What is Affiliate Marketing?
The easiest way to explain affiliate marketing is that it is a way of earning money online where you as a website owner gain a reward for helping a business by promoting their product or service.
There are numerous types of promotions but again the easiest is simply where you as website owner earn a commission for a visitor to your site clicking on a link to another site.
There are other subtle variations on this theme, maybe a user clicks on the link and they carry out an action or sign up for something, complete a survey maybe but it is all the same kind of principle.
Commissions are often a percentage of a sale paid when your 'account' gets to a certain level (e.
g.
£50) but they can also be a fixed amount per conversion.
The conversion are usually tracked by the code that you have been given being embedded in your site, take Google AdSense that i use on my blog, when you click on it Google know which site it was from (mine) and which advert they have served so the commission applicable.
Other variations on the theme are when maybe a publisher gives a coupon or voucher code out to help track conversions.
Advertisers often prefer affiliate marketing as a way to promote their products because they know they'll only need to pay for the advertising when there's a user action, usually a click or sign up.
Publishers often prefer affiliate marketing because if they find a product that is relevant to their niche that earnings can go well in excess of any cost per click or cost per impression advertising campaign.
So is Affiliate Marketing easy money? While affiliate marketing can be incredibly lucrative it is important to know that affiliate marketing is not easy money.
Most people who try it on their site make very little as it relies upon numerous factors including: o traffic (high traffic helps a lot) o finding relevant products for the user o finding quality products for the user o building trust with your readers, this ensures that they continue to view your site and carry out an 'action'.
o having a readership who is in a 'buying mood' o you being able to write good sales copy (and more) that keeps a user interested.
There's also a BIG risk associated with affiliate marketing in that if you push too hard or promote products of a low quality (of which you may have no experience of) you can actually lose customers and hurt your business reputation and brand.