AFFILIATE MARKETING BREAKDOWN

Many people mistakenly believe that affiliate marketing is referring to only the act of selling a product for a company and making a small commission.

However, there are some other forms of affiliate marketing that you need to know about if you are thinking of pursuing it as a business model.

By understanding these various methods of affiliate marketing, you are better positioned to choose the one that you believe will work best for your given situation.

Marketing for the vendor directly:
This is where you sign up for a stand alone affiliate program that a company has for their own products. In other words, they are not using a third party vendor to manage their affiliate program. This might be a specialty company or even a big retail store.

Third party affiliate programs:
This includes companies such as Clickbank, Commission Junction and Linkshare, among others. These companies manage all of the affiliates as well as the payouts and accounting for the companies.

When you sell a product of one of these companies, the third party company is actually the one handling the payment to you on behalf of the main vendor. For instance, if you were selling a certain men's watch, you would sign up for the vendor through the third party company and use a special coded affiliate link. If someone purchases through your link during a certain time period (specified by the merchant's agreement) then you get a commission.

Pay Per Lead:
This type of affiliate marketing is often used by insurance, mortgage and finance companies who are very dependent on getting quality leads. In this method, the affiliate attracts visitors to a page where there is usually a form to fill out.

They are tracked under the affiliate's code, so they are paid once the lead is generated after they fill out the form or application. This is also called CPA (cost per action) as the merchant pays for each time someone does a particular action on their site.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to catapult your income and have your own home based business.

The best advice, however, is to start with one type of affiliate marketing before trying out the others. This way you will have a better grasp of how they work and which ones you like.

A successful marketer often incorporates several methods into their overall marketing plan.

AFFILIATE MARKETING MISTAKES

There is no question that affiliate marketing can be one of the most lucrative jobs on the planet if done correctly.

Many internet marketers have made millions by starting out as small time affiliate marketers. However, just as with any profession, there are also a thousand ways to mess up any chance of success. 

Here are some common, yet deadly, ways to become a big failure at the affiliate marketing business:

Quit too soon:
Here is the real scoop on affiliate marketing- Anytime you quit, it was too soon. Affiliate marketing ALWAYS works. However, it can take a lot of time to get your business rolling. It can take months to see any income. It can take many months to learn all you need to know to be a success.

Then, once you know all of that, there is more to learn! Never quit when it comes to affiliate marketing because it will always work out eventually. The key is to keep plugging along working a little bit at a time on your business. Write articles and do the other necessary tasks every day and you will start to see success.

Don't write enough:
The key component to being successful in affiliate marketing is writing every single day (or having someone write for you). Submitting articles on a regular basis is so vital to your business. This keeps the search engines happy because you are providing valuable, fresh content. It also brings more traffic and backlinks to your site.

Losing Focus:
This is probably one of the biggest mistakes affiliate marketers make. This is when you start a niche and then jump to another one before you even know if the first one was good.

Once you are more experienced, you can work in multiple niches successfully. However, when you are new to the business you should not be jumping around from niche to niche.

Start with one niche, work it to death and then assess its progress. It is very easy to get distracted by every new shiny opportunity, but keep your head down and remain focused on the goal at hand.

Everyone who tries affiliate marketing wants to be a success, but it does take time and a lot of work. This is not an overnight get rich quick scheme. It takes studying, learning and application of the information to make it a success.

DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES?

With any career choice, there is always the possibility that you are just not cut out for that line of work. For example, those who are terrible at math probably should not pursue bookkeeping.

Conversely, if you are a horrible writer, then a newspaper-reporting job is probably not a good path to take. Of course, one can always study and practice until they are good at something, but the likelihood of them becoming great at that career is not all that great.

Affiliate marketing can be thought of the same way. There are certain key traits you simply must have in order to be a good affiliate marketer:

Patience:
Anyone who has been around this business for very long will tell you that success does not come overnight. There is work involved, and lot of the process includes a waiting game. You are always waiting for Google to index your site or for articles to be published. You cannot expect overnight millionaire status.

Hard worker:
You simply must be prepared to put in a lot of work. The thing with internet marketing is that sometimes you feel like you are playing a guessing game. You think something will work and it doesn't. You think something else was a mistake and you make big money. The key is to continue taking action. Action will eventually lead to success, however you must put in the hard work first.

Innovator:
You have to be willing to change things up and try new ideas. You cannot get stuck in a rut or you will not be able to grow. Look for new opportunities all the time. You never know where your next big idea will come from.

Adapts Well To Change:
You must love the idea of changing course midstream if something is not working. You have to be willing to scrap ideas that do not amount to anything and move to other ideas. The niches and hot selling items change like the wind, so be ready to move when needed.

Affiliate marketing is a dream job for many people who wish to be their own boss and control their own destiny. Money is there to be made from thousands of niches every single day.

The question is whether you have the patience, work ethic and ideas to make it happen?

AFFILIATE MARKETING 101

Many people these days want to figure out the best way to make money online. Usually, they all take the same path, which eventually leads them to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make huge amounts of money using the Internet, however it takes some time to build up that income.

Affiliate marketing is the process of selling someone else’s product online and making a commission on that sale. For example, if you wanted to market women’s handbags, you would sign up with vendors who were willing to pay you a commission on each sale.

There are outside third party affiliate programs that most marketers use. These companies (such as Commission Junction and Amazon) have hundreds of vendors who work in partnership with them. You sign up with the affiliate program and then you are able to sign up for individual vendors. These companies manage the affiliate program for the actual vendor.

Once you have signed up to sell for a particular company, you can begin writing articles and building websites to sell their products.

For instance, if you sign up to sell women’s scarves for the “Widget Scarf Company”, you will be given a special code to use on your sites. Any time someone clicks on your link with that code in it, a “cookie” (tracking code) is put on that computer for a specified period of time (this varies depending on the vendor).  Now, if your “cookie” is good for 30 days and that person goes back to the site directly to buy a scarf 7 days later, you will still get a commission!

Making money using affiliate marketing is a great way to catapult your new business. If you get a 10% commission on those scarves, for instance, and they cost $20 each, you would make $2 for each sale. While that does not seem like a lot, you can scale up your efforts to sell as many scarves as you desire each month.

If your website is getting 1000 hits per month and you sell 300 scarves that is $600!

Now, scale that up to owning 10 websites selling various products. If you only made $2 each on those (which is very low by industry standards), then you are looking at $6,000 per month.

Affiliate marketing has no limits, so you are only governed by your ability to build sites and write articles efficiently.

CHOOSING AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

All internet marketers are in the business to make money. Anyone who says otherwise is fooling you! Most people want to do a good job for their buyers, of course, but in the end it is still a business.

Profit is one of the major determining factors as to whether a marketing campaign was successful or not. Of course, you first must choose a great, thriving niche.

The second thing you have to do is find the right affiliate program that will serve the needs of the customers you are focusing on and still pay you a good commission. Here are some tips to remember when choosing an affiliate marketing program:

How high is the percentage of commission?
There are some programs which offer 4-8% commission while there are others that offer 35-50%, so there can be a large variation depending on the end product and the company.

Just because a commission is lower does not necessarily mean that it is not a good program to choose. You need to think about the projected traffic so that you can decide if there will be enough buyers to make up the profits in volume.

What tools does the merchant provide?
While it is possible to sell a product without the use of marketing tools, it certainly makes your job more difficult. Some vendors provide great sales tools such as banners, videos and sample articles that you can rewrite. The more tools you have, the quicker you can throw together a marketing campaign without a lot of upfront work.

Tracking:
You want to know what kind of tracking the vendor has in place for your sales. Have there been any complaints about the vendor not paying or tracking properly?

What is the length of the cookie?
This means if someone goes to the vendor's site using your affiliate link, how long will they honor any sales from that computer address? Some programs are only 24 hours while others will honor a sale up to 60-365 days!

As with any other business, it pays to do your research up front so there are no bad surprises later.

You want to choose solid, reputable companies so that you can depend on them and the customers you sell to can depend on the product as well. This just makes good business sense, and will help you protect all of the hard work you do.