Participating in affiliate programs involves using your website to earn revenue and commission through affiliate networks. As long as your website is interesting, attracts visitors and gets referrals from search engines you can make some money by promoting products for retailers.
What is affiliate marketing? From Wikipedia, it is defined as:
a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
Take for instance I have a business that sells books and I have an agreement with you that if you advertise my books and direct customers to me, I’ll pay you let’s say 10% of the sales. In that case you are not an affiliate. In essence, the amount of money you make depends on how well you market the product. So if you have good marketing skills and you participate in different affiliate programs, you would be earning commissions from every sale made. It’s just like door to door marketing or advertising except that it is done online.
The key to succeeding in any affiliate program is your marketing strategy. How do you market the product well enough to convince visitors to your site to buy the products? Remember all you have to do is direct the customers to the company and nothing else. The company deals with the ordering, packaging and despatch of the products. Do not fall for affiliate programs that promote “get rich quick schemes”, more often than not, they are getting rich from your ignorance. There isn’t anything like get rich quick, you have to put in time and efforts to generate income.
There are websites that advertise affiliate programs and asks you to pay to join. My resolve is that you do not promote an affiliate program but promote a product. I wouldn’t pay to join any affiliate program, instead the company pays you a commission to advertise their products so why should you have to pay to join a program in which you would be doing the company a favour. Those that fall for the gimmick to pay to join affiliate programs end up trying to con others because they fell for it. So be careful.
The good news about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to keep surfing the Internet to find companies that require affiliates. There are affiliate networks you can register with for free and you have access all the merchants in their database that require affiliates. All you need to do is create an account with them and then you choose which products you want to promote. Below are links to affiliate networks to get you started. They procedure is similar but you may want to browse through their websites for more information.
Top Affiliate Networks
Logo | Name | Url |
---|---|---|
ClixGalore | http://www.clixgalore.com | |
Affiliate Window | http://uk.affiliatewindow.com | |
Trade Doubler | http://www.tradedoubler.com | |
Skimlinks | http://www.skimlinks.com | |
Viglink | http://www.viglink.com |
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