What is
Affiliate Marketing?
How
to make money on the Internet in simple terms.
There
has been a lot said about affiliate marketing and easy ways
to make money on the internet, but when I first started investigating
the affiliate phenomena, it soon became apparent that poeple
are extremely reluctant to explain how it works, or give any
constructive advice on the topic.
Fortunately
I had an advantage. At the time I was was working
in a well paid job in the City and I had started to become
friendly with some of the staff in the I.T. office. I had
heard a rumour about one of the guys who was earning serious
money on the internet whilst still working in the company.
Infact I even heard that he even did most of the work in his
lunch hour!
I soon got to be friends with this person, and found the rumour
to be true. He now works full time on his internet projects,
he paid off his mortgage and now earns far more from
affiliate marketing than he did working long hours in the
City. I decide to pick his brains.
I quit my job over a year ago and havn't looked back since.
This was less than a year after meeting the 'internet' guy,
and in that time I managed to build an income superior to
my PAYE salary, but only working part time at home, on a dial
up internet connection, and all for an initial cost of less
than £20. I went on from what I had learned, bought
the books, tried many methods and rode the changing google
wave. I decided I would now try to explain how it works, the
do's and dont's without the pomp and unnecessary elaboration.
Simply, this is an guide for anyone with a basic understanding
of the internet.
So
what is an affiliate?
An
affiliate in internet terms, is someone who earns commision
from anyone he sends to the merchants website who subsequently
makes a sale. Some affiliate schemes even pay an amount for
everyone who even visits the merchants site, although this
is usually a very small amount. You may be suprised to know
that most major companies run affiliate schemes.
To
put it in simple terms, you have a website, you put a link
to the store or company for whome you are an affiliate, and
for anyone that clicks on the link and buys something, you
get a percentage of the sale.
At
this point it would be easy to assume that the commission
was so small as to make it extremely difficult to make any
money. Wrong. There are literally hundreds of affiliate programs
with different commissions, and sure, if your an affiliate
for books, 6% a sale isn't going to make you a millionaire
unless you sell thousands of books a week (although this isn't
unheard of!), but at the other end of the scale, loans and
mortgages can make you hundreds of pounds for each sale. I
wouldn't suggest this to start with though as there is a lot
of competition due to the high commision values. Somewhere
in the middle though are things like computers, electrical,
TV's, insurance, in fact just about anything with a sales
value of over a hundred pounds.
With
insurance for example, if your an affiliate of one of the
best companies (like morethan or esure) you know there quotes
are going to be pretty unbeatable, so conversion ratios are
going to be high (amount of people you send to the site vs
amount of sales). If your averaging £30 a sale, even
if you only get two sales a day thats nearly £11,000
pounds a year! Certainly not to be scoffed at. So one rule
is to pick the best affiliate programs. You don't want to
try and get people to buy a laptop that you know they can
get cheaper in 90% of the other online stores. You want to
'help' them buy a laptop that you know is from one of the
cheapest stores. That way you have your work cut our for you.
And
the catch is?
The
catch is, it is incredibly difficult to get a lot of unique
targeted traffic to your website. Unless of course you follow
a simple structured approach that I am hopefully going to
explain to you. I'll be honest, it does take some work, but
after your first venture into the world of affiliate marketing,
the second will be easier, the third even easier and so on.
OK,
If you already have an affiliate website you need to skip
to this section, unless you want to start from scratch.
I
already have a affiliate website
Otherwise:
Affiliate
Marketing - continued
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