Two Forms of Affiliate Marketing That Work!

The Internet has been making individuals get rich in the last two decades or so more than any other business platform on the planet. It’s truly astonishing how easy it can be to make money online using affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is, a marketing channel for the millions of products out there that need buyers.

As an affiliate marketer you are essentially a salesman promoting products that you have an interest in, the affiliate with the website has a link or banner promoting the merchants products, when the link is clicked the and the customer follows through to make a purchase the affiliate gets the commission.

Selecting Products

The first step is to select a product to promote from literally millions of products and services that exist on the Internet. There are usually 2 types of affiliate programs with similar yet different models. Both models are designed to make affiliate sales, but are essentially different.

Affiliate Program Concepts

Which one is best? They both have their place in the online marketing field Each affiliate needs to choose which concept suits their needs best, or they could choose to use both models.

The first model is you have a single product or service where that one item is offered by itself. Usually the author or a reseller offers an affiliate program for the product. To become an affiliate you will need to join and be assigned a unique affiliate link and password to your account. The link will both identify you as an affiliate for that product and also identify which affiliate you are so they know who to compensate for a sale. You will need to keep track of what affiliate link goes with each product you sign up for as each product will have a different affiliate link.

The second concept is having one affiliate program cover numerous individual products and/or services. This type of affiliate program has numerous advantages over the single product program:

1.Only one account for all commissions to accumulate (this is a advantage).

2.One account, means only one password to keep track of for numerous products and services.

3.New products are added regularly into the one account.

4.High volume activity and generally a support staff exists which provides quicker support responses.

5.No need to concern about getting paid. These sites exist by keeping their affiliates happy.

“Down Side” to Affiliate Programs

There are couple of “down side” points to make about affiliate marketing. Payments for credited referral sales (earned commissions) are usually not paid right away. There are good reasons for this practice by those running affiliate programs:

1.When a sale is made at a website, the buyer is usually given a money-back guarantee period of time, usually 30 days, to use and evaluate the product to ensure the customer is totally satisfied. If the buyer requests a refund of the purchase, then the affiliate also loses their commission for the sale. Payments to the affiliate are usually delayed until after the refund period has expired so the product owner is not “out of pocket” for already paying a commission on a sale that has now been refunded.

2.Commissions are usually paid on a regular payment cycle, normally monthly. What you earn in one payment cycle is usually not paid until the next payment cycle. This way all commission payments can be handled at one time.

The main “down side” to affiliate marketing is that most, if not all, affiliate programs set a minimum dollar amount you must reach in commissions before they will cut you a payment. This usually ranges from $ 20 – $ 50 or more in some cases. Breaking this down in simple, easy to understand expressions is best served by an example.

Say for instance you sign up for an affiliate program that has a $ 30 minimum payout level and the product sells for $ 39 with a 50% commission. You do all of your work and generate a sale from your affiliate link. OK, you have made a $ 19.50 commission (it will actually be a little less as you are paid on the net sale, after all processing expenses are paid) … You get that paid to you on the next payment cycle, right? Not quite … You see, your commission does not reach the $ 30 minimum payout the program sets before they will incur the expense of cutting you a payment.

So you have to wait until you make another sale to get you over the minimum before you get your commission on the first sale. This could actually carry over for months before you actually get paid. In some case, you may never reach the minimum if you do not make more than one sale. In that case, your commission remains in unpaid and this could go on forever.

And to compound this further, this minimum payout level applies to each individual product for which you are an affiliate. Different products are owned by different people and the earned commissions for all products do not accumulate to get you over any minimum payout level.

Any minimum payout level problem is solved when using affiliate sites instead of individual affiliate programs (this is the main advantage referenced earlier). Each sale you make under the association of the affiliate site is accumulated into one manageable market place, so you only have to make cumulative commissions to meet the minimum payout level to get paid.

To qualify for your commissions, you could make sales of 2 different products and the earned commissions from both are combined for you to reach the minimum payout level. Yes, this is huge … Instead of having 10 different sales individually setting in 10 different affiliate programs, none of which meet the minimum for you to get paid, now you have those 10 sales commissions added together to get you over the minimum payout level and now you get paid for all 10.

How To Get Your Affiliate Link Online

The beauty of affiliate marketing is that unlike a salesman in the real world, you are not trying to convince anyone of anything. You just register a domain (which is recommended but not required) and put up a product review site, a one page website that describes and promotes all the features and benefits of the product being promoted.

Although a product review site is recommended for the best results, it does require that you do have some web space on the Internet. Hosting accounts are available for just a few dollars a month so this should be within anyone’s reach that has a true desire to be an affiliate. Many review sites can be placed on one hosting account. In fact you could well have as many as you want review sites on one hosting account.

If you do not want to create product review sites, there are alternatives. Some affiliate sites offer you pre-made products and websites and are available for free for your use if you join their affiliate program.

Promoting Your Product

The seller in essence does all the conversion work; the affiliate job is to send targeted traffic to the sales page.
Here are a few ways to promote your affiliate link:

1.Article Marketing: Write an article describing the features and benefits of the product.

2.E-Mail Marketing

3.Classified Ads: There are numerous sites that do this all over the Internet for free.

4.Pay Per Click Marketing.

5. Blogging is an excellent form of traffic generation.

6.Many of the larger affiliate sites offer training and promotional materials for your use for free.

You are only restricted by your imagination on how to market your affiliate link. Be creative. Step “outside the box” and create a new way that works for you. You can also research by searching the Internet. Affiliate Marketing is a huge field and there are tons of informational products already written on the subject. Take advantage of that and you are on your way to financial freedom.

Making Money

Affiliate marketing is all about making money for both parties and often the commissions on sales (buyers you send to the site through your affiliate link) are 50% or higher! Some of the better affiliate programs pay as high as a 75% commission on every sale you make.

Although the product owner handles the product delivery, customer service and virtually everything else beyond you referring targeted potential buyers to them, including overhead, you get paid the same amount if not more as they complete on the sale! Your only overhead is your domain and advertising cost.

The possibility to make money online with a website to promote top products has never been easier, the Affiliates main task is to drive traffic and make those commissions and the only way to do that is to start as soon as possible because the investment level is so comparatively low to any other business, the only barrier is which choice to make?