A Total Beginners Guide To Affiliate Marketing

If the idea of making money on-line appeals to you, but you have no idea of how to do so, affiliate marketing is probably your best place to start.Briefly, affiliate marketing is promoting the products and/or services of others, where you earn a commission for every sale made through you. Thousands of business people and Web-based companies rely heavily on affiliates to sell their products (such as books, software, training courses and memberships) for them.This isn�t like �selling� in the traditional off-line sense, where you sometimes have to make a lot of phone calls or knock on a lot of doors to reach customers. Affiliate marketing can be done entirely on-line. You may never have to directly interact with a customer at all.So how do you sell products to people without talking to them, and perhaps not even e-mailing them? There are several ways, but first it helps to explain a little bit how affiliate marketing works.When you sign on as an affiliate, you provide the company or business person with some basic information about you (name, address, and so forth), as well as the manner in which you would like to be paid. The fastest way to receive payment for your affiliate marketing efforts is to set up an on-line banking account. PayPal is by far the most popular method of sending and receiving payment on-line.The seller then provides you with your own unique affiliate URL or link. This is the link you use to steer people to the product. When someone who clicks your link buys the product, the company knows which affiliate earned the commission for the sale.How do people find and click on your affiliate link? The most successful affiliate markets try one or a combination of the methods below:1.You can create a Web site of your own on a topic related to the product or services you are selling. For example, if the product is an ebook on how to win at poker, you could create a Web site that tells all about the game of poker, and include your affiliate link on every page of your site.2.Creating a blog that focuses on topics that would interest the kind of people who might buy the product. Using the vitamin example again, write a series of blog entries regarding the benefits of various vitamins that include your affiliate link.3.You can place classified ads with your link in on-line newsletters or on other people�s sites that are related to what you are promoting.4.Writing short articles on subjects closely tied to your products. There are a number of article databases on the Web where you can post these articles for free. When people read them and click on your affiliate link, you earn commissions from any sales that result.Finding affiliate programs is as easy as typing �be an affiliate� or �affiliate program� into any search engine. By doing so, you will soon discover the millions of opportunities out there for you to make money on-line through affiliate marketing.
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