Steady Income Now

Basics of Affiliate Marketing

December 16th, 2008

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a very simple process where you sell or promote a merchant’s product or service for which you will receive a commission. This makes you an “affiliate” of this merchant. Affiliate marketing is probably the business model whith the least investment, and this makes it the most popular method especially with newcomers to Online Marketing.

It comes in different forms which have in common that you join the affiliate program which the merchant is operating who sells the particular product you are interested to promote. The most common ways to earn money are these:

1. Pay per click - each visitor you send to the merchant’s site will earn you a commission.
2. Pay per lead - each person who leaves personal data on the merchants site after you send them there will earn you a commission.
3. Pay per sale - commission will be paid by the merchant for each sale made at his website.

Pay per sale is by far the most frequent model. Each one of the above returns a certain payment for delivering the click, lead, or sale.

Internet marketers who teach beginners will very often guide them into affiliate marketing because of its simplicity. It is easy and cheap to start and develop.

An affiliates prime costs will be in the promotion of the product or service. All costs and labor associated with the product, sales page, delivery, after sales services, merchant services (set up and ongoing), will be to the merchants account.

These are the steps to follow when starting your Internet business by affiliate marketing:

1. You need a suitable niche market with enough demand as well as a reasonable supply - and enough money and scalability to support future business growth.
2. Research what the market is looking for, solutions to problems (which?), or products/services which are short of supply.
3. Research the available affiliate products and services to find something that will fill the deficiency or fix the problem.
4. Promote the product by every means available to you.
5. Build your own website.

Owning your own website is not an absolute precondition, but it helps a lot. You have more ways to promote the products or/and services, you can have reviews on your website, and most importantly you can presell your website visitors on the products before redirecting them to the sales page(s) run by the merchant(s).

With your own website, you can gather your own opt-in list of customers and targeted potential customers. You can have an opt-in form connected to a follow-up “autoresponder” service (like Getresponse or Aweber).

As you wouldn’t give anybody your hard earned money whom you don’t trust (hopefully!!!), so will your potential customers. That’s why building trust between you and your customers is of prime importance to your business. Your customers should come to perceive you as their expert in your chosen niche so they take your recommendations and — buy. You cannot succeed without trust which may require some time to build. But this is the same with every type of business.

And this is why I have to advise you to operate your own website. Just by sending traffic to the merchant’s website via your affiliate link you will not build trust with anybody.

For a more thorough video based primer and help system click here.

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