authority in Google, and
articles often rank extremely well, so they can get a lot of traffic. However, one
thing you need to know about Ezine Articles is that they don't allow you to link
directly to your affiliate link; you'll need to purchase a domain name and then
forward it to your link.
As long as your articles are structured so that you are providing solid, useful
content with a link back to your domain showcased within the resource box,
article marketing is a simple and effective strategy to generating prime traffic.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that you should always use anchor text
within your resource boxes, rather than a direct link to your site. Anchor text will
help you rank for many different keywords rather than just your website URL
itself. Your author’s resource box needs to be as strong as your article’s headline and
contain information that will pull a reader in and motivate them to click on your
link and visit your website.
Essentially, a resource box is very much like a fast-track commercial. You have
only a few seconds to motivate them to read further and explore your website.
Here are the top five article marketing directories that you can use for your
campaigns:
www.EzineArticles.com
www.GoArticles.com
www.ArticlesBase.com
www.ArticleCity.com
www.ArticleDashboard.com
Feeder Sites:
If you want to push your marketing message out to your niche market quickly,
and absolutely free, you would want to turn to feeder sites.
Feeder sites are free remotely hosted web services that allow you to create
simple websites or web pages, such as Squidoo, available at
http://www.Squidoo.com, who provides a free "hub building service" to anyone
wishing to create a content rich web page.
Feeder sites are such a popular method of building targeted traffic campaigns
because of how quickly they rank in the major search engines.
Since these websites are deemed "authority sites", they are already ranked high in
engines like Google.com, and so by creating your sub-page on their server, your
page will be discovered by search engine spiders, and ranked very quickly.
When creating your Squidoo lens, be sure to take advantage of the various
modules that you can include on your page, and place a prominent link back to
your main affiliate link as well! In addition, break up your content into short articles, and avoid linking to any related products until after the initial launch is over, since your focus is on funneling this traffic through your affiliate link to the products order page.
For each feeder site, upload 1-2 keyword rich articles and spice up your pages
with images, videos and use built in modules or plug-ins whenever possible.
When you've finished creating your feeder pages, ping each URL to get the traffic
pumping in. You can do this with either http://www.Pingomatic.com or
http://www.PingGoat.com
Here are the top feeder site resources to help you get started:
Blogger: http://www.Blogger.com
Wordpress: http://www.Wordpress.com
WikiDot
A great way to get your sites ranking in the search engines quickly is by creating
an account at http://www.Wikidot.com
Weebly
Create free websites and blogs, switch designs instantly, and features a drag and
drop interface, Weebly helps you rank higher in search engines, especially on
Google. http://www.Weebly.com
http://www.WetPaint.com
Wet Paint features free wiki based websites that allow you to start your own
social website instantly. A very good site for backlinks and ranking.
http://www.LiveJournal.com
Another free blog platform that will allow you to customize your blog from top to
bottom including free themes and modules.
You now have the basics of creating profitable affiliate marketing campaigns. The
next step: Take action! It all begins with choosing a single product and marketing that product. Then, once you’ve been able to generate targeted traffic to your affiliate link, begin working towards expanding your outreach by creating additional affiliate campaigns, focusing on new products and evergreen markets.
Affiliate marketing is an exciting industry to be a part of, and if you take
consistent action in developing campaigns, creating high quality content and
keeping a pulse on market trends and demand, you’ll quickly reap the rewards.
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