What is
Affiliate Marketing?
In
addition to selling products and advertising, one of the most effective
ways to make money from your web site is
with affiliate marketing.
An affiliate
program is basically website advertising using banners or text links
that only pays when a sale is made or the customer performs a specific
action
like
signing
up for a mailing list.
The website
displaying the ads or links is called the affiliate, and the website
that the affiliate sends the traffic to is called the
publisher.
These
links can be used to promote individual products, categories of
products, promotions or sales,
or just link to the home page of the website. The links
are embedded with a code to identify
the sending website.
At the
top of this page are an assortment of affiliate products. You can
mouse over them to see examples of affiliate
links.
The
Catch? You need traffic. Lots of traffic. You should have at least 300 to
500 visitors per day before you set up affiliate
links
on your
site.
The basic
concept is very simple: add links, send traffic & get paid, but
in reality there is much you should learn before
you can get
started with
affiliate marketing.
Using Affiliate Links
Affiliate
product links need to be directly related to the web page they are
on.
Our website LittleShamrocks.com
has a variety of affiliate programs of Irish products including food,
jewelry, clothing, candy, books, gifts,
posters, etc, but the most successful by far has been the food products.
Here is
an example of relating affiliate products to the page. On our Valentine's
Recipes page we have affiliate links to the special cake molds & pans
as well as ingredients used to make the recipes. The page is related
to
the
affiliate
items and
the recipes actually create a need for the affiliate items.
About
Affiliate Networks
Affiliate
networks like Commission
Junction and LinkShare function
as middlemen between affiliates and publishers. When you join
an affiliate network as an affiliate you have usually hundreds of publishing
companies to pick from. When you join as a publisher you usually have
access to thousands of websites to potentially promote your products.
The affiliate
networks create the coded links, make them available to their affiliate
websites, allow publishers to review & approve
affiliates before they can promote links, and they handle distribution
of payment
to
the affiliates.
Every
affiliate network and each publisher has their own set of terms and
conditions that you must
read and
agree to.
If you
do not follow these conditions you be removed from
the program and maybe even lose the commissions you have
already generated.
Even
though there are no costs involved it is very important
to take your time to learn all you can about website
affiliate marketing before you jump in.
Here
is an excellent free resource to help you get started:
Free
Download!
The Affiliate
Masters Course by Dr. Ken Evoy has become
an Internet classic. Regularly updated, it has a
long history
of "firsts." It
literally invented the system of keyword brainstorming,
researching keyword supply and demand, niche identification,
and the development of theme-based content sites.
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