What Is Affiliate Marketing?

[paperkool]

Affiliate marketing is basically getting a code from a company, pasting it into an advertisement and receiving money, when you make a sale. That’s the basics. The depth comes in when you try to use PPC and they won’t let you advertise your affiliate link. Keep in mind I only use PPC for split testing things, in the beginning. You can function with out a web site although it is better, when you have your own for tracking purposes.

The best advertising is free advertising. I suggest article marketing and forum marketing. It's a big ocean as one person has already replied. You'll need to research and make tests. Don't spend a lot of money because that’s not needed. You basically advertise your link one way or another.

[davidmerrick]

Think of affiliate marketing as multilevel marketing (aka network marketing) but in an online environment. You join an affiliate network like clickbank.com or cj.com and then sell their products for a percentage of the sale. You can sell anything from dating site memberships to laptops to plasma TV's. You name it. If you can buy it offline, you can sell it online.

I am not yet successful in this business, because I am new, but I have studied extensively some of the best marketers online. What they all have in common is that they do very counter-intuitive things. Instead of finding niche markets with lots of demand and that are under-supplied, they figure out where people are already spending money, and go there.

For example, there is a huge niche market for people interested in dream interpretation, and this market doesn't have very much competition. But it's a terrible market because those people don't spend any money.

So basically, instead of being afraid of competition from other marketers, you welcome it, because it shows you that people are already making money.

Once you find a market, you pick a product that people are already buying and run paid ads that link directly to your chosen product's sales page. I guarantee you'll lose money doing this. So why do it? To make sure that you can get a sale before you invest a lot of time in free traffic that won't end up being profitable for you.

Leverage is the name of the game. Make sure you can sell in the market (even if you lose money to get the sale) before you invest your most valuable asset, which is time.

Then, once you get the free traffic through SEO, you start collecting e-mail addresses and build a list. Then you use an auto-responder through a service like aweber.com to sell related products. That's where the real money's at, in the upsells. Think about it--do people ever buy just one diet product? One video game?

[brokemet]

Affiliate marketing is one of the driving forces behind e-commerce. In theory, it allows for various parties on the internet to profit from it in some way. Also, it encourages more people to get involved in the world of e-commerce, because starting and maintaining a business centered on affiliate marketing isn’t necessarily costly; though, doing it does require a substantial investment of time and/or money to be seen as an expert in your niche which is essential to maintain traffic and sales as an affiliate.