Custom Search

What is affiliate marketing ?

Basically affiliate marketing is a term which can be explained from following figure.

Affiliate marketing

As shown in above figure affiliate marketing is a way to promote the products and business though a middle connector which is known as “Publisher“. Publishers promote the products of merchants though their websites, email marketing or PPC advertisement programs and if they made sales/leads they got their commission.

The good thing of affiliate marketing

During last couple of years a lot of people have earned a massive amount of money each month by affiliate marketing. With a Pay per click programs like adsense , you can’t get a lot of money due to very low per click income. But in affiliate income you get a commission of actual product. Which is more than a lot of clicks income. There are many publishers who are earning $10K+ income per month with affiliate marketing.

Where to start

A lot of people ask this questions as they really don’t know where to start for earning with affiliate marketing. But let me describe the types of products and types of affiliate programs first.

There could be two types of products

  1. Digital or virtual products: Like ebooks, ring tones, mp3 downloads, movie downloads etc. These products can give you commission whenever someone buys or download them with your affiliation.
  2. Physical products: Like LCD TV, Mobile Phones, Camera or any product which needs to be shipped to some physical address.

Affiliate networks

There are many affiliate networks on the Internet which lets you to join as an affiliate person and sell other people’s products. Some top affiliate networks are below

ClickBank affiliate network:
Clickbank is one the biggest digital affiliate network which lets you to promote digital or virtual products of merchants. But they don’t have all countries in their sign up list. If you can sign up for their affiliate program then you can really make a big amount of money each month. As selling digital products is not very difficult, you just need to find a specific niche and start getting targeted traffic to your product affiliate page. I’ll explain in some future article to find a better niche and to get targeted traffic to your affiliate landing pages.

Commission Junction:

This is another big name in affiliate marketing. CJ can promote both digital and physical products. And most of it, anyone can sign up with it. All you need is a website and a few number of visitors to start. Then you can promote the products with any other way like email marketing, PPC advertisement etc. Although commission junction’s payout percentage is less than clickbank but it provides both digital and physical products to promote. This lets a lot of people to earn faster and more than ever. You can also signup for eBay from CJ and use some programs like BANS to create automatted RSS product websites without worrying about unique contents.

Amazon associates:

Who don’t know about amazon? Almost everyone who use internet. Its a big name in shopping. Now they provides you a way to promote their products and as a result gives you a straight way to earn commission. Amazon’s commission is usually 4% of real product price. But if you can get targeted traffic then you can make a large amount of sales and money.

Shareasale.com
Shareasale is alternative to Clickbank. This is a mixture of clickbank and commission junction. They have over 2000 merchants ready for you so you can promot their products and earn a good amount of refferal money.

Ways to promote your affiliate product links

There could be many ways to get visitors to your product pages. Some people create landing pages(one page with product description and affiliate redirect) and then they use some PPC program like adwords to get targeted visitors. Some people write reviews on products and get visitors from search engines. Both ways can generate easy sales and leads. The only thing for you is to pay attention at starting point. Once you are stabilized on earning, its an auto pilot money for you.