Affiliate Marketing Business – How To Get Started
Affiliate marketing is actually based on a very simple concept. It’s all about helping the myriad of businesses who market their products and services online sell them, and you in turn earning commissions (a percentage) for each product or service you help them sell.
Affiliate marketing is really very straight forward; sell something to somebody and earn a commission in return. Sounds very uninteresting right? You will ask, ‘what’s the difference from someone who opens a shop across the street or even in the market?’
By telling you that this method of making money on the internet is still by selling something then where’s the difference from selling offline? Now know the difference. The difference lies in the potential reach of the different markets you both operate in. Your neighbour’s market is limited to the people in his immediate vicinity, while yours is not. Your market is everybody who has access to an internet connected computer anywhere in the world! Got it?
This proposition sounds very simple, but it will require lots of imagination to see all the possibilities that it has for you. Presently, there are about 1 billion people with access to the internet (which is constantly increasing), and this makes the Internet the world’s largest marketplace. It is open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. There are no weekends, no public holidays and no strikes! So let’s kick-off!
OVERVIEW
Welcome to the lucrative world of Affiliate marketing. In the simplest terms, this is what happens – You send people to someone else’s website. They buy something or sign up for something (i.e. fill out a form or survey) and you are paid a commission.
It is a revenue sharing arrangement set up between companies selling products or services and affiliates (you). You are rewarded for sending customers to the company’s website (and in most cases who eventually buy).
These pay-per-sale or pay-per-lead programs are easy to join. In an affiliate marketing program, a company (website) pays you to generate sales for them from your pay-per-click advert, banner, newsletter or email. There are thousands of companies that will pay you commissions for the sales or leads you generate for them.
To join an affiliate marketing program is totally free and easy to do. You are not required to buy and stock the product (as in distributorships). It just involves filling out a form – just as you do when you sign-up for an email account.
Affiliate marketing is the ideal way to quickly and easily make money online as you do not need to come up with your own product or service. All you need do is choose a way to promote someone else’s product or service effectively.
You can actually begin making money with affiliate marketing in as little as 15 minutes!
EARN COMMISSIONS WITHOUT SALES!
In some affiliate programs, the persons you refer to a website do not even need to buy anything. If they fill out a form, request a free report or download software for trial, you get paid. There are several web sponsors that have several of these pay-per-lead programs.
STARTING OUT
Basically, what you need to do is to drive internet traffic to a website or company that you partner with. How you do this does not matter, it could be from a banner advert on your website, a link in your e-mail, your newsletter or from an advert in a pay-per-click search engine e.g. (www.google.com).
Reasonably, let me assume that you are just new to the internet. Being new the ideal place for you to start is on Google.com. When you learn more you might then get a website which you can use to pre-sell your customers.
WHY GOOGLE COM
Presently, Google.com is the most popular search engine on the internet and boasts of more than 200 million searches every single day! These searches are made by people all over the world seeking answers to their questions or people out rightly looking for products and services to buy.
Note: people who will be able to buy through your ads are people in more developed countries where the use of credit cards are common.
However, it does not matter what your location is. Affiliates in the US do not have any notable advantage over you period! Now since people go to Google.com to research their potential purchases, it serves as a good place to show them those product and services you are affiliated with. Are you scared already? Please don’t be, you will find it all easy by the time you are through. Ok.
GOOGLE ADS
Google Ads is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising system run by Google. This is presently the best advertising system developed by man so far as you are only charged when and only when someone clicks on your advert. Google Ads appear as little text ads on your search results on Google.com
IN SUMMARY
You write Google Ads text promoting a company’s product or service. In your Google Ads advert is a link, and when your Advert is clicked, this link contains information about you and shows that the visitor came through you.
When the user gets to the site you are promoting, your affiliate ID is registered automatically. Now when the customer buys something or fills out a form on the site, you are paid a commission. However, if the customer does not buy at the time, you do not need to worry as many merchant sites place small programs called “cookies” on the customers computer for as long as 180 days which is about 6 months.
This means that if that customer comes back to the site on a later date and makes a purchase or registers for something, you still get your commission.
By the time you are through reading the post, you would have learnt all the tricks that are required to exploit the popularity of the popular search engine Google.
Things you need to start affiliate marketing:
• Access to the internet.
• A few hours of work weekly.
• A credit or debit card
• A Physical/Virtual Address (You’ll need this to do a successful registration
Part 1: Beginning
1. Choose an email address for your affiliate correspondence. You can use your regular email address or you can create one specifically for your affiliate correspondences.
2. Decide how you want to handle commission. Do you want to receive them through check or transfer?
3. Although you are now ready to register with affiliate programs, it is not essential that you do it right now. You can join later once you’ve identified a merchant you would like to promote.
Tip: Information products (books, software etc) are presently the highest selling products online. It is not that other products do not sell, but these sell more. So my suggestion is that you stick to information products.
STEP 2: Sign up for an affiliate marketing program and get your own affiliate ID.
STEP 3: Sign up for Google Ads.
STEP 4: Research keywords for your Google Ads campaign. These keywords are the words you will choose so that if anybody making a search on Google types it, your ad will appear.
STEP 5: Create your own Google Ads campaign, advertising the product or service you have chosen.
STEP 6: Analyze your initial results; if you discover from your analysis that your initial testing is making you money, then continue with the campaign if not redo them.
STEP 7: Relax and count your commissions! As you can see, this is actually a very simple process but it is imperative that you master all these steps in order to run a successful Google Ads campaign. It is possible to do the first 5 steps within a few short hours. However, I would advise you to do things thoroughly and spend more time on researching your keywords.
When you first start running Google Ads campaigns, it might take you quite some time to do your first campaign. After a while, you will be able to get this down in much less time.
The benefit lies in the fact that once the initial work is taken care of, there’s little on-going work required.