What is Affiliate Marketing?
Whether you have a product or service to sell or you want to make money by selling other people's products, affiliate marketing is a great way to accomplish your goals.
A product's owner will use affiliates to sell the product, usually over the Internet. The affiliate earns a commission for every sale that is made from the affiliates website or email link. Some people make a very comfortable living just by selling other people's products over the web. They create many different websites with content that is updated constantly. Some of the ads on their webpages are affiliate marketing, where the site owner gets paid everytime the link is clicked, or the product is purchased.
Some affilates will also create a mini webpage that is completely devoted to one product. This standard but extremely uncreative technique just has one long page that is essenctually a sales letter. At the end of the page is a link to purchase the item.
The details of how much money one can make through affiliate marketing is as varied as there are products available. Each program is going to be a little different. This is why you want to make sure that you know when, how much and how often you will get paid from the program that you are thinking of joining.
Let's look at a few ways that an affiliate can make money:
If the program is set up as a Pay Per Sale program, the affiliate earns a commission for every sale of the product that was caused by the affiliate.
Pay Per Click programs pay the affiliate everytime a link is clicked on the affiliates website or email. This can be very lucrative if you are creative with embedding the link into informational content.
An affiliate can also earn money by joining Pay Per Lead programs. The common way of doing this is to have customers register their contact information with the merchant. The affiliate gets paid a certain amount per registration.
A well-rounded strategy to make money through affiliate marketing will make use of all three of these techniques on their website, newsletter or email broadcasts. The more readers you get, the better chance that some will click on the advertising contained in the site, thereby making money for you.
Merchants love affiliate marketing because they have another marketing avenue that is effortless for them. They also don't have to pay for the marketing until the click, sale or lead. Marketing is very expensive, so not having to pay, until after the desired activity is extremely benefitial. Affiliate marketing is also cheaper than other marketing methods, both in money and time.
There are large affiliate programs that will match affiliates and merchants. If you have a website that gets a large number of visitors, these programs will supply you with banner ads and text links, to put on your site, from many large well known companies.
Many small business owners also have affiliate programs running from their websites. These are usually specialized products which are great for a more specialized website.
