Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers are the sales reps of the net. In order to earn, they have to advertise the product in which they are affiliated with in order earn their commissions. They would use as many means possible in order to make a sale. Affiliate marketers on the internet do the same thing, except that they don't walk door to door. They walk webpage to webpage, advertising their affiliate links as much as possible to earn a commission.


A starting affiliate marketer could start by looking for a product that he or she is willing to promote. Preferably, he or she would have tried the product enough to believe in it and market it effectively and with more conviction. So if you're looking for a product, try to find something that you would personally buy before trying to market it. A good place to start looking would be ClickBank, where you would be able to find a great selection of information products that would be possibly on demand on the internet. Keep in mind while you are looking for a product to sell, that it would be in an untapped niche where competition isn't very tight.

Having found your niche, promotion is the next step in the process. You can do these with three basic ways, aside from various other way to promote your product. Your aim is to generate traffic that will eventually convert into purchases, so you will need high quality directed traffic for your affiliate link.

1. Pay per click advertising
Pay per click advertising is an easy way to drive traffic to your affiliate link, at a cost. A prime example of pay per click advertising is Google Adwords. Adwords charges you for a specified amount depending on the amount of bidders who want to advertise for a particular keyword or search term. It is therefore important to find the keywords that haven't been tapped yet, but show potential for being searched. An example of this would be new trends that have recently been searched on Google and other major search engines. You then pay for the advertising by the number of clickthroughs that are made on your advertisement. Make sure to make the most out of your pay per click advertising to ensure the best results.
One con in Adwords is the remaining amount of click frauds that happen in AdSense. Of course, Google is one of the strictest advertisers around the web, so you can be assured of relative safety when it comes to their advertising. Still, you are welcome to try other forms of advertising, both paid and manual traffic exchange. However, it still depends on the website whether they will be able to maintain good quality traffic towards the advertisers.

2. Article marketing
Article marketing is another means in which to advertise your affiliate link, or to your blog or website where your affiliate link is attached. In article marketing, you submit an article to one of many article directories out there. Some of them pay you for the number of pageviews that your article gets, but some of them don't. But the advantage of putting up articles even in the ones that don't pay is the amount of exposure that you get in the area of online article writing. For every article, a person views your work as well as your author box, in which you may put backlinks back into your blog, website, or affiliate link. Mind you that you should take note of the terms of service of that particular article directory - some of them permit affiliate links on the page, some of them don't even allow articles that promote products. If you increase the number of backlinks to your site, you don't only increase possible traffic, you also increase your rankings in search engines.

3. Social networking
Social networking is the most basic way to promote your website. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Plurk, LinkedIn, and a vast number of networking sites give you countless opportunities in promoting your links, and with the number of people on the internet, a lot of people will definitely see them. Another more direct option is through email, but you will have to be creative in having to obtain email addresses from people. Try not to spam people, but to maintain a good relationship within the online community so that people will be able to support your online earning endeavors.