The goal of affiliate marketing is to recommend a site to your visitors and then you receive a commission on any sale that these visitors make. The merchant is happy because he has made another sale that he wouldn't have made otherwise, and the affiliate is happy because he benefits from the commission.
If you have already created a website earlier, you can just put a links to the merchant's site, or a banner ad or even a review of the product or service. But you could also design a new site from scratch especially to promote one product. As long as you would receive more money from commissions than it costs to create or run your website, you're doing fine.
What are the payment options?
The way in which you are paid completely depends upon how the merchant has set up his affiliate system. Some merchants have completely built their own affiliate program. Others use Clickbank or Commission Junction. Anyway, they're equipped with special types of software that assigns each affiliate marketer a special link that's used in promoting the product. All this software does is to track the sales of every marketer. The commissions are periodically paid by the merchant. PayPal is often used for payment or another system.
How to choose products or services to promote
This is a difficult question because there are literally thousands products sold online and in most cases, you can?t tell which one is good and which one should be avoided. From the outside it?s hard to tell as they usually all look pretty and promising. The two main factors that have the most influence on your income potential are:
1. how large are the commissions?
2. how well does the product or service sell?
I don't have to tell you that the selection of which program you will promote is vital and that you need to devote a lot of attention to it.
This choice of which product or service to promote, can be compared to picking stocks to invest in. In most cases, you will have far better results if you entirely comprehend what the company is doing. You should be more or less familiar with the products they sell or the kind of service they offer. The best thing is obviously if you have personally used the product or service yourself. Furthermore, it will be so much easier for you to write reviews or ads since you won't have to strain yourself to come up with the right things to write.
What also helps in the selection process is to limit yourself to only products that you are not embarrassed to promote. You're already promoting to your friends and relatives if you've gone to a really good restaurant or if you've seen a really cool movie. You do even if the owner doesn't pay you a commission. So why should you promote products that you'll feel comfortable recommending to your family and friends if they would ask you about it? Remember there are more products sold online than you have time to promote.
Another interesting factor is if the programs offers tools to ease the life of their affiliates when they are promoting. What we mean by that are things like banners, text links, and of course graphics, in short: things that you can directly put on your web site. Off course you're not obliged to use them; you can also model your own to it.
But I guess in most cases, it will be still the commission rates that are the deciding factor, isn't it? Why are you in business after all? I advise you to limit yourself to only select products or services with a commission rate of at least 50%. This may seem like much but especially for digital products such as ebooks for instance this is certainly attainable. Furthermore, it's always interesting if you can pick programs that pay multi-tier commissions if it's possible. This means payment on multiple levels. If you have a visitor who buys from your link you are paid a commission. So far so good. Suppose that this visitor is so pleased with the product that he decides to become an affiliate himself. Each time that this person makes a sale, you still receive a commission from that sale because you were the one who referred this affiliate. How cool is that? Off course, it will not make a big difference in the beginning, but in the long term, it surely can make a huge difference, believe me.
About the Author:
Fact: 90% of all affiliates do not make money. Are you fed up with working hard and earning nothing? Visit my blog and Download Affiliate Marketing Pitfalls to Avoid and don't be another sucker any more! It's FREE so what are you still waiting for?
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