It’s back to basics with this article. Sometimes it’s a good practice to make sure the basic principles are understood; like mastering addition and subtraction before tackling multiplication and division.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing at its simplest is: sending customers to someone else and in return that party gives you commission.
But anytime you put money in the equation people get weird and confusing ideas and misconceptions. I think the biggest misconception is that it’s somehow devious or misleading to have affiliate links in your content. Some people will even go so far as to read about a product or service they’re interested in, and instead of clicking the affiliate link, they’ll manually navigate to the company’s website so as to negate the author of the article or website from getting any credit for their purchases. Maybe they think this will save them money, it will not: the price will be the same regardless. Maybe those types of individuals are just mean.
Look at the “Products I Use and Recommend” section in the right-hand column (or below if you’re on a phone size display). These are all products or services that have affiliate programs. These can produce steady monthly income if you’re skillful enough to send them paying customers.
The biggest advantage to affiliate marketing is that it frees you from developing, maintaining, and supporting the product or service. It allows you to focus on spreading the word (marketing) and reaping the rewards.
There are affiliate programs in most areas of interest so that you can focus on something you like and enjoy.
With skill a person can make as much as they desire with affiliate marketing. Like a pump, recirculating profits back into promotions, sending more and more people to those affiliate landing pages.
How To Get Started?
I get irritated when trying to find an answer to something when the most basic of steps are left out because it’s assumed everyone knows them. So here’s how to get started with affiliate marketing. First you need an affiliate link. Go to the website of the company you want to do this with and look at the links at the bottom of the page, or in setup, config, or “your account”… somewhere in those areas, if they offer affiliate marketing, you will find information on how to get signed up. You need a link with your affiliate ID, etc. in it so that when you send traffic to their site they know it came from you. Some sites/companies will automatically generate a link for you after you create an account (a lot of digital currency exchanges seem to do this) and you’ll see it in your account information area. Some sites/companies will require you to sign up as an affiliate and once you do that you’ll get a link and possibly graphics and marketing info. Some rare cases will require you to email or call to get setup. Some companies require to you be an existing customer of the product/service you want to market, others do not. In any case, once you have a link you can place it in blog posts, articles, and ads on your blog/website and you can venture into running ads and funnels to get traffic (the link in the next sentence shows you how to do this).
Don’t Leave This Step Out:
There’s one very important step that you should not leave out; if possible you should always do X before sending someone to an affiliate landing page. I tell you here what X is.
My next article will talk about network marketing and how it’s different than affiliate marketing and yet similar.
Read this blog post on The Most Profitable Affiliate Marketing Program I’ve participated in.
Until next time,
Fred
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