Introduction to Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is an upcoming market

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is an upcoming market. An increasing number of products and services are purchased online these days and more and more companies look to promote these products and services through affiliate marketing. What is Affiliate marketing? As an affiliate or partner of a company you actually take over a part of the marketing and the promotion of that company. Your roll is to promote the companies products to generate them a higher turnover. Concerning the turnover which is realized by means of your work, a certain provision is paid to you. With the sale process and the supply of goods or services you have actually nothing to do. You only ensure that the company gets more customers. To promote a company you get access to all kinds of advertisement material, such as banners and text-links. Generally you use this material on your own Internet site. This sounds perhaps cryptic but it will become more clear, during this course, by means of examples. Selling your own products through affiliate marketing. It is also possible to sell your own products through affiliate marketing. In that case other affiliates will market your product for you. This can be done by joining an affiliate network or running your own affiliate tracking software. This will be covered later in this course. What is reseller marketing The terms "reseller" and "affiliate " marketing can be confusing, but there is an important difference. If you act as reseller or a company be you, you are more more than a promoter. You are then also responsible for the support to the customer and the customer considers you as the representer of the original firm. Many webhosting companies offer reseller marketing opportunities. You then get the arrangement concerning a certain band width and that you can independently sell to your customers. At the moment we will not go deeper into this subject and concentrate first on affiliate marketing. What does it cost to join an affiliate program? Joining an affiliate program should never cost money. If it does, then just back off and look for another one. Mind that it would be very strange that you have to pay for promoting someones product.. How does the compensation system work? That varies. Generally there are this possibilities: • • • • Click: (cpc): compensation for a click on the Internet site of the company that you promote, earnings vary from 1 penny up to some euros / dollars. View: (by 1000) (cpm): compensation for showing banners on your Internet site Lead: (cpl): compensation for a registration for a service or for example for making an appointment or requesting a brochure; earnings vary from 10 pennies up to 100 euro or even more Sale (sales): compensation as a percentage concerning sales which has been generated through your site 2- and 3-tier Affiliate Programs Lots of Affiliate Programs offer 2-tier or 3-tier programs. With a 2-tier affiliate program you not only get paid if you realize a sale but also when someone that joined the affiliate program through a link on your website or in your e-mail, realizes a sale. With a 3-tier program you also earn if someone signs in through your affiliate and makes a sale. How do you know what your earnings are? When you join an affiliate program of network you get a so called affiliate tracking code. You can use this code on your website or in your emails. Your sales are registered through this code. After you joined an affiliate network or program you get access to the statistics and you can see what your revenues are. What can be earned? This question I can't answer. Earnings can vary a lot and depend on how you handle it and the programs you choose. More about that in the next chapter. How to start with Affiliate Marketing? If you are looking to earn a few bucks you can just put up some banners or text links on your website and then wait for what happens.... (but don't expect too much). If you are serious about making money you must tackle it right from the beginning: In all cases you should make a plan and pay attention to the following: • • • • • • The choice of your product/service: Why did you choose this particular product or service? What kind of knowledge do you have of it? Who is your target audience Who is your competition What affiliate program are there for these products and how to choose the best How are you going to tackle the marketing and promotion Consider what kind of product or which service you want to promote. Think of products and services for which you yourself have at least some interest or even better, a passion. In stead of thinking about products and services you can also think about an area where you have an interest in, such as music, cooking, gaming, making money, dating, animals, freebies, traveling or whatever.. If you already have a website, it makes sense to look for products and services that fit well into it. People come to your website because they are interested in the subject of it so if the products you market are something totally different, it won't work. For example: if you run a website on music, you could look to promote cd's, dvd's or electronic gadgets. If your website is related to a certain country or area, you could look for travel affiliate programs. These are just some simple examples to make it more clear. The best opportunity you have to make money, is to find a niche market or product of your interest but where the competition is not yet so big. You can research this by doing keyword research at Overture Just type in a keyword of your choice and see how many people searched for this. Overture is just one of the search engines, but it gives you an idea. What kind of knowledge do you have of it? Explore what your knowledge is of the product or service and what the gaps are. Try to fill the gaps by reading books, exploring the internet or whatever is needed. Thanks to the internet, lots of information is for free these days. Consider who your target audience is. When promoting a product or service you have to know who your audience is and where to find them, so for example: • • • young people woman people with children • • • • people with handicaps seniors gamers etc. In the next chapters we will present some opportunities and businesses but you can also look for a specific product or service and a company that offers an affiliate program for it. Just perform a search on Google or another search engine and look for "your product or service" and "affiliate program". If you don't have a website, then you have to make a choice if you want one. If not, you could promote affiliate programs trough Google AdWords or Yahoo Publisher, as explained in one of the former chapters. Personally I think the best way is to have a website because it gives you a lot more control and you can make it more personal. Who is your competition? Look at your competition. Who offer the product already and how do they do that? How many are there that already promote the product or service. Is the market not overloaded? What affiliate programs are there to choose from and how to find the best? Do research on what companies offer an affiliate program for the products that you want to offer and how reliable are they. Try to get as much information about the company as possible, for example: • • • • • • How long does the company exist? How are the results? How reliable is the company if it concerns the pay-out and handling of its affiliates? What is the percentage they offer to you as their promotor? What are the compensations which the company pays; do they pay for leads, clicks or only for realised sales? How much do you earn when you realise a sale? How are you going tho handle the marketing? Do you already have a suitable website where the product or service fits in or are you going to built one? In most cases it won't do to just load up some banners onto your site. You have to make it personal or at least create the interest of the visitors of your website for the product you market. How are you going to tackle promotion? Promoting affiliate programs is not easy but is very important. Many sites on which could you advertise, don't permit affiliates to promote affiliate programs. This because they don't want loads of the same advertisements on their site. With an own Internet site, you don't have this problem because then you can advertise the link to your website in stead of the program. Link cloaking and the skepticism around affiliate marketing As you already might have noticed, some links in this course show up as an affiliate link. An affiliate link looks like this: Paydotcom.net At first, it looks like a normal link, but when you click on it, it, it looks different. As you can see the link shows some code then. This is the code that you have to put in, to link to an affiliate product that you promote. The code refers to your account at the affiliate network and that is how they and you know what your sales are. Some people that want to order through your site will notice that and that can prevent them from buying through your link. Why would that prevent them? Well, for different reasons probably: • • • • They might know what an affiliate program is and might not like the idea of making you money They might worry that they would have to pay more They might not trust it because it looks like an untrustworthy or at least, strange link. They might not like affiliate programs. If you don't want this to happen, then you can use a link cloaker that covers your affiliate link and makes it look normal. You can find a free link cloacker here: Clickfire Should I use a link cloacker? So far I have not used a link cloacker myself. Why not? I think that affiliate marketing is a good and honest way to earn money. It is hard work and there is nothing wrong in helping people find the products that you support. Internet marketing is a whole new world, also for big or small companies and small companies can often not afford to hire a professional or a marketing team. So if you can help them out there, what is the problem. If I would cloak my links than that would make it look like that it is something that should be hidden and I think, it should not.. Why not? If I would do that it would make me feel like I am ashamed of what I do. But the opposite is the case. I believe that through affiliate marketing, people can create new jobs for themselves or earn some more money and be more independent. On the other hand, if people have the wrong idea about affiliate marketing and that is what keeps them from buying through an affiliate link, I can understand that people use link cloaking. Why is there then a lot of skepticism about affiliate marketing? Some people think that affiliate marketing is some kind of illegal pyramid scheme. Is it an illegal pyramid scheme? No, because in a pyramid the people that started first, earn the most. In affiliate marketing the people that work hard, have the opportunities and facilities, or are smarter earn the most, just like in the real world. In affiliate marketing you have the system of 2-tier and 3-tier. This is a reward system for the person that made you join the program. So if I make you join an affiliate program and start with affiliate marketing, then I will earn a percentage everytime that you sell something and also when it is 3-tier, when you make someone join the affiliate program and he sells something. But then it stops. You have the same possiblity as me and you can also start making people join the affiliate program. I think it is normal that I get a reward for this information that I gave you, if it helped you. I will only get real rewards if you start earning money and it won't cost you anything. In an illegal pyramid this tier system goes from 2-tier to endless tier. The problem is that everyones percentage of what they can earn goes down when they reach a lower tier. So the people at the top get rich, doing nothing and the rest is working their ass off and earn nothing. That is also like in the real world but they can not forbid that. But people are not aware of this so they confuse affiliate marketing with the illegal pyramid system. This is even more so with multi-level-marketing because that programs add often many more levels and that is why I am careful with that. In my ignorant days I once was so stupid, desperate or curious that I joined SFI, (Six-Figure Income) which is a big multi-level-marketing company. I hated it there. It made me think of the stupid live presentation of an American multi-level-marketing company once here in the Netherlands, where Dutch people clapped and shouted and looked stupid. But SFI is still alive and I don't really know about how they are doing these days but might look into that once. Another reason is that there are a lot of bad affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing is quite new but lots of people already joined in and most of them know nothing to little and earn nothing to little. I consider myself as someone who knows a bit more than little. I joined the Internet in 1995 and from time to time I picked up an interest in affiliate marketing. I started researching it then and every time I backed off because of the unending horrible shouting websites that I found through search engines told me I could earn millions or at least thousands in seven days. The second category that give affiliate marketing a bad name are the so called guru's. I've mentioned them before but there are many around. You can recognize them through a number of things: • • • • • They have secrets that they offer to you for money or at least for your e-mail adres to sent you a free e-book or another gift. After you got that you will get emails with secrets and other offers. As for their secrets: I don't believe there are real secrets that will make you money. The Internet is a very open place and most so called secrets will be out in the open within no time. Also if their secrets are that valuable, they would probably never sell them, let stand give them away for your e-mail address. They have websites that shout at you! They shout that you can easily make money and lots of it, as long as you follow them. But the only ones that will make money are they because you are so stupid to follow them. They offer you an e-book or so for a certain price and together with that you get loads of freebies, worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. In reality they offer you an e-book together with other e-books that are outdated or that you can get anywhere for free. They give you an offer that only stands for 24 hours or so.. They need lots of words to say nearly nothing I could give you lots of examples but you probably know already what I mean and I don't like to make any promotion for them through links here. This does not mean that there are not any good people around where you can learn from. I will review some of them later. Do you believe in affiliate marketing? Yes, I do. But it is not for everyone. Affiliate marketing takes a lot of effort so you at least should believe that it has possibilities, before you start anything. You also must be prepared to learn a lot. It is very difficult to get good information. My intention is to make this the best free course on earning money online but at the moment it is probably not that.. And even then, you still would have to do some research yourself and make your own choices. How much do you earn now with affiliate marketing? Not much or a lot Where I live $200- 300 is not a lot of money. It does not even cover the rent. In some other countries you can easily live of that. And I believe hat more is possibe and because I definitely want to be independent I stick with it for the moment. So, what is the conclusion? I don't know if you should go for affiliate marketing, earning online or link cloaking. Just do what you feel is best. That's what i do too.