If you're looking to earn some money online, chances are you encountered the term “affiliate marketing”. This is how it works: with your own websites and marketing activities, you send customers to the vendor of a certain product or service. Thanks to a special code included in the links you'll publish on your websites to promote that product, the vendor will know which customers come from you. If they buy, you are rewarded a commission. The customer pays exactly the same price, whether or not he landed the vendor's website directly or via affiliate links on your websites.
Starting with affiliate marketing is easy, but making a decent living from it may be a long term endeavor. Anyway, the sooner you start, the earlier you can see additional income coming in. Affiliate marketing can be done as as secondary activity to your main job. A couple of hours a day in the evening will get you started all right.
You'll need to have some websites of yours, where to publish your affiliate banners and links. If you don't want to spend money, you can set up free blogs on WordPress.com or on blogger. If you learn the ropes and decide you have potential for developing it into a real business, you can go ahead and buy your own domain names and hosting later.
In order to find what exactly to promote, you can join affiliate networks such as Commission Junction or Shareasale. There are many of them. Just join one to see what everything is about, then you can search for others. When you join, you'll most probably need to already have a website, because they will ask you to see it. Make a free blog, put up a few posts and you're done.
After you get accepted, you'll see a list of merchants and products. For each merchant, you'll see what commission they give to affiliates. This can be anything between 2% and 50%. The art of affiliate marketing is to find those offers that pay well and are very easy to sell because people want them already.
Choose the merchants you want to promote and apply to their programs. Some of them will accept you on the spot, others will give you an answer in a few days. After you get approved, you have access to all banners and links. Browse through them and choose the ones you like. You'll be provided a line of code which you need to copy and paste on your website, in order to have that banner or link displayed and ready for your visitors to click on.
Knowing what to write to attract people and to rank high in search engines is actually what makes the difference between success and failure. If you want results, you'll need to learn the basics of SEO and of internet marketing. Bringing traffic to your websites is the most challenging part of affiliate marketing. If you succeed and your blog becomes popular, you'll be able to make money in more than one way out of it. Affiliate marketing is only one possibility.
Have you started your affiliate blog yet?
Related articles from around the web:
Related searches: Affiliate Marketing
How to Effectively Target Your Marketing
Advertising has traditionally entailed the creation and dissemination of promotional content that, one hopes, will attract the interest of new customers while also building a professional and wide brand image and awareness. Hopelessly inefficient, this form of advertising has been largely replaced by the rise of targeted advertising – helped along by big data sets […]
Why SEO is Important for startups?
Most of the startups just look at paid advertising as an Avenue to bring visitors to their website. The problem is that paid advertising requires you to spend a consistent amount of money. On the other hand, when you're looking at SEO, you would realize that the cost of running SEO campaign is much lower. […]
Top 10 Free Sales Tools from Google to Friday CRM
When you've started up with a product and you want to reach a much larger scale with, you are for sure going to choose something that is of a larger scale itself to promote it right? So when people launch a product or an item online the prime goal for it, is to be able […]
The Importance of Internet Marketing for Your Business
There is fierce competition in the industry which has led to a complexity in marketing. Traditional marketing was aimed at the local market and the target was the local audience. With the impressive growth of the internet and the surge in e-commerce, various businesses are going online and use digital marketing services for their business. […]