If you're new to affiliate marketing, one of the easiest places to not only learn about affiliate marketing from some of the great products but also how to get started promoting products is Clickbank. This is a marketplace of electronic products that you can start promoting any number of different products from dozens of different categories. It's good because they have a relatively high payout per sale. Unlike some affiliates that pay a small percentage of a retail product, you'll typically be making about $20 - $60 per sale which allows you to get less sales to achieve your financial goals.
Most affiliate networks require a website and an application process. One of the more well known affiliate networks is commission junction. Google now has an affiliate program as well. You can also find dozens of other affiliate networks by doing some simple searching on the internet for keywords like affiliate network or affiliate programs.
Another popular type of affiliate marketing is called CPA which stands for Cost Per Acquisition. This is a scenario in which the company whose products or services you're promoting is going to pay you for a lead. So, when a visitor to your site completes some action, you get paid. This may be as simple as someone putting in an email address all the way through someone completing a survey or multi-page application.
There are a number of ways to freely promote affiliate products. One way that you can find that is usually free is through online classified ads. Craigslist is the largest of these, but several other free online classified sites can generate a significant amount of traffic. The important part of doing anything related to online classifieds is to track your results. You should have a unique tracking ID attached to each affiliate link. If not, you'll get hits to your site without knowing what is generating the traffic and resulting sales.
Article marketing is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. Depending on which article directories you use, the idea is to write the article on a topic that is related to the product you'll be trying to promote and submit that article to article directories. The idea is to submit unique articles so that the search engines rank those articles which gets traffic to the articles and clicks to the links in your "resource box" or "author profile". I've found from personal experience that the click through rate for people who click on the links in your resource box is anywhere from 5 to 15% depending on the article and the specific call to action in the resource box.
Social networking is becoming more and more popular and can be leveraged to help you promote your affiliate program. Some sites, such as squidoo.com and hubpages.com allow you to create a page talking about and promoting whatever you want to promote. Other social networking sites can be leveraged significantly for getting your main website into the search engines as well.
Blogging is a good way to promote affiliate products. This strategy does require that you develop traffic to your blog. Unlike article marketing and social media sites that generate a good amount of traffic for you, a blog will require that you do the work to get traffic to that site. You're in luck, however, because search engines tend to like blogs for the most part because they represent updated, fresh content. You can use free websites like blogger.com to host your blog or a self-hosted blogging solution using some software, such as wordpress.
You can develop a more traditional website which would be similar to wordpress on a self hosted site. In fact, there would be no difference for the most part assuming you're using a program like wordpress to manage your content. The SEO tools and plugins that come with wordpress on a self-hosted blog scenario are very good. The idea here is to generate the kind of content that attracts people and keeps people on the site. Some ideas for how to generate this type of content can be found on copyblogger.com and problogger.net which are two excellent resource for how to make money using a blog.
Pay per click advertising can support driving traffic through to a page that you control the content, such as a landing or squeeze page or can also redirect traffic directly from the advertisement itself through to the affiliate site with your affiliate ID in the link itself. This method is called direct linking. Another scenario is to send the traffic from pay per click to an information site or a theme based site where you're going to rely on the fact that a certain percentage of people that visit that site are going to take action.
These are only a few of the methods of promoting affiliate products. My advice is to pick one, spend a little time learning more about it and then start doing. There are things about affiliate marketing that you'll never know until you try. Plus, you can't make any money by just learning about this stuff. Come up with a solid plan and start promoting. Start with the options that don't have a high cost and go from there. Good luck!
Most affiliate networks require a website and an application process. One of the more well known affiliate networks is commission junction. Google now has an affiliate program as well. You can also find dozens of other affiliate networks by doing some simple searching on the internet for keywords like affiliate network or affiliate programs.
Another popular type of affiliate marketing is called CPA which stands for Cost Per Acquisition. This is a scenario in which the company whose products or services you're promoting is going to pay you for a lead. So, when a visitor to your site completes some action, you get paid. This may be as simple as someone putting in an email address all the way through someone completing a survey or multi-page application.
There are a number of ways to freely promote affiliate products. One way that you can find that is usually free is through online classified ads. Craigslist is the largest of these, but several other free online classified sites can generate a significant amount of traffic. The important part of doing anything related to online classifieds is to track your results. You should have a unique tracking ID attached to each affiliate link. If not, you'll get hits to your site without knowing what is generating the traffic and resulting sales.
Article marketing is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. Depending on which article directories you use, the idea is to write the article on a topic that is related to the product you'll be trying to promote and submit that article to article directories. The idea is to submit unique articles so that the search engines rank those articles which gets traffic to the articles and clicks to the links in your "resource box" or "author profile". I've found from personal experience that the click through rate for people who click on the links in your resource box is anywhere from 5 to 15% depending on the article and the specific call to action in the resource box.
Social networking is becoming more and more popular and can be leveraged to help you promote your affiliate program. Some sites, such as squidoo.com and hubpages.com allow you to create a page talking about and promoting whatever you want to promote. Other social networking sites can be leveraged significantly for getting your main website into the search engines as well.
Blogging is a good way to promote affiliate products. This strategy does require that you develop traffic to your blog. Unlike article marketing and social media sites that generate a good amount of traffic for you, a blog will require that you do the work to get traffic to that site. You're in luck, however, because search engines tend to like blogs for the most part because they represent updated, fresh content. You can use free websites like blogger.com to host your blog or a self-hosted blogging solution using some software, such as wordpress.
You can develop a more traditional website which would be similar to wordpress on a self hosted site. In fact, there would be no difference for the most part assuming you're using a program like wordpress to manage your content. The SEO tools and plugins that come with wordpress on a self-hosted blog scenario are very good. The idea here is to generate the kind of content that attracts people and keeps people on the site. Some ideas for how to generate this type of content can be found on copyblogger.com and problogger.net which are two excellent resource for how to make money using a blog.
Pay per click advertising can support driving traffic through to a page that you control the content, such as a landing or squeeze page or can also redirect traffic directly from the advertisement itself through to the affiliate site with your affiliate ID in the link itself. This method is called direct linking. Another scenario is to send the traffic from pay per click to an information site or a theme based site where you're going to rely on the fact that a certain percentage of people that visit that site are going to take action.
These are only a few of the methods of promoting affiliate products. My advice is to pick one, spend a little time learning more about it and then start doing. There are things about affiliate marketing that you'll never know until you try. Plus, you can't make any money by just learning about this stuff. Come up with a solid plan and start promoting. Start with the options that don't have a high cost and go from there. Good luck!
About the Author:
If you'd like to learn more about affiliate marketing and details on each of these methods, you should visit Brian's website dedicated to making money with affiliate marketing. He writes articles and uses several of these methods personally both on this site and severals others he uses to make money as an affiliate marketer.
