Affiliate Marketing - The Ins and Outs

One of the best ways to make money from home these days is to leverage the power of the Internet. If set up properly, the Internet can work to make you money all day, all night and every day of the week. There are many inexpensive businesses that can be started online as well. This makes it possible for more and more people to realize their dreams of working from home, spending more time with their children, and making more money than they could from a traditional 9 to 5 jobs. There are many different paths to take regarding making money on the Internet. One of the more popular methods of making money online is through affiliate marketing.



One of the early adopters of affiliate marketing was Amazon. They incorporated it into their strategy early on in their existence, and they still rely heavily on it today. Their army of affiliates is responsible for sending millions of visitors to their site every day, which results in millions of dollars in sales each day as well. Amazon is not losing money using this strategy either, so you know that it works.



There are two sides to affiliate marketing. There is the affiliate who is responsible for advertising the supplier’s products using traffic from a website, email list of other methods. Then there is the supplier who provides the product itself. A supplier will pay a percentage, or commission, to the affiliate if someone comes and buys something as a result of being directed from the affiliate’s website or email list. The supplier will provide affiliate tracking codes or links to keep track of all this. If a visitor clicks on a link often affiliates sites, they will be redirected to the supplier’s site. Their supplier site will keep track of the affiliate id in the link during the visitor’s session. Should they buy something, the site will know that it owes commission to the affiliate.



You will need to apply for an affiliate program if you are interested in promoting their products. Many times they will ask you to show them evidence of the website traffic you can send to them. Many will take new people to affiliate marketing, but if you have the experience they are even more receptive to accepting you. Furthermore, if you are able to send them targeted traffic with high conversions,  then they may be willing to pay you an even higher commission rate versus those that are new to affiliate marketing. Just speak with the person running the program if you think you should be considered for higher commissions.



Affiliate marketing is a popular and lucrative way to make money leveraging the Internet. It is the best of both worlds because it gives you the opportunity to advertise and sell just about any product you can think of without having to buy expensive inventory, store it or ship it to the buyer. All, you have to do is send targeted traffic to the supplier and let them take care of the rest of the process.,

A Quick Guide To Affiliate Marketing

My path to success with affiliate marketing was a long one. It has taken me six years to be able to earn enough money to support myself off of affiliate commission checks. When I stared, the only help available were Internet forums and those silly gurus who claim to be millionaires.





It took me six years to wade through all the false promise and to learn what truly works. There are some hard and fast rules to affiliate market that everyone should know. Every Internet marketer should have a bread and butter traffic source and should have profitable campaigns running in at least the verticals. We will explain these concepts in this article.

Traffic Is King! 



In internet marketing traffic is king. Every time you sign up with a new CPA network or affiliate marketing program the account manager will ask how much traffic do you have. What exactly is traffic? Traffic is just an industry jargon term for how many people visit your websites or click your advertisement links.





There are multiple ways to get traffic on the Internet. You can pay for clicks and adds via Google AdWords or from banner placements. You can get organic traffic via having people find your site from search engines. Facebook even has it's own paid advertisement platform that you can use. Many people get traffic from youtube videos and article writing. These are all great choices of driving people to your website. It is always a good idea to test them all out to see which is the most profitable.





The cool thing about Internet marketing is that it is cheap to test out different methods of driving traffic to your site. You can run as many tests until you are sure which is the best.





Once you have an idea of how you will get traffic, you now need to decide what type of affiliate program you want to run. In the industry, we call something such as health a vertical. Under the health vertical their are many niches such as, weight loss, skin care, supplements and products that are designed to keep people healthy.





It is always wise to promote more than one niche and to use different affiliate programs because affiliate offers do not last forever. They get discontinued and stopped. You need to have another affiliate offer ready to run when this happens.





You also want to market more than one niche or product so if traffic slows in that one niche, you will have other ways to continue making income. I know many marketers who were making a killing under one specific vertical and when the methods used to market that vertical stopped producing traffic they saw a major decline in their income.





There's a ton of money to be made with affiliate marketing but you have to put in the time to study this industry. You have to roll up your sleeves and get dirty, trying different methods and ideas. Once you learn the basics, you will be able to make a living off of affiliate marketing.