Affiliate Marketing Basics - Introduction To Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Affiliate marketing basics provides clarification into what affiliate marketing is about. Explains to a beginner how it does work and how to make money doing it.

Affiliate Marketing Basics

What is Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing can easily be defined as the same as the job of an independent sales representative to a company. An independent sales representative job's to a company is to create awareness about the company's product(s), promote it benefits to people who needs it or who will find it useful and ultimately make sales. And in return the company pay's the individual an agreed percentage or commission on sales. This is what affiliate marketing is about and much more.

Online affiliate marketing has more benefits than the offline job of a sales representative. More on that shortly. Explaining more on what affiliate marketing is, you find a product, it could be an e-book, software, digital product e.t.c. that interests you and you realize the owner of the product welcome affiliates to promote the product for a fixed percentage share, you sign up, get your unique referral link and start promoting the product either on your website or through hub sites such as squidoo, hubpages e.t.c. You make a sale and the owner pays you the stipulated percentage per sale. Percentage earned on a single sale can be as high as 75%. Aside products, you can also generate leads to email sign ups, form registration e.t.c. Here you don't have to make any sale to be paid. You get paid a stipulated amount for referring someone to fill a form, sign up for a book download and so on.

Benefits of Online affiliate marketing Vs. Offline affiliate marketing

• When it is online, you don't have to go out of your house to promote the products or get customers. You can work from home.
• Requires less effort
• Since you only recommend products that relates to the content you provide online, you can make money while you sleep just by adding links to merchant product within your content.

Why will a merchant share is profit with affiliates instead of marketing his product and keep all profits?

Well, if a merchant decides to promote his product himself, his chance of reaching many of his targeted prospects is greatly reduced compared to when he welcomes affiliates to promote it for a share of profit. You can't compare the result from the sales effort of 10-20 persons to that of one person. A merchant that wants to be selfish and keep all his profits, he will make very little profit from his product compare to when he has other affiliates sell his product. When he welcomes affiliates he makes much more sales and therefore make much more money from his product.

Using affiliate marketing and the network marketing model companies are greatly reducing cost on advertising and making much more sales and profit.

Is affiliate marketing and network marketing the same?

They are similiar because they both require you to promote a product or even a service, but network marketing or MLM business model is much more deeper in earning structure and capabilities than affiliate marketing. The potential for wealth building is huge in network marketing unlike affiliate marketing because in network marketing you get to build a team of distributors several levels deep that you earn from their sales effort. You leverage greatly on others effort in network marketing. Some merchant use the multi-tier payment structure for their affiliates, but never as deep as in network marketing.

Affiliate marketing basics - Benefits of affiliate marketing over creating your own product

You may wonder why promote someone else's product when you can just create your own. Yes, it's good to create your own product, but here are some benefits in promoting someone else's product.

• You can sign up right away to an affiliate program and start making money right away promoting the product. You save time and the effort it will take to create your own product.
• You make sales and get paid when due without dealing with customer complaints, delivery, accounting, and so on. You focus only on getting the sales.
• You don't have to wait to be an expert in your niche to create a product, you can leverage on the expert status of the author or creator of another product to rake in sales.

The only disadvantage is that you don't get to keep the full profit unlike having your own product. But being an affiliate marketer doesn't stop you from creating your own product when you are ready. When you create your own product you can still use affiliate marketing to supplement your income as long as you don't promote products related to yours, but instead that compliments yours so it's easy to sell along with yours to your audience.

Affiliate marketing basics - How much can you make from affiliate marketing

How much you can make depends on a number of factors, but some internet marketers make 4 to 5 figure income from affiliate marketing while the majority struggle by, making a few hundred dollars. But it is still a great way to diverify your online income. Some affiliate programs pay up to 75% of the price of the product to affiliates. So even though you make only 5-10 sales a month, it will still add up to something.

Affiliate marketing basics - How to find good affiliate programs

There are several affiliate networks that you can sign up to for free where you can find great products. Affiliate networks are like the middle man between merchants and affiliates. And they help affiliates find many different offers in one place. Some of the authorities in affiliate networks are:

Clickbank (www.clickbank.com)

Commission Junction (www.cj.com)

LinkShare (www.linkshare.com)

Amazon (www.amazon.com)

Shareasale (www.shareasale.com)

If you have a blog, website, or a hub site where you provide helpful content, you can go to any of these sites now to sign up and find products related to the topic you discuss and start recommending them to your audience and make money. Start with Clickbank, though there are some countries Clickbank doesn't welcome sign up from. If your country is one of those country, check out the other top networks.

Later on affiliate marketing basics we will discuss how to maximize profit from affiliate marketing.

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