Affiliate Marketing
Anyone who has ventured into the world of online income generation must have heard of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is simply a means for the average ‘Joe’ to make money by sending visitors to other peoples’ websites where they hopefully become customers! You make money when your visitors buy from the website you have sent them to. Amazon is a great example of a company which offers this opportunity since it is a trusted ‘brand’ and deals with physical products. Most people are familiar with Amazon.com and have ordered something from them at one time or another.
Another great company offering affiliate products is Clickbank.com. Clickbank deals in instant download products or ‘information products’. Since there is no shipping or storage of products, the product creators are able to offer large commissions of up to 75% of the sale price of the product to the affiliate. Because of this Clickbank has become very competitive and thousands of affiliates have made money promoting these items.
This leads us to the ‘how’ of affiliate marketing. ‘How do I make money from this?’ To make money from this concept you need to send ‘buying’ customers to the products which they want. Many courses have been written on the various ways to do this. One way is to ‘catch’ the customer at the point of sale by offering a good review of the product. The customer is already interested in a specific product and simply wishes to find out more and be assured that it is indeed a good buy. By giving the customer this assurance and then leading him to the product, assuming he trusts you, you generate a sale and therefore a commission.
There are simply thousands of such reviews online covering thousands of products and services. Have a look through one and you are likely to find an affiliate link at the end of it. This is a link which lets the website know who has referred the customer so it can give them credit for the sale. The power of this is that you simply create the review once and it can be viewed thousands of times generating sales for years to come. Build many sites like this and you have the start of your own internet empire. So what is the downside?
The downside is that there are thousands of competing affiliates just like you who are already writing reviews for the same products. You need to choose your products wisely and go for keywords and product names with a high search volume but low competition. Simply creating a website or a blog does not guarantee anyone will see it and traffic generation to your site, review or blog is the life blood of your affiliate business. Spending time before rushing in and creating a site, to find little capitalized on keyword phrases is vital if you want to generate ‘free’ traffic to your affiliate links.
There are many ways to generate traffic to your site of course including pay per click, social networking, banner advertising and you can use offline advertising. However if you build a site around specific keywords which are product related and have little competition you can save yourself a whole heap of time – and misery! Even if you spam the entire social networking sites with your website link you are not necessarily going to attract buyers to your site. Much better to have even a small amount of targeted traffic which is buyer related traffic than hundreds of random visitors who simply stumble across your path from various dubious sources!
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Building an income in affiliate marketing has been a very slow process for me. After 2 years I am nowhere near my goals. Just a lot of hard work and unsatisfactory results. What are your thoughts?
I have had a similar experience and a lot of frustration. The key is to not give up and find something which shows some results even it it is very small, then build on that. Results are much slower than I initially had thought but I now look at my action steps and focus on activity and not the results. Looking for results too early made me feel demoralised and demotivated me. Concentrate on what you can do to move your business forward and keep taking action. Results will come – just never give up!
I have been doing internet marketing almost since three years but don’t have enough experience with Affiliate Marketing. I have concluded some thing after three years of internet marketing experience that if you are good in affiliate marketing then you are almost perfect in any sort of internet marketing. Lead generation is key to success and affiliate marketing is the name of lead generation. I am running my own blog and I have been signed up with Amazon Affiliate program. I wrote down a post for best ipad2 covers and it automatically ranked number one position and I have couple of business leads from that post. Now my page is ranking on 6th page and I think I need to promote that page to generate more business leads but via organic SEO.