Affiliate Marketing Explained, Simple As 1,2,3
Affiliate Marketing Explained…
A lot of people who want to make money online don’t go into affiliate marketing, which I think is a true shame. I think sometimes that they get scared off when confronted with all the terminology, but once you have affiliate marketing explained to you, I think you’ll agree that it’s a great way to make money online.
The truth is that it is quite easy to learn the skills necessary to make
money online as an affiliate marketer and once you’ve learned them you can put them to work for you over and over again. You can literally make as much money as you want to…but you have to know how.
First things first though, when you hear the term affiliate marketer this is simply referring to someone who is selling a product or service for someone else. They get paid a commission for every product they sell. It is free to sign up to become an affiliate and most companies have an affiliate program.
You can sell ‘real’ products like t.v.s or cell phones, or you can sell digital products like software and ebooks. There are many websites that are like affiliate marketing central where you can sign up to sell several different products from many different companies.
Most affiliate programs will give you a replicated affiliate website. This will
showcase the product you are selling and it will look exactly like the other
affiliate websites except that the website address will have a code in it that will identify your site so that when you make a sale you will be the one getting credit for it, a commission. The affiliate company will track your commissions, handle all the refunds and pay you your commission, so your main job is to get people to your website.
Traffic = Money
The biggest challenge any affiliate marketer faces is getting enough traffic to
their website so they can make the amount of money they want to make. There are many methods you can use to get traffic, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) and article marketing are the three most common. For a beginner I recommend SEO and article marketing since they are extremely effective, easy to learn, and free.
PPC can also be effective but it isn’t free so if you make a lot of mistakes it will
cost you, and it’s easy to make mistakes since this method has a pretty steep
learning curve.
Should I Pay For Traffic?
Once you’ve gotten the basics down you should take some time to learn how to do PPC properly before you jump in with both feet. The truth is though, that you don’t really ever have to use PPC if you don’t want to. If you are generating all the traffic you need by using the free methods, then by all means keep it up. After all, if you use free methods exclusively than you will have a much greater profit margin than if you have to pay for some of your traffic.
How Much Can I Make?
It’s also important to remember that as an affiliate you will probably get to the point where you are promoting more than one product, and you will have one website for each product you sell, this is especially true if you really want to make a lot of money since you don’t want all your eggs in one basket.
A good rule of thumb is to try to get your website to the point where it is making around $1,000 a month, then you can move on and start another one. You can repeat this process as many times as you want to because once you get your site to the point where it is profitable, it can run almost completely on autopilot from that point on. You can easily handle a dozen sites when they are all running smoothly and you only have to spend a few hours a month on maintaining them.
Putting It All Together…
So, that is affiliate marketing explained. You sign up to sell a product, and you make a commission. Obviously this is a simplified version, and you will still need to learn how to put all the pieces together so you can have an extremely profitable affiliate marketing business, but it is possible if you just take that first step.
