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How to Earn Money with Affiliate Marketing

It may surprise you to learn that you don’t need a business, or even a business idea, to earn money online. You can earn extra money online simply by recommending other peoples products and services – it’s called affiliate marketing.

So What is Affiliate Marketing?

With Affiliate Marketing you earn an agreed commission each and every time you direct a new customer to another businesses website. Affiliate marketing can give you instant access to third party marketers who will help promote your products through advertising, email, and online links in exchange for a commission.

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. ~ Wikipedia

Affiliate marketing is particularly suited to the Internet because consumers can move from one website to another instantly (i.e. instant referrals with no distractions in between) and everything can be tracked and accounted for automatically (i.e. no worrying about dishonest affiliate managers who might deny a new customer was referred by you). Last year, according to InternetRetailing.net, the affiliate marketing sector in the UK alone, generated sales of roughly £5bn. Would you like to learn how to earn money with Affiliate Marketing? The rest of this article will step you through all the things you will need to get started.

The 3 Key Players in Affiliate Marketing

In order for affiliate marketing to work, 3 people are required

The Merchant- A business that sells a product or service on the Internet that, also runs an affiliate program
The Customer – a person (the end customer) who ultimately buys ‘the Merchants’ product or service
The Affiliate – a person (you) who actively promotes the merchants product(s) and first engages with the customer (often on a website or by email) before referring the customer to the merchant

*please take note of the above terminology as it used throughout the remainder of this article

Affiliate Marketing Basics

The theory behind how the Affiliate Marketing process works is very straightforward. The merchant installs special software on their website that allows affiliates to create an affiliate account. This software then automatically issues the new affiliate with a special affiliate link. The affiliate then creates a webpage or writes an email that promotes the merchants products. This webpage (or email) directs viewers to the merchant website via the affiliate link. The affiliate software running on the merchants website tracks visitors that arrive via these affiliate links. If any of the visitors that arrive on the merchants site via an affiliate link buy a product (i.e. convert) then the affiliate software automatically updates the affiliates account with an agreed commission. The affiliate software can be (and often is) setup to pay out commissions automatically via PayPal.

How You Can Get Started as an Affiliate Marketer

Before you can start to earn money with affiliate marketing, you need to understand the basic steps involved.

– Find a business that sells a product or service that you are happy to recommend to people – that also has an affiliate program.

Signing up to an affiliate program is usually fully online and takes only seconds. Generally; you enter a username, an email address, a password and select how you would like to get paid. That’s it. Once signed up you are provided with your special link.

A link, for your information, is the blue underlined text you see on webpages that provides a method of moving between one website page and another. An affiliate link is special because it is unique. This special link allows the “merchant” (using special software) to automatically track “customers” sent from the “affiliate”.

Once someone clicks on your link they are taken to the “merchants” website. If they choose to Buy once they get there then you get paid an agreed commission. If they don’t buy then you get nothing. If they don’t buy right away, but come back and buy 3 (or 6) months later then you may get paid – it depends on the affiliate program and the terms and conditions you agreed to when you sign up. How you go about getting the visitors in the first place is explained in greater detail below and in even greater detail throughout our online marketing course.

Most affiliate programs pay out automatically to your PayPal account. Certain, bigger businesses prefer to send out a cheque (a.k.a “a check” for our American readers). The below diagram sums up this process nicely..

Affiliate Marketing Strategies that Work

All affiliate marketing campaigns begin with selecting an affiliate program that a) you believe has a market and b) offers a reasonably generous commission. How to do this generally involves:

keeping your eyes open for opportunities as you surf the web,
Searching for programs using Google or Affiliate Program Directories
Signing up to big Affiliate Management websites such as Commission Junction or Click Bank.

Once you have found an affiliate program you “like the look of” there are three main Affiliate Marketing Strategies that work. We will explain each, starting with the one that is the most time consuming – but has the greatest earning and growth potential.

Affiliate marketing is the “reason to be” for many blogs and websites you see on a daily basis. For many other websites, it is a major source of supplementary or secondary income. Many bloggers you will notice, who are considered experts by their readers, often recommend products and services in the articles they write. These articles of course contain affiliate links.

If you read back through the articles written on the ebusinessmatters.com blog, you will also notice book recommendations that contain affiliate links to other businesses (merchants) like Amazon.

The secret to affiliate marketing success with one large website is to find a niche where your opinions are relevant and will help you to connect with other like-minded people. The below points explain the things you need to do in order to succeed in Affiliate Marketing with Strategy 1 (and also link to lessons that explain each)

Develop a professional quality website (using WordPress which is free and easy)
Get a first class web design (you can buy a WordPress theme for less than )and hire a graphic designer on elance to update the images for less than 0
Write interesting articles that people enjoy so you can develop a loyal following over time
Optimize your website and articles so that they get found on search engines
Promote your site for free using a variety of technologies and online resources
Encourage visitors to buy products or services that are related to the central topic of the website.
Finally, analyse your sites stats on a regular basis to make sure you are getting the most from your marketing efforts and to make web design improvements that will lead to more visitors and more affiliate revenue.

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Doing these things yourself is not difficult, or expensive. Learn how at the ebusinessmatters.com online marketing course.

Creating and maintaining a blog on a subject that you are passionate about is an excellent way to get started with affiliate marketing. A blog like this will grow over time and the overall success of the site is not based on the strength of a single campaign (as you will see in strategy 2). As well as affiliate revenue, this type of website also gives you other opportunities to earn money. Often other businesses who target a similar niche will recognise your influence in their market and approach you with lucrative proposals to help promote their businesses. Many businesses will be preared to lease advertising space or offer you free stuff in return for a review or exposure on your blog. This type of website should be undertaken as a long term project and you can expect there to be a steady stream of user comments and emails that will need to be serviced on a fairly regular basis. The key benefit however is that this type of website will grow and evolve over time. This means that the success of your site is not all or nothing and you can expect revenue to rise continually. Ideas for this type of site might include

a travel blog where you rate and review places you stay and eat
a fashion or style blog – especially if you are into something off-beat or slightly different
a hobby or passtime you are passionate about – where you use the site to reach out to others who share your passion

Another common strategy with affiliate marketers is to identify a “search phrase” that they believe they can create a website to rank highly for. This new, super-optimized website should then deliver a steady flow of traffic to the merchant website.

Users search the web by entering keywords (a.k.a “search phrases”) into Search Engines that they feel will give them the best chance of finding what they are looking for. For example: if I was searching for a plumber in Dublin city I would run a search on Google.ie for something like “plumber dublin”. “plumber dublin” is therefore a search phrase made up of the keywords ‘plumber’ and ‘dublin’

These types of website effectively cost nothing to develop or maintain – and (once you know what you are doing) can be put together in a few hours. The lines separating failure and success in this form of affiliate marketing are more clearly defined. In order to succeed you must:

Understand search engine marketing – and how to identify search phrases that are popular with web users
Evaluate the level of competition for specific search phrases and accurately judge your chances for ranking highly for that search phrase
Develop a website that is designed to