What is Affiliate Marketing?

When starting out Affiliate Marketing is one of the easiest and quickest ways to start making money online. That’s said, it is not just for newbies. To a greater or lesser extent nearly all experienced internet marketers continue to earn income from affiliate marketing.

Simply explained, as an affiliate marketer you will be recommending products to your visitors and subscibers. If they buy the products you recommend then you will earn a commission.  On the face of it it sound like easy money doesn’t it. Well its not quite that straight forward.

To be successful in affiliate marketing you need many of the skills of a more traditional marketer.

Let me explain further.

Think of a market trader selling fruit and vegetables. Whilst he needs to buy stock day to day, he generally won’t be producing the produce that he is selling. However he will be knowledgeable about what are the best selling fruits and vegetables, how much they should buy their stock for, what price they should sell their stock for, where the wholesalers are that sell  the best fruit etc. But they do not produce them themselves. Through his knowledge, careful buying strategy and skillful marketing skills he buys stock in the morning and sells it at market for a profit.

Affiliate marketing is much the same, but with one key difference. Instead of having to buy the stock up front, you have to invest your time and effort up front to grow a subscriber list that you can market too, or to build a website that gets lots of visitors. To be successful, both approaches require you to know your subject well and to deal with the best products and have great marketing and sales skills.

 

So planning, marketing skills and good product selection are common skills. As we have already touched on though, the low cost of starting up makes being an affiliate marketer much more accessible. Affiliate marketing was the way I made my first sale and it is where I recommend you start your internet marketing career.

 

Simple 7 step plan for affiliate Marketing

If you are new to affiliate marketing then follow the following approach to get started;

  1. Choose a Market – Do feel you have to be totally original here. In fact go for the opposite. Find a market where there are lots of buyers and plenty of people selling. Grab yourself a small piece of that big pie!
  2. Get your tools in place – Get set up by building  a website and getting an autoresponder so that you can send sales campaigns out to your previous and potential customers.
  3. Select an offer to promote – Review all  the products in your market and select the best to promote. Visit Clickbank to see probably  the biggest collection of affiliate products around.
  4. Prepare you sales materials – Create a series of articles that give an introdcution to the subject matter that is covered in greater detail by your selected product.
  5. Create a tempting offer – Create a Squeeze page where you offer to give away a free report on your selected market in return people giving you their email address.
  6. Get customers to see your offer – Use SEO, Article marketing, social media etc, to drive traffic to your squeeze page.
  7. Deliver you sales message -Send the articles you created in step 4 by autoresponder to everyone who signs up for your free report .

This simple method is the route that is followed by thousands and thousands of successful affiliate marketers. You need to offer good advice on your selected market. Also your free report must be of high quality and give people a useful but partial answer to their questions. If you can achieve this, you will get a high number of people taking your recommendation and buying the product you are promoting.