What is Affiliate Marketing? Well let me put it this way. How many times have you told a friend or relative about a product or service that you like that resulted in them purchasing that product or service? Now imagine doing the same thing on the Internet, but on a much larger scale. Now imagine that that the companies you refer people to pay you a commission for your referrals. That is how affiliate marketing works.
The perks of starting an affiliate marketing business include:
- Typically, no cost to join most affiliate programs.
- The ability to work from home, be your own boss and set your own hours.
- Start-up costs are typically low, a fraction of what traditional business can be.
- You do not have to worry about customer service, inventory, shipping or receiving.
- It is easy to get started in affiliate marketing, there are many online programs that assist you and allow you to get started immediately.
- You can work your own hours.
- You can work full time or part time.
You may be surprised about how much affiliate marketing is going on out there. I know I was. It is all around us. For example, as I drive out of my housing development, there are small signs beside the road advertising a dating website. I see these signs every day, but I never realised they were put there by an affiliate marketer for marketing a dating site. The next time you are shopping at your favourite online store, try scrolling down to the very bottom on their homepage. You will find that many of them have a little link at the bottom of their page labelled “affiliate”. For example, look at the Amazon.com and Dell Computers sites. These companies are looking for people to advertise their products. How many times have you purchased a digital product on the Internet and ended up making your purchase through Clickbank? Clickbank is an affiliate program network. They describe themselves as “…the Internet’s largest digital marketplace”. They are basically the middlemen between affiliates and the real product sellers. If you have an eBook you want to sell, you might put it on Clickbank. When someone purchases your eBook, the affiliate and Clickbank both get a percentage of the sale.
The thing I like most about affiliate marketing, is that once you set up your website and some proven affiliate advertisements there really is not a huge amount of maintenance required, your home business can be on autopilot. Having said this, it is important to continue to interact with your customers or leads to hold them as repeat buyers or sell them additional products. There are things called sales funnels that are a method of bringing in customer to a low-priced product and to follow up (funnel) them with additional higher priced products or subscriptions.
Although focusing on one type of product is typically recommended, it’s not uncommon for affiliates to market for multiple companies, creating multiple streams of income. For example, you might have a website that promotes work at home opportunities where you may promote products from different work at home opportunities.
There is a lot of opportunity out there for those who want it. You must dedicate your time and energy to It during your start-up phase, but if you stick with it, you may expect to earn extra income, stay at home with your kids or replace your existing income working fewer hours. Do not expect this to occur overnight as it can take a considerable length of time to achieve, any many new affiliate marketers fail due to stopping because they do not make income when that are just starting. Many of these people are quitting just at the point they are just about to see results from their efforts.
If you are going to venture into affiliate marketing, you should do plenty of research before starting. One of the main steps is just to start, if you put it off because everything is not just right you will fail and miss out on the opportunity of learning as you go along.
There are a lot of people who try affiliate marketing, do not stick with it, and fail, but there are also those who are persistent and make a lot of money doing it. The best advice I can give is, start slowly, do your research, test to see what works for you and stick with it!
Peter Abraham