What IS Affiliate Marketing?

In my own words, I think of Affiliate Marketing as having the ability to work for any company in the world, at any time you choose to. For instance… let’s say that you want to sell the new PlayStation 3 and make a commission for each sale. First off, in the offline world, you would have to go get a job working for a company such as BestBuy, Circuit City or WalMart. Now, I’m not positive but I don’t believe most of these companies that sell this product actually pays a commission for each sale (I could be wrong, though).

Online, you can actually find quite a few places to sell this product from, as an Affiliate, and make money. But, the difference is that you do not have to be at work on time! I should also explain that you’re not stuck with 1 company. You’re allowed to sell as many products as you want, from any company you want, granted you have signed up with an Affiliate Company that provides access to these companies AND you have been approved.

Affiliate Marketing uses what’s called “Affiliate Links” that have dynamic Affiliate ID’s (in most cases) that will actually place a cookie on the Users machine to Identify who you are (although not all companies use cookies, some use sessions, which aren’t very helpful if the user decides to come back and purchase later through a bookmark). These cookies have bits of information about the company, produce and your Affiliate ID. This Affiliate ID is saved in the cookie for a set period of time (anywhere from a few hours to 30 years!), so if and when the person who clicked your link comes back and makes a purchase, the ID is saved into a Database transaction that proves it was YOUR link that they clicked and purchased from. Make sense?

So basically it works like this: You sign up for a Company such as Commission Junction and wait to get approved. Once approved (in most cases), you will be given access to apply to thousands of other companies, including many Brand Name Companies. When you’re approved for a Company, they will supply you with Banners, Links, etc. You can use your Affiliate Link for any Marketing Campaign you desire (Pay Per Click, Article Marketing, Email, etc).

Here’s a great image that helps explain how Affiliate Marketing works:

CLICK TO ENLARGE THE PHOTO

To get started, there’s quite a few companies out there that you can sign up with to become an Affiliate. Here’s a small list of Highly Respected Companies, off the top of my head:

Commission Junction
ShareASale
LinkShare
ClickBank

Signing up to these programs as an Affiliate is free of charge. Some people get confused and seem to think that Affiliate Marketing is the same thing as a Reseller Program, which it’s not. A Reseller program allows you to purchase a number of products from the company, direct, and resell them for a set price.

DO NOT pay to sign up for an Affiliate program! There’s some great companies on the first 3 links above, and some great books and software programs on the last one (Clickbank) that are absolutely FREE of charge. I only say this because I HAVE actually heard of a few people who claimed to have paid to sign up for an Affiliate Program. As a matter of fact, many places give YOU sign up bonuses for signing up.
Be sure to read about each program you apply to, to be sure that you fully understand how they work, and to be sure that you do not break any “rules” of their programs.

For instance… many programs/companies do not allow you to bid (PPC/PayPerClick) on their (Trademarked) name and some do. So before you go out and start a new PPC Campaign, be sure to follow their rules!

There’s a lot of things to take in when it comes to Affiliate Marketing, such as many, many acronyms. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP [yes, that's a tricky one]), and many more. Through the next few days, I will do my best to explain as much as I can without making your head spin.

Summary

Affiliate Marketing has created MANY Millionaires online through different programs. As you go through Affiliate Marketing Sales pages for the newest hyped up books - you’ll hear the term “Super Affiliate”. These are Affiliates who have become Masters of their Niche Markets, or have become Master PPC Experts. Just be careful of whom you take advice from… there’s a lot of Junk peddlers online and a lot of them come from Clickbank, unfortunately.

Affiliate Marketing is not as hard as it sounds… but many people DO fail because they fail to take action. Sure, there’s been quite a few that take action and fail, but there’s a reason for everything and sometimes they dive right in with no directions.

There’s a lot to learn about this business, but hopefully I can help guide you through the basics and help move you forward, towards a successful venture of your own.

You will see me recommend a few products, but these are products I highly recommend to get started, some are free, some are not. Take for example - Wealthy Affiliate University. I highly recommend this product because I have yet to see anyone fail while using this product and taking action. This membership program has a great support system, excellent tools and terrific training resources.

I will not recommend many Marketing ebooks because most are NOT worth the price you pay for them. Some are, most are not.

There’s also a lot of tools that I don’t believe you NEED to pay for, which is why I will give a lot of links for FREE tools, such as the Google Keyword Tool, MSN Lab, etc.

The main thing you need to focus on is to

1. Learn as much as you can, and then…
2. Take action.
3. Stay focused
4. Be persistent and consistent.
5. …Then the sales WILL start to roll in.

I am going to try my hardest to give you the absolute best advice on this site, as I do not want to give you half-assed information. I don’t believe in half assing anything, especially if someone is counting on me to do my best. And I will. I promise. If I feel that I may be wrong, I will do my best to explain that!

Some key factors that we will be focusing on is:

• Article Marketing (and Bum Marketing)
• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Search Engine Optimization
• Using Websites such as Squidoo, Hubpages, etc.
• Email Marketing
• Blogging
• More… I say “more” because I truly do not know, YET, what else we will be discussing.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you feel I have made a mistake somewhere, if you have an idea or … whatever! =)

CLICK HERE TO READ PART 2