Published By Martin Aranovitch

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a innovative method of generating visitors and sales via a network of online partners. A merchant with an affiliate network will normally pay their partners commission at the point at which a sale is made.

In other words, if you are an affiliate marketer, you agree to promote someone else’s products or services online for a percentage of the sales you generate, and get paid only when you generate sales.

All sales are tracked using specially-coded software links provided by the company. Most affiliate programs provide affiliates with access to sophisticated management control panels where you can view your stats (e.g.. how many people clicked on your link, how many made a purchase, etc …), as well as access marketing and promotional materials, set preferences for getting paid your affiliate commissions (e.g. via cheque or paypal), as well as get instant notifications whenever someone has purchased a product through your affiliate link.

A Brief History Of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing evolved from online advertising. The first online ads were paid based on a flat rate, so webmasters had no motivation to improve the sales of the advertiser.

By profit sharing based on performance,  Affiliate marketing was able to help increase the wealth of many individuals and contributed to the rise of many leading online companies.

Amazon.com, for example, was one of the first significant adopters and now has hundreds of thousands of affiliate relationships.

There are thousands of companies offering affiliate programs and incentives for people to sign up as an affiliate and start promoting their products. There are also companies that manage affiliate programs for other businesses, such as Commission Junction, Linkshare, Clickbank and many others.

Affiliate marketing is currently driven by entrepreneurs who work at the cutting edge of Internet marketing. Affiliate marketers are often the first to take advantage of emerging trends and new technologies.

How Affiliate Marketing Benefits A Business

Affiliate Marketing is one of the most cost effective and efficient forms of advertising for businesses. It is the concept of empowering other business websites to market your business to a new user base.

Affiliate marketing is the ideal partner to online retailers as it works like a virtual sales team who get paid only on commission.

There are several ways you can offer an affiliate program. You can join an established affiliate management company like Commission Junction or Clickbank (note: Clickbank sells digital products only), or you can install an affiliate software program like Post Affiliate Pro. For more information on using a standalone affiliate management software go here:

Alternatively, if you have created a digital information product and you want someone else to handle all of the product delivery, affiliate commission distribution, refunds, etc ... then you may want to consider signing up as a Clickbank publisher. Click on the image below to visit Clickbank:

How Affiliate Marketing Benefits You

Affiliate marketing can provide the necessary tools and opportunity for creative and hardworking individuals to venture out on their own.

Affiliate marketing can be a full time career, or for many affiliates, simply a way to make a great part time income.  It’s up you to you how you choose to participate.

If your goal as an affiliate marketer is to create significant income and long-term wealth, your aim would be to become a “super affiliate”. Super affiliates are affiliates that drive the vast majority of sales or leads to a business they are affiliated with.

Affiliate Marketing – Getting Started

Getting your affiliate business off the ground is not as difficult as you might think.

Despite the fact that there are so many people trying to make money online, the internet is still a place full of great new opportunities for making money. While there is definitely a lot of competition out there, it is not so “saturated” that you couldn’t stand out and become successful.  One of the greatest advantages of the internet being so vast and catering to every imaginable market is that there’s plenty of room for all of us.

One common misconception is that you need to already be an experienced online business owner if you actually want to start making money online.  This argument simply does not make sense.  Every person who is making money online right now was, at one point, a newbie like everyone else.  Everyone has to start somewhere.  The secret is to just get started.

You do need to make sure, however, that you’re going about things in the right way.  Everybody can make a profit on the internet, but the strategy you choose to start with will have a significant effect on how long it actually takes you to start making money online.

In my case, for example, this meant starting out trying to make money online with affiliate marketing.  When I first started experimenting with internet marketing, I tried anything and everything: online retail (an e-commerce store selling print reproductions), promoting surveys, blogging, creating and selling my own info products (e.g. e-books), etc.  Eventually, I decided that affiliate marketing was the most efficient way to start making money right away.

Now, please understand this. I did not make a fortune right from the start, but it was soon clear to me that affiliate marketing provided me with the best opportunity for running a profitable business online as a beginner internet marketer.  My initial goal was simply to start earning enough money as an affiliate marketer to cover my online costs.

I also looked at things from the perspective that I was gaining something a lot more important than making small profits - I was gaining valuable experience in how to make money online.

One of my first big decisions was to decide on what kind of niche I would focus my efforts on as an affiliate marketer. I could either go for what people call a “virgin niche”, which is a niche that has not yet been discovered or exploited, or a popular niche, where there are lots of buyers, but also plenty of competition.  With a virgin niche, I realized there may not be a lot of competition, but there also might not be a lot of potential customers. With a more popular niche, I’d have the opportunity to market to lots of potential customers, but there would also be a significant number of other businesses competing for their dollars.

After careful consideration and research, I decided to go for a more popular niche.  This proved to be a wiser decision, as I soon began to see results, even with the hundreds or maybe thousands of other affiliate marketers that I was competing against.

Although it may seem difficult in the beginning, you have to always remember that even though there may be thousands of other people competing for sales, not all of them will have the same level of skills, knowledge, experience or ability to create sites that convert visitors into customers. By working at it and learning how to improve your affiliate marketing skills and knowledge, you will soon begin to get increasingly better results than your online competitors.

So ...are there any downsides to Affiliate Marketing?

Yes, of course! Nothing is perfect and neither is the affiliate marketing business model. As an affiliate marketer, you do not control the product you are promoting. The company whose product you are promoting may decide to discontinue the product or remove it from sale ... or even go out of business. That's life! Once you become a skilled affiliate marketer, however, you will see that there is actually very little risk involved. There are thousands of companies offering affiliate programs, so if the product you are promoting suddenly disappears from the face of the planet, you can quickly substitute it for another product, make a couple of changes to your promotional copy (i.e. change the name of the product), and you're up and running again

The one thing I did that I know helped me to make money with affiliate marketing from the very beginning, even in the popular niche I chose to go into, is that I went in better prepared than most of my competitors.  I researched and found a proven ‘step-by-step’ system that helps people succeed in affiliate marketing.  I then followed this system and learned from the experiences of other users. This helped me avoid making a lot of the same fundamental mistakes I now see a lot of other people doing. Looking back on it now, I believe this preparation was extremely important for my success as an affiliate marketer, especially when I was just starting out.

In Conclusion …

There are a lot of affiliate marketing training systems and resources out there. Some work better than others.  Some don’t work at all, and it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes. 

Personally, I’ve looked into many affiliate marketing guides and programs, and so far, I have not found any better program for helping people with no previous online business experience make money online as an affiliate marketer than joining Portal Feeder.

Portal Feeder is an exclusive online community for web business builders and they provide you with everything you need to succeed online as an affiliate marketer: comprehensive training, custom tools, resources and support. I have been a member of Portal Feeder since they launched in 2005 and have written a comprehensive review about it here: Portal Feeder Review. 

I hope you have found this information useful and I wish you great success as an affiliate marketer. 

About:

Martin Aranovitch is a successful SME (small to medium enterprise) business coach, sales trainer and web business entrepreneur. Visit his site www.SocialBusinessWeb.com  to download a FREE report on How To Profit With Your Own Social Networking Site .

Source: http://www.portalfeederpro.com

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