Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest business models and this is why many new entrepreneurs begin with these programs. Theoretically all you need to do is send warm ready to buy visitors to your sponsor’s site and his compelling sales page will close the sale. You are just a salesman for other people’s products.
This all sounds deceivingly simple but there are a few things you should know to make an affiliate business work:
Choose the right programs: Choose the right programs: Be very careful of the programs you join. Check them carefully. They should have good support, and real time reliable tracking. A good commission should be paid monthly with no more than $20 limit for payout. Above all the products should be good and targeted to your particular market.
Pre sell, do not sell: One of the big mistakes affiliates do is try to sell their Sponsor’s product. They send the visitor to their sponsor’s page where they will be confronted by a second sales page. Double selling will deter people from buying. Warm your visitor to the sale by pre selling and let your sponsor’s sales page do the selling
Build your business as well as your sponsor’s: You are sending all these potential customers to your sponsor and building his customer list. In order to build your businesses have a way to capture these potential customers yourself. Offer a free newsletter on your site and build your own subscriber list.
Have your own website and drive targeted traffic to it: Do not rely on your Sponsor’s mirror site. Have a theme website of your own. You will be able to set up your own newsletter there and have multiple related affiliate products. The trick is to drive large amounts of traffic to your website and pre sell them to get the click through to your sponsor’s site.
Use these points to build your affiliate marketing enterprise. You will gradually increase your business until you become a “super affiliate.”
Affiliate marketing has quickly become one of the most popular and the most effective ways to advertise on the Internet. The premise of affiliate marketing is very simple.
A company, let’s say eBay, goes to another web site and asks them to place a banner or link to eBay on their site. Every time a user clicks on that eBay banner and visits the site, the owner of the original site gets a commission. It’s as simple as that.
The history of affiliate marketing goes back to approximately 1994 with the trailblazing music website www.CDNow.com. They were, as far as most people know, the first site to pay other sites for directing Internet traffic to them. Internet giant Amazon.com soon caught on and became the site most associated with affiliate marketing. Today, the practice of affiliate marketing is used by essentially every major web site in the world.
Why affiliate marketing? One of the reasons that affiliate marketing has proven to be so popular is that it is completely based on performance. In most cases, the company doing the advertising doesn’t pay a single penny to the site that is carrying their ad unless there is evidence that Internet traffic has been driven to the advertising site. There are, however, other ways of doing affiliate marketing.
Some advertising sites have paid the site hosting their link based not on the number of times an original IP visits through the link, but on the number of times the banner ad was “seen.” This method presents a whole host of problems since things like hit counts can be forged and there is no way to insure that just because someone visited a web page that had your logo on it that they even saw it or if they did, that they even knew what it was.
Other methods of affiliate marketing include paying only when a link is followed AND some kind of transaction takes place. This can be tough on the site hosting the link because the attention span of the average Internet user isn’t long enough in most cases to follow a link and then either complete a purchase, or fill out a form of some kind. The conventional method simply pays a host a commission for every time an original IP is directed to their site.
In a matter of only a few years, affiliate marketing has become one of the most cost effective ways to drive traffic to a site. Since, in most cases, both the advertiser and the host profit from the set up, there is no reason to believe that affiliate marketing won’t be a dominant advertising method well into the future.
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