Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Affiliate Marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money online. You don’t have to create or produce your own product, you don’t have to worry about collecting payments, you don’t have to deal with customer service issues, and you aren’t responsible for the product fulfillment system. Once the sale is made, you’re job is done!

Can it get any better then this? Actually it can because you still have a commission check to take to the bank. No directions needed for that. 

Affiliate Marketing the easy way means limited to no out of pocket expense, no product of your own to create, and no website design and hosting. The concept is to sell other people’s stuff and make a ton of money.

So, what’s the best and most profitable way to do this? Digital products verses physical products. Digital products consist of computer software and informational items in the form of eBooks or online videos.

After the payment is received, digital products are delivered immediately. Because you are actually selling digital copies there is no production, shipping or handling fees. Therefore,  digital products pay a lot more commission then physical products do.

How much more commission? Get ready because most physical products range in pay outs at an average of 3% to 6% commission. Digital products do a bit better paying out at 50% to 75% of the total price of the product. How does that comparison grab you?

Everyone loves instant gratification. People want what they have paid for as soon as possible. If you can sell a product that is delivered straight to a customer’s email after their payment is completed, you have a huge advantage over anyone selling the same information in a physical book or CD because the customer has to wait a week to get it.

The no brainer is how much more money you can make. Affiliate Marketing is hands down the way to go when you are new and trying to generate some money and  online momentum. You owe it to yourself to give it a try. 

Find More Affiliate Marketing Articles

If you are reading this article I am going to assume that you have basic understanding of what affiliate marketing is. I am now going to expand and give you a few ideas on where to advertise your vendors website; some of these may be obvious but others not. All you need to get started is the referral hop link URL and the HTML code the vendor provides.

The first is obvious, your website, blog, tweet, Facebook and/or MySpace. It’s free and easy to make a blog, you can blog about anything you would like-I do suggest though that you do write something on the same topic of the product you are promoting. After every page or so just stick a one liner in something like this:

If you enjoyed my article/blog about so and so then you may be interested in this product. Cheezy I know but it works. I found Facebook headlines work astoundingly well especially if you have a lot of friends.

Just say something like: Hey everyone, I found this great product about. (Insert Product here) you might be interested in. Then when your friends ask you about the product you can promote it even further.

Word of mouth has been proven time and time again the most effective advertising method. Next MySpace makes it very easy to insert the HTML code so I wont give an in depth explanation. As for twitter, tweet to your hearts content about your product.

Now that we have the most common methods out of the way lets look at some others. Forum signatures, writing reviews on products, eBooks, yahoo answers, and Google AdWords. Other offline methods are friends, business cards, flyers, posters, and classified ads. Lets start with forum writing and the signatures, if you are an avid forum poster then this could be one of the best free ways around.

For those of you who do not know what a forum signature is, it what always appears at the bottom of your posts. Now lets say now that you are promoting a movie website. You can start by compiling a list of movie forums, then you search the forums for every place that a user asks for a good site to watch streaming movies. You then come to there aid-or so they think and give them a totally unbiased representation of your product, or so they think. The same is true for yahoo answers.

The next great way to promote products is to write reviews of the products at places such as Google products. Again give an “unbiased” review of your product.

Google AdWords is a CPC program or cost per click which is almost guaranteed to get you traffic, but there is a catch. You will get a lot more traffic but you are paying for it.

Affiliate marketing, the selling of products and services of others, can be a blast. If you think about it, the sellers do all the work: they make the product, package it, set up marketing materials including a website, graphics, sales letter and usually more. You simply sign up for a coded link and sell. Can’t get much easier than that.

And an awesome part of this type of earning money is that you can add as many affiliates’ product to your promotions as you’d like. You can attach yourself to as many companies, as you want. It just depends on your ability to manage your promotions, time and earning in such manner that the many links can be fitted in, and yet can attract hits while bringing in sales.

As examples, say, for instance, you run a furniture business. In that case, it is in your interest to be affiliates of those companies who sell wall paintings, room decoration articles and so on, in short, stuff that someone who buys furniture, is also likely to buy. So, every time a purchase is made by following a link from your site, you get paid, for absolutely no effort! Not only that, in what is called a ‘ripple effect’, sometimes your own business picks up because of affiliated sales. Somebody gets a curtain, say, that person would also need to buy something from you to use that curtain. So, double profit.

Finally, you need to know about OSPs – Online Service Providers. They act as third party agents, negotiating between companies and affiliates. You need to register with them; that makes searching for likely affiliates that much easier, and far more efficient. You don’t even need to pay for this service, not at the outset. After you have linked up, and there are sales, the OSP gets a small share. That way, you do not have to spend your own money – yet, you are getting the job of finding partners done for you.

Related Affiliate Marketing Articles

Some recent Affiliate Marketing auctions on eBay:

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Many people have started to make use of the internet as a medium to start their own part time business as they are aware of the income that they can get from the internet. If you have been doing your research through the internet, you should be aware of the numerous advantages that this business model has over starting the offline business. Before you start your business online, you will want to be aware of the potential challenges that you will be facing so that you will be more prepared to overcome it when you experience it.

Challenges:

The 1st challenges that you will be facing is that you will not be communicating with your customer directly live. Most of the communication will be done digitally through the internet and you will not be able to see your customers’ expression. If you did not have an effective follow up communication with your customers, there is high possibility that you will lose them forever.

Solution:

The solution that you can use is to have a mechanism in place where you will be able to collect your customers’ details. If you are trying to sell them directly through your website, you will be driving the majority of the traffic out your website. By getting them to give you their details, you will have the opportunity to communicate with them through email and you can build good relationship with them. This ensures that you will still be able to sell the product effectively to them.

Challenges:

The 2nd challenges that you will face is that you do not have the knowledge on how to do marketing effectively through the internet. There is tons of information that are available online and it can be confusing for newbies to get the accurate information. Without the proper knowledge, you will not be able to take the appropriate action to market the product that you are promoting.

Solution:

The solution that you can use is to stay focus on following one marketing method at a time. There are many different ways to market the product. You will want to focus on mastering one method at a time so that you will be able to invest your time to become an expert in that marketing method. You should only go and learn the next marketing method after you have mastered the first method. When you know several methods to market your product, you will want to plan it systematically so that you have your own marketing plan to follow. 

Conclusion:

Here are the 2 challenges that you will face when you are using the internet as the medium to promote your affiliate marketing business. Focus on the solutions when you face these challenges so that you will be able to take the appropriate action to overcome the challenges and grow your business to the next level.

Some recent Affiliate Marketing auctions on eBay:

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