Affiliate Marketing Basics

Affiliate Marketing Basics

If you’re looking to earn money online and don’t have a product of your own to sell you might want to look into affiliate marketing. This is an arrangement where you sign on as a partner of sorts with the creator of a product or service and promote that product. For every product you sell you earn a commission. The association can be very profitable for the affiliate.

In my opinion, the major benefit for you as the affiliate is that you have virtually no contact with customers. This is a blessing as you can devote your time to marketing and not dealing with customer issues, refunds and other inevitable matters.

How You Get Paid
If you’re new to selling online it’s simple to become an affiliate for someone’s product. When you see a product you might like to promote check the bottom of the page for Affiliates or Affiliate Sign Up. You’ll first need to sign up as an affiliate and create a unique identity. With that identity you’ll next want to create an affiliate link containing your identity.

When a customer clicks on that link it tells the vendor which affiliate sent the customer to the sales page. And if the customer actually buys the product you are credited with the sale and an affiliate commission is generated. You’ll receive a check or electronic payment on a schedule according to the affiliate network’s terms. It’s actually easy.

What To Promote
To me, this is simple. Sell something you believe in, something you’ve actually bought and used. You might not be in a position to purchase every product you’d like to promote so you might want to write a sincere email to the creator and ask for a review copy. Many will oblige. This is not a technique to get lots free digital products but a sincere appeal to determine if the product is a good fit for your marketing.

Here’s something else I feel is extremely important and I want to illustrate it with a quote from Carlos Castaneda. He said, “You can make yourself happy or you can make yourself miserable, the work is the same.”

How does that apply to affiliate marketing? It’s simple, really. Since the effort you put forth to promote a product will be virtually the same regardless of the price of the item, doesn’t it make sense to promote something that will put dollars in your pocket rather than pennies? It does to me. Enough on that.

How To Promote Affiliate Products
There are enough online marketing methods out there to fill hundreds of books. In this piece we’ll look at writing product reviews as a marketing method.

If you’re actually familiar with the product you’re promoting you might consider writing reviews on it. There are several approaches to this technique. One is to create a mini site or blog and put up your review. Obviously, you’ll want to have the page optimized for search engines. Take a look at SEO for tips on that.

When you’re an actual happy customer of a product or service it shouldn’t be hard to write a compelling review for it. If you’re not the greatest writer out there, a simple search for article writers should turn up more than enough reasonably-priced writers to meet your needs.

Another way to promote affiliate products is with article marketing. Articles will enhance your efforts in several ways.

Each of your articles will contain backlinks to your review page which helps with SEO
Well written articles with the right keywords can help in getting you in search results
Articles will help build your credibility as a user of the product

If you’re a decent writer you should be able to post several articles to various article sites per week. Here’s a list of the top 50 article sites according to traffic and page rank. The articles you write will contain general information about the product you’re promoting and will have a link to your review page.

Obviously, your review page is going to contain several links to the product sales page. That’s the progression you’ll use to get targeted visitors to your review page. Be sure to stop back for more tips on promoting your affiliate products.

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