If you are a beginner internet marketer, or if you have just started to learn how to make money online, then you must have heard about affiliate marketing. But what exactly is affiliate marketing? How can you use affiliate marketing to make money online?
Well, in affiliate marketing, you promote products of other companies and internet marketers and get a portion of sale if someone buys something from your link. Affiliate marketing is amazing because you can start making money right away without owning any product. This is the reason why its the most popular method of making money online.
Why I like affiliate marketing?
As stated above, I like affiliate marketing mainly because there is no need to create a product. You don’t have to be an expert in any subject to create an ebook or video course to sell. There is no need to manufacture anything. All you have to do is to convince people to buy a product based upon your recommendation, and you immediately get a cut of the sale!
Another cool thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to provide after sales support. Product owner will deal with all the after sales issues like service, support, product delivery (online download or drop shipping) and payment processing. As an affiliate marketer, you just need to make a sale and collect your check.
You also have a built-in advantage when promoting popular products. If you are affiliate of a popular product, chances are that people already know about it and won’t need much convincing to buy the product. For instance, if you are affiliate for a product such as iPad, through amazon affiliates program, then all you have to do is push people over the edge on a product (iPad) they were considering purchasing anyway. Thus, when you are an affiliate for popular products, your half work (marketing) is already done.
Getting started with affiliate marketing
Almost all products have affiliate or partner programs these days. Just look for it on their website. Once you find the program, go through its details. Normally, you just have to sign up for the affiliate/partner program to get a special link for the sales site. This special link tells the product owner that it was you who sent the customer to their site, so that they can give you your share. You can check the stats on their site and you can get payments via check or paypal depending upon the product you are promoting.
Once you get the affiliate link for the product you want to promote, you have to drive targetted traffic to the sales site using this link. There are many ways to do this. You can,
- Use this affiliate link in a review post on a blog or website.
- Use Google adwords.
- Send the link to your email list.
That’s it. In short, all you need is choose a product, get affiliate link for it, send traffic to it and start collecting money!
Guest Author Mayur Somani is a wordpress developer who blogs at Hacktrix. You can guest blog on QOT and share your affiliate marketing tips.