With the aid of the Internet, you can almost have everything right at your fingertips. With just a few clicks you get access to thousands and even millions of pieces of information and data on virtually any field of interest.
As years pass by, the Internet continuous to effect radical changes in many facets of human endeavors, including commerce.
Experts say that the information space, commonly known as the “world wide web,” grows by over a million pages every day as more and more people utilize the Internet for information, education, entertainment, business, and other personal reasons.
It doesn’t take a business-oriented individual to realize that this phenomenon can bring about sky-high financial gains. The Internet’s fast-growing popularity in recent years is surely an opportunity for a business that any entrepreneur would not want to miss.
What is Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a way of making money online by promoting someone else’s products.
As an affiliate you’re essentially a commission salesperson for the products you’re promoting: You earn a commission for every paying customer you send to the merchant selling the product.
It’s kind of like being a real estate agent: You don’t own the home you’re promoting, but you get a nice commission for promoting it and finding the right buyer.
To see how it works, let’s imagine that you are an affiliate for AXYZ store, where customers can buy top hats, monocles and other accessories to make themselves more “fancy”. See how you earn your commission below
You might be thinking only businessmen can make much money out of the Internet, don’t you? Think again. You too can earn big bucks through the Internet even if you don’t have products to sell and high-profile and established company. How? That is through affiliate marketing.
What Make Affiliate Marketing Great?
If you’re brand new to making money online, affiliate marketing is a great place to start for a variety of reasons:
Reason #1: It’s easy to get started
As an affiliate, you don’t have to create the products you’re promoting. You just promote something that already exists. This is a lot easier than building and selling your own physical or digital product:
- You don’t have to spend time and money on building the product
- You don’t have to buy stock to sell, or store it anywhere
- You don’t need to figure out how to run a shopping cart
- You don’t have to handle customer supportYou basically get many of the benefits of having your own product, without all the annoying parts. And the best thing is… you can even end up earning MORE than the product owner for each sale! Commissions of 70% are quite common..
Reason #2: It’s easy to grow
One of the best ways to make more money is to add new products to your lineup. When you’re selling your own products, it can take months to develop a new product. But as an affiliate, it’s as easy as putting up a new advertisement, or writing a few paragraphs talking about the new product.
Reason #3: No special skills required
You don’t need any particular skills or experience to get started as an affiliate. Most affiliates start out with no knowledge, and just learn as they go. Of course having
a background in web design, writing, graphic design or marketing doesn’t hurt, but it’s not necessary. Some of the best affiliates we’ve seen started completely from scratch.
(In some ways it’s even BETTER to have no previous knowledge. It means you don’t need to unlearn any bad habits!)
Here are the things you actually DO really need to succeed:
• Basic computer skills and an internet connection.
• Determination and perseverance.
• A willingness to learn new things.
• Patience: It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme!
Reason #4: Low, low startup costs
One of the biggest benefits of affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to invest a lot of money to get started.
Imagine buying a bricks-and-mortar business: You’d probably spend tens of thousands of dollars on it, before you’ll make a single cent!
But for a bare-bones affiliate website, your initial costs will be tiny: Just $10/year for a domain name, and around $50/year for web hosting.
You can do pretty much everything yourself without spending any more, but a lot of affiliates choose to hire people to do things like write articles, design graphics, etc. It can often be a good investment to stop yourself from getting stuck on things you’re not good at.
Recommended Resource
Affilorama offers free in-depth written and video lessons, tools, tips and support allowing complete beginners to build up a successful affiliate marketing business from scratch. Click here to dive access all lessons.
You might have come across these words over the net while surfing. Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing between a merchant and an affiliate who gets paid for referring or promoting the merchants’ products and services.
It is one of the burgeoning industries nowadays because it is proven to be cost-efficient and quantifiable means of attaining great profit both for the merchant and the affiliate and other players in the affiliate program, such as the affiliate network or affiliate solution provider.
Affiliate marketing works effectively for the merchant and the affiliate. To the first, he gains opportunities to advertise his products to a larger market, which increases his chances to earn. The more affiliate websites or hard-working affiliates he gets, the more sales he can expect.
By getting affiliates to market his products and services, he is saving himself time, effort and money in looking for possible markets and customers. When a client clicks on the link in the affiliate website, purchases the product, recommends it to others who look for the same item or buys it again, the merchant multiplies his chances of earning.
On the other hand, the affiliate marketer benefits from each customer who clicks on the link in his website and who actually purchases the product or avails of the service provided by the merchant. In most cases, the affiliate gets a commission per sale, which can be a fixed percentage or fixed amount.
How not to mess up?
If you want to be an affiliate marketer and make fortunes out of the Internet, you may follow the following most basic and easiest ways to start an effective affiliate marketing program. First is to identify a particular thing you are interested in or passionate about so you won’t be bored and forced to develop your affiliate web site later on. Focusing on a specific area you know very well will help you bring out your best without much risks and effort.
You can add a personal touch to your site and give your visitors who are possible buyers an impression that you are an expert in your field. In this way, you gain their trust and eventually encourage them to buy the products you endorse. Next is to look for good paying merchants and products or services related to your interest and create now a website. In choosing the products, you must also consider its conversion rate.
Do I need to build a website?
Most of the rest of this guide is going to talk about how to build a website to make money as an affiliate. There are certainly ways to be an affiliate without building a website, but in our experience, building a website is more effective at generating a long-lasting passive income.
So what are the steps involved in building your own money-making affiliate website?
