How to get started quickly with affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing over the years has become a multi-million dollar business. And it’s easy to see why. Companies have realized that to get more exposure for the products they sell, they need a sales force. But instead of hiring salespeople who cold-call or even go door-to-door, they’ve found that there are thousands of people online who will be willing to sell to them for a percentage of the sales they make.

This is affiliate marketing.

Normally, the commissions you earn are based on a percentage and the percentage differs depending on the affiliate network you choose and the company that provides the product.

The largest commissions generally come from information products like the products you’ll find on ClickBank.com. This is because the products are instantly available after purchase. You don’t have to wait for a product to ship, pay shipping costs, or anything like that. In other words, it’s instant gratification.

To get started with affiliate marketing, you only need a handful of things.

First, you need your own website set up and running. This website can promote many different types of affiliate products or it can focus on a single product. The bottom line is that in order to make a profit, you need to make more money from your affiliate sales than it cost you to set up the site. Which usually involves registering a domain name, finding web hosting, and getting a website design up and running.

From there, it’s all about choosing the product you’ll be promoting. It is often suggested that you choose to work with a known affiliate network. These are companies that act as “intermediaries” between the seller (you) and the company selling the product.

Since affiliate networks are a third party involved in the entire transaction, you do not have to rely on the company itself to pay you your commissions, instead your payments will come from the affiliate network itself.

Also, since many affiliate networks run many different businesses, you can sign up once with the affiliate network and then promote any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of products available within that network. This saves you time having to sign up for each individual affiliate program yourself.

Choosing a product to promote can also take a bit of time, as you need to market a product that is directly related to the types of website visitors you will receive. However, here are some things you can look for:

  1. When selling information products, you’ll want to look for those products that offer a commission of 60% or more. This will ensure that you are covering your costs and making a profit.
  2. Also, find those products that are already selling well. These are easily found on ClickBank within their “marketplace”; the place within ClickBank you will go to find a product to promote. Any product that has a severity greater than 100 tells you that other affiliates are already selling it well.
  3. Once you’ve found one of these products, take a look at the page they have available for affiliates. Often they will have various banner ads, PPC ads, articles, and emails that you can use to promote your product. What you are trying to find is a product that has a wide variety of affiliate tools.
  4. Your sales page should also be easy to read, contain lots of bullet points about product benefits, and have a highly visible “buy now” button or link. If site visitors have a hard time locating this on the page, you might lose some sales for this silly reason.

Once you’ve mastered these basics, you can continue to grow your web properties by creating new sites (or adding pages to your existing site) that promote other products. Your next task would be to simply drive traffic to that site so you can start making sales; And this can be easily achieved by writing articles in article directories, using PPC advertising and the like.

Just know that it is possible to make a living as an affiliate; it just takes a little effort on your part to make it all work.

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