How to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

There are seemingly infinite opportunities for making money online. But in my opinion, the easiest and most straightforward opportunity is affiliate marketing. Tens of thousands of people are involved in affiliate marketing. They work from the comfort of their homes and make a full-time living through the Internet. I have personally known people who make more than $50,000 per month via affiliate marketing. That is not to say all involved with affiliate marketing will earn this income, but it does illustrate the scope of income possibilities. It takes several years of experience to reach this high income level, but even if you have just 1% of the success that the top affiliate marketers have, I am confident you will be glad you tried it. I am personally involved with affiliate marketing and it provides comfortable supplementary income.

Before you get into the process of earning money through affiliate marketing, you should first learn a bit about traditional marketing. Before the Internet became widespread, companies had internal marketing departments. They advertised their products through traditional media outlets like television, newspapers, radio, and print magazines. These were the only methods of marketing for several decades before the Internet was born. Traditional methods allowed little to no opportunity for outsourcing the marketing process. The advent of the Internet, however, enabled advertisers to outsource their marketing process to individuals like you and me.

Today the Internet is widely used by millions of people all over the world, allowing them to purchase products and services from various companies with a click of a button. When transactions are made online, it is possible to track each user’s behavior. This tracking process prompted the birth of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing involves two parties: the advertiser, also called the merchant or retailer, and the publisher, also called the affiliate. In this case, since we do not have our own product or service, we are the affiliates. Affiliate marketing is also defined as performance-based marketing. In other words, the advertiser will compensate the publisher depending upon the performance of the publisher. Usually the publisher or the affiliate is paid for every sale that is generated via the publisher’s affiliate link.

For example, imagine that an advertiser is selling t-shirts online at T-Shirts.com and each shirt costs $10. The advertiser can choose to give away 20% of the sale price to the affiliate who referred that sale. If you as a publisher refer a customer to buy a t-shirt from the advertiser, you will get $2 for each sale. If you refer 10 customers to them, you will earn $20.

If you want to become an affiliate of a particular advertiser, you have to sign up for an affiliate account. After your account is approved, you will be provided with your own unique affiliate link. For example, if you are an affiliate of T-Shirts.com, you will be given an affiliate link that looks something like <www.T-Shirts.com/?=YourAffiliateID>. Your affiliate ID can be a username, a random number, or any other form of unique identification.

When an Internet user clicks your affiliate link, he or she will visit T-Shirts.com and the affiliate tracking system will record that you referred the visitor to their website. When the visitor purchases a t-shirt, you will be credited with $2 commission in your affiliate account. Note that you will not make money when the customer clicks the affiliate link. You will earn affiliate commissions only when the customer completes the purchase on the merchant’s website. The advertiser is paying you for the performance and not just the volume of visitors (hence the alternate name of performance-based marketing).

Affiliate Networks: As you can see in the above example, the t-shirt merchant does not need to worry about marketing at all. All they did was simply set up the affiliate system and pay the affiliates who referred sales to the merchant. The ease of this system made affiliate marketing very popular. Almost every merchant selling products or services online started their own affiliate system. But this phenomenon gave rise to a new problem. Affiliates who were promoting many different products found it very difficult to track all of their earnings in different affiliate accounts held with each merchant. This led to the creation of affiliate networks. An affiliate network acts as a meeting place between publishers and advertisers. Advertisers no longer need to install their own affiliate system. Instead, they can approach the affiliate network and set up their program. Affiliates can sign up with the network and promote any product that they find in the affiliate network. One of the biggest affiliate networks on the Internet is Commission Junction (CJ.com). They have been around for more than 10 years and are one of the most trusted networks on the web. Another prominent network is ClickBank.com. ClickBank is similar to Commission Junction, but ClickBank specializes in digital products.

Types of Affiliate Programs: There are basically two types of affiliate programs. The first is Pay Per Sale, meaning the affiliate earns a percentage of the sale or a fixed amount for every sale whenever a visitor clicks the affiliate’s link and purchases the product or service on the advertiser’s website. The second is Pay Per Lead, meaning the visitor need not purchase any product, but instead fills out a form or signs up for a free account on the merchant’s website. For example, many free dating websites will prompt visitors to sign up for a free account through your affiliate link. When they do, you will earn $1-5 for every lead depending on the advertiser.

Now that you know what an affiliate program is and how affiliate marketing works, let’s look at the different methods by which you can promote your affiliate link.

Websites: If you have a blog or a website about a certain topic, you can find affiliate programs related to your topic by searching Google. For example, if your blog is about skin care, search Google for “skin care affiliate programs” and sign up. You may also find skin care related affiliate programs inside affiliate networks. Once you have acquired your affiliate link, the next goal is to drive clicks to that link. You can place banners or text links on your website and wait for people to follow the link and make a purchase. An effective way to promote a product is to buy the product yourself and write a review of it in your website or blog. At the end of the review, you can instruct your readers to click the link and buy the product at the merchant’s website.

Article Marketing: If you have strong writing skills, you can write articles of 300 to 500 words about certain topics and submit them to article directories such as ArticlesBase.com. These article directories have vast databases of articles on nearly every imaginable topic. When you submit an article, they allow you to include a custom signature, which can also include your affiliate link. Once your article is accepted and published at an article directory, anyone has the permission to copy that article and post it in their own website or blog as long as they keep the signature box intact. If your article is strong, many people will post it on their website, which will lead more people to your affiliate link.

Another popular article directory is EzineArticles.com, but they have stricter guidelines which do not allow affiliate links in your signature. To promote affiliate products through EzineArticles, you should first build a one page website where you can market your merchant’s product with your affiliate link. Then you can link to your website from the article’s signature. If your marketing message (also called a sales copy) is very influential in convincing the prospect to buy the merchant’s product, it can be more effective than redirecting the visitor straight to the merchant’s website via your affiliate link.

Forum Marketing: A forum is a place where people discuss a particular topic with other like-minded people. There are forums on a vast range of markets. To find forums on a particular topic, search Google for a keyword from the topic followed by the word forum. For example, if you want to find forums about Weight Loss, search for “Weight Loss forum.” Forums allow you to sign up for a free account and participate in the conversations. Most forums have a signature box where you can insert promotional links. When you participate in the forum by posting useful information, your signature will be displayed along with each post. The more you post, the more your affiliate link gets clicked.

Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the art of promoting your affiliate links via paid search results. When you search for a particular keyword in a search engine like Google, the results that you see on the left side are the natural, or organic, search results. The links that you see on the right side of the screen are sponsored links or paid search results. Companies or organizations pay Google to include their link in the search results when a particular keyword is searched. For example, if you want to promote a facial skin cream via SEM, you should first sign up for an account at Google AdWords (adwords.google.com). Then you should instruct Google to display your affiliate link whenever people search for the term “skin cream” or “buy skin cream.” You then have to pay Google for every click that you get. For example, if a product costs $50 and the merchant is giving away 20% affiliate commission, then you will receive $10 for each sale as affiliate commission. When you drive 100 visitors to your merchant’s website through your affiliate link by paying Google $0.10 for every click, you total investment would be $10. In this case you need to make at least one sale to break even. With two sales, you would earn a profit of $10, and so on.

Search engine marketing requires a lot of experience and expertise. This method is not recommended for beginners, because if they are not careful and strategic, they may end up throwing away money in marketing and get no sales or profit in return.

Buying Traffic: Another good way to promote affiliate links is to buy traffic from other websites. This is similar to SEM, but instead of paying the search engine for getting clicks, you pay other webmasters to display your banner or text advertisement on their websites. Before you commit to a big advertising package, you should first test the quality of their traffic and analyze whether the traffic coming from their websites will convert into enough sales to give you a good return on investment.

Email Marketing: The process of promoting a product or service by sending direct emails to the target audience is called email marketing. The first step in email marketing is getting an email list of potential customers. You can build your own email list by asking people to opt-in on your website, or you can purchase one. One of the most popular email marketing services on the web is Aweber.com. They provide features such as tracking clicks in the email and sending automatic follow-up messages. These services cost only $19.95 per month. In email marketing, you should send emails only to those who have opted to receive your email. Otherwise, it will be considered spam and you will lose your brand image.

If you are a beginner in the Internet marketing industry, you should try article marketing and forum marketing first. Once you have gained experience, you can invest your earnings in creating a website or trying Search Engine Marketing. If you are interested in becoming an expert in this field, there are several online coaching programs with step-by-step guidelines for how to participate in affiliate marketing most effectively.