What is Affiliate Marketing?

More and more people get involved with affiliate marketing every day, yet they do not have the knowledge needed to succeed and end up making expensive mistakes. Affiliate marketing is one of the major pieces involved in making money online. It is a joint effort between a merchant and an affiliate. Following is an explanation of some of the common misconceptions many have.

In affiliate marketing, you make money when you get a visitor to your assigned website and the visitor purchases an item or in some cases provides their information to the merchant thereby becoming a lead for them. The compensation is set by the merchant at the time you sign up with the program. For the merchant, affiliate marketing is attractive because they do not have to pay you until you bring them results minimizing their advertising costs.

Affiliate networks like Clickbank or Linkshare make it easy to setup a system between affiliates and merchants. The network provides a website link for the products you are going to market and usually collects all commission fees which it then pays most of it to you . These networks sometimes provide statistics to inform you how well the product is doing as well as information regarding refunds.

The merchant is typically a web site owner that wants their product marketed by others. They are able to control the affiliate program. The merchant develops the web site with the sales copy as well as the product that is going to be sold. Sometimes they even provide you with marketing material like banners and sample ads to help you increase your sales. The advantage for a merchant is that their product will get free marketing by you, and will only have to pay you when a sale is made or a lead is generated your provided website.

You, the affiliate promotes, one or more merchants web sites. Your main task is to drive qualified traffic to the assigned website. Many in affiliate marketing will promote a product by writing reviews of the product or targeting buyers through pay-per-click marketing. The dangers of being involved with this is that you might spend a lot of time and money marketing the product and not make a sale. Learning internet marketing principles will help the you avoid these costly mistakes. The advantage for you is that you do not have to put together a product to make money online. When you learn effective internet marketing techniques then you can make a full time income marketing other people's products.

Affiliate marketing can be a great avenue to make money. It is easy to get started with and you can have a marketing campaign up in a few days. The key to succeeding is to get qualified traffic to the web site.

What is So Great About Affiliate Marketing?

I'll tell you what. One simple click on an affiliate ad can earn you money. Yes, it could just be a few pennies but it could also be several hundred dollars. And that could be repeated over and over again.

Affiliate marketing is one of the least understood and yet, one of the best ways to make money online. What the marketer does is join affiliate programs, such as Clickbank, that have products or services they want to promote. The marketer promotes the product, finds customers for the company they are promoting and, when the customer buys, the marketer gets a commission.

The most common business model is the marketer creating a site (or sites) on topic(s) that are of interest to them. Once the site is established, and getting a large amount of targeted traffic, the potential for making a nice income can be as simple as putting up Google AdSense ads and/or a few affiliate links.

The Internet provides available traffic 24/7/365. The term 'business hours' has become meaningless. And the more unique the content, the greater the potential for targeted traffic. And the greater the targeted traffic, the higher the potential for earning income. And this traffic can come any time of the day or night, while you are sleeping or while you are on vacation. What a nice way to earn extra income!

There are many affiliate networks available to marketers. The key is to pick a topic for a site that is of interest to you. That way you will be able to keep it updated with good content. Good content will get you the traffic. And traffic will get you the sales.

What's Good About Joining Affiliate Networks?

Affiliate marketing networks serve as efficient intermediaries, that provide services like aggregation, for both affiliate merchants and affiliates.

For individual merchants, these value-added service providers may also include providing easy applications to new marketers, as well as providing reporting tools and payment aggregation services.

Observing Prospective Affiliate Networks

For first-time affiliates and merchants, probably the best thing to do in embarking on the search for which networks to join, is to conduct an extensive research on each affiliate network you stumble upon, and visit their Web sites so that you will personally find out all the pertinent details, in a subjective manner as possible.

It would also be nice to join some forums on affiliate networks, so that you will found what other people have to say about their quality of service and remuneration benefits and packages. Like in any endeavor, it's important to be careful, as it would be better to take your time in deciding which network to sign up, than just rushing in and advertising on your site, and then finding out later that the network you chose isn't applicable, or right for you.

Joining A Network Helps Move Your Marketing Efforts To A Higher Level

The good thing about affiliate marketing networks, according to long-time industry observers, is that these networks help to take your online marketing programs and campaigns to a much higher level. There are many benefits of using these marketing networks, as they give a lot of healthy options for online retailers who would wish to effectively harness the full scope and opportunity of affiliate marketing.

By signing up as a merchant, one can have access and would be able to communicate with them in finding out better ways to explore the potentials they have to improve your sales and widen your reach. These marketing networks help in aligning merchants and affiliates to team up together, while at the same time also serving as a potent Web marketing tool.

Parameters In Choosing which Network To Join

In coherently choosing a network, find out if a specific network is user-friendly and has good features which help you become profitable when you participate in their programs. In joining a network, you need to be in a position to promote and actively campaign on many programs, as well as effectively analyzing productivity for better performance.

In addition, you need to check out if they offer good affiliate management solutions, which may include hosted services, stand-alone software, shopping carts with affiliations and third party networks. As with any merchant, the main objective of having an affiliate program is to earn more profits, therefore the more Web sites that promote his or her products and services, the more profits they will rake in.

Selecting the appropriate affiliate network is a quite confusing and technically-tough process, and one of the major reasons for this is that of the cost it entails. In rendering your decision-making process much easier, you need to find out if a specific network offers the most cost-effective solutions, exhibits user-friendliness of the account interface, plus you also need to evaluate the responsiveness and helpfulness of its account representatives and other staffers, and evaluate its integration impact on the IT department as well.

Affiliate Marketing Tips - Does the Affiliate Network Matter?

Does the affiliate network you sign up with REALLY matter? Well, the honest answer is, yes and no. If that sounds a bit like a copout, let me explain. See, it's not all about the network. Yes, that's one variable, but it's not the only one. As a matter of fact, it's not even the most important one. In this article, I'm going to explain what the factors are that really determine the success that you'll have. The actual network you sign up with is very close to the bottom of the list.

Let's start out with why the affiliate network IS important. Each one IS different. For example, they all have different payment schedule policies and how you get paid. For example, Clickbank pays you directly. Now, you can even get paid direct deposit every week, which is great. I know if no other network that does that. Of course to qualify for payment through Clickbank is a lot harder than other networks. You need 5 sales and at least 2 major credit cards. PayPal payments don't count.

On the other hand, a network like PayDotCom doesn't have such a restriction. You can make just one sale and qualify for payment. The problem with PayDotCom though is that they don't pay you directly. You get paid by the merchant of the product. And that's where you can sometimes run into problems. See, the sad truth is, some merchants don't pay, or don't pay on time or not without a lot of badgering from you. Plus, payments are not made until after the refund period is over. So you're waiting a very long time for your money.

I personally use Clickbank and PayDotCom, but I only use the latter through merchants I know and trust.

What really matters more than this is the market you target and the product you choose. If you pick a poor product that doesn't sell well, it doesn't matter what affiliate network you choose, you won't make any sales.

So, while affiliate networks do affect things somewhat, they are nowhere near as important as choosing a product that sells because the market has a burning need for a real solution to its problem.