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What is Affiliate Marketing?
These days money can be very tight for many people and most of us can definitely use some extra money. There are many different ways to make money online, and unfortunately many of them are nothing but “get rich quick schemes” that never work or sometimes even outright scams. However, if you want a legitimate way to make money online, one of the most popular ways is through affiliate marketing. What is affiliate marketing and can you really make money with it?
Basically affiliate marketing is a way of making money online by marketing products or services for other businesses. You do this by putting links, banners or specific product information on your own website or blog. You are not creating products you are just affiliating yourself with an existing company and marketing their products and services to others online.
There are two different types of affiliate marketing. First, you put a link on your blog or website to the business you are marketing and when someone clicks on the link it will take them to a page where they can purchase something from that particular business. You make money this way by getting a certain percentage of the sales.
The other way is by referring someone to the business website where the person is able to sign up for something or leave their contact information on the businesses website. You make money simply from them giving their information. There are many different types of affiliate programs available so finding a company that you are comfortable advertising for that will also match your website or blog is a lot easier then you think. A great place to start is the Clickbank.com marketplace.
The popularity of affiliate marketing programs has grown tremendously in recent years because of the ease of entry and the desire to make money online. There are also many individuals needing to find ways to supplement their income and affiliate marketing can be a great way to do that. It is quite possible to make a decent income from affiliate marketing you just have to invest the time and effort needed to build a successful online business. You won’t get rich quick so don’t even let that thought enter your mind!
There are many websites/blogs that offer free information about how to start an online business with affiliate marketing, and also plenty of forums available that you can use to find tips and tricks to help get you started. The nice thing about affiliate marketing is that you can do it in the comfort of your own home and on your own schedule, if you want to do it part time or full time that is entirely up to you. Just remember that it will take time to build a decent income from affiliate marketing, but once you become familiar as to how things work you will be surprised at the amount of money you truly can make by marketing for other companies.
How to Learn Affiliate Marketing the Right Way
Many experts believe that affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and fastest ways to make money online. The best thing about online affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to have a background in business or sales to enter it and become successful at it. All you need to succeed in this field is creativity, your time and some focused effort.
Affiliate marketing is actually quite easy to do. In fact, if you wanted to, you could start right now and become an “affiliate marketer” in a matter of minutes. All you have to do to get started is sign up with any of the free affiliate sites such as Clickbank.com and choose a product to promote, and then start promoting it. One of the best things about affiliate marketing is that you can find an unlimited number of products and services to promote in just about every niche imaginable.
In order to sell your affiliate products you will need to start a campaign. Simply put, a campaign covers everything that you are planning to do to promote your selected affiliate product. A popular type of an affiliate marketing campaign is called pay-per-click (PPC) which is a paid advertising campaign where you bid for a spot on a site and you have to pay every time someone click on your ad, hence the name.
Though PPC is one of the best ways to attract traffic it is not advisable for newbie’s because it can be very expensive and easy to mess up. There’s a lot to learn before you become an expert PPC marketer. Those new to affiliate marketing will benefit more from the free methods of increasing traffic to a site.
One popular free method of affiliate marketing is blogging. If you don’t have a blog yet then you should know that it is very easy to start one using services such as Blogger or WordPress. Before you sign up for a blogging service you should first select an affiliate product that you would want to promote from one of the various affiliate marketing sites. Now create a blog centered on a theme related to the product or service you have chosen. Then start posting useful content to your blog and promote your blog by submitting it to blog directories or by writing articles with your blog link on it then submitting them to article directories.
The above description of affiliate marketing may be a simple one but it provides a basic idea of how affiliate marketing works. If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing there are many resources available that can help you. In choosing a resource to help you learn affiliate marketing, choose one that is not full of hype and empty promises. Many affiliate marketing resources from so-called “gurus” are simply fluff filled materials that will do nothing but make you more confused about how to become a successful affiliate marketer.
The best affiliate marketing resources you can get are the ones that provide real, useful, step-by-step information about how to make money online as an affiliate marketer.